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TRADITIONS IN SOCIAL THEORY SERIES Founding Editor: Ian Craib Series Editor: Rob Stones This series offers a selection of concise introductions to particular traditions in sociological thought. The books deepen the reader’s knowledge of particular theoretical approaches and enhance their wider understanding of sociological theorizing. Each book offers: a history of the chosen approach and the debates that have driven it forward, a discussion of the current state of the debates within the approach (or related debates that take different approaches) and an argument for the distinctive contribution of each approach and its likely future value. The series is a companion to the Themes in Social Theory series, edited by Rob Stones. PUBLISHED PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE (Third Edition) Ted Benton and Ian Craib CRITICAL THEORY Alan How MARXISM AND SOCIAL THEORY Jonathan Joseph THE SIMMELIAN LEGACY Olli Pyyhtinen MICRO SOCIAL THEORY Brian Roberts WEBER AND THE WEBERIANS Lawrence Scaff STRUCTURATION THEORY Rob Stones
THEMES IN SOCIAL THEORY SERIES This series explores how cutting-edge research within the social sciences relies on distinctive combinations of social theory and empirical evidence. Different books examine how this relationship works in particular subject areas, from technology and health to politics and human rights. Giving the reader a brief overview of the major theoretical approaches used in an area, the books then describe and analyse their application in a range of empirical research projects. Each text looks at contemporary and classical theories, provides a map of primary research carried out in the subject area and highlights advances in the field. The series is a companion to the Traditions in Social Theory series, founded by Ian Craib and edited by Rob Stones. PUBLISHED CRIME AND SOCIAL THEORY Eamonn Carrabine HEALTH AND SOCIAL THEORY Fernando De Maio INSTITUTIONS, INTERACTION AND SOCIAL THEORY Will Gibson and Dirk vom Lehn POLITICS AND SOCIAL THEORY Will Leggett TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL THEORY Steve Matthewman HUMAN RIGHTS AND SOCIAL THEORY Lydia Morris INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION AND SOCIAL THEORY Karen O’Reilly ENVIRONMENTS, NATURES AND SOCIAL THEORY Damian White, Alan Rudy and Brian Gareau GENDER, WORK AND SOCIAL THEORY Kate Huppatz
PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL THOUGHT THIRD EDITION Ted Benton and Ian Craib
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2001 This edition published 2023 Copyright © Ted Benton and Ian Craib, 2023 The authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image © Holli/Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:
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CONTENTS
List of Figures and Tables ix Preface to the Third Edition x Preface to the Second Edition xiii Acknowledgements xiv 1
Introduction to the First Edition Philosophy and the Social Sciences A Philosophical Toolkit Politics and Political Philosophy The Book and Its Arguments How to Read the Book
1 1 3 7 8 10
2
Empiricism and Positivism in Science 13 Introduction 13 Empiricism and the Theory of Knowledge 13 Positivism and Sociology 21 Further Reading 26
3
Some Problems of Empiricism and Positivism Introduction: Two Ways to Criticize Positivism Some Problems of Empiricism Further Problems of Positivism Further Reading
4
Science, Nature and Society: Some Alternatives to Empiricism 49 Marxism and Science 49 Weber, Merton and the Sociology of Science 52 Historical Epistemology and Structural Marxism 54 Revolutions and Relativism: From Kuhn to the ‘Strong Programme’ 57 Gender and Science: The Feminist Vision 61 The Reflexive Turn: ‘Constructing’ Nature and Society 65 Conclusion 71 Further Reading 71 Postscript 72
5
Interpretive Approaches 1: Instrumental Rationality Weber’s Discussion of the Objects of the Social Sciences
27 27 28 43 47
75 76
Contents
Weber’s Methodology: Understanding and Ideal Types 78 Weber on Objectivity and Value Freedom 80 Phenomenology: A Philosophical Foundation for Instrumental Rationality 81 Instrumental Variations I: Rational Choice Theory 84 Instrumental Variations II: Pragmatism and Symbolic Interactionism 85 Reasons and Causes 87 Individualism, Holism and Functional Explanation 88 Conclusion 89 Further Reading 90 Postscript 90 6 Interpretive Approaches 2: Rationality as Rule-Following: Cultures, Traditions and Hermeneutics 93 Introduction 93 Peter Winch: Philosophy and Social Science 94 Language, Games and Rules 95 Understanding Other Societies 97 What Can We Do with Winch? 99 Alasdair MacIntyre: Narratives and Communities 101 Hermeneutics: Hans-Georg Gadamer 102 Conclusion 105 Further Reading 105 Postscript 105 7
Interpretive Approaches 3: Critical Rationality 107 Introduction: Hegel, Marx and the Dialectic 107 The Dialectic of the Enlightenment 109 Ideology 110 Habermas: The Possibility of an Emancipatory Science 112 Critical Theory and the Linguistic Turn 114 Conclusion 116 Further Reading 117 Postscript 117
8
Critical Realism and the Social Sciences 119 Introduction 119 Realism and Natural Science 121 Experiments, Laws and Mechanisms 123 Reality as Stratified 124 Stratification, Emergence and Reduction 125 Reality as Differentiated: Closed and Open Systems 127 Realism and Social Science 129
vi
Contents
Critical Realism and Human Emancipation 134 Further Reading 137 Postscript 138 9
Feminism, Knowledge and Society 141 Introduction: Objectivity and Cultural Diversity 141 Feminist Politics and Social Knowledge 144 Feminism and Epistemology 146 Debating the Feminist Standpoint 152 Post-modern Feminism 158 Further Reading 159 Postscript 159
10 Post-structuralism and Post-modernism 163 Introduction 163 Post-structuralism: The Move to the Signifier 166 Foucault: The Construction of the Subject 167 Derrida and Deconstruction 169 Post-modernism: Losing Philosophy 170 The Politics of Post-structuralism and Post-modernism 172 What Do We Do with the Posts? 173 Further Reading 174 Postscript 175 11 Conclusion to the First Edition: In Defence of Philosophy (1st Edition, 2001)
177
12 Commentary on Some Recent Developments (2nd Edition, 2011 and 3rd Edition, 2023, Ted Benton) 183 Peter Winch and Hermeneutics 184 Meaning, Action and Explanation 184 Understanding Other Cultures and Criticizing One’s Own 189 ‘Limiting notions’, Human Nature and Social Science Naturalism 192 Post-Marxism and Post-Structuralism 194 Critical Realism and Social Science 201 Archer’s Morphogenesis and Human Flourishing 215 Critical Realism and the Philosophy of Social Science: Some Recent Interventions 219 13 Critical Social Science, Nature and Human Nature (3rd Edition, 2023, Ted Benton) 225 Introduction 225 Andrew Sayer’s Philosophical Anthropology 228 vii
Contents
Humans as Social or Natural Beings? Human Beings as Both Ecologically and Socially Embedded A Dangerously Disrupted Metabolism with Nature
233 237 241
14 Nature, Economy and Society: Can the Contradictions Be Reconciled? (3rd Edition, 2023, Ted Benton) Sustainable Development ‘Mainstream’ Environmental Economics to the Rescue? Is There an Alternative? Classical Political Economy Marx and Engels: Prometheans or Pioneering Ecologists? Ecological Marx and the Metabolic Rift O’Connor and the ‘Second Contradiction’
243 243 245 253 254 255 261 262
Appendix I: Personal Conclusions (1st Edition, 2001)
265
Appendix II: Obituary for Professor Ian Craib (1945–2002)
275
Glossary 278 Bibliography 285 Index 303
viii
FIGURES AND TABLES
Figures 3.1 3.2
The duck-rabbit The Hypothetico-Deductive account of scientific theories: the kinetic theory of gases as an example
31 37
Table 2.1
Suicides in different countries per million persons of each confession
23
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
