Conflicts in social science

the long version

Can social science contribute to the settlement of conflicts while the field is itself divided by intellectual conflicts? The contributors, while themselves coming from distinct areas of the social sciences, all share the basic assumption that conflicts in social science must be worked out at the level of the individual social scientific disciplines rather than at the level of philosophy. Through a range of detailed case studies, they look at the different ways in which social scientists deal with the tension implied by being at the same time both party to a conflict and a contributor to the settlement of the conflict. They find that at the level of the disciplines there is no unquestioned belief in the conflict-transcending objectivity of the social sciences and that the search for a non-relativistic way of conflict-solving proves to be a subtle and intriguing activity.