What Is Social Science? A Comparison with Biology

Abstract

What is social science? This article examines this perennial question by addressing the relation between human biology and social science, exploring whether social science constitutes a “science” in the sense conventionally denoted. In suggesting that social science is defined by a “spatiotemporal specificity” different from life science, I will explore the historicist traditions represented by writers such as Knies, Schmoller, Weber, and Collingwood. Drawing on processual philosophies in sociology and biology and the example provided by sociotechnical “acceleration,” I argue that the human flair for language, symbolism, and technology distinguishes humanity and is constitutive of the way social science tends toward process particularity and the historical rather than process recurrence and the transhistorical. I then consider implications for historicist conjecture, sociological theory, and natural science; the transposability of theory and data; the design of sociopolitical policy; and the need for epistemological pluralism among sociologists pursuing “biosocial” endeavors.

What is social science? I address this perennial question by comparing life science with social science, especially the relation between sociology and human biology. In so doing, my interest in life science is chiefly for its heuristic value in providing a contrast to social science rather than a desire to interrogate or propagate biological perspectives within sociology. My principal concern is with whether we can assume the domain of “biology” and the “social” are on the same ontological terrain and if not, what the implications are for epistemology in sociology and social science. In particular, despite the frequently made comparison between social science and biology, is social science really a science in the sense conventionally denoted by natural science? If not, (1) what does this say about the epistemological assumptions we can entertain in sociology, and (2) is social science more akin to history than to natural science?

Indications that the transition between natural and social science may not be straightforward come from long-standing tensions between social scientists who identify more closely with life and physical science tropes, such as experimentation and quantification, and scholars critical of this alignment. Dissension has variously afflicted several social science disciplines, as observed in the traditional friction between social and biological anthropology, human/cultural and physical geography (e.g., geomorphology, climatology, oceanography), and the continuing division within psychology between social/cultural psychology and its more biologically oriented fields, such as neuropsychology and experimental psychology (Newton 2023). Yet in spite of these historical tensions, sociologists have become increasingly interested in biological issues (e.g., Meloni 2014, 2019), as reflected in feminist argument (e.g., Birke 1999); the sociology of emotion, health (e.g., Williams 2001), and pain (e.g., Leeds 2024); genomics and epigenetics (e.g., Buklijas 2018); microbiomics (e.g., Wilson 2004); social neuroscience (e.g., Fitzgerald and Callard 2015); and the variants of anti-dualist philosophy found in actor-network theory, more-than-human contention, new materialism, and so on.

In addition, sociological theories continue to use biology to rationalize their epistemology. For instance, in their advocacy of social mechanisms, both Hedström and Swedberg (1998) and Elster (1998) began their argument by referencing biological mechanisms, and although there has been some critique of these parallels (e.g., Little, 2014; Ramström 2018), they appear relatively common in debates about social mechanisms. Indeed, Hedström and Ylikoski (2010:50) defend social mechanisms by noting their epistemological significance in “biological sciences . . . cell biology . . . and the neurosciences,” and Gross’s (2018:344) reframing of social mechanisms concludes that “many would accept” that biology constitutes the “starting point.”

This continued rationalization of social science through life or physical science should not be surprising given its lengthy association with the study of sociology. Durkheim (1995:448), for instance, portrayed “social forces” as akin to, if different from, those of nature, an apparent similarity that made it possible to speak of the promise of sociology “to open a new way to the science of man.” Although Durkheim’s “canonical status” has been questioned (Pedersen 2001:231; cf. Dawson 2023), it remains significant that he portrayed sociology as the logical extension of natural science where “the sociologist . . . studies societies simply to know them and to understand them, just as the physicist, the chemist, and the biologist [italics added] do for physical, chemical, and biological phenomena” (Durkheim 2014:71). In this fashion, sociology promised to deliver similar changes “in the social realm” to those witnessed “since the positive natural sciences were established” (Durkheim 2014:75). The continuing tendency to draw parallels with natural science is thus far from a sociological novelty, even if contemporary writers may be less likely to confidently follow Durkheim’s (2014:75) proclamation that “progress in the political arts will follow those in social science, just as the discoveries of physiology and anatomy helped perfect medical arts, just as the power of industry has increased a hundredfold since mechanics and the physico-chemical sciences have sprung to life.”

Yet detractors of this view have long questioned the “uncritical constructions of home-grown ‘theories of society’ based on ‘natural science’” (Weber 2014:112). For instance, although Weber (2014:116–19) did not rule out the attempt to formulate social science “laws” in a manner similar to natural science, he doubted their ability to capture the “richness of reality” in social science and understand “a cultural phenomenon that we find historically significant” [italics added] due to its “distinctive character.” Furthermore, as Eliaeson (2002:17) notes, Weber “rejected all biological analogies” and more generally questioned “naturalistic monism” and “the naturalistic prejudice” that proposes that the cultural sciences must “create something akin to the exact natural sciences” (Weber 2014:122–23).

In what follows, I shall further scrutinize the correspondence between sociology and natural science with particular attention to human biology and life science. In so doing, I am not concerned with analyzing or “implanting” biological perspectives into sociology, such as through the advocacy of evolutionary arguments (e.g., Freese, Allen Li, and Wade 2003) or the critique of its use in social science (e.g., Dupré 2001). Instead, my present interest in human biology derives from its heuristic advantage in understanding social science and its implications for sociological theory. In particular, I wish to ask whether ontological differences between the “social” and the “biological” make it tenuous to assume that social and life science share similar epistemological assumptions. Furthermore, if this relationship is defined by difference, what does this say about sociological theory and how we do sociology?

Relatedly, I wish to defend “difference” against those who seek to theoretically relegate it because difference may promote “apartheid” (Barad 2014:170). Although sociocultural differences are frequently politically weaponized (e.g., in relation to gender, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, colonialism), this does not mean that “onto-epistemological” differences do not continue to exist, and we seriously circumscribe sociological theory if we ignore this reality.

In summary, my interest in biology derives from the heuristic contrast it provides to social science, especially the way that epistemological assumptions informing biology may become inappropriate in most social sciences because of ontological differences in the “spatiotemporal specificity” of their respective subject matter. I borrow the term “spatiotemporal specificity” from its use in life science, although it is closely related to “historical specificity,” where the latter is defined as variation in “historical time and geographic space” (Hodgson 2001:23). Addressing spatiotemporal specificity remains central to sociology because it places constraints on our ability to generalize beyond the time and place in which our research is conducted.

In advancing this thesis, my approach is informed by the tradition that stresses how the social terrain is distinguished by a historical and cultural specificity stronger and more thoroughgoing than that observed in natural science (e.g., Collingwood 1946; Gergen 1976; Knies 1930; Mills 1959; Schmoller 1915; Wray 2005). In general terms, I am sympathetic to the argument that “no social science can be assumed to transcend history” (Mills 1959:146). It is not that similar social situations will never recur in the future, but the likelihood of variability across time and space makes it difficult to reliably entertain assumptions of generalizability, transcendence, or reproducibility in social science.

