Should The Social Scientists Use The Method Of Social Sciences?

It has been a great discussion in the social sciences that how a past event can be transferred into today’s world. The debate predominantly focuses on the question of should the social scientists use the method of natural sciences or do social sciences have different set of methodologies. Along with that the place of the historical agency and his/her self-understanding is also quite debated issue in the social sciences. Which one should be trusted? Should we stick to the explanations of the historical agents or should we focus on our understanding the events as social scientists? Concomitant to these debates, there have been proposed theoretical approaches, and along with them what Peter Munz offers can be counted as a solution to the problem
When the historian is using general laws that are known to him but that could demonstrably not have been known to the people he is talking about, he is interpreting” (Munz, 1977, p. 70). Therefore, there are two possibilities of transferring the historical events to today’s world: explanation and interpretation. For Munz, there is a difference between reality and actuality. Accordingly, using the general law of the historical agents gives us “what actually happened”, whilst to find out “what really happened”, “we must seek to obtain a sequence of events linked by a law that we believe to be true” (Munz, 1977, p. 84). This paper, by taking Munz’s methodology, focuses on changes in the punishment methods in the late 18th and 19th centuries, and presents both an explanation and one of the interpretations of the
In Foucault’s example, we see that young prisoners were not tortured, they were put in a punitive working with the rights of eating, praying and going to school (Foucault, 1995, pp. 6-7). There seems a great difference between two instances but neither the first instance nor the second one are unrepresentative. These centuries witnessed to fundamental changes in punishment. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries “the gloomy festival of punishment was dying out”. Although there are some differences in years, first amende honorable , then the pillory was abolished both in France and England in this period. Besides, in countries such as Austria and Switzerland “use of prisoners in public works, cleaning city streets or repairing the highways” started to be seen (Foucault, 1995, p. 8). Therefore, it is too obvious that there had been a social drive that made possible these changes. When we focus on the general laws employed by the people of the 18th century’s Europe, we reach the explanation that the punishment system had to change, because the Enlightenment humanitarianism opposes torturing one’s body. Let’s look at the historical