Human nature is susceptible to constant interpretation which changes over a span of time. And with time not only do meanings change but they lose their older meaning and assume a new one according to the local context.
I agree that natural sciences play a rather important part in social sciences. Every form of study requires some sort of quantitative data to be able to compared and set against changing time. By gaining statistical data, the facts can be compared year after year since the basis of collecting data is repeatable. For e.g. by statistics we know that there has been a change in the attitudes of women towards marriage and careers. Statistical knowledge hence can be put up as facts in a natural scientific realm. But even though this knowledge is very important it cannot answer the ‘why’ question since it eliminates values from the equation. Subjective knowledge though very controversial is very important to understand society layer by layer.
Descriptivists are flawed in their very method on non judgement. Phenomenologist’s though gain a deep insight are not unbiased observers. And if they manage to keep their own judgements out of research they do end up influencing those around them. According to basic sociological study, human behaviour is likely to change if observed due to demand characteristics. Hence, either the data is coloured by judgement or demand characteristics alter the human behaviour under study. Descriptivists escape this criticism by being passive observers but their presence does influence others behaviour. Also descriptions cannot explain personal and social phenomenon as they do not delve deeper than face value. Description is part of the natural sciences therefore they don’t explain events either.
Once again, even if they do gain the ‘why’ perspective by asking questions to the observed group, i ask who do they ask to gain the best interpretation. Within a muslim community, there are rather different interpretations of a single event, many people perceive a similar event with a different interpretation. According to that who is the single authority to define muslim culture? Even in a family, there is a split between an older generation and a younger generation interpretation. Another criticism is that even though descriptivists put their own judgements out of their study they judge people around them. Fauzia saaed followed this same method but she judged society who looked down upon the red light society though she didn’t judge the red light society itself.
Critical social scientist stand on very stable grounds when they put forth that observations cannot be uncoloured by ones judgement and that social sciences cannot be descriptive alone. Human study if wanted to be evaluated has to be put against a standard and the main question arising is that who sets the standard of what’s wrong and right. There can be no standard of appropriate behaviour in the world. They also advocate that everything in this world is relative hence relativity itself becomes absolute and change becomes constant. But they don’t really put up a proper method to analyse.
Post modernists do hit close to home that every social order and meaning is local and contextual. But according to their theory no society can be studied deeply as a whole since cosmopolitan society has various layers which hold their own local interpretations. Every society has layers and large societies which share different shared values from one and other are ignored in their theory. But they made the best point so far that every value is susceptible to change in every time frame. There is no fixed human behaviour just as there is no one interpretation of human behaviour. But once again many societies don’t form values on their own; they follow it as passed on by higher authorities. Such as in older times religion became the basis of human behaviour hence people didn’t have any social order and meaning of their own but borrowed them from a higher powerful authority. Therefore their behaviour cannot be held as natural and their own as they were forced into submission. Social constructionists give the biggest complexity that objectivity and subjectivity is part of each other. One cannot exist without the other if society is to be studied on a pedestal.
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