For an Epistemological and Methodological Characterization of Social Science

Abstract

To confinn the gap left by what has been classified as lapse of the «great reports» is the starting point of this text. Which takes shapes wlthin the boundaries of the social sciences, affecting the two main tendencies which have prevailed for more than fifty years, that is marxism and functionalism. The non-existence of firm theoretical frames, able to account for and understand (a synonim of capture and predation) the phenomena that occur in the capitalist formations of the end of the century, a complex, chaotic mixture of «neofordism» and «postfordism» emerges as the most immediate consequence, and reveals, above all, defining and delving into the «place of the statement». The elements proposed here, in a way of guess, from a viewpoint similar to that of the «desconstruccionism» show their character as discoursive and self-referential production of this knowledge, from which «thresholds» and «rules» outstand and operate in their rethorical display. Discourses and rules conveyed by specific scientific-technical devices for the inteligibility of the social computerized. Such knowledge and technological devices (recurrent, sociahistorical and conveyers of an unavoidable political dimension) come up against a boundary in their codifying fonctional character, namely: the basically impredicatable, stocastic nature of the «social magma». Anyway, this situation and, more specifically, its repercussions on the aforementioned technological devices, has paradoxical effects. On the one hand, it is symptomatic of the vulnerabitity of the instrument' of analysis and a «normalizer» intervention. But, on the other hand, it spreads out a whole range of possibilities in a deeply critical and desconstructive sense, which allows to play with the «intensional» character of thought, That supposes that the descriptions or claims can «float» without being necessarily stuck to any known object whatsoever.