By the time this edition leaves the printers, it will have been fully twenty years since the death of my co-author, Ian Craib. Ian and I had taught philosophy of social science together for some twenty-five years, and we saw the book as a setting down of the current state of an ongoing debate between us and our students on the many topics in the discipline. Although we both drew on the heritage of Marx and Engels, we drew on it very differently, to the point that Ian, in his typically paradoxical personal conclusion, had come to see himself as an anarcho-syndicalist (though he was no longer sure what that meant). Ian had by that time become an NHS psychotherapist, deeply concerned with questions about how people deal, or fail to deal, with the consequences of ‘the hand of cards’ which they are dealt as they start their lives. He said this was a source of wonder to him, and he became convinced of the importance to human flourishing of the ability to think: Those who do best in psychotherapy are those who can learn to think about their inner lives, often think the unthinkable, who can learn to tolerate anxiety, contradiction, paradox and uncertainty and internal conflict and make something out of it all. (Craib, Appendix 1 of this book) The chapters Ian wrote for this book were infused with his own, very particular, grasp of these aspects of personal life, and they presented me with some difficulties in continuing with subsequent editions after his death. First, I am so far from a comparable grasp of those dimensions of our lives that to revise anything Ian wrote would be absurd. Second, his arguments in the book represent a certain point in his intellectual journey, and in our arguments with one another, that were worth retaining as a record. So, for both the second and, now, the third edition, the editors and I agreed that the original text should remain unaltered. But even in a sub-field of the ancient discipline of philosophy, the world does not stand still. A new edition should attempt to monitor the significant changes and, if necessary, to mark critical distances. In both the second and this edition a postscript was added to chapters where it seemed that the debate had been carried forward. This might simply be the addition of new references or, in some cases, might involve extending the argument. In the second edition I took the liberty of adding a new chapter (12) taking up a wide range of newer contributions to the field, including newer work on hermeneutic approaches, most especially the work of Peter Winch. In this I took a rather different line of argument from that given in Ian’s contribution to the first edition. In addition,
Preface to the Third Edition
the critical realist approach had by that time become more widely adopted both philosophically and as a guide to substantive research, so a significant part of the new chapter was devoted to a review of some of the issues posed by that tradition. In this edition I have both corrected and developed some of the themes in that chapter, taking into account important new work by Margaret Archer and her colleagues, by the analytical philosopher of social science David Little, and several others. The most extensive new contribution in this edition is the addition of two new chapters (13 and 14) that centre on the question of the relation between social science and nature. In many ways the arguments presented in these chapters are prefigured in the earlier editions. Both Ian Craib and I were opponents of what some call ‘sociological reductionism’ (or ‘sociological imperialism’) – a tendency to extend sociological analysis beyond the boundaries of its legitimate application – either into the deep recesses of mental life or, externally, into the proper terrain of the natural sciences. We both saw, in critical realism, an approach that recognized the complex, multilayered character of reality, accessible only partially by any disciplinary matrix – many different conceptual and methodological resources would be needed, each with its own distinctive insights. For me, this meant, especially, the requirement for sociological analysis to be able to work collaboratively with natural science disciplines, especially the life sciences – notwithstanding the risks that involved. In the period since the first edition of this book, that requirement has become ever-more urgent, as the existential threats of climate change and biodiversity loss have at long last moved to centre stage politically. These threats are far too serious to be left to the physical scientists alone, as they pose major challenges to existing social and economic orders. Equally, they are too serious to be left to social and political scientists who work with concepts of the social as an autonomous order, unanchored in any natural conditions of existence. Chapters 13 and 14 both attempt to deal with the challenge of bringing these different ‘takes’ on the world together. At the centre of Chapter 13 is a sympathetic engagement with the view of human nature presented in the work of Andrew Sayer. The thoroughly social view of our nature advocated by him is endorsed, but an attempt is made to situate it within a broader conception of humans as an evolving species, whose nature is essentially bound up with their living and non-living natural conditions of existence and flourishing. Chapter 14 attempts to correct a limitation of earlier editions by reflecting philosophically on economic analysis. Economics was arguably the first of the social science disciplines to take account of the crisis in our relations to nature. This makes sense, as it is through the economy, as the social organization of our need-meeting interactions with nature, that our ecological problems arise. However, the currently dominant modes of economic analysis are open to question and have been more rigorously challenged since the financial crisis of 2007/8. Chapter 14 examines the resources of ‘orthodox’ economics and introduces some alternatives, in relation to their attempts to grasp our relation to (the rest of) nature.
xi
Preface to the Third Edition
These chapters present arguments, mostly pointing to a need for radical social and economic change, but those arguments are not conclusive: they are presented as contributions to a dialogue. Here I can echo Ian Craib’s insistence on the central importance of learning to think and to argue. That was the ethos of the department and university in which we worked, and it is sad that the conditions for such free-thinking, open dialogue are under growing threat, even in our universities. Ted Benton
xii
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The death of my co-author, Ian Craib, on the 22 December 2002 has made the preparation of this second edition both poignant and somewhat awesome. Although, rather to the surprise of both of us, we were able to co-write a book with little or no discomfort, there were quite deep differences of philosophical orientation between us (see Appendix I – originally intended to be included as Chapter 11 of the first edition). I have therefore refrained from any attempt at revision of Ian’s chapters and, as a consequence, have left my own as they were. However, in the ten years or so since we wrote our respective sections of the book, the literature of the philosophy of social science has grown. As the rate of change in philosophy and its sub-disciplines is usually quite slow – even ‘glacial’ – it is unlikely that a topic such as ours will have been transformed in so short a time-span. Where new developments have seemed to me of particular significance, in clarifying, developing or calling into question our lines of argument in the first edition, I have added a short postscript to the relevant chapter. In most cases, this will refer the reader to a more detailed treatment in the new chapter ‘Commentary on Recent Developments’, written specifically for this edition. Again, published work that has appeared since the first edition has been added to the bibliography. Inevitably, the selection of new work for discussion in this edition would have been different if I had been sharing the task with Ian. Almost certainly significant new thinking has appeared but no one volume could cover all materials. Partly this is because the world of academic publishing has escalated in sheer volume to the point where any claim to ‘completeness’ must be treated with scepticism. But also, some of the developments that have taken place more recently bear upon topics and traditions of thought that belong to Ian’s share in the division of labour between us. As well as being less familiar with those topics than was Ian, I also have a somewhat different ‘take’ on the issues. So, where I comment on some of this literature (especially in relation to Chapter 6), I have taken the opportunity to include some thoughts of my own that open up differences with Ian’s arguments. In fact, this was part of our original intention for the book – Ian and I had conducted one very long discussion, often including other colleagues and students, through the quarter-century that we worked together. Our initial thought was that we might actually emphasize our differences in this book and continue the debate in print. In the end, the book took the form of something closer to a conventional textbook than either of us had intended. If this new edition takes us back in this respect to something more like the original intentions of its authors, then the only sadness is that Ian is no longer around to add his characteristically pithy and insightful rejoinders. That said, enough of Ian remains in my head for me to hear him chortle a witty demolition.
