The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
December 2002
Web 4/4
Scott Gordon
The history and philosophy of social science
Chapter 18: The foundations of science
Routledge,
pp.
589-668
Index
Introduction
A. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
1. The rise and fall of positivism
(1) Observations are concept-laden.
(2) Observations are hypothesis-laden
(3) Observations are value-laden
(4) Observations are interest-laden
(5) Observations are laden with culture-specific
ontologies
2. Current epistemological theories
(a) Predictive instrumentalism
(b) Conventionalism
(c) Rhetorical analysis
(d) Phenomenology
(e) Evolutionary epistemology
(f) Kuhn’s paradigm model
(g) Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research
programmes
(h) The ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of
science
3. Cognitive instrumentalism
(a) Science, intelligibility, and public
knowledge
(b) Theories, facts, and empirical adequacy
(c) The problem orientation of science
(d) Science and non-science
B. THE STUDY OF SOCIAL PHENOMENA
1. Social science and natural science
2. Mentation, individualism, and holism
B. THE STUDY OF SOCIAL PHENOMENA
According to Harry Elmer Barnes, the social
sciences were created by the industrial revolution, which he describes as ‘the
greatest transformation in the history of humanity’.
This revolution ‘broke down the foundations of the previous social
system’ and ‘out of the confusion, as an aid in solving the newly created
social problems,… to reconstruct the disintegrating social order’ sociology
and the other social sciences came into being (An Introduction to the
History of Sociology, 1948, pp. 47 f.). There
is much to be said for this view, emphasizing as it does the relation of the
social sciences to the social problems that attended the development of a much
more complex system of economic and social organization.
Nevertheless, the social sciences
remained for a long time almost purely academic disciplines.
Economic theory made some tentative
appearance in the eighteenth-century discussion by businessmen of
international trade and the monetary system, and political theory
in the English
constitutional debates of the seventeenth century, but, as we have seen,
systematic social theory was largely a nineteenth-century creation and, though
it was clearly oriented to the discussion of contemporary social problems, its
main venue was the academy rather than the domain of practical affairs.
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Indeed, up to the middle of the present century,
professional economists, political scientists, and sociologists found
employment almost entirely in
academic institutions. Since
then, the nature of the social science professions has undergone a profound
change. There are far more economists
today in governmental agencies and business firms than in the universities
and, to only a lesser degree, professional sociology and political science
have experienced a similar transformation. If
we take the view that the willingness of practical men of affairs to spend
good money for a service certifies its value, the social sciences are today
generously certified. One of them,
economics, has since 1969 even been endorsed by the highest court of science
itself, the Nobel Prize Committee.
Nevertheless, considerable doubt remains
concerning the scientific credentials of the social disciplines.
Philosophers of science, and
practitioners of the disciplines themselves, continue to question their
epistemic foundations, some castigating social scientists for failing to adopt
the proven methodology of science, others complaining that they have been led
to pursue incorrect methods by attempting to imitate the natural sciences,
still others contending that the very idea of a ‘scientific’ study of social
phenomena is a delusion, or an abomination. Moreover,
some writers on this question have radically altered their views.
Alexander Rosenberg, a philosopher
whose initial work was on the epistemological foundations of economics
(Microeconomic Laws a Philosophical Analysis, 1976) declared the
discipline to be truly scientific in its methodology, even by comparison with
physics, and strongly defended the economist’s use of mental entities, such as
preferences and purposes, as causal factors.
But more recently he has declared that such entities do not have causal
status (Sociobiology and the Presumption of Social Science, 1980); that
economics is not really an empirical science but just a branch of mathematics
(‘If Economics isn’t Science, What is it?’ Philosophical Forum, 1983);
and that the social sciences in general are not yet sufficiently developed to
permit a philosopher to subject them to epistemic analysis (‘Philosophy of
Science and the Potentials for Knowledge in the Social Sciences’, in Donald W.
Fiske and Richard A. Schweder, eds., Metatheory in Social Science,
1986).
I cannot undertake here to review the literature
on the philosophy of the social sciences, or even to do so comprehensively for
one of them. In any case, many of the
issues that have been addressed, and the positions taken, parallel those
examined in the preceding section. I
shall concentrate on three matters that seem to me to require special
attention: the relation between the social and natural sciences; the epistemic
status of mental states and the debate between individualism and holism; and
the problem of objectivity.
1. Social science and natural
science
The notion that the social sciences must be
judged by reference to the natural sciences has been, and continues to be, the
most prominent theme in the
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literature of the philosophy of social science.
It not only reflects the general view
that there is a ‘unity of scientific method’ but, more specifically, that the
practices of the natural sciences constitute the standards to which the social
sciences are obliged to conform. This
notion has survived the controversies among philosophers concerning the
philosophy of science. As we have
seen, there is, today, no consensual view of this.
Presumably, the social sciences are to
be judged by reference to the natural sciences even though there is no
agreement concerning the epistemic foundations of the natural sciences
themselves.
Isaac Newton said, in reference to the
methodology he practised: ‘if natural Philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing
this Method, shall at length be perfected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will
also be enlarged’ (quoted from the Opticks in S. A. Grave, The
Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense, 1960, p. 7).
In the terminology of his day
In 1878 Francis Galton proposed to the British
Association that economics should be removed from its roster because it was
not properly a ‘science’, but he was rebuffed on the grounds that economics
was not inherently unscientific, just more difficult than the natural
sciences. Economics, or ‘political
economy’ as it was then called, was accorded scientific status, not so much
because of its specific findings as on account of its method, which even at
that stage resembled physics in its use of abstract modelling.
Indeed, many of the strong
mid-nineteenth-century opponents of political economy, such as the romantics,
objected to it because it was scientific, applying Newtonian methods to
phenomena which, in their view, belonged to a fundamentally different
ontological category.
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The view that the sciences, or at least those
disciplines that are truly sciences, are united by the adoption of a common
philosophy of knowledge and the use of similar methods of investigation was a
central principle of the
None the less, serious objections to the unity
of science thesis have been expressed by a variety of writers.
In our examination above of the ideas
of Max Weber (Chapter 15 C) we encountered a theme that continues to punctuate
the literature on the philosophy of social science.
Weber argued that the study of social
phenomena must be pursued in a fundamentally different way from the natural
sciences. Social phenomena result from
the rational, evaluative, and purposeful actions of individuals.
The natural scientist cannot go beyond
the construction of a body of knowledge based upon external observation; but
the social scientist, who shares the property of consciousness with those
entities whose actions make social phenomena, can, and must, present a more
intimate, empathetic understanding of these phenomena.
Weber’s concept of Verstehen
has been variously interpreted by philosophers and social scientists but, in
one way or another, it lies at the root of most of the claims that there are
fundamental epistemic differences between the social and the natural sciences,
as advanced, for example, by Frank Knight, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises,
and the modern ‘Austrian school’ in economics, and by Talcott Parsons and his
followers in sociology. The word
‘scientism’ was coined by Hayek as a derogatory term for the view that social
phenomena should be studied by the methods of the natural sciences (The
Counter-revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason,
1955).
On the whole, philosophers
have been hostile to the Weberian thesis, but Karl Popper seems to go a
considerable distance towards it in
contending that social scientists should pursue ‘situational
analysis’, investigating the decisions of human agents in the situations in
which they find themselves (see Douglas W. Hands, ‘Karl Popper and Economic
Methodology: a New Look’, Economics and Philosophy,
1985).
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Weber did not argue that the study of social
phenomena is not scientific; on the contrary, he contended that the method of
Verstehen is essential to making it so.
But others have taken the view that the nature of the subject matter
of the social disciplines, and the relationship between the investigator and
his subject matter, are so fundamentally different from those of the natural
sciences that the term ‘social science’ is an oxymoron, combining two notions
that are inherently contradictory. Weber’s
rejection of the unity of science doctrine is regarded by them as
insufficient; the study of social phenomena is not, cannot be, and ought not
to be regarded as in any way akin to the study of natural phenomena.
In a widely discussed book (The
Idea of a Social Science, and its Relation to Philosophy, 1958), Peter
Winch argues that the study of social phenomena must be ‘philosophical’ rather
than ‘scientific’, by which he means that the proper way to comprehend such
phenomena is by conceptual analysis rather than by means of empirical
research. The notion of ‘cause’, says
Winch, does not belong to the domain of social phenomena; what is needed
instead is a penetrating analysis of the concept of man as a ‘rule-following’
being. According to Winch, the
relations between the individual members of a society are, at bottom, the
relations between ideas. Economists,
sociologists, and others should abandon their attempts to discover the causal
determinants of social phenomena and try to make society ‘philosophically
intelligible’, or else give way to philosophers, who are trained in conceptual
analysis and understand the social (i.e. ‘rule-governed’) nature of language.
A. R. Louch (Explanation and Human
Action, 1966) agrees with Winch but criticizes him for failing to see
that, since social phenomena are the result of deliberate individual actions,
they are irredeemably moral in character. These
moral judgements are directly ascertainable and they should form the basic
material of social analysis. In
effect, Louch tries to overturn two Humean doctrines - the non-observability
of causation, and the distinction between facts and values - and to argue that
because the social scientist, an inside observer of social events, can escape
Hume’s restrictions, his epistemic foundations are fundamentally different
from those of the natural scientist.
Winch and Louch do not supply their readers with
concrete examples of how the social sciences could be improved by following
their prescriptions. Lacking such
demonstration, one is reasonably justified
in taking the view
that what they propose is unlikely to give us a better understanding of our
social world or enable us to deal with its problems through social policy.
Most philosophers continue to insist
that empirical phenomena, of whatever sort, must be investigated by procedures
in which empirical methods play a vital role.
