Philosophy of Social Science provides a tightly argued yet accessible introduction to the philosophical foundations of the human sciences, including economics, anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology, history, and the disciplines emerging at the intersections of these subjects with biology. Philosophy is unavoidable for social scientists because the choices they make in their disciplines force them to take sides on philosophical matters. Conversely, the philosophy of social science is equally necessary for philosophers since the social sciences must inform their understanding of human action, norms, and social institutions.

The third edition retains an illuminating interpretation of the enduring relations between the conduct of inquiry in the social sciences and the fundamental problems of philosophy, with accessible considerations of positivism, European philosophy of history, causation, statistical laws, quantitative models, and postempiricist social science, and it reflects developments in social research over the past two decades that have informed debate in the philosophy of social science.

I used this book as one of two textbooks in a philosophy of science course for advanced undergraduate social science students. I am sorry to say that I won't use it again and that my students' opinion of it was clearly negative. The following is mostly distilled from student comments.

Positives
The book covers a huge range of complex material in a reasonably organized way. It gives fair treatment to many different approaches within social science. It covers a lot of ground: common sense and folk psychology, behaviorism, rational choice, qualitative social science, social constructionism, sociobiology, as well as shorter treatments of critical theory, game theory, Marx, Freud, Kant, feminist theory, etc. You can definitely learn something from it.

Negatives
Rosenberg sometimes writes well, but overall this book does not show a person with that gift of clear exposition that makes for the very best textbooks.

In many places, the writing needs more revision to increase the clarity of the prose. Sentences are long. Rosenberg's writing is sometimes a bit uncontrolled. He sometimes writes too abstractly and forgets that beginning readers need compelling, concrete examples of what he is talking about. Rosenberg is a little long-winded and often takes a long time before he gets to the point.

The text of the book itself is rather ahistorical, by which I mean that he does very little recap of the progression of thought in a given area in the text, relegating mention of other philosophers to a bibliographical essay at the end of each chapter. This makes it hard to identify arguments with their proponents while reading the text.

The use of the abbreviation [L] in the book is somewhat grating.

A peculiarity of Rosenberg's book is his insistence that "you have to choose" or take sides as a social scientist: you can't just say that there are different paths to the truth. Most of my students disagreed with this. I think it is best to read this stance as simply Rosenberg's hope that people will engage with the questions he raises.

My students felt that the opening chapters of the book were especially difficult and the later ones somewhat clearer.

If you are considering this book, I recommend you look at other competing texts first. Next time I teach this course I expect to use Robert Bishop's Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Bishop's book too has its pluses and minuses, but an important plus is that it is written more sincerely and temperately than Rosenberg's, and includes helpful chapter outlines and study questions.

Professor of Philosophy at Duke University Alexander Rosenberg brings us the third edition of "The Philosophy of Social Science", a thoroughly argued yet still accessible introduction to the philosophical foundations of human sciences such as economics, anthropology, sociology, and many others. New to this edition include an overview of the eclipse of behaviorism in psychology and the rise of game theory in economics, consideration of problems for functionalism in social science that must be addressed by an appeal to biology and especially Darwinism thinking; and so much more on top of that. "The Philosophy of Social Science" is highly recommended to college philosophy shelves as a complete reference and to non-specialized general readers with an interest in psychology.

As a recent college graduate, I can say I've learned more about the social sciences and its theoretical underpinnings from this book than I did my entire 5 years in college. While Rosenberg's survey of the social sciences is certainly not exhaustive, he covers many core family disciplines of the social sciences, such as economics and sociology, and their philosophical foundations. Moreover, Rosenberg even includes a review of critical theory, a discipline that probably would not have been mentioned by many mainstream thinkers. The way he uses the problems of philosophy, especially metaphysics and ethics, to compare and contrast the natural sciences and social sciences is powerfully insightful. For anyone interested in the study of human behavior or philosophy, this book is highly recommended.

There are many books out there with the same title as this one. But if you want to know what the real issues in the philosophy of social science are, and how they connect to the basic questions of philosophy--from Plato to Popper--this is the book to read. Rosenberg uniquely combines expertise across the range of problems about social scientific method with an eye to the sides social scientists actually have to take about fundamental questions. The comparison of rational choice, functionalist, and Darwinian explanations of cross-cousin marriage rules is just one example!