Preface to the Second Edition
I have also taken the liberty of responding to one of the reviewers of the first edition. Garry Potter (2002), in a very generous set of comments, argues for a rather different pedagogy. Maybe Ian and I were too scrupulous in being fair to the various positions we discussed – perhaps we should have made it clearer where we thought the arguments were more convincing? Should we have ‘come out’ more with our own (albeit provisional) intellectual positions? Of course, I cannot speak for Ian (though his contribution to Appendix I should give some illumination), but hopefully my own sympathies will be more evident in the new ‘Commentary on Recent Developments’. However, despite their more ‘committed’ character, these notes are intended to retain the careful and respectful attitude to alternative points of view which (I hope) were a feature of the first edition. Partly because of its more committed nature, the new ‘commentary’ section will probably be experienced as more demanding in its level. New readers might be advised to read the relevant sections of the main text before turning to the new material. In sum, this new edition includes brief updates on the state of debate on the topics covered in most chapters. These updates are added as postscripts to the relevant chapters. There is a more extended review and critical commentary on what has seemed to me the more significant of the additions to the literature since Ian and I wrote the book. This new ‘Commentary on Recent Developments’ includes a detailed engagement with a recent book staunchly defending the work of Peter Winch that allows me to take the discussion of Winch’s work rather further than Ian does in his Chapter 6. It also includes a discussion of an important development among the ‘posts’ in the shape of post-Marxist discourse theory, together with an overview of the great recent proliferation of work in the critical realist tradition. This new edition also includes a slightly modified version of an obituary for Ian that I wrote for publication in the journal Radical Philosophy. Finally, I have included a chapter originally prepared for, but not published in, the first edition. Ian and I both felt that it would help readers to make sense of the selection of topics and arguments used in the book if we owned up to our own personal intellectual (and political) journeys. We accepted the advice of readers not to include it at that time, but the lapse of time since we wrote it has made it seem more appropriate for this second edition. The insights Ian gave into his own intellectual biography may be of particular interest. Finally, many new works are included in the updated bibliography. Ted Benton
Acknowledgements I would like to express my appreciation of Darcy Ahl, Elizabeth Holmes and the team at Bloomsbury for managing the transfer of this book, and the work on the third edition so smoothly and capably. I would also like to thank the Series editor, Professor Rob Stones, for his continued support and encouragement.
xiv
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION
Philosophy and the Social Sciences Philosophy and the social sciences are usually seen to be separate subjects, so why should students of the social sciences be interested in philosophy? We hope that this question will have answered itself by the end of our book, but we can make a start with it right away. At the time when modern science was in the process of emergence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was very difficult to say where the boundary between philosophy and science should be placed. It was only later that it became more conventional to see a separation between the two. As this separation took place, there were two basic models of the relationship. In one view, philosophy could arrive at certain knowledge by rational argument. The most fundamental truths about ourselves and the nature of the world we live in, as well as the rules for arriving at such knowledge, could be established by philosophers. In this way, philosophy provided ‘foundations’ for the research done in the particular scientific specialisms. This is sometimes called the ‘masterbuilder’ or ‘master-scientist’ view of philosophy, and it is associated with an approach to philosophy called ‘metaphysics’. In metaphysics, philosophers try to give an account of the universe, the world and everything in it. Nowadays philosophers tend to be a bit more modest. The alternative view of the relation between philosophy and the sciences is sometimes called the ‘underlabourer’ view. On this view, it is accepted that armchair speculation about the nature of the world cannot give us certain or reliable knowledge. Knowledge can come only from practical experience, observation and systematic experimentation. So, the special sciences don’t need to wait for philosophers to provide them with foundations, or to tell them what they should think. On the underlabourer view, philosophy should be there to provide help and support to the work of the scientists, as they get on with the job of discovering how nature works. But what sort of help can philosophy give? There are various different views on this. One view is that in our common-sense thinking there are prejudices, superstitions and unquestioned assumptions which are obstacles to scientific progress. Philosophy can perhaps play a part in exposing these and criticizing them, so as to set science free. This is a bit like clearing away the dead leaves on the railway line to let the trains run on. Another sort of help might be to provide a map of the pattern of existing scientific knowledge, so that scientific specialists can get some idea about where they are in the wider field of knowledge. A third possibility is that the philosophers can use their
Philosophy of Social Science
expertise in logic and argumentation in refining the methods of investigation which scientists use. In this book, philosophy will be used in all these ways, but most importantly it will be used to provide underlabouring in yet another way. To see what this sort of help might be, we can remind ourselves that philosophy is not just an academic discipline. In everyday life people use the word to mean something rather different from its use in academic contexts. We sometimes say that someone who has had to face up to very distressing circumstances, such as a job loss, or bereavement, that they were ‘philosophical’ about it. Certainly, most of us do not spend a great deal of time soul-searching about the meaning of life, or the ultimate basis of our values and attitudes. However, there are moments in everyone’s life when we are faced with serious moral dilemmas, or with such life-challenging events as losing a job, or a loved one, or being diagnosed with a serious illness. It is at times like these when we are forced to reflect on these questions of fundamental meaning and value in our lives. It is in this sense that, as the Italian Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci (Gramsci 1971) said, ‘Everyone is a philosopher.’ But if we are philosophers at these times of crisis, it is also true that in the way we interact with each other in our everyday lives, in the way we choose to spend our free time, in the jobs we choose (if we are lucky enough to have that choice) and so on, we are still implicitly philosophers. Our lives display or represent, whether we are generally self-conscious about it or not, a philosophical orientation to the world. We can think of this as a tacit or practical philosophy of life. So, how does this relate to the question we started out with – the relationship between philosophy and social science? If we go back to the map analogy, it is obvious that people don’t usually refer to a map if they are confident they already know where they are going, and how to get there. In everyday life, when things are going on smoothly, with no major problems, we aren’t forced to question our basic attitudes and priorities in life. But in the social sciences, things do not run along smoothly. (As we will see, the natural sciences don’t run along smoothly either, but most of the time this fact is less obvious.) The social sciences are often derided by public figures and in the media, and social scientists themselves tend to be less confident about their achievements than are natural scientists: they can’t prove their success by generating new and impressive technologies, for example. Moreover, social scientists are themselves divided about what is the nature of their disciplines. Many, for example, would not agree that their work is scientific in the same sense as the natural sciences are. Even the ones who do will often disagree about what science is. For this reason, social scientists, and sociologists in particular, tend to be more reflexive about their subjects than natural scientists – that is, they are more likely to spend time thinking about just what kind of activity sociology (or political science or anthropology or any other such subject) is, what sort of methods it should use, what sort of relationship it should have with its subject-matter and so on. The kinds of questions we ask when we are being reflexive in this way about our own disciplines are philosophical questions. They are not imposed on us from outside, as in the masterbuilder view, but they arise
2
Introduction to the First Edition
from within our subjects, as a result of the special difficulties and deep disagreements that we find there. So, the main job of underlabouring we will be doing in this book will be an attempt to address the question: ‘What are we doing when we attempt to study human social life in a systematic way?’ Depending on how we answer that question, further questions arise: what are the proper methods of investigation of social processes? Can there be objective knowledge of society when the investigators as well as the subject-matter are all part of society? What role do moral and political values play in our work? How should we view the fact of continuing disagreement among social scientists about basics? Is this perhaps a sign of the immaturity of the social sciences, or is it something we should expect as a permanent fact of life, and even welcome? And so on.