The views expressed by Winch and Louch may perhaps receive a
sympathetic response from some modern Marxist social scientists, and some
orthodox ones such as the disciples of Ludwig von Mises in economics and those
of Leo Strauss in political science but, generally speaking, social scientists
are now firmly committed to the view that the investigation of social
phenomena should strive to be objective and empirical, limited in this only by
technical feasibility.
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Max Weber did not intend to drive his notion of
Verstehen in the direction taken by Winch and Louch.
He insisted upon the firm separation
of facts and values, the need for scientific detachment and objectivity in
social investigation, and the indispensable role of empirical evidence.
The philosophical issue that is raised
by Weberian Verstehen is the epistemic status of mental entities such
as motives and preferences. Is it
permissible to construe such factors as causal variables in explaining social
phenomena? This is an important
question which deserves specific attention. I
defer discussion of it to the next section.
The arguments put forward by defenders of the
unity of science leave something to be desired.
A great deal of the literature on this
proceeds as if the only natural science were physics.
But large areas of biology, geology,
and other natural sciences are very different from physics, more so perhaps
than some areas of the social sciences are. If
one sets up physics as the standard there is no unity of science within the
domain of natural science itself. The
early positivists adopted such a standard but, as we have seen, philosophers
of science have abandoned positivism, and it has been succeeded by a large
number of epistemological theories, none of which has achieved general
acceptance. Since there is no unity in
epistemological theory, how can it be claimed that there is epistemological
unity in science? However, if
the reader is prepared to accept the argument advanced above that ‘cognitive
instrumentalism’ is a more acceptable epistemology than the other candidates,
he will have no difficulty in embracing the unity of science thesis.
This epistemology sets up no specific
science as representing the ideal, and makes limited prescriptive demands that
can, in principle, be satisfied by scientific investigation in all domains.
According to cognitive
instrumentalism, theories and empirical data function as complementary
implements of investigation, and the only rules that must be followed are that
theories should be coherent and logically sound, and articulate with
observation data that are objectively obtained and properly processed.
Except for those who reject
empiricism, these are the rules that are, in fact, accepted as binding by
social as well as natural scientists.
Nonetheless, there are important
differences between the natural and social sciences.
Epistemological unity does not mean
homogeneity of substantive content, or homology of research procedures in all
domains of scientific investigation. In
understanding a scientific discipline it is necessary to comprehend not only
what it shares with other disciplines but also wherein it is dissimilar.
There are important differences among
the social sciences themselves (as there are among the natural sciences), but
to examine these in detail would extend the length of this book beyond reason,
so I will confine the discussion to the more general differences between the
natural and social sciences. This
issue has been extensively discussed in the literature, some writers claiming
that there are good grounds for regarding the natural and social sciences as
categorically distinct, others saying that the differences are only matters of
degree (see, for example, an excellent paper by Michael Scriven, ‘The
Frontiers of Psychology: Psychoanalysis and Parapsychology’, in Robert G.
Colodny, ed., Frontiers of
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Science and Philosophy,
1962). In
the ‘Preliminary Remarks’ on this matter in Chapter 3 C above we noted that
social phenomena are not as uniform, or as constant overtime, as natural
phenomena are; that social scientists cannot carry out the kinds of
experiments that natural scientists can, and test their ‘hunches’ in that way;
that value judgements are more involved in the social than the natural
sciences; that social phenomena reflect the operation of psychic entities
while natural phenomena (or, at least, non-organic phenomena) do not; and that
social scientists are less able to isolate particular causal factors from
their general context than natural scientists.
Further discussion of these and related matters will occupy our
attention in the remainder of this chapter. They
will not be discussed in terms of comparison between the natural and social
sciences, for these issues must be addressed by the philosophy of social
science quite apart from that comparison. But
before we leave the subject of this section, we should consider a difference
between natural and social phenomena which is an ontological difference, a
categorical distinction of kind, not merely one of degree.
Here and there in the preceding
chapters we have had occasion to note the importance of social organization
and the distinctiveness of the modes and mechanisms of organization in
human societies. Now I want to
reiterate this and emphasize its philosophical significance.
The
If one rejects the notion that there are
non-material transcendental entities of the sort that idealist philosophers
and theologians talk about, the positivist doctrine of metaphysical monism
appears to be inescapable. All things,
including organisms and their brains, are composed of molecules, and these in
turn are composed of more elementary physical particles; all events, including
social events, involve the operation of the primary physical forces.
The metaphysical monism of the modern
positivists reflects a theme that has a long history, going back at least as
far as the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient
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One may tackle this issue by invoking the notion
of emergent properties (see above, Chapter 3 B).
According to this view, the
existential diversity we observe empirically does not (necessarily) reflect
differences in the fundamental constituents of things, but properties that
become manifest at different levels of organization.
With a new level of organization, new
properties appear, which may be taken to reflect the coming into existence of
new real things. Water, for example,
is a different thing from the oxygen and hydrogen which compose it and we may
speak of it without impropriety as having a real existence of its own.
So also we may regard mountains, solar
systems, organic cells, and termite colonies as real things, having properties
that distinguish them from other things. Scientific
investigation would get nowhere if it were to cling firmly to the notion that
all things are made up of whirling particles and insist that all explanations
be in terms of them. For every
science, the ‘laws’ that it postulates are propositions that pertain to a
particular level of organization, and causal explanation is, primarily,
elucidation of how a particular type of organization works.
Newtonian celestial mechanics, for
example, describes the planetary motions in terms of the organization of the
solar system, and explains that organization in terms of the operation of
gravitational attraction, which is taken to be the dominant force at that
level. Every science focuses upon a
specific level of organization and the phenomena it investigates are the
properties that pertain to at that level.
Existential phenomena are exceedingly diverse,
reflecting the many different levels of organization that have evolved since
the primordial beginning of the universe. But,
in addition to the emergence of novel properties, on one planet at least among
the billions that exist there have also evolved two novel forms of
organization: organic systems and social systems have come into existence.
Living organisms do not differ from
non-living matter only in the emergence of new properties when the requisite
chemicals are combined; a fundamentally different mode of organization is
involved. And human societies do not
merely have properties that come into existence when individuals live together
in a co-operating fashion; their organization involves the operation of unique
co-ordinating mechanisms. There are,
one might say, three ontological categories of existence: the domain of matter
and energy; the domain of life; and the social domain.
Karl Popper attempted to make such a distinction in his proposition
that there are ‘three worlds’ (see above, Chapter 15 B, Note 1), but he did
not succeed in identifying the fundamental differences.
He focused upon certain properties of life and society instead of
considering their special modes of organization.
The difference between living and non-living
phenomena has exercised the attention of philosophers since the dawn of
philosophy in ancient
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is stored. This
energy is released by the disassembly of organic molecules, and maybe utilized
to power the processes of growth, movement, and reproduction, which
phenomenally differentiate living from non-living things.
The distinction between them does not
appear to be categorical, however, since metabolism (the building up and
breaking down of organic molecules) can be explained as chemical processes
that are not fundamentally different from those of the non-organic domain.
Dissatisfaction with what appeared to
be a ‘mechanistic’ view led some late nineteenth and early twentieth-century
writers to postulate the existence of a special entity that is uniquely
present in living phenomena. Most
prominent in taking this stance were the French philosopher Henri Bergson (in
a series of books, the most popular
being Matter and Memoiy, 1896, and Creative Evolution,
1907), and the German biologist-philosopher Hans Driesch (The History and
Theory of Vitalism, 1905). But
Bergson, Driesch, and other writers who followed this line of thought were
unable to explicate the nature of the special entity (Bergson called it the
élan vital) that differentiates the living from the non-living world in a
fashion that would satisfy an empiricist. The
notion was embraced by some prominent literary figures of the period (e.g.
Samuel Butler and George Bernard Shaw), but scientists and philosophers of
science firmly rejected it. Understanding
of the fundamental difference between the organic and the inorganic world, in
non-mystical terms, had to await the development of modern genetics.
The DNA molecule, in chemical terms, is just a
molecule. But its philosophical
significance is momentous. It has the
capacity to encode information, which controls the embryological development
of an organism from a single cell into a complex system of functionally
specialized parts. After birth, the
DNA-encoded information controls the internal physiological processes of the
organism and, for most species, it totally controls the organism’s responses
to the external environment. This
information is transmissible from one organism to another when reproduction
takes place and, at this point, changes in the information content of the DNA
can occur, making the progeny different from its parents.
An organism is not merely a distinct
level of organization with emergent properties that are different from its
chemical constituents; it represents a different mode of organization,
one in which certain chemical constituents carry encoded information which
creates and governs the structure and function of an integrated and co-ordinated
system.
To explain the organization of a mountain we
need not resort to anything other than the laws of matter and energy.
To explain a living organism we have
to recognize the addition of a fundamentally different mode of organization
that is mediated by encoded information. This
point has recently been strongly emphasized by Ernst Mayr in some of the
essays collected in his Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (1988; see
especially chapter 1). Mayr is right
in rejecting ‘vitalistic’ explanations of organic phenomena and also in
chiding philosophers for their preoccupation with physics, but he also
contends that biology requires a fundamentally different epistemology from
other natural sciences, and this is
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not sustainable.
What is required is the delineation of an ontological difference
between living and non-living phenomena, based not only upon the emergence of
unique properties in the domain of life but, more fundamentally, on the
emergence of a unique mode of organization, one that is mediated by
instructions encoded in a form that permits their transmission from entities
whose existence is limited to a short time-span to their, similarly limited,
successor entities. By this means,
populations of organisms may persist indefinitely while the
individuals who compose them have only a brief span of existence as organized
entities. One should stress, in this
connection, that genetically encoded instructions control
organic processes as
well as somatic structure, and these processes are understandable as
performing functions. In describing an
inorganic natural entity such as, say, the solar system, it would not be
meaningful to speak of a planet as performing a function that is necessary to
the dynamic equilibrium of the system, but the status of an organ such as the
liver in a living organism cannot be understood without reference to its
functional role in maintaining the organization of the organism.
