A propos

This project, firstly, explores the complete identity of the knowledge paradigm governing social sciences since centuries and assesses not only its ability to face today's global challenges, but also its validity. Then, in this wake, considering the powerlessness of this paradigm to propose ways out of the impasse faced by all Livings, it proposes an alternative. It's imperative to reform the social sciences by opening to them a new universe of construction of the knowledge. In this new universe, we'll highlight immutable and irrefutable laws and principles from which new scientific theories will be developed in almost all disciplines of social and human sciences (sociology, economics, law, etc.). The ambition is then to make social sciences a PURE SCIENCE like Physics, etc. Called Social & Human Sciences Engineering, all the analyses will be based on an in-depth knowledge of the identity and dynamic of biological determinism. From these analyses, a new discipline will emerge: Microanthropology.

Keywords: Engineering, biological determinism, naturalism, epigenetics, philosophy of cognitive sciences, law, economics, sociology. 

The questions and the research proposal

The construction of knowledge in social sciences is necessarily determined on a way of seeing or perceiving existence. This can be based on a "truth", a postulate, even a simple hypothesis. This potentially opens up distinct and sometimes antagonistic guidelines. For example, the knowledge construction guideline of a group of atheists will not be the same as that of a group of believers. The difference between the two will be even more marked in case of radicalism in each of these groups. The set of coherent and specific principles prescribing a direction to the construction of the knowledge represents what we call the knowledge paradigm.

According to the context of the 18th century, the secularization of Western societies in particular seemed to be the new horizon. This process, for it to be legitimate, involved knowledges about the functioning of the brain. This involvement, more cultural than scientific, represented what G.S. Rousseau[1] calls "neuromania"[2]. In this wake, since the Enlightenment, the social sciences have been governed by a paradigm which reduces existence to materiality. Precisely, this paradigm assimilates the soul/mind to the body. This neuromania is very accentuated in Diderot[3], one of the Enlightenment thinkers.

Objectively, in the philosophy of cognitive science, neuroscientific materialists defend the idea that "all mental states have their sources in the physical structures of the body (specifically the brain)". According to them, « Psyché est corporelle »[4] ("Psyche is corporeal"). They are qualified as monists, because very far from the three-dimensionality advocating the three dimensions of the human being structure, they refute Cartesian dualism[5]. By reducing existence, and specifically the structure of the human being, to its material dimension, doesn't the monism reduce at the same time the fields of the possible of the knowledge? Precisely, as this paradigm imposes a unique and restricted trajectory of the construction of the knowledge, doesn't it atrophies the field of the knowledge? Isn't it the main current problem of social sciences? We hypothesize that both this unique trajectory and the restriction of the field of the knowledge are at the origin of both the impasse which the livings are currently facing and the impotence of the social sciences to produce responses. In this project, first, we will verify this hypothesis in depth by showing how this paradigm atrophies and falses the construction of the knowledge in all social science disciplines; then we will propose an alternative. Precisely, this project proposes to create the Social and Human Sciences Engineering that will open a new universe to the knowledge construction.

[1] G.S. Rousseau, Nervous Acts : Essays on Literature, Culture, and Sensibility, p. 250, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

[2] G.S. Rousseau, Nervous Acts : Essays on Literature, Culture, and Sensibility, p. 250, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

[3] Denis Diderot, Éléments de physiologie, Histoire du matérialisme, Éditions Matériologique, [1875] 2019.

[4] Françoise Coblence « La vie d'âme. Psyché est corporelle, n'en sait rien », Revue française de psychanalyse, 74/5, (2010), p. 1285-1356, 2010.

[5] René Descartes, Le discours de la méthode, Édition numérique réalisée par Tremblay Jean-Marie (Cégep, Chicoutimi). https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1522/cla.der.dis (« Les auteur(e)s classiques »), 1637.