It used to be somewhat common for Philosphers like Habermas or Jon Elster to make significant contributions to social science, especially theory? Is this still the case?
I know both Habermas and Elster are still alive. But I’m not sure if they are really representative of the state of things now.
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Yes.
Obviously it depends on the field and can vary a lot, but there are certain fields of social sciences where philosophers can and do make significant contributions. I’ll give one example I’m familiar with, but I’m sure there are many more.
So, ever heard about depression? There’s kind of a big problem when it comes to treating it: our best treatments seem to be, at best, unable to decrease the number of people who suffer from it contemporaneously (i.e. the prevalence) and the number of people who’re being diagnosed with it (i.e. first instances). Ormel et al. have dubbed it the “Treatment-Prevalence Paradox.”
The problem can be summed up like this (this is an oversimplification for comprehensibility’s sake): in the last 4 decades or so treatment for depression has become more common, but there are no fewer people that suffer from it. How come? Assuming that the causes for depressive disorders (DDs) haven’t become significantly more prevalent in the same time period, or at the very least that the rate of growth of people who suffer from DDs isn’t greater than the rate of growing access to treatment (and particularly antidepressants), then it doesn’t make sense that there’d be more anti-depression treatment but no less depressed people.
For example: if treatment for schizophrenia would’ve become more common, then less people would suffer from schizophrenic symptoms. Why isn’t it the case with DDs?
There are many different hypotheses what that’s the case. Imo one of the most interesting among them is not that the treatment isn’t as good as research led on, or that DDs are becoming increasingly more common, or even that the clinical criteria for diagnosis have been used more inclusively — as all of those are likely true but also unsatisfactory — but that currently the most commonly used theoretical framework to understand DDs is inadequate.
The most common framework for DDs is medical (or more correctly medicalized): DDS are diagnosed based on symptomatology, explained and described based on psychophysiological etiology, and treated with psychiatric medications. In simpler terms: DDs are treated like a physical disorder in all possible ways — from how they look like, what’s causing them, and how to treat them.
But, and hear me out here, that’s not the best approach to deal with depression? I don’t mean to say that the medical framework is wrong per se — it’s not, and in fact it helped many millions of people — but that there’s another, better theoretical framework which addresses aspects that are very hard (or impossible) to describe empirically, which are more fundamental to depression than the psychophysical aspects?
And this is where philosophy comes in: depression can also be described phenomenologically, i.e. as essentially experiential. This is a field that has been studied extensively by Matthew Ratcliffe: he even wrote an entire book about it called Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology. Very basically, the idea is this: one of the most commonly shared things among depressed individuals— arguably even more so than their symptomatology (which can vary quite significantly) or their neuro-chemical imbalance — is their depressive experiences. Particularly, Ratcliffe argues that depressed individuals have consistent irregularities in their experiences which can be described as a feature or a characteristic of DDs; the symptomatology isn’t only objective (i.e. if we perceive the patient for an external POV, like an object), but also subjective (i.e. if we perceive the patient from an internal POV, by “being in their shoes”).
The research about this topic exists (see the book above), but more theoretically and less regarding its application in real life clinical practice. However, due to the problems which continue to plague treatments for DDs — with more and more evidence that shows something’s gotta give — there’s (slowly) growing voice within some subfields within psychology that call for a re-evaluation of depression, among other mental disorders (also heard similar calls regarding anxiety, but from a different direction).
Edit: grammar and misspelling
It depends on what you mean by common, but there are definitely philosophers who are widely cited in various social sciences. Off the top of my head:
Martha Nussbaum helped develop the capabilities approach to human welfare alongside, which has gained traction in economics, political science, and public policy.
Judith Butler’s account of gender performativity has been massively influential in gender studies and sociology. Gender Trouble, her best-known work, has been cited over 100,000 times according to Google Scholar, with a lot of the citations coming from social science publications.
Peter Spirtes, Clark N Glymour, and Richard Scheines’ work on causal inference and learning algorithms has gained a some popularity in the more statistics-heavy fields (you can see the citations here)
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