A Philosophical Toolkit To help us be more systematic in our reflexive investigation, we can call in the help of the academic discipline of philosophy. There are some very valuable ideas and arguments we can draw upon, but always, of course, to answer questions posed by the problems we face as would-be social scientists. There are four sub-disciplines, or fields, within philosophy from which we can most usefully draw. These are: Theory of Knowledge The technical term for this is ‘epistemology’. In the seventeenth-century disputes about philosophy and science there were two main alternative views, in opposition to each other. Generally, the masterbuilders had a ‘rationalist’ view of the nature of knowledge. They were very impressed by mathematics, which seemed to arrive at absolutely certain conclusions by formal reasoning. The seventeenth-century French philosopher Descartes (1641, 1931) is perhaps the best known of the rationalists. His method of systematically doubting everything that could be doubted led him to the conclusion that even as he doubted he must at least be thinking. So what could not be doubted was his own existence as a thinking being. This provided the certain foundation from which he was able (at least to his own satisfaction!) to begin the task of reconstructing the whole edifice of knowledge. The rival theory of knowledge, generally associated with the underlabourer view, was ‘empiricism’. For the empiricist philosophers (see Honderich 1999), the sole source of knowledge about the world was the evidence of our senses. At birth, they held, the human mind is a blank sheet, as it were, and our knowledge is acquired subsequently, through learning to recognize recurrent patterns in our experience, and attaching general ideas to them. Genuine knowledge (as distinct from mere belief, or prejudice) is limited to the statement of these patterns in experience, and what can be inferred from them. The apparent certainty of the conclusions of mathematical and logical arguments,
3
Philosophy of Social Science
which the rationalists were so impressed by, is due to the fact that they are true by definition. So the certainty of such statements as ‘All bachelors are male,’ or ‘2+2=4’, tells us nothing we didn’t already know about the world. They are statements in which we make explicit the implications of the way we define certain words, or mathematical operations. As we will see, the empiricist view of knowledge has been the one that most natural and social scientists have appealed to when making out their claims to provide genuine or authoritative knowledge. It is also the view of knowledge which is closest to most people’s common-sense intuitions: ‘Seeing is believing,’ ‘I saw it with my own eyes.’ Ontology This is a technical term in philosophy, and unfortunately it is used in very different ways in different traditions of philosophical thinking. In the sense we use the term here, an ‘ontology’ is the answer one would give to the question: ‘What kinds of things are there in the world?’ In the history of philosophy the many different ways of answering this question can be loosely divided into four main traditions. ‘Materialists’ have argued that the world is made up entirely of matter (or ‘matter in motion’), and the different characteristics of material objects, living things, people, societies and so on can in principle be explained in terms of the greater or lesser complexity of the organization of matter. By contrast, ‘idealists’ have argued that the ultimate reality is mental, or spiritual. This may be because they, like Descartes, think that their experience of their own inner, conscious life is the thing they can be most certain of. If one begins with this, then it can seem reasonable to think of the material objects and other bodies one encounters as constructs of one’s own inner thought processes. As we will see, ‘constructivist’ views of the external world, with historical roots in Descartes’s philosophy, have become fashionable in sociology and related disciplines. But idealists do have difficulty in being fully convincing when they deny the independent materiality of the external world, and, similarly, materialists have difficulty being fully convincing in explaining away the distinctive character of subjective experience. This is why a third option has been quite popular in the history of philosophy. This is referred to as ‘dualism’. Again, Descartes is a convenient and well-known example. Having convinced himself of his own existence as a thinking being, it seemed to him that there was a further question as to whether he existed as an embodied, material being. Eventually, he was able to be certain of that, but in the process came to see body and mind as two quite different kinds of thing, or ‘substance’. So human individuals were, for him, a rather mysterious and contingent combination of a mechanical body with a ghostly mind, or soul (see Ryle 1949, 2002). In Descartes especially we see a close connection between epistemology, or theory of knowledge, on the one hand, and ontology, on the other: what is accepted as existing depends on how confident we can be about our knowledge of it. For some philosophers, the apparent difficulty of being sure about the nature of anything beyond the limits of our own conscious experience leads them to ‘agnosticism’. This is not just the don’t-know 4
Introduction to the First Edition
option in the philosophers’ public opinion poll. Rather, it is the positive doctrine that the nature of the world as it exists independently of our subjective experience just cannot be known. This rather crude division of philosophers into rival materialist, idealist, dualist and agnostic traditions does have some relevance to debates in the social sciences, and we can find many echoes of the debates among philosophers here. However, the disputes in the social sciences tend to be more localized in character. They usually concern not philosophical ontology, but what we might call regional or special ontology. So, instead of asking ‘What kinds of things are there in the world?’, we might, as biologists, ask ‘What kinds of things are living organisms made up of, and how are they put together?’ As chemists, we might ask: ‘How many elements are there, what are their properties, how do they interact?’ and so on. Each discipline has its own regional ontology, its own way of listing, describing and classifying the range of things, relations or processes it deals with; this is the range of things which it claims to give us knowledge of. In the case of the social sciences, there are deep, ongoing controversies about what the constituents of the social world are. One of the most basic disputes has to do with whether society itself is an independent reality in its own right (a ‘reality sui generis’, as Durkheim put it). So-called ‘methodological individualists’ argue against this. For them, society is nothing over and above the collection of individual people who make it up. Another ontological dispute concerns whether sociologists are justified in referring to social and economic structures and processes which exist independently of the symbolic or cultural meanings of social actors. Are we justified, for example, in talking sociologically about social classes and class interests in societies where individual social actors have no concept of themselves as belonging to social classes? Logic So far we’ve often referred to the disputes, disagreements, arguments and so on which go on among philosophers and social scientists. If we examine the texts in which these disputes are conducted, we will often find stereotyping and caricaturing of one another’s views, outright misrepresentation, questioning of political motives, allegations of bias and so on. While these tactics might have a lot of rhetorical and persuasive force, they are not the same thing as good arguments. The discipline of logic is an attempt to set down in a systematic way what makes the difference between a good and a bad argument. When we construct an argument we are usually attempting to show why a particular statement (our ‘conclusion’) should be accepted as true. In order to do this, we bring together other statements, which give an account of the relevant evidence, or other considerations, which provide the grounds for believing the truth of the conclusions. These statements are the ‘premisses’ of the argument. A ‘valid argument’ is one in which the conclusion follows from the premisses. It is one in which anyone who accepts the premisses must accept the conclusion. This does not mean that the conclusion itself must 5
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be true, only that it is as reliable or as well established as the premisses from which it is derived. For example: If there is a peace settlement in Ireland, this government has at least one great achievement to its credit. There is a peace settlement in Ireland. ———— Therefore: This government has at least one great achievement to its credit. This is a valid argument, because the conclusion does follow from the premisses. However, the conclusion could still be false, because there might turn out not to be a peace settlement in Ireland, or because even if there is, it might not be an achievement of the government. Interestingly, the conclusion could also turn out to be true, even though the premisses turned out to be false, because the government might, for example, have failed to settle the Irish question, but have found a permanent solution to the problem of unemployment instead. What the validity of the argument does rule out is the possibility that both premisses could be true and the conclusion false. However, this is not a book on formal logic, and most of the time we will have to rely on our intuitive sense of when an argument is or is not valid. The important thing to keep in mind is that the validity of an argument is a matter of the logical relationship between sets of statements. It is not a matter of how good or bad the evidence is for or against any particular factual claim (though, confusingly, in research methods courses, there is a completely different use of the term ‘validity’ to refer to the adequacy of a measure to quantify the thing it is supposed to be measuring). Ethics and Moral Philosophy Ethical questions arise at many points in the course of social scientific research. Sociologists are often involved in uncovering information about the beliefs and practices of the people they study which might put those people at risk. Sometimes this might be because the practices concerned are socially stigmatized, and the researcher might be concerned not to jeopardize the anonymity of her or his informants. Alternatively, the researcher might well feel that her discovery of corrupt or unjustly discriminatory practices in official organizations ought to be made public. But doing so would at the same time be a betrayal of trust, and might also jeopardize the possibility of further research. Often, too, researchers may be employed to carry out research for projects they did not design, or for organizations whose aims they might not sympathize with. To what extent should they keep quiet about their reservations in order to keep their career prospects open? These are moral quandaries which frequently arise in the course of research practice. There are other ethical questions which are intrinsic to the research process itself. These 6
Introduction to the First Edition
