The case study is a framework privileged by the social sciences today. A whole epistemology is redrawn here. Its primary feature is to shape a set of events without fear of applying a diversity of reasonably complementary and vital disciplines. It concerns an empirical knowledge that does not proceed by documentary saturation but is interested more by the exactness of its approach than by decision. A result of different modelisations, it will give its place to the juridical dimension under whose impact human affairs sometimes take their final form. But the convergence of clues towards a center where the meaning of human behaviours will be unified will have been abandoned. That is why it was necessary to free oneself from some epistemological habits implied in the juridical vocabulary, or casuistry, of the case. From here, follows the outline of an epistemological history in the course of which, from civil galileism, human activities acquired a specific visibility and a representation of themselves. After the Enlightenment, this history was that of a slow divorce between the judgement of experience, heir of naturalist phenomenologies, and this new knowledge. The break occurred on the edge of anthropology. It becomes then a question of constituting a process of objectification of behaviours and subjectification of that which gives them intelligence and normativity, including the terms in which they are stated and thought. One must accept that human sciences draw their strenght from the incompleteness of a process of which they are a necessary part. They maintain their creative movement to rival a process of an equally incomplete modernity. Their non-saturation will be considered in their favor.
Case study; Epistemology of human sciences; Mathematical galileism; Civil galileism; Philosophical galileism; First and second modernity; Subjectivity