The transplantation of the positivist paradigm from the natural sciences to the domain of social inquiry has precipitated profound and persistent epistemological tensions. This intellectual inheritance, characterized by its commitment to methodological monism, seeks to subordinate the study of human affairs to the nomothetic ideal—the establishment of generalizable, law-like regularities. Such an enterprise, however, rests upon a contestable ontological assumption: that social phenomena possess the same objective, observer-independent status as their physical counterparts. This foundational premise has been systematically dismantled by critiques asserting that the object of social scientific inquiry is not inert but is intrinsically constituted by intersubjective meanings, historical contingency, and the reflexive capacity of human agents. Consequently, the uncritical application of positivist methodologies is frequently condemned as inherently reductive, eliding the nuanced, value-laden particularity of human action in favor of abstract variables. Causal-explanatory models, while powerful within their proper domain, are ill-suited to capture the logic of social systems, which are fundamentally symbolic and context-dependent. Proponents of alternative frameworks argue that a more veridical account demands a pivot towards idiographic approaches, foregrounding hermeneutic interpretation and the deep elucidation of culturally specific rationalities. Notwithstanding the cogency of these arguments, the institutional prestige of quantifiable data and the perceived objectivity of statistical modeling ensure that positivist presuppositions continue to permeate social research, often implicitly. The core intellectual challenge, therefore, is not a simplistic binary of quantitative versus qualitative methods, but a deeper, unresolved schism between divergent epistemological underpinnings regarding the very nature and possibility of a science of society.