have to do with the power relations between researcher and researched. In most social research there is inequality of social status between the two, and even where there is not, the social scientist is implicitly claiming the authority to interpret and represent the beliefs or attitudes of those who are the objects of study. Where there are class, gender, ethnic or other social differences between researcher and researched, such ethical issues necessarily arise. Finally, sociologists and anthropologists, especially, are constantly confronted by the enormous diversity of human cultures and subcultures. Part of this diversity is diversity in moral values. Because of the ethnographic requirement to interpret other cultures in terms available to the participants in those cultures, these social scientists must be able to suspend their own judgements. The ethical sensitivity which goes along with this, and reflexivity about the power relations between researcher and researched, leads many sociologists and anthropologists towards a position of ‘moral relativism’. That is to say, they tend to resist the idea that there are universally obligatory moral values, applicable across all cultures. Morality comes to be seen as a matter of what participants in each culture take to be acceptable or unacceptable. No one culture has a right to dictate to any other what rules it should live by. On the other hand, closer examination shows that cultures themselves tend not to be so consensual internally as this picture assumes. If there are ethical conflicts within a culture, the relativist view is not much help. Also, it can be argued that the relativist position itself rests on a universal principle – that all cultures have a right to their own autonomy and integrity. Finally, it is much easier to adopt the stance of a moral relativist in the abstract than when confronted with a real moral issue. When they encounter cultures in which systematic torture, female circumcision, endemic racism or capital punishment is accepted as morally proper, most social scientists are liable to find their capacity to suspend judgement sorely tested. So, there seems to be plenty of room for the help of moral philosophy in the work of the social sciences!
Politics and Political Philosophy These moral issues that might be faced by the researcher have wider implications. Whether we are thinking about female circumcision, capital punishment or social stratification, we are implicitly or explicitly taking a stand on what sort of society we want to live in, and what the ‘good’ society might look like. Some social sciences and social scientists have been intimately involved with political arguments and processes – from Marx’s leading role in the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association to Anthony Giddens’s involvement with New Labour and the ‘Third Way’ (from the sublime to the ridiculous?). Government advisers include economists, political scientists, social policy and other experts (although interestingly not many psychologists and historians), all of whom would regard themselves as in some sense or another social scientists. It is not just in the social sciences that we find this connection, since modern governments 7
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have teams of natural science advisers. The main difference is that in the latter case, scientific advice is commonly treated as a clear warrant for or legitimation of action. Be that as it may, the social sciences raise issues about the desirability and possibility of different types of society, and this takes us into issues of political philosophy. This will become most apparent when we discuss the idea of an ‘emancipatory’ science – a science whose aim is human liberation – and theories of feminist epistemology, developed from Marxism, that suggest that an oppressed group has access to knowledge in a way that other groups do not. Politics will, however, always be close to the surface.
The Book and Its Arguments It is important to emphasize that this is going to be a book of arguments – arguments about the nature of the social sciences that are not settled, and perhaps by their nature cannot be. Each science, each type of science, changes and is affected by changes in related disciplines as researchers and thinkers learn from each other. We will be discussing the issues in fairly general terms – our aim is to introduce the student to the most general issues, and at this level the development of the field is comparatively slow. There are two ways in which the reader can approach this book, the first being to see it as a high-altitude photograph or a small-scale map of a particular terrain in which he or she can situate a particular discipline or approach even if we do not mention it directly. It should be possible to situate every social science and every variation somewhere in the picture or on the map. The arguments we explore in relation to one science can certainly be discovered in others. The second way to approach the book is as a sort of language primer, an introduction to often difficult ideas and arguments which take time to learn and which are best learnt through participating in the arguments. In an everyday sense we are all philosophers, and as you read you should reflect on your own ideas about the subject you are studying: for example, does the way in which you think about your subject, whether it be geography, sociology, economics, psychology, history or whatever, place it near to or far away from the natural sciences? We will in fact start by examining the philosophy of natural science. The natural sciences are not as monolithic or simplistic in their approach as critics often seem to assume. Even within the most influential philosophy of natural science, known as ‘empiricism’, we can find a number of different approaches, and there has been a serious questioning of principles and accepted views of scientific progress from within the philosophy of natural science and the natural sciences themselves. We will be discussing arguments that the social sciences, if they are to be ‘real sciences’, should model themselves on the empiricist account of science, and we will be discussing where this might or might not be appropriate. We will also be looking at developments in the history and social study of the natural sciences that raise important questions about the nature and status of the knowledge produced by those disciplines. It might seem strange to start a book on the philosophy of the social sciences with three chapters on the natural sciences, but the two are intimately related. It is not possible to grasp the development of philosophical debates in the social sciences or indeed the development 8
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of the social sciences themselves without a knowledge of the way in which the natural sciences have thought about themselves, and the way philosophers have thought about them, as they have developed. These chapters are centrally concerned with empiricist views of natural science, and with the critics of empiricism. The most telling criticisms of empiricism as an account of natural scientific knowledge have come from approaches which recognize the sciences as historically and socially located practices. However, sociological and historical approaches to the understanding of science themselves make knowledge-claims, use empirical methods of research and so on. So to treat their findings about science as authoritatively true would beg the central questions of this book. As we will see in Chapter 4, attempts to construct sociological and historical accounts of science as alternatives to the empiricist view remain controversial. The divisions and debates in the field of social studies of science, or science studies, have many connections with, and often directly reflect, the more general debates about the nature of social scientific knowledge which make up our theme in this book. The main approaches we will introduce in Chapter 4 are selected partly by virtue of the influence they have had on debates in the philosophy of social science, and partly because of their importance as background to the discussion in later chapters. In most cases, we have had space to provide only a brief introductory outline, and you are advised to follow up approaches which interest you with further reading. We will move from this discussion to an examination of those positions and writers that argue that the social sciences, or some social sciences, are scientific but not in the same way as the natural sciences. The social sciences study human beings, and human beings are different from the objects of physics or chemistry – they know they are being studied, they can understand what is said about them and they can take the scientists’ findings into account and act differently. This approach is more closely linked to the rationalist tradition, although in the social sciences it is often referred to as ‘interpretivist’. There are in fact several such interpretivist positions and several different conceptions of rationality to be found in the social sciences: the simple instrumental rationality of rational choice theory to be found in some forms of economics and some forms of sociology; the more complicated instrumental rationality of Weberian sociology and the descendants of G. H. Mead’s pragmatism; the idea of rationality as rule-following, stemming from anthropology and the philosophy of Wittgenstein and Peter Winch; and the notion of dialectical or critical rationality developed from the Marxist interpretation of the German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. We will be exploring and comparing all of these approaches. This will take us on to more recent developments, which move in two directions. One development of some of the arguments about positivism in the natural and social sciences has been the development of modern critical realism, particularly in such disciplines as geography, sociology, politics, economics and psychology. Whereas positivism is primarily concerned with epistemology, the theory of knowledge, realism is primarily concerned with ontology, the theory of what exists in the world. This enables a reopening of the debate about the relationship between the social and natural sciences, in a way which suggests that there are both similarities and differences between the two – a more sophisticated view than we will have come across before. 9
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The second development has been towards a systematic relativism. In this book we will trace this through the development of identity politics and in particular feminism. Some feminists have tried to develop a feminist epistemology, basing their arguments on the work of the early twentieth-century Marxist philosopher George Lukács, who argued that the proletariat, the working class, had a privileged position as far as knowledge of the social world was concerned precisely because of their underprivileged position in that world. To put it very crudely, they had nothing to lose by acknowledging the truth. Lukács was of course more sophisticated than this might suggest, as are the feminist philosophers who tried to develop his ideas to argue the same point about women. There is a continuing debate between advocates of various versions of this ‘standpoint’ epistemology and their post-modernist critics. We will follow this first through the development of post-structuralism. The first generation of structuralist theorists developed the idea of underlying structures in society and social life, using a linguistic analogy. Realism developed the idea further, but post-structuralism has moved away from this concern to become part of what is now known as the ‘linguistic turn’ in twentieth-century philosophy. This approach sees the social world as constituted in and by language, or different ‘discourses’. In much post-structuralist philosophy we find the development of a relativist position – the idea that no one discourse is more right, or scientific, than another. This approach has been particularly influential in sociology, cultural studies and social psychology and the study of literature, but it can also be found in history. Post-modernism takes this movement even further, almost to the point of abandoning philosophy altogether – or more accurately using philosophical arguments against philosophy.