Central to my contention is the argument that although the social and the biological are composed of complex processes, it is only in biology that we routinely observe “process recurrence” at macro and micro levels. ¹ Although biological organisms are constituted within differing temporalities, they are often characterized by process recurrences that repeat over considerable timescales. Otherwise, humans and many other animals would not have the same morphology and biochemistry across millennia. As argued below, this kind of process recurrence is unlikely to be observed in social science in a comparable manner, and it is this difference that conditions social science as being more readily amenable to process particularity and historical analysis than the transhistorical recurring possibilities traditionally associated with “science.” This is significant if only because, even among those who are critical of transhistorical “mechanisms” and “tendencies” in social science, there can be an initial reluctance to abandon the belief in the “recurring aspect of social life” characterized by “repeatable processes” and “social regularities” that can be “quite regular and predictable” (Reed 2011:159–60). ²

The remainder of the article is structured as follows. First, I survey the history of spatiotemporal specificity with particular attention to the work of Weber. Although Weber has been criticized for the influence of ethnonationalism on his work (Barbalet 2023; Bhambra and Holmwood 2021), his epistemological endeavor remains of central significance to sociological theory because of the way it attempted to reconcile the transhistorical with spatiotemporal specificity, following the contestation represented by the Methodenstreit dispute. My own argument relates to this historical contestation, although my explanation differs through its focus on the interrelation between human “technolinguistic” skill and our “primate atypical” capacity for fluidity and accelerating change.

I also examine processual philosophies in biology and sociology. This comparison is useful in understanding why some sociologists continue to believe that social and life science are, more or less, “on the same page.” It also provides a useful prologue to the opposing argument that life and social science are defined by difference rather than similarity, a difference constituted by the way biology is characterized by process recurrence whereas sociology and social science lean heavily toward process particularity.

In explaining process particularity in social science, I refer to the examples provided by sociotechnical “acceleration” (Rosa 2013) and the fluidity afforded by our human flair for language, symbolism, and technology. However, in stressing language and technology, I do not mean to imply these skills are somehow “separate” from the interwoven “affordances” between humanity and “nature” (Gibson 1979) or the way that, in general, “humans engineer their environment to support their activities” (Sterelny 2010:466) within “particularly extended milieus” (Osborne and Rose 2024:95). Nevertheless, within these “scaffolded” worlds, human language, symbolism, and technology are pivotal to our sociotechnical fluidity. Together, these human facets limit the ontological likelihood of process recurrence, and critically constrain the epistemological possibility of generalizability or universalism in sociology.

The History of Spatiotemporal Specificity

To preface the discussion of spatiotemporal specificity, it is necessary to first consider the complexity of the argument that “the social sciences are . . . historical disciplines” (Mills 1959:146), as associated with writers as various as Knies, Schmoller, Weber, Collingwood, Polanyi, Mills, Gergen, and Hacking. For instance, the philosopher of history, R. G. Collingwood (1946:217), suggested the “world of nature” is “altogether different in kind” from the social because we cannot get “inside” nature and think or feel as nature might. For example, we cannot understand what it means to be “a blade of grass” (Collingwood 1946:200). In contrast, by virtue of being human, we “inhabit” the social arena and have privileged interpretive access. We can thus “achieve something quite inaccessible to natural science: namely, an ‘understanding’ of the behaviour of participating individuals, whereas we do not, for example, ‘understand’ the behaviour of cells, but merely register them functionally” (Weber 2019:92).

This last quotation illustrates how much of Collingwood’s thesis was anticipated by Weber, who “by 1914 was . . . well ahead of his time” (Beiser 2011:514), even if the influences on Weber’s thought have tended to be forgotten (Abbott 2001). Most notable among these is the late nineteenth-century Methodenstreit dispute between the competing positions of Carl Menger (1840–1921), of the Austrian school of economics, and Gustav von Schmoller (1837–1917), of the German “Younger Historical School.” This historical contestation illustrates how the tension between spatiotemporal specificity and generalization/universalism represents a long-standing area of controversy, and one that “had important consequences for the development of neighboring disciplines, especially sociology” (Schefold 1987:257).

In this “old war between positivism and historicism,” Menger “believed that the method of economics could be the same as the natural sciences” (Beiser 2011:522), and as such, could construct general hypothetical laws rather than basing analysis solely on historically situated evidence. Menger (1985:103) argued that socioeconomic exchanges, such as those surrounding the use of “private property, of barter, of money, of credit,” represent transhistorical phenomena mirroring those found in nature, including “all oxygen, all hydrogen, all iron.” Apparently, these social transactions had been “manifesting themselves repeatedly in the course of human development, to some extent for millennia [italics added]” (Menger 1985:103), a conclusion contradicted by our contemporary awareness that for a very large part of human history, nomadic peoples knew neither property, credit, nor money. Menger revised this universalism, arguing in a second edition of Principles of Economics that his thesis only applied to the modern exchange economy (Polanyi 1977), but Hayek subsequently chose to translate Menger’s first “unqualified” edition. To the extent that Menger represents an influence on contemporary economics, via “monetarism” and “neoliberalism,” it has thus tended to be through Hayek’s promotion of Menger’s prior universalism along with its elision of spatiotemporal specificity (Hodgson 2001).

In contrast to Menger, Schmoller reasserted the historicist thesis that universal social laws are misguided because they can be true “only for one epoch and culture” (Beiser 2011:524). To take one of Collingwood’s (1946:223) examples, “the behaviour-patterns characteristic of a feudal baron were no doubt fairly constant so long as there were feudal barons living in a feudal society. But they will be sought in vain . . . in a world whose social structure is of another kind.” In a similar fashion, Schmoller denied “the existence of objectively determined, trans-historical [italics added], individual-level types as the primitive building blocks of social phenomena” (Spiegler and Milberg 2011:30).

At first sight, Schmoller thus appears to be a disciple of spatiotemporal specificity, following the example of writers associated with the German Older Historical School. For example, Knies (1833:478, cited in Streissler and Milford 1993:70) argued that

the causal connection of variables in the natural universe . . . always remains the same [italics added], because the nature of these causal forces never changes [italics added] wherever they may appear. In contrast the intellectual and personal elements, put into operation by human beings, change with respect to time and space [italics added], which results in completely different effects.

Yet this association of social science with spatiotemporal specificity did not necessarily mean members of the German Historical School refrained from statements suggestive of universalism and generalization. For example, although Schmoller has not been widely translated in English (Senn 1989), what sources are available suggest he was not averse to generalization or universalization. In particular, Schmoller (1915:506, 521) referred to the “universal [italics added] striving for power and control” and made universalist statements such as “the more dense the population the more do people learn to have consideration for one another” and “the increasing ratio of urban life intensifies the pressure for equality.” A simple association between Schmoller and spatiotemporal specificity thus appears unwarranted because his social theorizing seems, on occasion, to be peppered with generalization.