A similar ontological distinction can be claimed
for societies composed of organisms. Whether
this applies to social systems other than those of the species Homo sapiens
is problematic, and I will consider here only human societies.
In addition to controls that are
exercised by information encoded in the human genome, the behaviour of
individuals is channelled in ways that permit the emergence, maintenance, and
orderly development of social systems by instructions that are mediated by
three other modes: established customs, traditions, and values; the exercise
of coercive power by some individuals over others through hierarchically
structured institutions; and the co-ordination of voluntary actions in the
economic domain through the information carried by market prices.
The oft-made assertion that ‘the whole
is more than the sum of its parts’ does not refer only to the fact that the
parts interact with one another and thus generate new properties.
If that were so, the assertion would
be little more than a cliché, or a way of stating what is obvious.
The scientific analysis of wholes
would require only that the ‘composition laws’ that govern the assemblage of
parts into wholes be elucidated. But,
in some cases, fundamentally new modes of organization, which are not obvious
to casual observation or captured by composition laws, come into existence.
These have special scientific and
philosophical significance, which can be appreciated only by resorting, again,
to the concept of function. The
significance of customs, governments, and markets derives from the functions
they perform in maintaining the organizational integrity of a social system.
Because of the presence of such modes
of organization, societies deserve to be recognized as distinctive ontological
existents, significantly different from both material and organic entities.
Like populations of organisms, societies persist beyond the life-span
of their member individuals but, unlike populations, their persistence is not
explicable solely in terms of genetic factors.
Adam Smith initiated the scientific study of
social systems as ontologically
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distinct phenomena by pointing out that the
division of labour which increases productivity can be practised only if, and
to the degree that, there are trading markets in existence.
Herbert Spencer’s distinction between
the ‘militant’ and ‘industrial’ types of societies focused upon the difference
between co-ordinating mechanisms that operate through the exercise of coercive
power and those that utilize market exchange.
Emile Durkheim regarded the conscience collective as a co-ordinating
mechanism that controls behaviour through enculturation and by placing
pressure upon individuals to conform to established norms.
However, the philosophical
significance of such modes of organization was not recognized by these writers
or, so far as I am aware, by subsequent ones.
The doctrine of the unity of science is still widely held by
philosophers and social scientists. I
emphasize again, though, that recognition of the ontological distinctiveness
of social systems does not mean that there is an epistemic difference between
the social and natural sciences. Scientific
explanation, in all domains, must utilize coherent and logically valid
theories that model empirical phenomena, and treat relevant empirical evidence
carefully and objectively. The social,
biological, and physical sciences differ from one another mainly because they
address phenomena that emerge in differently organized systems.
(This point is amplified in my ‘Why
does Homo sapiens Differ?’ Journal of Social and Biological Structures,
1988, and my lecture How many Kinds of Things are there in the World?
2. Mentation, individualism,
and holism
Max Weber contended that the methodology of the
social sciences is fundamentally different from that of the natural sciences,
and necessarily so, because the explanation of social phenomena requires an
analysis of what individual persons do, not in terms of their physiological
processes or their passive responses to changes in ambient conditions, but as
active agents with the rational capacity to choose the means of achieving
their objectives. It is easy to see
why Weber thought that the social and natural sciences differ.
Physical entities such as atoms and
planets cannot be regarded as active agents in this sense; and, while
non-human animals can be, the biologist is too far removed from other species
to achieve an empathetic understanding of their behaviour.
Weber was wrong in regarding these
factors as calling for a distinctive epistemology of social science, and he
failed to perceive that the existence of different modes of organization is
what most significantly differentiates physical, biological, and social
systems. But his insistence that the
social scientist should regard social phenomena as resulting from the rational
acts of individuals is less easy to dismiss. In
Weber’s day, one of the social sciences, economics, was already dominated by
theoretical models in which the central role was played by rational
individuals. During his lifetime, this
type of theory was entrenched still further by the development of neoclassical
economics.
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More recently, ‘methodological individualism’,
as this has come to be called, has been extended beyond the specialized domain
of economics to political science, sociology, and law.
These developments have been
accompanied by intense debate, among philosophers and social scientists,
concerning the epistemic foundations, and the ethical and political
implications, of this conception of social phenomena, with ‘methodological
holists’ contending that it seriously misdirects social research and social
philosophy. I cannot review this
debate in detail here (see section 4 of May Brodbeck, ed., Readings in the
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1968, for a small, but good, selection
of representative papers), but the main issues involved warrant more
discussion than has been devoted to them thus far.
As a first step we must consider the
epistemic status of the mental entities that occupy a central place in the
individualist methodology.
A wide variety of terms is available for
reference to mental phenomena. We
speak of a person as having ‘desires’, ‘preferences’, ‘purposes’, or
‘intentions’, and as being ‘lonely’, ‘irrational’, ‘happy’, or ‘apprehensive’,
to name only a few of the words that the English language supplies.
For our purposes we may collapse this
dictionary of mentation into three terms; ‘motives’, ‘tastes’, and ‘beliefs’.
The first of these refers to that
which is valued by the actor, the end or ends he hopes to attain by his
actions. Two individuals may have the
same general motives but differ considerably in their ‘tastes’ for specifics.
One may rank brandy higher than beer
and ballet higher than basketball, while the other may have the opposite
schedule of preferences. Under
the heading of ‘beliefs’ we include the individual’s views concerning the
probability that an action will, in fact, serve to realize his motives; that
is to say, the knowledge he considers himself to possess with respect to the
relevant relations of cause and effect. The
individual may also have moral beliefs, and these may affect his motives, but
I will not take these into account in the immediate discussion here.
A person may consider more than one
thing to be worthy and there may be more than one way of attaining any
particular end, so a fourth mentational concept is useful: ‘choice’.
Economic analysis tries to cut through
the complexity of multiple ends and multiple means of attaining them by
postulating that the individual seeks to maximize his ‘utility’.
Thus economic theory has been
described as ‘the logic of rational choice’, an explication of the choices
that a rational utility-maximizing person would make in a given situation.
This way of looking at human behaviour,
which has characterized economics from its earliest beginnings as a systematic
discipline, has been subject to unremitting attack by other social scientists,
psychologists, and occasionally by economists themselves when engaged in
methodological meditation, but this will not concern us here.
The immediate problem before us is not
the particular ways in which mental entities are used in explaining social
phenomenon but the justification for using such entities at all.
What is the source of our knowledge about mental
entities? They are not observable in
the way that chairs, rivers, and other things are.
They are objects
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of perception, but the type of perception
involved is what psychologists call ‘proprioception’, the perception that one
has of one’s own physical body and other aspects of oneself.
Knowledge of one’s own mental
state is a form of proprioception usually called ‘introspection’.
The argument has been made that this
knowledge is ‘subjective’ and, therefore, cannot be used in a scientific
analysis of social phenomena. One may
perhaps explain the action of a particular individual in terms of his own
motives and beliefs, but such mental entities cannot be used to explain things
like crime rates and inflation. The
central issue here is whether information about mental states derived by
introspection can be generalized. In
explaining the foundations of government Thomas Hobbes argued that everyone
desires security and believes that it can be obtained by the
centralization of coercive power.
Max Weber’s concept of ‘ideal types’ rests upon the view that, while it is not
true that all people at all times have the same motives and beliefs, the
social scientist can employ the conception of an idealized person for
analytical purposes just as the physicist uses the concept of an idealized
mass.
The use of such idealizations as heuristic
generalizations about human agents has played a large role in the development
of social theory, but not without considerable concern over its methodological
validity. In economics, the
development, in the 1870’s, of the concept of ‘marginal utility’ to explain
the market values of commodities initiated a debate that has persisted down to
the present. The notion of ‘utility’,
it has been argued, is irremediably subjective.
One cannot compare the utility of one
person with that of another, and one cannot apply the concept of utility to
groups of individuals, for this would be equivalent to ascribing properties of
mind to populational categories such as classes, clubs, communities, or
nations. This argument has been
accepted by most orthodox economists. Many textbooks in elementary
microeconomics and virtually all in more advanced ‘welfare economics’ tell the
student that it is impermissible to make interpersonal comparisons of utility.
Nevertheless, economic theory
continues to make heavy use of ideal type analysis in which the postulated
agent is represented as a utility-maximizing individual; the recent extensions
of economic theory to the analysis of political and legal phenomena proceeds
as if interpersonal comparisons of utility are permissible; and much applied
economics assumes that such comparisons can be made, and even estimated
quantitatively. In order to make the
concept of utility instrumentally effective in social analysis some relaxation
of the ban on generalizing it is necessary. Pragmatics
overwhelms scholastics in social science as in other areas of scientific
inquiry.
This does not mean, however, that the door is
open to whatever mental entities one may care to postulate a priori, or
to the varied and complex mental states that psychologists and psychiatrists
deal with. In order to render social
phenomena intelligible, social theory must restrict itself to mental entities
that are very simple, and understandable in commonsense terms.
The notion that human agents seek to
maximize their utility and pursue actions they believe to
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be effective in promoting this end is such a
simple and commonsense notion. So is,
it seems to me, the ‘law of diminishing marginal utility’, which states that
the satisfaction one derives from consuming additional units of a commodity
declines as one’s rate of consumption of it increases.