How to Read the Book To repeat: this is a book of arguments not of conclusions. It should perhaps be read as a primer in constructing arguments. Most students should find themselves intuitively sympathetic to one position or another. If you do, you should first try to work out the reasons for and the implications of holding a particular position, and then try to argue against yourself from alternative points of view and see what happens. You should be asking questions about how these ideas apply to your particular discipline: Are some of them irrelevant to the pursuit of knowledge or understanding in your area? Are they mutually exclusive? Whatever you do, don’t stop asking questions about these ideas. As well as being a book of arguments and about arguments, it is a book which has grown out of arguments between the authors, who have taught a course together in the University of Essex sociology department for the last twenty-five years. We think that the ideas and arguments presented here have a life of their own, independently of the biographies of their authors. They can be evaluated, criticized, tested for their wider applicability, accepted, rejected, played with or developed according to the interests of the reader. On the other hand, the biographies of the authors do have a bearing on the pattern of inclusions and exclusions, emphases and omissions you will find 10
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in the book. Ideas don’t drop from the sky (to quote an eminent philosopher), and it will help you to situate yourself in relation to our arguments to know something of where they came from. Both authors could be described as of the generation of the 1960s. We both started out with a strong sense of the political and moral significance of social scientific work. As philosophically informed social scientists, we were engaged through our careers with attempting to make sense of our work as wouldbe social scientists in a historical context which has changed enormously during that period, and in ways which have repeatedly called into question our favourite assumptions. Our initial commitments to Marxism (though on opposite sides of the debate then raging about how to understand and develop that tradition) were called into question by proliferating social movements and issues which could not be readily addressed without deep revision of basic assumptions. Black power, gay rights and liberation, feminism in its many forms and, more recently, the green movement provided intellectual challenges with which we are still trying to grapple, with effects noticeable throughout this book. Given our different starting points in the discipline, we have addressed these challenges in rather different ways. I. C. has focused on the problematic relationship between social scientific approaches and the understanding of subjective life and personal agency. Meanwhile, T. B. has been concerned with the no less problematic relationship between the social sciences and the understanding of non-human nature – a concern prompted by both green and feminist thought. These differences in biography go a long way to explaining the differences of emphasis you will find in the different parts of the book, and also the division of labour we have adopted in the allocation of the chapters. Although we have worked together on all chapters, we should plead guilty to those parts of the book for which we carry prime responsibility: Ted Benton for Chapters 2, 3, 4, 8 and 9, Ian Craib for Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 10. We both contributed to the introduction and conclusion. All mistakes are of course the responsibility of the other author!
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CHAPTER 2 EMPIRICISM AND POSITIVISM IN SCIENCE
Introduction In this chapter we will discuss the main outlines of the empiricist account of natural science, and then go on to consider why and how the positivist tradition has tried to apply it to social scientific explanation.
Empiricism and the Theory of Knowledge As we mentioned in Chapter 1, the history of modern science and the history of theories of knowledge have been closely bound up with each other. Sciences such as physics and chemistry, which rely a great deal on observation and experiment, have tended to justify their methods and knowledge-claims in terms of the empiricist view of knowledge. Empiricist philosophers have tended to return the compliment, by treating science as the highest form of genuine knowledge, or often even the only one. In the twentieth century, empiricist philosophers (particularly those, such as R. Carnap (1966), and the British philosopher A. J. Ayer (1946), who are known as the ‘logical positivists’) have been especially concerned to draw a clear dividing line between science, as genuine knowledge, and various belief-systems such as religion, metaphysics, psychoanalysis and Marxism. In the empiricist view, these belief-systems, which sometimes present themselves as scientific, can be shown to be ‘pseudo-sciences’ (though it is a bit more complicated than this – one of the leading logical positivists, Otto Neurath, was also a Marxist). One of the difficulties they have encountered in trying to do this is that a very strict criterion of scientific status, which is adequate to the job of keeping out Marxism, psychoanalysis and the rest, generally also rules out a great deal of established science! Although empiricist philosophy is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge in general, our concern is more narrowly with its account of natural science. We will also be working with an ‘ideal-typical’ construct of empiricist philosophy, which does not take much notice of the many different versions of empiricism. Anyone who wants to take these debates further will need to read more widely to get an idea of the more sophisticated variants of empiricism. For our purposes, the empiricist view of science can be characterized in terms of seven basic doctrines: 1. The individual human mind starts out as a ‘blank sheet’. We acquire our knowledge from our sensory experience of the world and our interaction with it.
