L'avenir des sciences sociales Entre l'empirique et le normat

This article takes a processualist position to identify the current forces conducive to rapid change in the social sciences, of which the most important is the division between the empirical and normative dimensions of the social sciences. It claims that this gap between the many and various empirical ontologies we typically use and the much more restricted normative ontology on which we base our moral judgments is problematic. In fact, the majority of such normative judgments rest on the ontology of liberal contractarianism, which might indeed be called "normative contractarianism." While this ontology is the most widely used for normative judgments in the social sciences, it is not really effective in correctly capturing the normative problems raised by the particularity and historicity of the social process, nor in capturing the astonishing diversity of values in the world. The piece closes with a call to establish a truly processual foundation for our normative ontology, which must move away from contractualism and imagine new ways of founding the human normative project.