Mentational concepts such as, for
example, those of Freudian psychology, may be more sophisticated, but they are
unlikely to be serviceable in explaining market prices, or other social
phenomena, in terms of mental entities. A
Weberian ‘ideal type’ of human agent is one whose mentation is construed as
consisting of simple motives, tastes, and beliefs that are immediately
understandable by other humans. Economics
and the other social sciences have demonstrated that reference to mental
entities, if severely constrained, can be effectively used in constructing
cognitively instrumental theories. Weber,
and many of his followers, claimed that social phenomena cannot be analysed
without the use of mentational concepts. This
is too strong, since it makes the use of mentational concepts obligatory
in all branches of social science. Showing
that such concepts are required in tackling some problems does not demonstrate
that they are required in all. But
Weber’s contention was quite unnecessary. From
the standpoint of epistemology, the issue is not whether reference to mental
states is obligatory but whether it is permissible in scientific explanation.
Some philosophers of science (e.g. Ernest Nagel,
Karl Popper, A. F. MacKay, Daniel Hausman) accept references to mental states
in scientific explanation; others (e.g. May Brodbeck) regard such references
as dubious; while still others (e.g. Gustav Bergmann, Alexander Rosenberg in
some of his more recent writings) firmly reject them.
The central point at issue is whether
social phenomena may be explained by construing motives and beliefs as their
causes. The early positivists, as we
have seen, attempted to eject the concept of causality from the domain of
scientific inquiry. They were
unsuccessful, but the restoration of causality leaves open the issue of what
sorts of things may properly be accorded causal status in a scientific
explanation. Resolution of this
question would seem to rest upon the solution of a prior problem: the nature
of causality. But philosophers have
come to no agreement about this as a general issue in epistemology, so firm
statements that motives and beliefs may be construed as causes, or that they
may not, would seem to be at least premature.
But we may have to wait a long time for philosophers to reach a
satisfactory definition of the nature of causality.
Meanwhile, science proceeds.
If one is prepared to adopt cognitive
instrumentalism as an epistemological theory, the question can be
reformulated: does reference to mental states enable one to render an observed
phenomenon more intelligible than it would be without it?
Some primitive peoples resort to
mentational concepts in explaining everything; ‘animism’ is the notion that
all existence is characterized by the operation of entities of the sort that
one knows by introspection. In more
advanced communities the use of concepts like the Hegelian Geist or
‘divine will’ is not dissimilar, but the application of such concepts to
physical phenomena has been generally rejected by philosophers.
647
The question is, are simple, commonsense,
human mental states instrumentally useful in explaining human social
phenomena?
Let us take a simple illustration.
John Smith enters a shop carrying a
loaded revolver, has a verbal exchange with Henry Jones, a clerk, whom he
shoots and kills, and then departs with the contents of the cash register.
One could expand this account by
furnishing more details, such as the type of revolver, what organs of Jones’s
body were injured, etc., but we cannot make the events more intelligible as a
social phenomenon without referring to the motives and beliefs of Smith and
Jones. The INUS model of causation has
not been generally accepted by philosophers, but one of its merits is that it
enables one to clarify the causal role of mental entities in such situations.
According to this model (see above,
Chapter 3 A 3) the requirements of necessity and sufficiency can be met by
only defining a set of causal factors, since no single factor by itself is
sufficient, and sometimes is not necessary, to cause an event.
Applying it to the above illustration,
it is evident that the motives and beliefs of both Smith and Jones were both
necessary to cause Jones’s death, since no sufficient set can be complete
without them. If Jones had not chosen
to resist Smith’s demand, he would not have been shot, so he was a partial
agent in his own demise. On the other
hand, if Smith had intended to leave no witnesses, Jones would have been shot
even if he had not resisted, so reference to his mental state is not
necessary to the completion of a causal set.
Let us alter the story when Jones refuses his
demand, Smith does not shoot and flees empty-handed.
In this case no murder, or robbery,
takes place. But this does not mean
that an explanation is not required. A
satisfactory explanation can be reached by noting that the mental states of
Smith and Jones were, in this case, incapable of completing any causal set
sufficient to produce a murder or a robbery. For
the strict behaviourist, who eschews reference to mental states, non-events
are difficult to handle without resort to linguistic rephrasing that construes
them as events. But in social
phenomena, non-action can be as significant as action.
For example, if the President of the
United States refrains from signing a statute passed by Congress before the
deadline prescribed bylaw, it is described as having been ‘pocket vetoed’ by
him. But in fact we do not observe the
President as doing anything with respect to the statute, and this is what
requires explanation. It is difficult
to see how such cases can be handled without reference to mental states.
If Rosenberg were right in claiming
that mentational concepts cannot be used in scientific explanation because
they do not represent entities that are ‘natural kinds’, then it would be
equally improper to use such concepts
in considering
everyday phenomena. But we do
persistently use them in vernacular speech to make sense of our normal
experiences. It is
The physical sciences have no warrant for
referring to motives, tastes, and beliefs, because such things do not operate
within the phenomenal domain of
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their concern. In
communicating with one another, however, scientists are engaged in a social
activity. Alfred Schutz, a strong
advocate of Weberian epistemology, points out that when one scientist
considers the work of another he must know not only what the other did, but
what his purpose was in doing it (‘Concept and Theory Formation in the Social
Sciences’, Journal of Philosophy,
1954).
Scientific papers are
written as reports of observable events, using the passive voice, but if the
reader wishes to understand what is going on he must reconstrue the text in
terms of motives and beliefs. The text
may say something like ‘the sample was centrifuged at 30,000 G and the
supernatant fluid decanted’ but the reader must know what the scientist was
hoping to achieve by this in order to make scientific sense of it.
Despite his strong insistence that
there is no place for mental entities in science, Alexander Rosenberg
nevertheless refers to them without restraint in evaluating the work of other
philosophers. Is philosophical
discourse exempt from the rules it prescribes for other social phenomena?
If one does not, and cannot, practise
what one preaches, the normative prescription becomes dubious; as Hume
succinctly put it, ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. The
communication of ideas cannot be conducted without reference to mental
entities.
This view has recently been aggressively
attacked by a school of literary criticism called ‘deconstructionism’.
The adherents of this view claim that
the proper way to read a text is to take it as it is, without reference to the
author’s thoughts, just as if it had been written by an inanimate being.
Deconstructionists are manifestly
unable to follow this rule when quarrelling among themselves, or with literary
critics of other schools. The
contention that no reference to mental entities should be made by the reader
of a text seems to be clearly untenable (even if it were possible) when the
matter in hand is as personal and subjective as are poems, novels, and other
forms of art, but it is equally untenable with respect to scientific texts.
The above illustrations show, conclusively it
seems to me, that reference to introspectively known mental states is
serviceable in rendering social phenomena intelligible.
That is to say, the epistemological
theory of cognitive instrumentalism permits the use of mental entities.
But other epistemologies may not be
able to accommodate them, or to do so easily.
We should note especially Carl Hempel’s ‘covering law’ model of
scientific explanation in this regard. Many
philosophers who examined the scientific status of mental entities in the
1960s did so in terms of Hempel’s model (see Paul M. Churchland, ‘The Logical
Character of Action - Explanations’, Philosophical Review, 1970).
As we saw in discussing the debate
over historical explanation in Chapter 14 A, Hempel argued that the use of
mental entities is permissible if, and only if, they can be formulated as
general laws, and chided historians for failing to do this.
According to Hempel, when an historian
explains, for example, why Henry IV of France rejected his Protestant
upbringing and embraced Catholicism in 1593, he is obligated to state the
operative covering law, such as ‘whenever anyone is faced with a choice
between his religion and a crown, he will choose
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the crown’. Naturally
enough, historians regard Hempel’s demand as placing an obligation upon them
that they cannot meet, and any attempt to do so would only expose themselves
to justified ridicule. A strict
Hempelian would say that this simply shows that the work of historians is not
‘scientific’, and he might go on to extend this judgement to a wide range of
social science, since it is not possible to state many empirically true
general covering laws of human behaviour in terms of mental states.
The difficulty, however, lies more
with Hempel’s epistemology than with the practices of historians and other
social scientists. Covering laws are
explanatory, but they are not the only form of scientific explanation.
In fact, physics and economics are the
only sciences that persistently employ such laws.
Economic propositions such as the ‘law
of demand’ show that mental entities can sometimes be embodied in
general law statements but this does not demonstrate that this is the only way
in which they may be used in scientific explanation.
Social scientists who accept the causal status
of motives, tastes, and beliefs frequently treat explanations in terms of them
as complete. This can be defended in
terms of the division of labour among scientists.
The economist, for example, might say
that he has reached the boundaries of his disciplinary domain of investigation
when he has traced phenomena to the utility-maximizing motives of the actors.
As Joseph Schumpeter put it, ‘the task of the economist is finished when his
vessel grounds upon a non-economic bottom’. Further
investigation may be undertaken by psychologists, or sociologists, or
biologists, but so far as economics is concerned the explanation is complete.
A stronger view is that the mental
entities that the economist uses are not scientifically explicable, by
economics or by any other discipline. Neither
of these positions is easy to accept. The
first appears to construe the disciplinary boundaries as if they were
properties of the phenomenal world rather than as conventions, which they
clearly are. The second appears to
regard motives, tastes, and beliefs as belonging to an ontological domain that
is categorically distinct from all other phenomena.
If we reject the notion that mental entities are
ontologically distinct it does not follow that social scientists are obligated
to furnish complete explanations of social phenomena.
The contention that complete
explanations are required is implicit in the argument of some philosophers and
social scientists that, while motives, tastes, and beliefs may be construed as
causes, they are only links in a causal chain, being themselves the effects of
other causes, which must be elucidated. This
seems to be the root of the view adopted by sociobiologists that social
phenomena should be analysed in terms of genetic factors; mental entities may
be referred to, but only in the course of passage to the genes.