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2. Any genuine knowledge-claim is testable by experience (observation or experiment). 3. This rules out knowledge-claims about beings or entities which cannot be observed. 4. Scientific laws are statements about general, recurring patterns of experience. 5. To explain a phenomenon scientifically is to show that it is an instance of a scientific law. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘covering law’ model of scientific explanation. 6. If explaining a phenomenon is a matter of showing that it is an example or ‘instance’ of a general law, then knowing the law should enable us to predict future occurrences of phenomena of that type. The logic of prediction and explanation is the same. This is sometimes known as the thesis of the ‘symmetry of explanation and prediction’. 7. Scientific objectivity rests on a clear separation of (testable) factual statements from (subjective) value judgements. We can now put some flesh on these bare bones. The first doctrine of empiricism is associated with it historically, but it is not essential. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, empiricists tended to accept some version of the association of ideas as their theory of how the mind works, and how learning takes place. This governed their view of how individuals acquire their knowledge (that is, from experience, and not from the inheritance of innate ideas, or instinct). Today’s empiricists are not bound to accept this, and they generally make an important distinction between the process of gaining or acquiring knowledge (a matter for psychology) and the process of testing whether beliefs or hypotheses (however we acquired them) are true. In the terminology of Karl Popper, this is the distinction between the ‘context of discovery’ and the ‘context of justification’. The second doctrine of empiricism is at the core of this philosophical approach. The basic point the empiricists are making is that if you want us to accept any claim as true, you should be able to state what the evidence for it is. If you can go on claiming it is true whatever evidence turns up, then you are not making a factual statement at all. If the manufacturer of a food additive claims that it is safe for human consumption, but cannot give evidence that anyone has yet consumed it, we would expect the official body concerned with food safety standards to refuse to accept their assurances. If they then provide results of tests on animal and subsequently human consumers of the product which show unexpected instances of symptoms of food-poisoning, but continue to insist the product is safe, we might start to suspect that they are not interested in the truth, but solely in selling the product. Thus far, this doctrine of empiricism accords very closely with widely held (and very reasonable!) intuitions. It is important to note that our statement of the second doctrine of empiricism could be misleading. For empiricism, a statement can be accepted in this sense as genuine knowledge, or as scientific, without being true. The important point is that statements must be capable of being shown to be true or false, by referring to actual or possible 14
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sources of evidence. On this criterion, ‘The moon is made of green cheese’ is acceptable, because it can be made clear what evidence of the senses will count for it, and what evidence will count against it. A statement such as ‘God will reward the faithful’ is ruled out, because it cannot be made clear what evidence would count for or against it, or because believers continue to believe in it whatever evidence turns up. This latter possibility is significant, since for some empiricists the testability of a statement is not so much a matter of the properties of the statement as of the way believers in it respond to experiences which appear to count against it. But once we recognize that there might be a choice about whether to give up our beliefs when we face evidence which seems to count against them, this raises problems about what it is to test a belief, or knowledge-claim. In a recently reported case, it was claimed by a group of researchers that rates of recovery of patients suffering from a potentially fatal disease who were undergoing additional treatment at a complementary clinic were actually worse than those of patients not undergoing this treatment. This appeared to be strong evidence that the treatment was ineffective, if not actually harmful. Would it have been right for the clinic to have accepted these findings, and to have closed down forthwith? In the event, subsequent analysis of the data suggested that patients selected for the additional treatment had, on average, poorer prognoses than those who were not. They were, in any case, less likely to recover, so that the research did not, after all, show the treatment to be ineffective or even harmful. Even had advocates of the ‘complementary’ treatment not been able to show this weakness in the research design, they might well have argued that a more prolonged investigation, or one which included the results of a number of different clinics offering the same sort of treatment, might have come up with more favourable evidence. In this case, a potentially beneficial treatment might have been abandoned if its advocates had been too ready to accept apparent evidence against it. On the other hand, to keep hanging on to a belief against repeated failure of test- expectations starts to look suspicious. However, because tests rarely, if ever, provide conclusive proof or disproof of a knowledge-claim, judgement is generally involved in deciding how to weigh the significance of new evidence. In practice it can be very difficult to see where to draw the line between someone who is being reasonably cautious in not abandoning their beliefs, and someone who is dogmatically hanging on to them come what may. This is a big problem for the empiricist philosophers of science who want a sharp dividing line between science and pseudo-science, and want to base it on the criterion of ‘testability’ by observation or experiment. To preserve the distinctive status of scientific knowledge-claims they need to reduce the scope for legitimate disagreement about how to weigh evidence for or against a hypothesis. There are two obvious ways of doing this. One is to be very strict about what can count as a hypothesis, or scientific statement, so that the knowledge-claims it makes are very closely tied to the evidence for or against it. A general statement which just summarizes descriptions of direct observations might satisfy this requirement. A standard textbook example is ‘All swans are white.’ This is supported by every observation of a white swan, and actually disproved by any single observation of a non-white swan. 15
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This example can also be used to illustrate the second way of tightening up on testability. If we consider the implications of the claim that all swans are white, it is clear that it is about an indefinitely large class of possible observations. Someone interested in testing it could go out and observe large numbers of swans of different species, in different habitats and in different countries. The more swans observed without encountering a non-white one, the more confidence the researcher is likely to have that the universal statement is true: each successive observation will tend to add to this confidence, and be counted as confirmation. This seems to be common sense, but, as we will see, there are serious problems with it. However, for empiricist philosophers of science, the issue is seen as one of finding a set of rules which will enable us to measure the degree of confidence we are entitled to have in the truth of a knowledge-claim (the degree of confirmation it has) on the basis of any given finite set of observations. A great deal of ingenuity has gone into applying mathematical probability theory to this problem. The third doctrine of empiricism was initially meant to rule out as unscientific appeals to God’s intentions, or nature’s purposes, as explanatory principles. Darwin’s explanation of the adaptive character of many features of living organisms in terms of differential reproduction rates of random individual variations over many generations made it possible to explain the appearance of design in nature without reference to God, the designer. But in many scientific, or would-be scientific, disciplines, researchers appeal to entities or forces which are not observable. Newton’s famous law of universal gravitation, for example, has been used to explain the rotation of the earth around the sun, the orbit of the moon, the motion of the tides, the path of projectiles, the acceleration of freely falling bodies near the earth’s surface and many other things. However, no one has ever seen gravity. It has been similar with the theory that matter is made up of minute particles, or atoms. This theory was accepted as scientific long before instruments were developed to detect atomic- and molecular-level processes. And even now that such instruments have been developed, the interpretation of observations and measurements made with them depends on theoretical assumptions – including the assumption that the atomic view of matter is true! Other appeals to unobservable entities and forces have not been accepted. These include the view, widely held among biologists until the middle of the last century, that there were fundamental differences between living and non- living things. Living things displayed ‘spontaneity’, in the sense that they did not behave predictably in response to external influences, and they also showed something like ‘purposiveness’ in the way individuals develop from single cells to adult organisms. These distinctive features of living things were attributed, by ‘vitalist’ biologists, to an additional force, the ‘vital force’. The opponents of this view had several different criticisms of it. Some were philosophical materialists in their ontology, and were committed to finding explanations in terms of the chemistry of living things. But the vitalists were also criticized in empiricist terms for believing in unobservable forces and ‘essences’. More recently, the empiricists have directed their attention to psychoanalysis as a pseudo-science which postulates unobservable entities such as the unconscious, the superego and so on (Cioffi and Borger 1970; Craib 1989). 16
