Abstract
methodology with William Milberg at the New School, I was thinking about philosophy of science; so one frequent topic of discussion in our correspondence was whether the social sciences are properly so called, or whether it is even desirable for these disciplines to aspire to be scientific. In fact, when Defending SdenceWithin Reason (2003) was finished, I opened my chapter on the social sciences with a quotation from Adolf Lowe, Heilbroner's own teacher and mentor, to whose work he had introduced me: "[o]nly if a region of inquiry can be opened up in which both the scientific and the humanist approach play their characteristic roles may we ever hope to gain knowledge of man knowledge rather than figment, and of man rather than of social atoms" (1959: 154). In this chapter, entitled "The Same, Only Different," guided by the Critical Common-sensist philosophy of science developed elsewhere in the book, I offered my interpretation of Lowe's appealing idea of "social science with a human face" by tracing some main similarities, and some main differences between the natural and the social sciences. I didn't, however, specifically tackle the critique of the scientific aspirations of contemporary economics that Heilbroner had developed