A methodology for conducting interdisciplinary social research

The Vienna Circle idea that science is an interdisciplinary enterprise leads to the question of how the knowledge of the natural sciences can be used to further understanding in the social sciences. Analysis of the practice of social research shows there is no easy answer to this question. Ideologies colour the use of exact knowledge in social research methods; even in the natural sciences ideological misunderstandings seem inevitable in research practice. The concept of strangification is introduced to describe this situation and to give a framework for a methodology to handle this problem of scientific regression. It is applied to the problem of how the mathematical theory of complexity can be used in the social sciences to understand complex social phenomena.