Critical (i.e., separating) methods apply only to the world-as-nature. — Social science

"Science, as we know it, is not value-free. This is more so with social sciences. And certainly, a subject such as ethnic relations, which tends to have an emotional overtone cannot be expected to be presented or analysed with pure objectivity, however one claims, or wants it to be. To an extent, the treatment of the subject depends on the angle that the person is looking at, his theoretical orientation and even political bias, and his short and long-term motives. A social scientist may look at, or even magnify ethnic relations to legitimise his discipline, or even for scholarly recognition. A writer may provide a sensational tint for commercial purposes. A politician may use it to catch votes and wrest power even if he knows it can instill ill-will and suspicion. I am not saying this because I do not believe in the study of ethnic relations. In fact, I believe studies in ethnic relations can be healthy and injustices motivated by discriminative and oppressive tendencies. I do not claim to know which is right in terms of solving ethnic problems, for "right" too is subjective. But I believe ethnic relations, if it is to be positive, must be viewed within a particular historical context, as well as the relevant socio-cultural, economic and political setting. As such, answers to questions pertaining to Malaysian ethnic relations must necessarily be peculiarly Malaysian."

"The restriction of rationality to the use of means … entails that the other aspect of the practical problematic, the realm of ends, falls prey to pure decisionism, the whim of mere decisions not reflected upon by reason. The decisionism of unreflected, arbitrary decisions in the realm of practice corresponds to the positivism implied by the restriction to pure value-free theories."

"have done an excellent and courageous job of sounding the alarm on the enormous dangers of the continuation of business as usual with respect to carbon emissions and other planetary boundaries. But mainstream social science as it exists today has almost completely internalized capitalist ideology; so much so that conventional social scientists are completely unable to address the problem on the scale and in the historical terms that are necessary. They are accustomed to the view that society long ago “conquered” nature and that social science concerns only people-people relations, never people-nature relations. This feeds a where Earth system-scale problems are concerned. Those mainstream social scientists who do address s more often than not do so as if we are dealing with fairly normal conditions, and not a planetary emergency, not a no-analogue situation."

"Because war and exploitation and poverty and racial discrimination and psychological insecurity plague modern societies, social science must justify itself by providing solutions for all of these problems. Yet social scientists may be no better equipped to solve these urgent problems today than were physicians, such as Harvey or Sydenham, to identify, study, and cure coronary thrombosis in 1655. Yet, as history testifies, the inadequacy of medicine to cope with this particular problem scarcely meant that it lacked powers of development. If everyone backs only the sure thing, who will support the colt yet to come into its own?"

"A comparative social science requires a generalized system of concepts which will enable the scientific observer to compare and contrast large bodies of concretely different social phenomena in consistent terms."

"The idea found embedded in European thought, particularly in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries that Africans were inferior socially and behaviorally has tainted most of what passes for social science in the West, definitionally and conceptually. Few have been able to escape Alexander Popes dictum in the Essay on Man (1733) "some are, and must be, greater than the rest" and its implication for European contact and interpretation of that contact with the rest of the world."