But why stop there?
Scientific investigation is not truly
grounded on bottom until it has reached quantum mechanics or the Big Bang.
The demand for such a radical
reductionism is clearly not helpful in advancing the enterprise of science.
The boundaries between the disciplines
may be conventional, but they are also useful to the furtherance of scientific
inquiry. The contention that the
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present boundaries should be redrawn can be
certified only by concrete demonstration of the improvements in scientific
inquiry that would ensue. That mental
entities are unobservable is no argument for insistence that we go beyond
them. There are lots of unobservable
entities in science, including ‘genes’.
Emile Durkheim took a different tack on this
issue. He opposed the notion that
social phenomena should be explained by reference to mental states, but he
also rejected the view that human behaviour is explained by reduction to
biological factors ‘Social life,’ he
said, ‘should be explained, not by the notions of those who participate in it,
but by more profound causes which are unperceived by consciousness’ (quoted by
Antony Flew, Thinking about Social Thinking, 1985, p. 46).
These ‘more profound causes’, in
Durkheim’s view, are the social factors that mould and govern the ideas of the
individual members of a society. I
defer discussion of this for a moment, until we come to consider the
deficiencies of methodological individualism that some regard as calling for a
holistic approach to social phenomena
The term ‘methodological individuahsm’ was
coined orginally by Joseph Schumpeter to refer to what he viewed as the
dominant methodological precept of orthodox economics.
It has come since to be used more
generally for the doctrine that social phenomena must be explained in terms of
the behaviour of individuals This
contention is not based merely upon the view that societies are composed of
individual persons; similarly banal composition propositions can be made about
everything in existence . The proponents of methodological individualism
favour reduction in scientific analysis but insist that this be carried to the
appropriate level and no further. The
appropriate level is construed to be the human individual, because it is at
this level that mentation occurs and choices are made among alternative
behaviour possibilities. As Herbert
Spencer argued, the notion of consciousness can be applied to individual
organisms but not to social groups as such. If
social phenomena are to be explained in terms of mental states, it follows
that the appropnate unit of analysis is the individual.
There is a close connection between the debate over the causal status
of mental entities and the debate over methodological individualism.
But, as we shall see, it does not
follow that anyone who grants causal status to mental entities is thereby
committed to a rigorous methodological individualism in social science, and
certainly not to the extreme form of it that some have advocated
Methodological individualism has been strongly
advocated by some sociologists and political scientists, but most notably by
economists, and in the interest of brevity I shall confine the discussion here
to the debate in that venue (see R. P. Dore, ‘Function and Cause’, in Alan
Ryan, ed., The Philosophy of Social Explanation, 1973, for an excellent
defence of methodological individualism in sociology).
The standard treatment of
microeconomic phenomena in the current economic literature is individualist.
In explaining the determinants of
market prices, for example, the market demand functions for
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particular goods and services are derived by
simple aggregation of the demand functions of the individual consumers.
On the other side of the market, the
supply functions of the several producing firms is similarly aggregated.
The producing ‘firm’ is treated as if
it were an individual person, neglecting the complexities of large corporate
organization (or deferring them to subsidiary examination).
Consumers and firms are construed to
be the appropriate units of study because it is at these levels that
‘decisions’ or ‘choices’ are made on the basis of motives, tastes, and
beliefs. Economists are, generally
speaking, strongly committed to such an approach to the explanation of the
phenomena in their domain and feel it necessary to construct models that
rigorously adhere to the canons of methodological individualism.
Macroeconomic phenomena such as
unemployment and inflation have not been satisfactorily modelled in this way,
and many economists have expressed the view that macroeconomic theory remains
insecure until it has been furnished with ‘microeconomic foundations’.
The central thesis of methodological
individualism was stated by John Stuart Mill in his System of Logic.
Speaking ‘Of the Chemical, or
Experimental, Method in the Social Sciences’, Mill declared:
The laws of the phenomena of society are, and
can be, nothing but the laws of the actions and passions of human beings
united together in the social state. Men,
however, in a state of society, are still men; their actions and passions are
obedient to the laws of individual human nature.
Men are not, when brought together,
converted into another kind of substance, with different properties; as
hydrogen and oxygen are different from water... Human beings in society have
no properties but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the
laws of the nature of individual man. (Book VI, chapter VII)
The most influential formulation of this thesis
in modern economics was contained in Lionel Robbins’s Essay on the Nature
and Significance of Economic Science (1932), which, frequently reprinted,
became almost a manifesto of orthodox economic methodology.
Economics, said Robbins, develops its
theorems by rigorous deduction from premises that state propositions
concerning human nature. These
premises are so simple and plain that, though they are derived by personal
introspection, their universal truth is undeniable.
Modus ponens logic therefore
guarantees that the conclusions deduced must also be true.
One cannot use introspection, or any
other means, to obtain similarly ‘self-evident’ truths about social groups, so
economic theory must analyse social phenomena in terms of the rational actions
of individuals. Robbins did not,
I think, intend to claim that the construction of such deductive models is all
that economists are called upon to do. He
was not, at least in principle, averse to empirical work in economics, though
some critics (especially T. W. Hutchison) criticized him severely on this
ground. Robbins never clarified his
position on this matter satisfactorily, but he was, it seems, talking not
about the methodology of ‘economic science’ but about that part of
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it which is economic theory.
None the less, so far as our
present subject is concerned, he adopted a clear individualist stance, and it
was largely this that was responsible for the widespread favourable reception
of his book even in an era when empirical work in economics was rapidly
developing.
Robbins and the ‘Austrian school’ of economists
have often been treated as having similar methodological views, but this is
incorrect. Ludwig von Mises and his
followers argue that deducing conclusions from propositions about mental
states is the whole of economics.
Moreover, they regard such propositions as a priori truths; they are
not furnished by an empirical procedure such as introspection.
Robbins spoke of the mentational
postulates of economic theory as ‘indisputable facts of experience’.
The Austrians regard ‘experience’ as
having nothing to do with economics. They
reject empiricism altogether and contend that economics, when properly
conducted, differs from the natural sciences in being purely deductive.
Economics is methodologically akin to
Eucidian geometry and, like it, furnishes a body of apodictic truth.
A small school that sometimes refers
to itself as practising ‘subjectivist economics’ has developed under the
inspiration of this methodological thesis. The
main effect so far has been to bring into disrepute the notion that mental
entities can be accorded causal status in a scientific explanation.
But any idea can be made nonsensical
by exaggeration, as the medieval scholastics, the philosophical ancestors of
the Austrian school, amply showed. There
is a great deal of difference between claiming that mental entities may
be employed as causal factors in a scientific analysis of social phenomena;
claiming, as Weber did, that they are necessary in scientific social
inquiry; and contending that they, and modus ponens logic, are
sufficient to enable one to discover the indubitable way of the social
world.
If the only criticisms that could be mounted
against methodological individualism were aimed at its extreme forms, the
precept would remain undamaged. But
there are others that must be more seriously considered.
The most important of these is Emile
Durkheim’s. David Braybrooke notes
that the fundamental position adopted by methodological individualism is that
‘the only ultimately satisfactory strategy of explanation in the social
sciences is one that moves from person facts to explain group facts and not
the other way round’ (Philosophy of Social Science, 1987, p. 33).
Durkheim’s contention was that the
‘other way round’ is the most significant feature
of human sociality
Individual minds, forming groups by mingling and
fusing, give birth to a being, psychological if you will, but constituting a
psychic individuality of a new sort. It
is, then, in the nature of this collective individuality, not in that of the
associated units, that we must seek the immediate and determining causes of
the facts appearing therein. The group
thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which its members
would were they isolated. If, then, we
begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand nothing of what
takes place in the group. (The Rules of Sociological Method, 1938, pp.
103-4)
653
This passage stands in sharp contrast to the one
quoted above from J. S. Mill. In its
wording Durkheim’s position here is indefensible, since it seems to say that
social groups possess the property of mind. Whether
Durkheim did or did not embrace this highly suspect notion is debatable, but
he did emphasize the methodological implications of something that cannot be
empirically denied, or disregarded, in social inquiry: that the social group(s)
to which an individual belongs play a strong role
in determining his
motives, tastes, and beliefs. This
point has been highlighted repeatedly in this book, starting with the first
chapter, where we noted that humans are exceptionally altricial animals who
undergo a long period of enculturation. The
biologist can disregard the properties of humans that are derived from
enculturation, but the social scientist cannot, since the object of his
inquiry is social phenomena. The
causal connections between the mental states of the individual and social
phenomena are reciprocal. The
individualist and the holist argue for unidirectionality of causation, but in
opposite directions. When moderately
expressed as empirical statements, both positions are right; when expressed as
hard methodological principles, both are wrong.
The methodological individualist construes the
action of an individual as explicable in terms of mental states, but it is
evident that reference to these is frequently meaningless without at least
implicit reference also to the relevant social context of the act.
If we observe that a person writes his
name on a piece of paper ‘in order to obtain currency from a bank’, a social
context is implied. But different
social contexts are relevant if the same act of writing is intended to
identify the agent as confessing to a crime, or as the official authorized to
conclude a treaty, or is an exercise in calligraphy by a student in a course
on drafting. Within each of such
social contexts we may generalize about what individuals do when they write
their names, but any generalization about an act of ‘signing’ as such would be
meaningless. Similarly, words such as
‘buy’ and ‘sell’ do not simply signify that money and goods change hands in
opposite directions. Pieces of paper
and metal that play a role in
such exchanges in
The multisociality that characterizes many human
societies makes recognition of the context of an action even more imperative.
