The change of scientific paradigm and its implications for social theory

The metaphysics of science is concerned with the general attempts to make sense of the entities, phenomena and concepts that figure in the science as a whole. Yet how these questions are formulated and answered depends not only upon the realm of reality scientists are investigating but also upon a series of implicit metaphysical presuppositions involved in the actual practices. They, like the lens, form the basis of the underlying foundations of any scientific investigations and the conceptual schemes of both natural and social science. Therefore the objective is to make these presuppositions explicit in both areas of research by analysing the evolution of science as a shift from classical scientific paradigm (CSP) to a new scientific paradigm (NSP). This reveals how significant and yet unaware were the influences of the fundamentals in the field of natural science on presuppositions in social theory. The CSP formation is linked with mechanistic Newtonian physics and its fundamentals were taken as granted by social science. The radical change of the fundamentals caused by the NSP is a result of the revolution in contemporary natural science. The main problem emphasised is that social theory is still not fully committed to accepting these challenges and rethinking the old visions inherited from the CSP. In order to encourage this rethinking, there is a need to clarify and compare the fundamental assumptions of each paradigm.