Against this background, Weber’s response to the Methodenstreit debate remains particularly interesting. Weber (1989:200) referred to himself as one of the “younger representatives of the German Historical School,” but he was sympathetic to the need for abstraction associated with the Austrian school of economics. Nevertheless, Weber’s heuristic solution, his “ideal types,” represented an attempt to get beyond the theoretical naivety of the Austrian school because in the “cultural” domain it would be “absurd” to “reduce the empirical [reality] to ‘laws’” (Weber 2014:119). At the same time, Weber (2014:117, 115) retained a spatiotemporal sensitivity toward “analysing the cultural significance of the historical fact,” a reflection of the (Older) German Historical School belief that “the social sciences are concerned with . . . a task that is specifically different from . . . the exact knowledge of the natural world.”

Nevertheless, Weber’s (2014:118) approach could be accompanied by a proposition more in keeping with the Austrian school, as exampled by his argument that “the construction of abstract generic concepts” and “the acquisition of knowledge concerning regularities [italics added]” do have a place in “the cultural sciences” so that “history is to be raised above the level of a mere chronicle of notable events and personalities” (Weber 1922:266–67, cited in Eliaeson 2002:20). Put another way, Weber’s position ran counter to Comtean positivism and its depiction of “all phenomena as subjected to invariable natural Laws” (Comte 1896:5), yet he was also sympathetic to the view “that facts cannot be observed without the guidance of some theory” (Comte 1896:4). In part, the latter reflected his critique of the atheoretical inclinations of German historicism and its “overdescriptiveness” (Senn 1989:277), given Weber’s (2014:119) concern that we “must be able to distinguish between what is important and what is unimportant” and avoid the historian’s tendency to “unconsciously” import “evaluative ideas” (Weber 1949:82). ³

In this context, Weber’s favorite heuristic, the ideal type, represents an attempt to reconcile the conflict between Schmoller’s stress on historical specificity and Menger’s desire for the transhistorical. On the one hand, ideal type analysis reflects a transhistorical objective, constituting “an attempt to deal with the problem of historical specificity” (Hodgson 2001:126) through the “construction of . . . trans-historical and trans-cultural types” (Roth 1978:xxxvi). On the other hand, Weber (2014:114, 116) retained a sensibility to historical specificity in his awareness of “the distinctive character of the reality of the life in which we are placed” and the consequent need to analyze any socioeconomic phenomena, such as capitalism, as a “historically given cultural world.”

However, ideal types have been criticized on the grounds they represent a form of Eurocentrism inattentive to other ways of thinking, reflecting a colonial apparatus that imposes a particular mindset and values (Barbalet 2023; Bhambra and Holmwood 2021). Although not without some validity, this critique is in danger of ignoring the continuing significance of ideal types for sociological theory, especially where such criticism is insufficiently attentive to “the need for a careful historical sociology” (Dawson 2022:416). For instance, critics who suggest Weber’s ideal types mean the “variables ‘time’ and ‘history’ are cancelled” (Farris 2022:414) overlook the historical context in which they were developed and their epistemological objective. Rather than denying “time” and “history,” the concept of ideal types acknowledges the historical specificity of the German historical schools yet tries to devise a transhistorical heuristic. Even though this defended the possibilities of transhistoricism, the advancement of ideal types also constituted an acceptance of the salience of “time,” “history,” and spatiotemporal specificity.

Problems of the transhistorical were not, of course, unique to Weber, as witnessed in Durkheim’s attention to the contrast between spatiotemporal specificity and universalism. As Gieryn (1982) notes, there have been two contrasting interpretations of Durkheim, one suggesting a positivist correspondence between “science” and that which is observed (e.g., Douglas 1975; Lukes 1973) and the other exploring the historical relativism in Durkheim’s thought (e.g., Laudan 1977; Stark 1958). These contradictions become explicable if we consider that Durkheim was trying to reconcile the way categories of thought “change with place and time” (Durkheim 1995:17) with an understanding of science as providing a “universal and impersonal understanding” (Durkheim 1977:340–341). For Durkheim (1960:408), even though scientific knowledge is incomplete, with its quest influenced by the spatiotemporal specificities of “human interest,” its program nevertheless represents an ultimate arbiter of truth. Although far from a “crude functionalist” (Gane 2001:79), Durkheim appears to resolve the conflict between universalism and specificity through recourse to a “romantic vision of science” (Gieryn 1982:120) that appears almost unquestionable in its ability to determine truth from falsehood and “progressively . . . sweep away the darkness” (Durkheim 1995:25).

The history of spatiotemporal specificity is, of course, interrelated with the subsequent development of sociology, especially among those attentive to “historical particularity” (Bendix 1976:247). However, even among scholars proclaiming the necessity of the historical, there can be a variable commitment to spatiotemporal specificity, as is perhaps most obviously illustrated by the history of comparative historical analysis (e.g., Reed 2011). Similarly, although Bourdieu stated that “the separation of sociology and history is a disastrous division” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:90), Calhoun (1993:82) seems right to suggest that Bourdieu is not “entirely clear what sorts of categories should be taken as historically specific and which are trans-historical.” On the one hand, Bourdieu interpreted “institutions and behaviours” as governed by “their historical necessity [italics added]” (Bourdieu 2008:195) such that, say, “neoliberal economics . . . is immersed in a particular society [italics added]” (Bourdieu 2005:10) with a particular “state tradition” (Bourdieu 2005:12) and “historically constituted habitus” (Bourdieu 2005:10). On the other hand, we are left to wonder whether aspects of his theorizing favor the transhistorical, perhaps especially in “his accounts of capital” (Calhoun 1993:71) and his fondness for the “habitus as a historical transcendental” (Bourdieu 2004:78).

To sum up, spatiotemporal specificity has a long history of debate and contestation within sociological and economic theory. Yet as I suggest, it is one that can be usefully informed by using a heuristic comparison with life science. In drawing forth this argument, I first illustrate the seeming similarities between processual philosophy in life science and sociology before attending to their disparities. To understand these differences, I explore the significance of sociotechnical “acceleration” and its interrelation with the human capacity for fluidity, a consequence of our remarkable linguistic and technological proficiency. These human facets mean that the social terrain tends toward process particularity rather than the process recurrence witnessed in biology.

Similarity and Difference?

Why do sociologists and philosophers continue to use physical and life science as a legitimating rationale in areas as varied as social mechanisms (e.g., Hedström and Ylikoski 2010:50), new materialism (e.g., Barad 2007), and temporality studies (e.g., Urry 2000), deploying natural science allusions in defense of their epistemology and methodology? And in respect to life science, why do they suggest that “although there are differences between social and biological processes and inquiry, the comparison suggests the objections may amount to little more than paper doubts [italics added]” (Gross 2018:354)?

