Abstract

In his book on “Die Wissenschaftstheorie der Soziologie”, Frankfurt sociologist Gerhard Wagner outlines nothing less than a new research program for Sociology: Sociology as “social physics”, based on the diagnosis that sociology—due to its inner fragmentation and its pre-paradigmatic stage—is threatened to lose the character of a science and needs a restart. This restart would require the development of a research program that can provide an internal theoretical integration and an external connection to scientific developments that are supported by principles of general scientific realism. Wagner develops this new core, the “social physics”, with reference to recent positions in the philosophy of science and classical sociology. Hence the title of the book is slightly misleading—it is not a treatise on the epistemological problems of sociology but rather an outline of a social theoretical research program substantiated by current research in the philosophy of science.Let us first turn ..