At the beginning of a science, the first step is always to declare the thingness of something that we want to study. This is a star. That is a cow. This is a society. That is a race. This is a mind. That first step is actually a huge step which we rarely ever talk about.
It's just kind of assumed that obviously we can just identify things as clearly being real using our senses and our intuitions and as long as our scientific conclusions seem predictive to us (using the same senses and intuition) then we assume we must be on the right track.
Social phenomena present a real challenge here because we can't perceive social reality directly with our senses and different people have different intuitions which seem to lead to different frameworks which all seem to have some predictive validity.
To be clear, I don't think this issue is limited to social science, it's just more obvious there.
In my field statistics, statistical phenomena also can't be perceived with our senses directly and different people have different intuitions about data. This can lead to different frameworks that are extremely predictive but point to different underlying truths.
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