Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
> For Miller, the
> antipositivists were correct in attacking positvism
> for trying to force social science into a narrow mold
> centering around the covering law model and
> deductive-nomological models of explanation
> and Humean causality, but the same flaws also
> applied to their analysis of natural science. In
> reality such an analysis, in Miller's view is not
> properly applicable to either natural science
> or social science.
>
This sounds interesting. Marx did call Smith, Ricardo, and other early political economists "scientific" in contrast to "vulgar economy." And if one accepts that, then we would have to say that political economy (i.e., social science in the broadest sense), far from being the _last_ science to develop was one of the first three (along with physics and astronomy). Both chemistry and geology, let alone biology, escaped from pre-scientific analogicak modes of thinking rather later than political economy. For a century or two, for example, geologists kept trying to explain the circulation of water as analogous to the circulation of blood in the human body.
Carrol