Why social sciences are natural, and why they can’t

Abstract

It is argued that there are no fundamental ontological nor epistemological differences between the natural and the social sciences, though the social realm is so complex and unstable that it makes it difficult the emergence (and, hence, the discovery) of significant robust regularities. As a suggestion of how social sciences might be ‘naturalised’, an abstract model of normative based behaviour is also presented, such that it is coherent with empirical discoveries in cognitive sciences and capable of being implemented in computer simulations.