75 CADMUS, Volume 3, No.5, October 2018, 75-80 On the Principles of a Social Theory Carlos Blanco-Pérez Universidad Pontifcia Comillas, Spain; Associate Fellow, World Academy of Art & Science Abstract This paper addresses the problem of how to identify a small and parsimonious set of principles or “postulates” that may help us understand the great theoretical foundations of the social sciences. From a philosophical point of view, it presents ten premises that are perhaps essential for any attempt at elaborating a social theory. When one tries to elaborate a theory of society based on the principles of reason and experience, frst it is essential to examine the nature of the fundamental elements that should be included in such a model. As it happens with a great variety of frameworks in the natural sciences, it is inevitable for the social researcher to start with postulates, susceptible to improvement or elimination, but always latent in any statement. How to successfully combine the conceptual and the empirical dimensions represents one of the greatest challenges of the social sciences. The method employed by the natural sciences achieves an optimum in the relation between the conceptual and empirical realms: it gradually refnes the frst in interaction with the second, and enriches our possible knowledge of the second, thanks to the frst. In this fruitful synthesis of reason, observation and experience lies one of the foremost intellectual conquests of the human mind, since it has provided us with a virtually infallible strategy to unravel the mysteries of nature. In the social and humanistic disciplines, it is legitimate to consider what indispensable postulates should appear in any successful attempt to subsume the vast heterogeneity of human phenomena under certain theoretical paradigms. Of course, a considerable number of models have addressed this issue from diferent perspectives, often diverging. I do not want to insist on this point, or analyze them with the historical and systematic prolixity that they would demand; I simply seek to sketch a brief and succinct list of postulates from which, in my opinion, no theoretical model can be exempted. Extracted from experience, deduced from pure reason or inferred from a combination of both faculties, many of these principles may seem obvious to everyone, but their evidence does not contradict their explanatory inexorability. Indeed, they can be conceived as heuristic rules that tentatively orient our understanding of human activity. First, any social science aims to understand the combined activity of human beings. Therefore, the inexcusable starting point is the human being as a biological entity in possession of cognitive abilities far superior to those of other animals in dimensions such as the power of abstraction, symbolism and inventiveness.