The Logic of Social Science

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The book addresses the essentialism problem in social science, where categories are often treated as having inherent properties. Mahoney critiques this view and the extreme rejection of external realities by proposing scientific constructivism as a middle ground. This approach combines elements of both scientific and constructivist perspectives, leveraging cognitive science to address biases like essentialism. Mahoney introduces a set-theoretic analysis to examine how categories function in the mind, laying out foundational methods and applying them to social science tools and case studies.