The individual may be described as
seeking to maximize his utility in all his actions, but his specific acts may
have different meanings in relation to his membership of a church, a
professional association, a political party, or a tennis club, which cannot be
disregarded in the analysis of social phenomena.
If we focus upon the most fundamental
problem in social
science, the operation of the modes and
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mechanisms of social organization, we encounter
again the fact that these function within particular institutional and
cultural contexts. Even the market
mode, in which the voluntary self-interested acts of individuals play the
primary role, functions within a context of legal, business, and other social
institutions, and is constrained by cultural norms.
Human individuals are ontological
entities, but this does not mean, as methodological individualists contend,
that the scientific explanation of social phenomena must run exclusively in
terms of mental states. Social wholes
are ontological entities as well.
Among the many institutions that compose the
general social ambience within which individuals are raised to maturity and
live out their adult lives, those that generate and disseminate scientific
knowledge are especially important. The
social nature of knowledge poses no special problems for the natural scientist
because the phenomena with which he deals are not affected by it.
The orbits of the planets did not
change as a consequence of the publication of
Philosophers have called this the problem of
‘reflexive predictions’. In an
excellent paper (‘Reflexive Predictions’, Philosophy of Science, 1963)
Roger C Buck argues that though it is in principle a serious problem for the
social sciences it is of no great concern in practice because it requires wide
dissemination of knowledge. If a
prediction is secretly made, using a theory (which Buck takes to be the
typical case, contrary to the assumption of ‘rational expectations theory’),
the phenomena will not be altered by the prediction.
This is, I think, sometimes, but not
universally, correct. If the few who
are privy to the knowledge have substantial power, their actions may be
sufficient to influence events.
For example, if a central bank makes a prediction about the future state of
the economy, and acts upon it, it may affect events even if the officers of
the bank are the only ones who know about the prediction and the theory on
which it is based.
A notable case of reflexivity is that of
Girolamo Cardano, a sixteenth-century Italian physician and mathematician who
was one of the founders of modern probability theory.
He was also a strong believer in
astrology and became
655
famous for his medical horoscopes, casting one
for Edward VI of
Reflexivity, or the ‘Oedipus effect’, as Karl
Popper called it, is a unique problem in human societies.
It arises from the reciprocal
connection between individual action and social phenomena - in this case the
crucial linkage is the social nature of knowledge.
The choice that an individual makes
among alternative possible actions is based upon his beliefs as well as his
motives and tastes, and even when the latter are stable, his beliefs
concerning the relative efficacy of different courses of action may change
rapidly. Under certain conditions,
which are not rare, the beliefs of a large number of people may change at the
same time and in the same way. In
recent years economists have paid a great deal of attention to the role of
‘expectations’ as mentational causal factors in certain events.
In macroeconomic theory this has been
especially prominent - for example, the important role of ‘inflationary
expectations’ in the dynamics of inflation is now universally recognized, and
is not confined to rare events such as the German hyper-inflation of the
1920’s. But dealing with pubic
expectations within the epistemic rules of, as Braybrooke put it, a ‘strategy
of explanation... that moves from person facts to explain group facts and not
the other way around’ is obviously incapable of addressing such problems
effectively.
Many of the strong proponents of methodological
individualism appear to embrace it, at least in part, because of what they
perceive to be the nefarious objectives of holists.
The main objects of attack are
Marxists who regard Marxian theory as not only scientifically true but as a
potent political instrument that can be used to bring its predictions to pass.
In effect, reflexivity is construed,
not as an epistemic problem, but as a political opportunity.
V. I. Lenin made this into Communist
Party doctrine by declaring that a cadre of professional revolutionaries,
convinced of the truth of Marx’s theory of
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history, is necessary to bring about the
predictions of that theory (What is to be Done? 1902).
Not all holists can be accused of such
a perversion of science, and it certainly is not an inherent property of a
holistic methodology. The debate
between individualism and holism as epistemic doctrines does not hinge upon
which of them has been more abused and exaggerated by its adherents.
The main difficulties of methodological holism
stem from the problems that are encountered in identifying the entities that
are to serve as the ‘wholes’ in a social theory.
In a complex society like that of the
Some methodological holists, however, have been
led into highly questionable contentions by treating social entities as
natural. If societies are natural
entities, what kind of natural entities are they?
We have argued above that they are
distinct entities of their own, owing to the fact that their organization
makes use of special modes and mechanisms. However,
a long tradition in the philosophy of metaphysics holds that there are only
two kinds of natural existents, mechanisms and organisms.
Holists appear to accept this, and
regard societies as belonging to the latter category.
Since Plato, the conception of society
as an organism has appeared over and over again in the history of social
thought. Just as Bergson and Driesch
argued that the property that distinguishes living organisms from physical
matter is the existence of a ‘vital principle’, so some holists seem to
believe that a society possesses an equally mystical property of its own, a
Geist, an animating spirit, a vis vitae, or a teleological mission
that is its historical destiny. The
notion of societies as organisms appears to be supported by the
‘functionalist’ approach in social science, which treats the various social
institutions in terms of the functions they perform in the operations of the
whole, analogous to the way in which the physiologist explains the functions
of the heart, liver, kidney, etc., in an individual animal.
This leads by a short step, or a
stumble, to the contention that
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societies have purposes and objectives of their
own, and to the accompanying judgement that the welfare of a ‘society’ is
different from, and has moral priority over, that of the persons who compose
it. Societies are, by such reasoning,
not only reified, but reified as entities that possess mentational and moral
properties. To avoid this error it is
not necessary to embrace the epistemic and ontological canons of
methodological individualism. Acceptance
of the notion that societies belong to a distinct ontological category, being
neither mechanisms nor organisms, will serve.
From this triadic standpoint, mentation is a property that only
organisms possess, but organization, operating through different modes,
is a property of all three types of existents.
Part of the problem we encounter in the
individualism-holism debate is semantic rather than philosophical or
scientific. When Romeo exclaims,
‘Juliet is the sun,’ we know that he does not mean that she is a fiery ball
865,000 miles in diameter; and when a journalist writes that ‘the White House
consulted the Pentagon’ we know that he does not mean that two buildings
talked with one another. But when we
say things like ‘the Catholic Church opposes abortion’ or ‘Hitler invaded the
U.S.S.R.’ it is more difficult, but just as important to clear thinking, to
recognize that figures of speech are being employed.
Narrative historians, especially those
who regard their craft as belonging to the domain of literature rather than
social science, tend to use figures of speech with little restraint,
apparently preferring them to straightforward descriptive locution.
For example, J. J. Scarisbrick in his
widely acclaimed biography Henry VIII (1968) often says ‘Henry’ or
‘England’ when he is really referring to the group of persons responsible for
the formation of the government’s foreign policy;
in the one case being
excessively individualistic and in the other excessively holistic.
It would be ridiculous to demand that
history should be written like a scientific paper, without recourse to
metaphors, metonymies, and other figures of speech.
But some writers who adopt
methodological holism use not only language but arguments in which
collective entities are construed as having powers of autonomous action.
In our day and age, the nation-state
is the favoured collective entity for such endowment, but it is not at all
uncommon to read popular, and academic, literature in which religions,
cultures, socio-economic classes, language groups, or, with grand
comprehensiveness, ‘society’ or ‘history’ are treated as if they possess such
powers and have needs and aims different from, and superior to, those of
individual humans.
The great debate between individualists and
holists that was prominent in the literature of social science a
quarter-century ago was largely initiated by Karl Popper’s The Open Society
and its Enemies (1945).
Popper argued that there is
a close connection between epistemology and political philosophy.
He traced the development of modern
totalitarianism as exemplified by fascism in
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methodological holism, an epistemic error.
Individualism is not only the proper
methodology of scientific inquiry in the social domain, but provides a
philosophical bulwark against the enemies of democracy and personal freedom.
At the time, this seemed for some of
Popper’s readers to be a revelation of profound importance.
The fundamental philosophical source
of political totalitarianism had been identified; now it would be possible to
recognize its nascent forms in social science, and extirpate them, by rational
criticism, before they could undermine the fabric of a free society.
Popper was undoubtedly correct in perceiving an
historical connection between the totalitarian philosophy of the state and the
notion that a society or, rather, a nation, is a whole that is ‘greater’ than
the sum of its members. One has only
to pay attention to the language of modern romanticist political philosophy to
become convinced that this connection persists.
But Popper overstated his case.
The rise of fascism and totalitarian
communism in
In making a linkage between the political
philosophy of democratic states and the epistemology of social science we have
to recognize the role of utilitarianism. As
a political philosophy utilitarianism developed a strong individualist
orientation, especially in the hands of John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick.
This focused, not on the necessity of
eschewing holistic entities in social science, but on recognition of the fact
that only individuals have the power of choice and moral judgement.
The companion of utilitarian political
philosophy and ethics in the epistemology of the social sciences is cognitive
instrumentalism. This does not
consider scientific concepts in terms of their inherent nature but evaluates
them in terms of their capacity to connect with empirical information in ways
that render social phenomena intelligible, and manageable by individual and
collective human action. How we should
act does not come within the orbit of instrumentalist epistemology, because
science and value judgements belong to different domains of rational
discourse. One cannot derive moral
values from the findings of social science any more than one can from physics
or biology. But the social sciences
have, unavoidably, a closer connection with values than do the natural
sciences. Clarifying that connection
is a major issue in the philosophy of social science, to which we now turn our
attention.
Among the many properties that have been
described as unique to the species Homo sapiens, the possession of the
mentational capacity for moral judgement has frequently been instanced.
Sociobiologists have argued that the
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performance of altruistic acts (which they
regard as the fundamental nature of moral behaviour) is no different in man
than in other animals and is not, at bottom, a matter of mentation.
