The effects were debilitating indeed. We do not need to go to great lengths documenting the failure of the behavioral and social sciences in their efforts to understand human beings and to account for their behavior. This is well documented and all too familiar. And many critics are even coming to see the connection between these failures on the one hand and the that outdated mode of viewing the world and conceptualizing science which still dominate the social sciences even today. Critics of psychological research and practice for example, are coming to say in different words something like the following.
Psychology has an identity problem.
Similar assessments of the situation in psychology abound. But Wallace, the self-admitted naturalist, had to find some way to explain out the malaise so that naturalism could come out unscathed. The explanation has to come still from within the parameters of the normal paradigm. In social work, a heated debate has been going on for a decade to the same effect. Many critics are increasingly coming to see that the major problem with the social sciences find their roots in the fact that human beings are different in many ways from things, machines or other living organisms.