This anthology surveys an intellectual landscape vastly and importantly reshaped
over the last 25 years. Historically, the philosophy of the social sciences has been
an inquiry loosely organized around the problem of the scientific status of social
knowledge. This problematic emerged with social sciences themselves in the latter
part of the nineteenth century and continued, in one form or another, to dominate
discussion through the better part of the next. A trio of core issues – the
scientific status of intentional explanations (and agency), the nature of rationality,
and the methodological hallmarks of science – seemingly persist through current
discussion and debate. But the substance attached to these issues has fundamentally
shifted and altered. Without examining details of the substantive changes,
the shifts in the subject matter remain obscured. This introduction examines
these shifts and proposes an explanation of how and why they occur.