It is governed by biological
imperatives that reflect the degree of gene-sharing between the performer of
the act and the beneficiary of it. But
other biologists reject this as a satisfactory explanation of human morality.
Ernst Mayr has recently argued (noting
that other biologists have made similar contentions) that ‘the emergence of
genuine ethics’ has come about only with the evolution of an organism that is
capable of anticipating the consequences of alternative courses of action and
choosing between them on the basis of moral principles.
‘Human beings,’ says Mayr, ‘have the
capacity to make such judgements because of the reasoning power provided by
the evolving human brain,’ and adds, in italics, ‘The shift from an
instinctive altruism based on inclusive fitness [i.e. gene-sharing] to
an ethics based on decision making was perhaps the most important step in
humanization’ (Towards a New Philosophy of Biology, 1988, p. 77).
There can be no question that an
organism can do only what it has the biological capacity to do, and humans do
appear to make value judgements. The
issue that concerns us here is not whether this is a mere appearance that
masks the operation of genetic imperatives, as strict sociobiologists would
claim. I will accept Mayr’s view of
the case, that humans make rational choices which are influenced by value
judgements. The problem we must now
consider is the connection, if any, between this and the other rational
activity that is an outstanding property of mankind, our ability to obtain
objective knowledge of the world in which we live.
If an empirical science of ethics could be
constructed, the connection between these two activities would be very close.
Some biologists and philosophers have
recently argued that this is now possible, that we can explain not only the
moral principles that men hold, but demonstrate what principles they ought
to hold by construing such beliefs as having evolved, like the brain, by
the process of natural selection (see Michael Ruse, Taking Darwin
Seriously, 1986, chapters 3 and 6, for a good discussion of this).
We have noted from time to time in
this book the argument that ethical principles can be directly derived, not
from biology, but from the social sciences (see, for example, the discussion
above of David Ricardo’s theories of value and rent, Chapter 9 A and B).
Such contentions amount to saying
that, contrary to David Hume’s famous dictum, moral propositions can be
derived from factual propositions. Though
philosophers still debate this, no one has yet been able to provide even a
hypothetical example of such a connection, and it seems to me that ‘Hume’s
fork’ remains untarnished.
But this does not mean that there is no
connection at all between moral propositions and scientific ones.
On the contrary, we rely upon our
scientific knowledge to supply the specificity to general moral principles
that is necessary for action. For
example, if we accept the general moral principle that the members of a
society should have greater equality of opportunity, we rely upon empirical
sociology and economics to tell us whether we ought therefore to
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adopt specific social policies such as the
special taxation of inherited wealth and the financing of education from state
funds. This kind of connection between
values and science creates no problems that need concern us here.
The connection we have to examine
raises the question whether it is possible to construct a social science that
is objective or, put differently, if scientific knowledge is defined as having
the property of objectivity, is it possible to have scientific
knowledge of social phenomena? The
main contention that this is not possible rests upon the view that
in the study of social
phenomena there is such an intimate and unavoidable entanglement between the
values held by scientists and their research procedures that objective
findings are unattainable.
If the members of a community believe that a
bridge would be desirable in a certain place, engineers can be relied upon to
construct it by using objective knowledge. If
engineering knowledge were itself so deeply affected by value judgements that,
for example, the stress data for bridge trusses were dependent upon the
engineers’ values, the community would be in great difficulty, even if its
members were unanimous in regarding a bridge as desirable.
Is this the case with the social
sciences? Is the work of economists,
sociologists, and others unavoidably entangled with value judgements to such a
degree that there can be no reliable knowledge in this domain?
In the discussion earlier in this
chapter of the general epistemic argument advanced by Russell Hanson and
others that empirical observations are ‘theory-laden’ (section A 1), this
problem was dismissed rather summarily; now we must examine it more fully.
The examination of the sociological ideas of
Herbert Spencer and Max Weber in Chapter 15 noted that, in their
methodological writings, they regarded this problem as very important.
The greater part of Spencer’s The
Study of Sociology (1875) is devoted to it.
In Spencer’s view the sociologist is
likely to bring certain preconceptions to his study of social phenomena
because he has been enculturated into, and remains a member of, a society with
certain commonly held beliefs and values. He
regarded this as a problem for scientific sociology, but not an insuperable
one, since the conscientious sociologist can identify the biases he may
possess and guard against them. It is
perhaps significant that his book was frequently adopted as a text in
introductory courses in sociology in American universities.
Apparently American sociologists, at
this early period in the development of their discipline, regarded Spencer’s
warnings, and his advice on this matter, as salutary.
In
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Sozialpolitik, the leading association of German
social scientists. The controversy
spread to neoclassical economics with the almost simultaneous publication of
Gunnar Myrdal’s The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory
(1930) and Lionel Robbins’s Essay on the Nature and Significance of
Economic Science (1932), which took opposite positions.
Myrdal argued that economics is
inextricably entangled with value judgements; Robbins claimed that economic
theory, as a pure logic of rational choice, achieves the Wertfreiheit
that Weber demanded. Since then the
controversy has continued unabated (for an excellent review of it see Mark
Blaug, The Methodology of Economics, 1980, chapter
5).
With the downfall of
positivism the issue has also entered the domain of general epistemology.
The ‘rhetorical analysis’ espoused by
Donald McCloskey declares that all claims of scientific objectivity are a sham
and that so-called scientific publications should be read as exercises in
persuasion, which are strongly governed by the author’s own value judgements.
A similar view is contained in the
writings of the
A companion issue that intersects with the
debate over Wertfreiheit is the contention that the work of the
scientist is influenced by his ‘interests’, that is to say, his desire to
achieve objectives other than the advancement of knowledge.
That scientists are not saints but,
like common folk, are motivated by the desire for wealth, fame, power,
respect, and admiration is scarcely to be doubted.
That these motives, rather than the
search for knowledge in
itself, frequently dominate their activities, as scientists, is equally
plausible, supported, for example, by James Watson’s frank account in The
Double Helix (1968) of how he and Francis Crick discovered the geometry of
the DNA molecule, Nuel Pharr Davis’s Lawrence and Oppenheimer (1969),
David Hull’s Science as a Process (1988), and numerous other books and
articles recounting the ‘inside story’ of scientific discoveries, and by
biographies of prominent scientists. The
role of non-intellectual motives in
scientific practice is,
in fact, a matter of more interest to the social scientist than
the issue of Wertfreiheit, since it raises the question of whether the
institutional organization of science and the incentive structure it contains
contributes to the advance of objective knowledge or retards it.
But let us defer that issue for a
moment.
Ernest Nagel has surveyed the question of
objectivity, with specific attention to the social sciences, in his The
Structure of Science (1961). Focusing
on his discussion will serve our purposes, since he considers the main
arguments that have been advanced against the notion of Wertfreiheit in
social science and gives
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counter-arguments in defense of it.
(In this summary, and the following
discussion, I will draw upon material in my paper ‘Social Science and Value
Judgements’, Canadian Journal of Economics, 1977.)
The first argument examined by Nagel is the
contention that social scientists do not study all social phenomena with equal
intensity; they select among the potential specific topics of study and, it is
claimed, their selection is determined by value judgements.
Nagel rejects this argument, on the
ground that no scientist can study everything, even within the limited domain
of his discipline, and that social scientists are no different from natural
scientists in selecting among potential topics.
This seems to me to be an inadequate
defence of social science, for two reasons. First,
one cannot acquit one branch of science from a charge of questionable
procedure simply by showing that other branches are also culpable.
Secondly, and more important, there is
the question whether the social and natural sciences are equally
culpable. One cannot measure this
quantitatively, but there would seem to be good reason to believe that the
selection of specific topics for investigation is governed by value judgements
to a greater degree in the social sciences. Social
research is strongly oriented towards social problems and social scientists
may differ greatly in how they evaluate such problems.
For example, one economist may regard
the distribution of income between workers and property owners as important in
assessing the quality of a society, another may think that this is better
indicated by the size distribution of income regardless of its source, and a
third might regard the number of people whose income is below the ‘poverty
line’ as the relevant indicator. Natural
scientists may select among lines of research on grounds of their comparative
potentials for social betterment, but they are less strongly impelled to
consider the practical applications of their research than social scientists
are. In the area of pure science,
topics are selected for research by considering the comparative potentials of
different lines of research in yielding scientifically important results.
In doing this scientists are making
value judgements. But this is not the
kind of value judgement that is relevant to the assessment of scientific
objectivity, for either the social or the natural sciences.
To claim that a scientist is not being
objective when he chooses one line of research as more promising,
scientifically, than another, would lead to the ludicrous contention that the
claim to objectivity could be sustained only if scientists were to allow their
research topics to be determined by a process of random selection!
Nagel makes a distinction between
‘characterizing judgements’ and ‘appraising judgements’ and contends that some
of the arguments made against the notion of Wertfreiheit in social
science rest upon a confusion of these.
Every scientist must characterize the specific phenomena he observes
and investigates as belonging to a certain generic class.
The biologist, for example, uses a
definition in order to determine whether a particular phenomenon belongs to
the classification ‘respiration’ or ‘photosynthesis’.
In doing so he is making
characterizing judgements, but he is not making any evaluative
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appraisal of the phenomena.
In the social sciences, says Nagel,
equally immaculate characterizing judgements may be made.
In principle, this may be correct, but
in practice there are great difficulties. If
an attack is made on a village by a group of armed men, is it an act of
‘terrorism’, or ‘liberation from tyranny’, or a ‘bandit raid’?