One answer is that as with early sociologists such as Durkheim, we remain more than a little enchanted by the complexity and achievement of natural science. Another is that we see compelling parallels between natural and social science in their philosophies, epistemological issues, and research difficulties. Especially interesting in this regard is the parallel between current processual philosophies in social science and life science. On the one hand, these shared philosophies appear to support the proposition that social science and life science are largely complementary. Yet on the other hand, focusing on processes can lead us to question this assumption. Instead of similarity, processualism reveals why biological and social processes are characterized by ontological disparities, with differences that condition social science toward historical rather than transhistorical analysis.

Parallels between Processual Sociology and Life Science?

As noted, processual approaches are curious because at first sight, they suggest life and social science correspondence, but attention to processes can also reveal their disparity. When we turn to their application in social science, processual philosophy is found in disciplines such as sociology, human/cultural geography, and critical/cultural psychology, especially in its “processual-constructivist” variants (Vandenberghe 2018:39). Included within its sociological ranks are authors such as Abbott, Dépelteau, and Elias, who, although presenting a range of argumentation, depict a social world where everything is potentially fluid and sociotechnical relations “are not just static ties, but unfolding, dynamic processes” (Selg, Klasche, and Nõgisto 2024:26) and “change, not stability, is the natural state of social life” (Abbott 2016:24) because “everything is changing all the time, including ourselves” (Dépelteau 2018:503). In a “go-faster” world where “products places and people go rapidly in and out of fashion” and “time-horizons . . . dramatically shrink” (Urry 2000:125), the “long term” can become “a hollow shell carrying no meaning” (Bauman 2000:125), and “explaining stability becomes the central theoretical challenge” (Abbott 2007:8).

In summary, “processual sociologists start from the premise that the social world is one of constant change. Everything flows. Stability is not given” (Vandenberghe 2018:44). It is this stress on fluidity and potential instability that finds a notable parallel in processual biology. Ontologically speaking, processualism can appear attractive within the philosophy of biology because “life suggests a need for continuous change” (Anjum and Mumford 2018:63). We are kept alive by a series of processes where “change is everywhere” (Anjum and Mumford 2018:72), whether that of microbiome interactions, cellular reproduction, or the firing of neuronal synapses. As with processual sociology, the central tenet is that “everything which persists in space time is understood as the result of sequential manifestations of interconnected and interrelated processes [italics added]” (Koutroufinis 2014:11) so that “enduring things are never more than patterns of stability in a sea of process” (Rescher 2006:14).

On the Same Page?

Although there are differences in emphasis and inflection, a reader of processual sociology and biology could be forgiven for thinking that epistemological differences between them “amount to little more than paper doubts” (Gross 2018:354), given the similar stress on process, network complexity, and the precarity of stability. Things do not exist; they flow, continuously interact and interweave, and are always in a semifluid state of “becoming.” Given these similarities, it is not surprising that some authors observe that historically speaking, we have “reopened the barrier between the biological and the social” (Renwick 2018:107). Furthermore, whether we draw on “processual” or “mechanicist” philosophies of biology, these parallels suggest that life and social science are directly comparable, leading some to argue that “biology provides the paradigmatic science for many social scientists today” (Gorski 2009:166). This comparison appears particularly convenient to sociological theories utilizing biological analogies to proclaim transhistoricism and transposability. For example, in the case of social mechanisms advocacy, it becomes possible to state that “the term [social] ‘mechanism’ refers to recurrent processes” (Mayntz 2004:241), generalizable devices that are “transposable between different cases” (Norton 2014:169).

Yet in the remainder of this article, I wish to interrogate these assumptions. In particular, I will suggest that we should expect a stronger similarity of process and outcome across time and space in human biology than in the social domain. In particular, the key difference between life and social science is that the former tends toward process recurrence, whereas the latter is chiefly characterized by process particularity. To illustrate the reason for this difference, I reference two distinct kinds of explanation, the first drawn from current sociology and the second from an ethological consideration of the biosocial competences particular to humanity.

The first point of reference derives from sociological attention to the way that societies seem to be characterized by increasing sociotechnical “acceleration.” The second focuses on the linguistic and technological skills that render humanity particularly capable of remaking our worlds and, following the acceleration thesis, at increasing “speed.” Together, these human facets increase the likelihood the social arena will be characterized by a spatiotemporal specificity that is not so readily apparent in human biology. In addition, they question whether social science is deserving of the epithet “science,” at least in its traditional connotation of generalizability across time and space.

Acceleration, Spatiotemporal Specificity, and Recurrence

If we follow writers on acceleration, many societies are experiencing progressively rapid change so that the experience of one decade may be increasingly distinct from the next because things seem to be speeding up, slippery and transient. Within this landscape, “arboreal” assumptions about the solidity of the world (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) become increasingly dubious as we see the “transformation of stability into instability” (Simmel 1991:30). As Weber (1949:105) noted, “the history of the social sciences” involves the “dissolution of the analytical constructs . . . and the reformulation anew [italics added] of concepts” and remains a continuous process according to “the conceptual stock-in-trade of its time,” reflecting the fact “that any such synthesis must be transient” (Weber 2014:134) and therefore “necessarily changeable” (Weber 2014:135). Although Simmel and Weber remind us that a concern with change has accompanied modernity, it can feel as though we are presently assaulted by “the violence of speed” (Virilio 1986:166), a mind-boggling pace of change” (Bauman 2007:11) that provokes a “new ‘unfixedness’ of the self” (Bauman 2005:32).

Furthermore, if social experience is increasingly fluid and changeable, why should anything we observe right now be present in the future, especially given the “runaway character of modernity” (Giddens 1991:30)? Such images have led some sociologists to declare that “social acceleration represents one, if not, the, fundamental tendency of modernity” (Rosa 2013:304). Instead of intergenerational transformation, the “increasing speed of social change” (Rosa 2010:61) means sociotechnical revision appears continuous and intragenerational, witnessed in a matter of years or decades rather than epochs. For example, although only formed in 2008, Airbnb and similar digital platforms have transformed property markets in many areas, often further entrenching patterns of socioeconomic inequality (Stabrowski 2017; Wolifson, Maalsen, and Rogers 2023).

In this fashion, the acceleration thesis implies sharpening spatiotemporal specificity because empirical research findings may increasingly be particular to a time and place, “one-offs,” rather than generalizable. Social science research may thus become a “history of the here and now,” reflecting process particularity rather than recurrence. However, this slipperiness does not exist in the same way in human biology. To be sure, as noted by processual philosophers of biology, fluidity is central because everything biological is in “motion.” Yet less emphasized by processualists is the likelihood that what is observed now in life science will recur in the future. This is most obvious at the macro level: For example, it seems highly probable that human beings will remain characterized by two legs, eyes, ears, and hands over millennia to come. Even if we entertain transhuman fantasies of bodily redesign, there are notable evolutionary advantages to our current morphology, such as bipedalism or the “tool ready” intricacies of the human hand. At the micro level, things become trickier given the complexity of biological process across space and time, and it is thus not surprising that “exact” research replications constitute a precarious feat, and one that is difficult to realize in biology (Helm and Shavit 2017; Peterson and Panofsky 2021). Yet we can still expect correspondence in future millennia such that human biochemistry will still involve elements such as carbon, calcium, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus or a similarity in the processes surrounding neuronal synaptic “firing” (Machamer, Darden, and Craver 2000).

