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A more charitable interpretation would be that the author is being tactical in addressing a discipline where the dominant fashion has been to critique or dismiss scientific methods. By packaging “let’s be more scientific” in an argument that sounds like “let’s not be narrowly prescriptive about epistemologies”, they may have a better chance at getting through to the most relevant target audience.

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Yes, and now that I reread it I also see there’s a bit more emphasis than I perceived on first reading on the author speaking to people who do computational work to convince them that social science disciplinary knowledge is important to have. In other words, the author is saying to computational workers, “Don't pigeonhole us as totally outside academics” and to academics, “Don’t pigeonhole us as merely methods people.”

Of course, a manifesto proclaiming the independence and usefulness of computational social science will never get you as far as actually demonstrating its usefulness.

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