Such characterizing judgements are
obviously infused with values, and the implicit values govern the research
undertaken to explain them. In the
social sciences there are many concepts, such as, for example, ‘money supply’,
‘voting’, ‘congressional committee’, and ‘professional association’, that
permit purely characterizing judgements to be made, but there are many that
cannot be detached from valuational connotations: ‘unemployment’, ‘crime’,
‘drug addiction’, ‘log-rolling’, to cite just a few examples of the many that
could be instanced. The value-loading
of such concepts may be a matter of language, due to the fact that ordinary
language is used for scientific purposes in economics, sociology, and the
other social disciplines. But it is
doubtful that any language, even an artificially contrived one, could be
preserved from contamination by values, when used to examine social phenomena.
Nagel notes the contention that the social
sciences cannot be objective because prior values govern not only the choice
of specific topics for investigation and the concepts employed, but are
injected into the analysis itself and effectively control the conclusions
reached. This amounts to saying that
social scientists are prone to employ warped logic and improper treatment of
empirical data in order to support views they held prior to the investigation.
I think that Nagel is right to dismiss
this as a problem specific to the social sciences, since it is simply bad
scientific practice tout court. Such
practices may be easier to conceal in the social than in the natural sciences,
but the contention that the possibility (or even the probability) of this
destroys the claim of objectivity is not warranted.
There is, however, a problem in the treatment of
empirical data that cannot be reduced to a matter of sound or unsound
practice, which Nagel considers but, in my view, underrates.
This problem was first noted by Jerzy
Neyman in his early papers that led to the development of the Neyman-Pearson
model of statistical inference in the 1930’s and emerges clearly in Abraham
Wald’s formulation of statistical inference as a process of decision-making
under conditions of uncertainty. The
heart of the problem is concisely stated by Richard Rudner, a philosopher, in
a paper unambiguously entitled ‘The Scientist qua Scientist makes Value
Judgements’ (Philosophy of Science,
1953).
When the data used in a
scientific investigation are statistical, as is usually the case in the social
sciences, one rarely finds that they provide categorical answers to the
question at issue. Take, for example,
the ‘law of demand’ in economics. This
stipulates that people will purchase more of a commodity at a lower price than
at a higher one, other factors affecting purchases held constant.
If we wish to ascertain whether this
is consistent with empirical evidence, we might collect the relevant data by
means of a sample survey of
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households and compute the general mathematical
relationship between quantities purchased and prices.
Leaving aside the technical
difficulties in doing this, suppose we find that the relationship between
prices and quantities purchased is indeed negative as the law of demand
states. Our data, however, are merely
a sample, not the whole population of households in the community.
What econometricians do in such a case
is to calculate the probability that such a survey will yield the results it
did by chance. Let us say that this
tells us that such results could occur by chance four times in a hundred if we
were to do the exercise over and over again. Should
we conclude that the data support the postulated law?
If we do so we risk some danger of
accepting the law when in fact it is not true.
If, however, we conclude that the law is not supported by the data, we
risk rejecting it when in fact it is true. There
is no objective way of determining when we should accept and when reject: is a
4 per cent chance of being wrong ‘small’ or ‘large’?
The economist might say that, in this
particular case, he is prepared to accept such a chance of being wrong.
But suppose the data yielded a
positive relationship between prices and quantities purchased, not the
negative one postulated by the law of demand.
In this case the economist might well say that, since the law plays
such a vital role in the general structure of microeconomic theory, he is
unwilling to accept the result of the survey and reject the law even though
there might be a 96 per cent chance that the law of demand is indeed false.
What probability of being wrong would
convince him? Mathematical statistics
deserts one here. A value judgement
must be made, and such judgements might well differ among scientifically
conscientious economists.
The above illustrations indicate that a
scientist might be unwilling to accept the results of an empirical study, even
if the mathematics of inference indicated that there was only, say, a 4 per
cent probability that the results were untrue, when such acceptance would do
grave damage to a central pillar in the general structure of the science as
presently constituted. One of the
merits of the epistemological theory advanced by Imre Lakatos is in pointing
out that certain propositions in a ‘research programme’ are more vital than
others, being part of the ‘hard core’ of the programme.
Scientists are reluctant to accept
empirical evidence that is inconsistent with the hard core, for to do so would
require the abandonment of the programme, and no viable alternative may be
available. The judgement involved here
concerns the scientific, not the moral consequences of regarding contradictory
evidence as conclusive. That is, it is
not the kind of judgement that involves values other than the scientist’s
general belief that the advancement of scientific knowledge is a worthy aim.
Indeed, the insistence that one must
eliminate all values from science would amount to the destruction of
scientific inquiry. Mark Blaug points
out that the acceptance of empirically true statements rests upon the view
that they ought to be accepted (The Methodology of Economics,
1980, p. 131). If this were the only
value judgement involved in science, its claim to objectivity would be secure
against attack by all but the most determined scholastic pedant.
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Social scientists have a heuristic interest in
protecting their hard core propositions, just as natural scientists do, but
choosing between the risk of accepting a false hypothesis and rejecting a true
one also enters when statistical data are used to provide empirical
foundations for decisions on matters of social policy.
The judgements involved here are not
devoid of valuational content. For
example, if the data show that there is a positive correlation between the
level of the legal minimum wage and the amount of unemployment, with, say, a 4
per cent chance of being due to chance, should one advise the governmental
authorities to lower the minimum or repeal the law altogether?
Undoubtedly, economists employed by
labour unions and ones employed by business firms will differ on this; but
even economists who are not interested parties may differ, for the decision
hinges upon value judgements. This
problem applies to all applied sciences. An
engineer might, for example, accept a 90 per cent safety probability for a
coal-fired generator but insist on a much higher one for a nuclear power
plant. The social sciences, however,
are much more dependent upon non-experimental statistical data (some of which
are quite soft) than the natural sciences are, and much more of their work is
directly oriented to making assessments of social policies.
These are the main arguments that one finds in
the literature on the issue of Wertfreiheit in the social sciences.
Nagel’s general conclusion is that the
contention that the study of social phenomena cannot be objective is not
sustainable or, at least, that the problems one encounters in the social
sciences are no more severe than those that face natural scientists.
I have tried to show that, with
respect to most of these issues, Nagel’s view is questionable; value
judgements do enter in significant ways into all domains of scientific inquiry
but they do so to a greater degree in the study of social phenomena and the
application to social policy. Does
this mean the notion of objectivity must be abandoned?
Not by any means.
In our general review of the
epistemology of science in the first section of this chapter we found that the
notion of absolute certainly, which the early positivists embraced,
must be abandoned in any realistic view of scientific knowledge and its
potential for further development, but that does not mean that it is illusory
to believe that we have some objective knowledge of the world and that we can
improve that knowledge. Perfect
insulation of science from value judgements is not possible, but this is
merely one of the reasons why we must regard our knowledge as contingent.
The instruments of scientific inquiry
cannot furnish apodictic truths about the world, but they can enable us to
obtain limited and tentative knowledge about it and, in some areas, that
knowledge is sufficiently reliable to serve practical purposes.
Objectivity, then, like certainty, must be
regarded as a philosophical ideal rather than a characterizing property of
scientific knowledge. Most
philosophers of science, including most of those who have abandoned
positivism, hold that it is desirable to make our knowledge of the world more
objective and more certain. This is,
of course, a value judgement, but it is one
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that serves the process of scientific inquiry
rather than rendering it problematic. That
these ideals cannot be attained is not a reason for disregarding them.
Perfect cleanliness is also impossible, but that does not serve as a
warrant for not washing, much less for rolling in a manure pile.
All knowledge is human knowledge and
humans are imperfect beings, who can only cope with the problems they
encounter as best they may. Scientists
are human too. That they make value
judgements in selecting problems for investigation, in framing theoretical
concepts, and in drawing inferences from empirical data means only that
science requires the use of informed judgement as well as the application of
formal logic and the rules of empirical methodology.
If objectivity is regarded in this way, the
important issue is the pragmatic one: by what means can the degree of
objectivity in scientific work be raised, or prevented from declining?
Herbert Spencer advocated that social
scientists should be conscious of the biases they may harbor owing to family
background, education, and the general norms of their culture, as well as
their personal interests. Insisting
that all aspiring social scientists should take a course
in professional ethics
modelled after Spencer’s The Study of Sociology would probably do no
harm, but one may be sceptical that this would suffice to assure that social
research would be pursued with a degree of objectivity sufficient to preserve
it from gross contamination by value judgements and other biases.
Max Weber argued that Wertfreiheit
requires consciousness of potential bias, and recommended honest and
public admission by the social scientist of the values he embraces, but he
also made the much more important point that the accumulation of reliable
knowledge depends as well upon the social organization of science.
Ernest Nagel echoes Weber’s point in
emphasizing ‘the self-corrective mechanism of science as a social enterprise’
that operates when scientists are free to criticize one another and pursue
their activities in a regime of friendly competition.
The importance of the social organization of
science with regard to the issue of objectivity can be illustrated by
comparing two cases of extreme lack of objectivity: the outright fabrication
of empirical data. Several years ago
-a scientist named Summerlin, at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in
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quickly exposed, and negligible harm done to the
body of scientific knowledge or its practical applications.
By contrast, there is the case of
Trofim Lysenko in the
The social sciences are more heavily involved
with value judgements, political ideologies, and other contaminants of
objectivity than are the natural sciences and, lacking the ability to make
closed-system experiments, they are less able to contend with fabricated data
and other abuses of empirical evidence. But
mainstream social scientists are committed to an epistemology of empiricism,
and where they work in a pluralist environment of intellectual independence,
the ideal of objectivity can be approached, even though never attained.
In his famous essay On Liberty,
John Stuart Mill argued the case for intellectual freedom on utilitarian
grounds, as a form of social organization that promotes the advance of
knowledge. The thesis he advanced need
not be defended as a matter of faith or liberal political ideology it is
certified by the historical experience of science in all its domains.
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END
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
December 2002