Biology, of course, contains varying timescales and temporal horizons. For example, viruses constitute a challenge to notions of longue durée biology due to the rapidity of their evolutionary change and their continuous potential instability (Dupré and Guttinger 2016). Nevertheless, each virus mutation remains characterized by recurrent processes through which hosts are infected by the “delivery” of the “virion”. If this were not the case, we could not have designed vaccines that limit COVID-19 because vaccines rely on biological recurrence for their effectiveness. Furthermore, designing these vaccines in less than a year “relied . . . heavily on previous coronavirus work” (Messan et al. 2023), drawing on research deciphering biologically recurrent processes.

Over millennial timescales, biological processes may adapt and change. Yet because most biologists are studying present-day “model” species in the here and now, such as the fruit fly, nematode worm, or mouse (Ankeny and Leonelli 2011; Krause 2021), they routinely employ an ontological expectation of process recurrence. In other words, although we can agree with processualists that process appears central to life science because “stasis for an organism implies death” (Dupré 2014:15), current human biology generally depends on process recurrence, such as that of the continuous cellular replication underlying the epidermic replacement of our skin. ⁴

Researching and modeling these biological processes often presents considerable complexity and the need for continual refinement (Peterson 2015) or changing conventions (Krause 2021), but there is nevertheless an ontological expectation of process recurrence in life science that is not so readily apparent in social science due to the spatiotemporal nature of its subject matter, where there is no ontological parallel with the millennial continuity of many human morphologies and processes, such as bipedalism or the biochemistry of blood. If “observations must be stable . . . and therefore repeatable” (Collins 2016:78), this creates problems particular to social science because there is nothing in the social arena that even begins to resemble the extremely longue durée process recurrence apparent within many aspects of human biology. There may be certain tendencies, such as historically persistent social inequalities, but their instantiation is distinctly variable across time and space, as illustrated by changes in forms of inequality in the West, from feudal to maritime, mercantile, colonial, industrial, postindustrial societies, and so on.

To understand these differences and the human propensity for accelerating change, we need to consider the particularities of the human condition by applying a sociological perspective to comparative ethology. This perspective allows us to consider whether there are facets of humanity that make us especially amenable to acceleration and fluidity such that social life becomes a “highly mutable affair” (Mills 1959:164). From this standpoint, there are noteworthy human characteristics, namely our facility for language, symbolism, and technology and their historically interwoven development.

Spatiotemporal Specificity: Symbolism, Language, and Technology

The question of spatiotemporal specificity in social science is intimately tied up with what it means to be a human animal because our remarkable facility for language and symbolism has fostered an extraordinary talent for (re)making our worlds, with the consequence that “language is central to social scientists’ activities” (Collins 2016:79). In stressing this linguistic flair, my present concern is not that traditionally represented by the linguistic or cultural “turn,” such as Foucault’s attention to discursive “rupture” and transformation or the more general desire to “close the ‘gap’ between text and reality” (Wagner 2003:171). Instead, I aim to underscore the way language and symbolism represent an exceptional characteristic of the human primate that, ethologically speaking, constitutes an ontological difference from other species (Elias 1991). Other animals can communicate “signals,” such as the warning cries of birds, but it is “the uniqueness of human language” that constitutes an evolution “from signal to symbol” (Planer and Sterelny 2021:5), and it is this symbol manipulation that appears particularly human. For instance, other primates can be taught a limited vocabulary, but we are the only primate that uses elaborate languages and other symbolic skills, such as complex mathematics. As Horigan (1988:100) notes, “ape language experiments exhibit a marked degree of anthropocentrism” because they attempt to impose a linguistic system on primates that are “at best limited-vocal learners” (Petkov and Wilson 2012:2077). Quite apart from the resistance of our primate cousins to such anthropocentric ambition, the denial of the Aristotelian distinction between humans and other animals ignores the fact that we remain the only primate that uses symbolic processes to enable a strong and accelerating degree of sociocultural fluidity—and as a consequence, spatiotemporal specificity.

Assertions of human exceptionalism have been critiqued for their false elision with notions of human superiority (e.g., Anderson and Perrin 2015), but exceptionalism need not imply that humans are “superior” to other animals. It is not that “the social realm is a natural realm which differs from the others only by a greater complexity [italics added]” (Durkheim 1995:17); other organisms also exhibit extraordinary complexity, such as the remarkable visual, olfactory, and mobility affordances observed with other animals. We remain animals like other creatures, “a part of nature” (Durkheim 1995:17), but with some very particular linguistic talents that give us the potential to continually refashion rather than replicate.

In other words, our unique linguistic and symbolic competence is central to our inherent capacity for open-ended fluidity, acceleration, and particularity rather than closure, regularity, and recurrence. This competence is critical to our unique ability to communicate arguments, ideas, and techniques to others and thus change our worlds within and between generations (Elias 1991). For instance, the “scaffolds” (Sterelny 2010) represented by the evolution of universities constitute an important means for the intragenerational and intergenerational symbolic communication of linguistic, mathematical, and technical repositories of knowledge (de Ridder-Symoens 1991). This transmitted knowledge facilitates change and development at a much greater speed than the slower change observed among species more reliant on biological evolution. In effect, these symbolic repositories enable subsequent generations to learn, innovate, and change in a primate atypical manner. As Elias (1991:31–32) argues, it is because of language and symbolism that “in the case of human societies a great social change such as that from tribe to empire can occur without any biological change [italics added].”

Yet it is not the case that “the only unique thing about the social sciences . . . is that the feedback is mediated by language” (Collins 2016:78): Human animals also exhibit an exceptional technological competence (Sterelny 2010). Other animals evince technological ability, but this does not match the elaborate technologies already witnessed within Neolithic humanity (Robb 2013) through our unique capacity to create “artificial materials such as bronze, iron, concrete, and bread” (Gibson 1979:129). In addition, there is a variety of argument indicating that our abilities with tools and signs are interrelated (e.g., Ilyenkov 1977), representing artifice that may have evolved in tandem (Washburn 1960). For example, there are archaeological indications that language may have been significant to human technological refinement and finesse (Morgan et al. 2015). As Mithen (2019) argues, the development of language appears interwoven with human technological development, as reflected in the Neolithic transition from hunter-gatherer to farming societies, where novel techniques would have necessitated a new lexicon relating to the growing, weeding, watering, and storing of crops. And although Elias (1991:104) underplays the significance of technology (Burkitt 1999), he nevertheless points to the importance of its interrelation with language. As he suggests, “could human knowledge have been extended, as it was for example from the making of hunting axes to that of computers, from the perception of the sun as . . . the vehicle of a God to that as a kind of helium burning furnace, without . . . languages?”

