Reduction, supervenience, and the autonomy of social scientific laws

Many have felt that it is impossible to defend autonomous laws of social sc ience: where the regularities upheld are law-like it is argued that they ar e not at base social scientific, and where the phenomena to be explained wo uld seem to require social descriptions, it is argued that laws governing t he phenomena are unavailable at that level. But is it possible to develop a n ontology that supports the dependence of the social on the physical, whil e nonetheless supporting the explanatory power of genuinely autonomous soci al scientific laws? The aim of this paper is to show that reductive explana tion is not a requirement of a 'naturalist' ontology, thereby defending an account of supervenience as a suitable framework within which to recognize a metaphysical relationship between the natural and the social that is cons istent with the pursuit of autonomous nomological social scientific explana tions.