Neo-Dataism and the Problem of Descriptive and Explanatory Inexhaustibility in the Social Sciences

Abstract

We shall question the thesis that new technologies for data collection and processing render obsolete the metascientific projects proposed since Bacon. The claim that such technologies can be extended to the social sciences encounters difficulties arising from the peculiarity that social facts present themselves to observation as already pre-interpreted. The constant attribution of meaning by common sense to social facts and events generates methodological challenges that resist attempts to overcome them by making research revolve around the pyramidal collection of data subjected to computational processing. The activities of description and explanation remain open-ended in cases where the objects of study - such as social facts - are liable to change insofar as they are affected by the opinions formed about them. What is thought - whether by common sense or by science - adds information to the facts as they emerge and, in many cases, is capable of altering their configuration to such an extent that it becomes necessary to modify or replace the previously formulated explanation. The fact that social facts are affected both by the opinions of those who experience them and by the theories of those who study them hinders the stabilization of descriptions and the consolidation of explanations.