In this fashion, Homo sapiens can be seen as a particularly technolinguistic primate. Yet in making this observation, my concern is not to promote technological determinism, linguistic idealism, or human superiority but rather to underscore the ethological centrality of both technology and language to human sociotechnical and sociocultural fluidity. It is this interrelation of technolinguistic skill and social fluidity that enables accelerating human sociotechnical change.

Most significantly, our technolinguistic aptitude has allowed us a unique agility in discovering and deploying the dynamically recurrent processes of the natural world, such as those realized with the Sino-development of the magnetic compass, paper, printing, and gunpowder (Needham 1956). Through this technolinguistic facility, we learned that these technologies would repeatedly produce the same outcome due to the “natural” process recurrence they incorporated, such as the magnetic response of the compass or the volatile gases produced by gunpowder. Similarly, our rapid need to control COVID-19 was based on energizing biological process recurrence. In this fashion, the history of science and technology reflects the relation between differing social and natural temporalities as the fluidity of human technolinguistic adaptability became interwoven with the regularity of processual recurrences in biology and physics. From this perspective, we can see that the current concern with sociotechnical acceleration, and lives lived in the “fast lane,” reflects a capacity always inherent in the human talent for language, symbolism, and technology. Things may have “speeded up” since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution(s), but this acceleration potential remained highly unlikely without the “plasticity” afforded by our technolinguistic flair. Furthermore, this ability to “play” with the process recurrence of nature has come to define an era where other organisms struggle to survive in an anthropocentric world and its complex “aftermath” (Landecker 2025), characterized as it is by anthropogenic climate change, habitat depletion, and species extinction.

In summary, if we wish to understand why any social relation tends to reflect “a certain stage in history” (Collingwood 1946:229), it is useful to apply a comparative ethological perspective because it alerts us to the facets of human experience that make us especially capable of remaking our worlds and advancing an accelerating fluidity. Yet if the human social is ontologically governed by variability and particularity, it creates problems for traditional “scientific” epistemology. For instance, for social scientists who promote the desirability of research replication and recurrence, a continually changing culture and technology generates a critical constraint because it makes it much less likely that anything we observe “now” will be seen in quite the same way again.

These epistemological and empirical constraints do not apply in the same way to biological research because most human biological processes are recurrent, and this recurrence is essential to our health, as with the forestalling or repairing of genomic copying “errors” and the normal replenishment of our skin. In this sense, many biological processes exhibit a dynamic stability where “persistence is achieved through activity” (Dupré 2021a:10674). As noted, this does not mean experimental replication will be straightforward because biological processes are active, complex, and in motion (Peterson 2015). Yet given that process recurrence constitutes a reasonable ontological assumption in human biology, it becomes meaningful to entertain it, even if it may be constrained by time/space variability and a host of programmatical, methodological, and reporting issues (Munafò et al. 2017). The same ontological supposition cannot be so confidently maintained in the social sciences because our symbolic and technological competence allows us the possibility of accelerating fluidity, changeability, and particularity. In other words, the historically particular combination of human technolinguistic flair and fluidity means that the social domain is often governed by process particularity rather than recurrence.

Implications for Spatiotemporal Specificity

The foregoing argument suggests two principal observations relating to the history of thought regarding spatiotemporal specificity, the first relating to temporal perspective and the second to the position of Weber.

First, most sociology addressing spatiotemporal specificity tends to define it through reference to “the historical transition from one epoch [italics added] to another” (Mills 1959:152). Prominent historical sociologists, such as Elias (1994), predominantly portray historical change as epochal in nature, as with the radical transition consequent upon court society. Similarly, although Bourdieu considered “shorter-term processes of change” (Calhoun 2013:65; cf. Atkinson 2019; Steinmetz 2011), he often emphasized the epochal, as with the hysteresis he witnessed with Algerian peasantry (Bourdieu 1979) or among the “outmoded” male peasantry in his native Béarn (Bourdieu 2008) or the various transformations he associated with neoliberalism (Bourdieu 2005).

This temporal emphasis was prefigured in Weber’s (1949:95) concern with the “ideal type” as that “which can be abstracted from certain characteristic social phenomena of an epoch [italics added].” The commonality of this temporal orientation is unsurprising given the compelling nature of epochal difference. To take a crude example, would Sartre have considered existentialism in a feudal society? Similarly, “it is not imaginable that Marx would have developed his theory of capitalism had he lived in the ninth and not the nineteenth century” (Calhoun 1992:260). Although these epochal contrasts feel incontrovertible, they detract attention from more rapid processes of change. In particular, if sociotechnical change is now accelerating apace in many societies, we need to ask whether significant spatiotemporal variability applies to much shorter time periods, not just between epochs and eras but between decades and years.

Second, the focus on spatiotemporal specificity sets up an inevitable tension with desires to maintain transhistorical conjecture (Reed 2011, 2023), and it is here that Weber remains especially interesting. Although I agree with Weber’s differentiation between social and natural science, I disagree with the terms on which it is made because his distinction relies on human facets that, although undoubtedly relevant, appear secondary to our constitution as a technolinguistic primate.

For instance, if we follow Oakes (1975:37), Weber’s “social/nature” distinction relies on human values, as it is made “not on ontological grounds . . . but rather on axiological [italics added] grounds.” In particular, “the concept of culture is a value concept” (Weber 2014:116) where “reality under the guidance of values . . . is entirely different [italics added] from the analysis of reality in terms of laws and general concepts” that are traditionally associated with natural science (Weber 1949:77). Alternatively, Bruun and Whimster (2014) emphasize sociocultural interpretation as the key facet differentiating social and natural science, as denoted by Weber’s Verstehen and Deutung and the “insider” access they provide to a social realm distinct from “nature” (Collingwood 1946).

Yet from the present perspective, it is not values or meaning that are the primary determinants of the differentiation between natural and social science but our ethological nature as a technolinguistic primate. It is this characteristic that gives us an extraordinary flexibility for change and flux, and this open fluidity means the social arena is more likely to witness process particularity than process recurrence. In other words, although our values and interpretation remain key attributes of the sociocultural, it is our technolinguistic flair that constitutes the principal differentiation of social from natural science because it is this uniquely developed attribute that allows us a remarkable degree of sociotechnical changeability and “acceleration” potential compared to other animals. This technolinguistically enabled “slipperiness” continuously challenges notions of process recurrence, increasing the likelihood that sociological research reflects the particular, the “here and now,” rather than the transcendent or universal.

One might argue that Weber’s ideal types address this issue. At least at the level of heuristics, they appear to provide a means of rescuing the transhistorical from the destabilizing tendencies of spatiotemporal specificity. In part, however, this depends on which interpretation of ideal types we adopt. As others have noted, making definitive statements about Weber can be as difficult as “catching . . . slippery soap” (Eliaeson 2016:253), with the consequence that “Weberian methodology” can appear like “a language game unto itself” (Reed 2011:141), and it is perhaps not surprising that “it still remains open to debate whether the ideal type of 1904–6 was the same conceptual instrument as that of WG [Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society)] in 1920” (Bruun and Whimster 2014:xxv).

In his earlier work, Weber (1949:107) stresses that “ideal-type and historical reality should not be confused with each other.” Although Weber (2019:97) partly maintained this epistemological “divorce” in his later writing, greater ambiguity appears where he refers to ideal types as “‘typical’ cases,” a comment suggestive of “a systematic sociological terminology by which regularities [italics added] of social behaviour can be typified” (Bruun and Whimster 2014:xxv). Put another way, although we can conceive of ideal types purely as a transhistorical heuristic, their empirical point of reference chiefly concerns endurance and generalization rather than specificity and particularity. As Kalberg (1994:54) observes, “each of Weber’s ideal types—for example, the family, civil servants, the capitalist economy, the aestheticism path of salvation, and bureaucratic authority—implies regular action orientations with a degree of endurance, directedness, and firmness [italics added].” In other words, the point of ideal types mostly relates to explaining “real” transhistorical “continuity” (Kalberg 1994:54).

Yet spatiotemporal specificity doubts the feasibility of this project. It asks whether it is possible to realize “the acquisition of knowledge concerning regularities” (Weber 2014:118) when things continuously change. In particular, in worlds increasingly governed by accelerating change and specificity, can we defend ideal types if they are treated as mechanisms to proclaim “actual” transhistorical endurance?

In summary, process particularity and fluidity are not in keeping with Weber’s (2014:133) desire to rescue the transhistorical in spite of his sensitivity to the problems confronting “historical disciplines” where we “are constantly confronted with new questions by the ever-advancing flow of culture.” As argued previously, it is the latter spatiotemporal specificities that mean social science is unlikely to witness the kind of process recurrence found in natural science, and it this that constitutes the principal ontological difference distinguishing social from natural science, rather than interpretation or meaning per se. Technolinguistic flair represents a reality that continuously circumscribes transhistorical desire.

Implications for Sociological Theory

Spatiotemporal specificity has a number of implications for sociological theory.

First, there is a need for circumscription in social science because our studies are necessarily temporally and spatially bounded. Where we ignore these restrictions, the probability grows that our research “imposes a continuity that isn’t there” (Abbott 1988:320). Instead of implicit assumptions of generalizability, we need to accept “spatiotemporal demarcation,” acknowledging the limited “circumference” to which our research applies. Second, changeable historical and cultural circumstances also imply caution in the design and implementation of sociopolitical policies. In other words, changing circumstances further complicate policy interventions that, following Weber and Elias, may already be subject to a range of unintended consequences. In particular, spatiotemporal specificity suggests policies need to be sensitive not just to the local sociocultural and political contexts but also to the increasing likelihood of rapid changes in that context. Policy programs may be targeting a landscape that has already changed before policies are enacted. For instance, governments have been slow in appreciating the regulatory requirements posed by digital platforms such as Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta (Birkinshaw 2024). Similarly, many national and local regulatory bodies reacted too slowly in developing housing policies to address the post-Airbnb landscape, especially in areas of housing shortage (Kramer 2025; Wolifson et al. 2023). Acceleration and spatiotemporal specificity suggest “policy catchup” may become increasingly widespread.

Third, spatiotemporal specificity means sociology and most other social sciences may have considerable difficulty in attempts to predict the future. For instance, it was not easy in the 1990s to predict the effects of rapid house price inflation and understand “how profound the effects of the asset economy” would be for changing social inequalities in the twenty-first century (Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2020:61–62) or to see how it might create a “new world” where the rent from owning housing assets “often pays more than working for a living” (Adkins et al. 2020:5; cf. Piketty 2014). These relatively rapid developments occurred in just a few decades and meant that new intergenerational inequalities arose due to rapid house price inflation, as reflected in the postmillennial inequality between asset-rich, property-owning, older generations and younger people who may be confined to Generation Rent “forever”. Following accelerating spatiotemporal specificity, the future becomes yet more uncertain.

Fourth, these examples illustrate why sociologists and social scientists need to exercise demarcation rather than generalization, but this does not mean we can no longer “do” sociology. In particular, comparative sociology is relevant even where we limit our analysis to a particular decade or geographic location, despite the generalizing proclivities traditionally associated with comparative historical analysis (Reed 2011). Our studies, whether empirical or theoretical, are enriched through reference to work undertaken in different contexts. In other words, it is not the case that “only on the metaphysical assumption that some relations are necessary and at least relatively enduring can we reasonably set out to practice science or to study society,” as critical realists such as Archer (1995:166) attest. This argument ignores the central significance of the comparative in sociology, which retains relevance even though our theory or research remains particular to a time and place.

In other words, we do not have to subscribe to Weber’s ideal types or related interpretations, such as Bendix’s (1968:71) “contrast-conceptions,” to see that comparison forms an ongoing part of our endeavor (Krause 2021). For example, although not usually couched in these terms, theories of acceleration deploy the historical comparative. In effect, their assertion that life has become more changeable only makes sense when you compare it to a past when this was not the case—by arguing, say, that from the mid-twentieth century onward, meaningful change became increasingly “decennial” rather than “centennial” or “epochal” (Rosa 2013). Similarly, the proliferation of social theories receptive to the creation of “new worlds” also utilize comparative historical strategies that dramatize “the new” by (implicitly) comparing it with “the old.” Rose (1990), for instance, commenced his influential “governmentality” thesis by referencing Foucault’s (1982:783) argument that “individuality would be shaped in a new [italics added] form” and refashioned through “new [italics added] regimes of truth . . . new [italics added] ways of saying plausible things . . . new [italics added] ways for thinking” (Rose 1990:4). Although not defined in these terms, Rose’s approach represents a comparative historical genealogy accounting for how subjectivity became “newly” problematized and “governed” through a plethora of innovative “institutions, procedures, analysis and reflections, . . . calculations and tactics” (Foucault 1979:20). Such examples illustrate how sociology is not incapacitated when we assume spatiotemporal specificity, flux, and instability rather than endurance and stability.

Fifth, spatiotemporal specificity does mean that the adoption of natural science epistemology and assumption is frequently inappropriate because the social arena is not subject to process recurrence in a manner ontologically similar to that found in “nature.” Little in the social world has the same reliable recurrence as turning on a light switch or boiling a kettle. Furthermore, even though natural science research frequently involves considerable complexity undertaken within a sociopolitical terrain, it still generally relies on an ontology of process recurrence. For instance, the development of medicines may be subject to commercial and political pressure and their effects variable between human bodies, but the entire pharmacological enterprise rests on an assumption of process recurrence in which the drugs will “deliver.” In contrast, due to the fluidity afforded by human technolinguistic flair, the social constitutes a far more slippery landscape, and assumptions about recurrence or generalization often remain tenuous.

Sixth, existing sociological, historical, and philosophical theory may still be germane, as illustrated by the relevance of the German Historical Schools, Weber, Collingwood, Gergen, and Mills to the present argument. Yet in relation to empirical research, the transposability of existing sociological theory is likely to be far more context dependent, and it seems reasonable to suggest these theories will require modification to remain relevant to changing circumstances. For instance, in their study of the “new” asset economies surrounding rapid house price inflation, Adkins et al. (2020:62) note their analysis is at least “analogous to Marxist and Weberian schemes.” Nevertheless, because they were interested in the way that rapid asset price inflation engendered new inequalities, it is not surprising that these authors principally adapted social theories more amenable to understanding the “shift from [commodity] price inflation towards asset inflation” (Adkins et al. 2020:22), such as Minsky’s (1982:14) attention to “the financing of capital assets” and Piketty’s (2014) interest in asset appreciation, both of which provide a more direct understanding of the “reconfiguration of patterns of inequality . . . [around] home ownership” (Adkins et al. 2020:27). In summary, given that new futures engender new particulars, existing social theories will generally require modification and supplementation to retain relevance.

Seventh, the current thesis also questions the continuing tendency among sociologists and other social scientists to draw on natural science to legitimate social science rationales (Newton 2007; Reed 2011), as witnessed within social mechanisms, critical realism, and variants of new materialism. Relatedly, this perspective questions the flat ontologies seen in approaches such as actor-network theory, assemblage theories, more-than-human proposition, and new materialism. Their appeal is unsurprising given that humans and other life forms do constitute an interweaving of the social, biological, and physical/neurochemical, a Spinozist unity of matter that implicitly questions “the Cartesian view of man’s [sic] relation to nature” (de Spinoza 1994:xv). However, a problem arises with these flat onto-epistemologies where they treat all aspects of this complexity in an ontologically or epistemologically equivalent manner (Choat 2018; van Ingen 2016). We may wish to deny “a metaphysics” of “inherent difference between human and non-human, subject and object, mind and body” (Barad 2007:185), but monist declarations do not of themselves resolve differences in our knowledge of the social, biological, or physical terrain. In other words, it is not the case that “monism . . . exceeds and overwhelms the dualities it replaces” (Fox and Aldred 2017:14) because onto-epistemological differences remain.

Most variants of monist and new materialist literature show little interest in the Methodenstreit debate, or the historical argument that we cannot apply the assumptions of natural science to social science, as explored by authors such as Knies, Schmoller, Weber, and Collingwood. In addition, many of their anti-dualist “borrowings from the sciences” have been “not only extremely eclectic but also highly selective” (Jackson and Scott 2014:577), with a tendency to overlook the fact that “different disciplines have their own cultures, frames of reference, methods, objectives and languages” (Cromby 2007:150). In consequence, “translation errors” are almost inevitable where monist writers move between social and natural science fields as variable as biology, physics, sociology, feminist studies, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

At worst, the fashion for monism and anti-dualism resembles an ironically anthropocentric ambition where “nature” is colonized through its capture within a predominantly “social” interpretation that, somewhat imperialistically, advocates “rejecting differences between ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ realms” (Fox and Aldred 2017:7). Yet most significant from the present perspective is that these bypassing, minimizing, and erasing desires either minimize or overlook the likelihood that the natural and social terrains occupy different ontological domains because the former is often characterized by process recurrence and the latter frequently is not.

Eighth, spatiotemporality has significant implications for the interdisciplinary adventures between sociology and human biology following increased sociological interest in emotion, health, neuroscience, feminist biosocial debate, the microbiome, epigenetics, and so on. A fair amount of this literature proceeds as though the transition between social and life science is epistemological unproblematic (Newton 2003, 2007, 2016), a questionable proposition when the ontological assumptions of life science do not routinely hold with social science. In addition, given that life and social scientists may inhabit different universes, it remains unsurprising that scholars encounter difficulties in interdisciplinary endeavor, especially if participants lack awareness of the need for epistemological pluralism in working across the biosocial terrain.

Conclusions

In explaining why social and life science occupy different ontological and epistemological terrains, the present article represents an explanatory addendum to historicist theses. To understand “historical necessity,” it suggests that we need to attend to the interrelation of human technolinguistic flair and sociotechnical fluidity, flux, and particularity, especially in the context of accelerating change. Our unique technolinguistic aptitude means it is difficult to convincingly defend “the idea that sociology could be a science in the same sense as the natural sciences” (Calhoun 2007:6) because social “slipperiness” makes it hard to transfer the time transcendent proclivities of natural science to social science. The problem is that human configurations remain remarkably open because of the free-floating nature of human technolinguistic and symbolic skill, where expression is independent of substance. This “open plasticity” makes it problematic to assume generalizability and transcendence, making it more likely we will witness process particularity than process recurrence. It is not that recurrences may never occur, but human temporal and cultural variation, together with extensive social interweaving, interlacing, and entanglement (Barad 2007; Elias 1994), make it hard to build an epistemology based on an assumption of generalizability and transhistorical transcendence. In addition, in a de-traditionalized and “changeling” world where things appear yet more fluid and mutable, notions of social endurance or recurrence become increasingly tenuous.

Of course, the natural world is also characterized by considerable complexity of process. Yet this does not mean process recurrence is ontologically unlikely. For instance, biological communication is not open-ended, as illustrated by the nucleotide processes surrounding DNA, RNA, and mRNA that are often attuned, even if contingently (Keller 2000), toward closure, prescription, and recurrence.

In underscoring these ontological differences, the present argument doubts anti-dualist propositions that play down or suppress disparity between the natural and social terrain through advancing a monist universe. The elision between ontology and epistemology characterizing approaches like actor-network, more-than human proposition, and new materialism is questionable to the extent it ignores “onto-epistemological” differences between social, life, and physical science. Rather than monist prescription, sociological adventures across the biosocial terrain in areas such as emotion, neuroscience, genomics, and microbiomics require epistemological pluralism. Similarly, whatever their desire for “unity” rather than pluralism (e.g., Miłkowski, Hohol, and Nowakowski 2019), the history of schisms in social sciences is unsurprising given that it remains difficult to achieve a common unitary epistemology across fields such as biological/cultural anthropology or biological/social psychology (Newton 2023).

Finally, we need to consider whether natural science can ever provide an appropriate model for social science. Natural science can inform social science debates, as when underscoring the futility of desires for “unity” (Dupré 1993; Galison and Stump 1996) or illustrating the evolving nature of scientific “conventions” (Krause 2021), but it is often illusory to assume we can base social science ontology and epistemology on the natural sciences. With the latter, there is at least a reasonable ontological expectation that recurrences will occur, an assumption that is generally inappropriate in sociology because it remains a substantially historical discipline attentive to a particular period in time and space. However, in emphasizing “the sociological principle of historical specificity” (Mills 1959:157), the argument presented here does not favor a strong cultural or historical relativism. Social science is telling us something about ourselves, but we need to accept that this knowledge is circumscribed by spatiotemporal specificity. If we accept this argument, repeatedly deploying rationalizing allusions to biology or physical science constitutes a sociological disservice to the extent that they are frequently unrealistic and detract from realizing what is significant to sociological understanding. ⁵