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The fourth doctrine of empiricism is its account of the nature of scientific laws. It is acknowledged that a very large part of the achievement of modern science is its accumulation of general statements about regularities in nature. These are termed ‘scientific laws’, or ‘laws of nature’. We have already mentioned Newton’s law of gravitation. Put simply, this states that all bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is proportional to their masses, but also gets weaker the further they are apart. Not all laws are obviously universal in this way. For example, some naturally occurring materials are unstable and give off radiation. The elements concerned (such as uranium, radium and plutonium) exist in more than one form. The unstable form (or ‘isotope’) tends to emit radiation as its atoms ‘decay’. Depending on the isotope concerned, a constant proportion of its atoms will decay over a given time period. The law governing radioactive decay for each isotope is therefore statistical, or probabilistic, like a lot of the generalizations that are familiar in the social sciences. A common way of representing this is to state the time period over which, for each isotope, half of its atoms undergo decay. So, the half-life of uranium-235 is 700 million years, that of radon-220 a mere 52 seconds. Of course, this can also be represented as a universal law in the sense that each and every sample of radon-220 will show the same statistical pattern. In biology, it is harder to find generalizations which can count as universal in the same way. One of the best-known examples is provided by the work of the nineteenthcentury Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel. He was interested in explaining how the characteristics of organisms get passed on from generation to generation. He did breeding experiments on different varieties of pea plants, using pairs of contrasting characteristics, or ‘traits’, such as round- versus wrinkled-seed shapes, and yellow versus green colour. He showed that the offspring of cross-breedings did not, as might be expected, show blending of these characters. On the contrary, the offspring in successive generations showed definite statistical patterns of occurrence of each of the parental traits. These statistical patterns are Mendel’s laws, and Mendel is generally acknowledged as the founder of modern genetics. However, Mendel did not stop at simply making these statistical generalizations. He reasoned back from them to their implications for the nature of the process of biological inheritance itself. His results showed that some factor in the reproductive cells of the pea plants is responsible for each of the traits, that this factor remains constant through the generations, and that when two different factors are present in the same cell (as must be the case for at least some of the offspring of cross-breeding), only one of them is active in producing the observed trait. Subsequently, it became conventional to refer to these factors as ‘genes’, and to distinguish between ‘dominant’ and ‘recessive’ genes according to which trait was produced when the genes for both were present together. This way of thinking also led to an important distinction between two different ways of describing the nature of an organism: in terms of its observable characteristics or traits (the phenotype), and in terms of its genetic constitution (the genotype). With these examples of scientific generalizations in mind, we can see how well or badly the empiricist view fits them. As we saw above, empiricists are committed to 17
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accepting as scientific only those statements which are testable by observation or experiment. The most straightforward way to meet this requirement, we saw, was to limit scientific generalizations to mere summaries of observations. But it would be hard to represent Newton’s law of universal gravitation in this way. For one thing, the rotation of the earth and planets around the sun is affected to some degree by the gravitational forces of bodies outside the solar system. These forces have to be treated as constant, or for practical purposes as irrelevant, if the pattern of motions within the solar system is to be analysed as the outcome of gravitational attractions operating between the sun and the planets, and among the planets themselves. The law of universal gravitation is therefore not a summary of observations, but the outcome of quite complex calculations on the basis of both empirical observations and theoretical assumptions. Moreover, it could be arrived at only by virtue of the fact that the solar system exists as a naturally occurring closed system, in the sense that the gravitational forces operating between the sun and planets are very large compared with external influences. But Newton’s law cannot be treated as a mere summary of observations for another reason, namely that it applies to the relationship between any bodies in the universe. The scope of the law, and so the range of possible observations required to conclusively establish its truth, is indefinitely large. No matter how many observations have been made, it is always possible that the next one will show that the law is false. It is, of course, also the case that we cannot go back in time to carry out the necessary measurements to find out if the law held throughout the past history of the universe. Nor will we ever know whether it holds in parts of the universe beyond the reach of measuring instruments. In fact, subsequent scientific developments have modified the status of Newton’s law to an approximation with restricted scope. However, it is arguable that if the law had not made a claim to universality, then the subsequent progress of science in testing its limitations and so revising it could not have taken place. This suggests that it is in the nature of scientific laws that they make claims which go beyond the necessarily limited set of observations or experimental results upon which they are based. Having established that the half-life of radon is 52 seconds from a small number of samples, scientists simply assume that this will be true of any other sample. As we will see, this has been regarded as a fundamental flaw in scientific reasoning. It simply does not follow logically, from the fact that some regularity has been observed repeatedly and without exception so far, that it will continue into the future. The leap that scientific laws make from the observation of a finite number of examples to a universal claim that ‘always’ this will happen cannot be justified by logic. This problem was made famous by the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and it is known as the problem of ‘induction’. A common illustration (not unconnected with Newton’s law) is that we all expect the sun to rise tomorrow because it has always been observed to do so in the past, but we have no logical justification for expecting the future to be like the past. In fact, our past observations are simply a limited series, and so the logic is the same as if we were to say ‘It has been sunny every day this week, so it will be sunny tomorrow,’ or ‘Stock markets have risen constantly for the last ten years, so they will carry on doing so.’ 18
Empiricism and Positivism in Science
As we saw above, a possible response to this problem for empiricists is to resort to a relatively weak criterion of testability, such that statements can be accepted as testable if they can be confirmed to a greater or lesser degree by accumulated observations. Intuitively, it seems that the more observations we have which support a universal law, without encountering any disconfirming instances, the more likely it is that the law is true. Unfortunately, this does not affect the logic of the problem of induction. No matter how many confirming instances we have, they remain an infinitesimally small proportion of the indefinitely large set of possible observations implied by a universal claim. So, in the terms allowed by empiricism, it seems that we are faced with a dilemma: either scientific laws must be excluded as unscientific, or it has to be accepted that science rests on an untestable and metaphysical faith in the uniformity and regularity of nature. This brings us to the empiricist account of what it is to explain something scientifically. Let us take a biological example. Some species of dragonfly emerge early in the spring. Unlike later-emerging species, they generally exhibit what is called ‘synchronized emergence’. The immature stages or ‘nymphs’ live underwater, but when they are ready to emerge they climb out of the water and shed their outer ‘skin’ to become air-breathing, flying, adult dragonflies. In these species, local populations will emerge together over a few days, even in some cases in one night. How can this be explained? The current view is that larval development ceases over the winter (a phenomenon known as ‘diapause’), leaving only the final stage of metamorphosis to be completed in the spring. A combination of increasing day length and reaching a certain temperature threshold switches on metamorphosis so that each individual emerges at more or less the same time. To explain why a particular population of a particular species emerged on a particular night would involve a pattern of reasoning somewhat like this: Emergence is determined by day length d plus, combined with temperature t. On 17 April, population p was exposed to temperature t, and day length d had already been passed. ———— Therefore: population p emerged on 17 April. This could fairly easily be stated more formally as a logically valid argument, in which the premisses include the statement of a general law linking temperature and day length with emergence and particular statements specifying actual day lengths and temperatures. The conclusion is the statement describing the emergence of the dragonflies – the event we are trying to explain. The ‘covering law’, combined with the particular conditions, shows that the event to be explained was to be expected. This analysis of the logic of scientific explanation also enables us to see why there is a close connection between scientific explanation and prediction. If we know an event has happened (for example, the dragonflies emerged on 17 April), then the law plus the statement of the particular circumstances (day length and temperature in this case) explains it. If, on the other hand, the emergence has not yet happened, we can use 19
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our knowledge of the law to predict that it will happen when the appropriate ‘initial conditions’ are satisfied. Knowledge of a scientific law can also be used to justify what are called ‘counterfactual’ statements. For example, we can say that the dragonflies would not have emerged if the temperature had not reached the threshold, or if they had been kept under artificial conditions with day length kept constant below d. And these counterfactuals can then be used in experimental tests of the law. Again, what is clear from these examples is that a scientific law makes claims which go beyond the mere summary of past observations. If the event to be explained was already part of the observational evidence upon which the law was based, then the ‘explanation’ of the event would add nothing to what was already known. Similarly, if the law were treated simply as a summary of past observations, it would not provide us with any grounds for prediction. This point can be made clear by distinguishing between scientific laws, on the one hand, and mere ‘contingent’ or ‘accidental’ generalizations, on the other. The standard example, ‘All swans are white,’ is just such a ‘contingent generalization’. It just so happened that until Western observers encountered Australian swans they had only seen white ones. There was no scientific reason – only habit or prejudice – for expecting swans in another part of the world to be white. To call a generalization a law is to say that it encapsulates a regularity which is more than just coincidence: exceptions are ruled out as impossible, events ‘must’ obey the law and so on. As we have seen, this presents problems for a thoroughgoing empiricist, since claims as strong and as wide in scope as those made by scientific laws cannot be conclusively tested by observation and experiment. One way out of this was recognized by the philosopher Karl Popper, and it formed the basis for a quite different approach to the nature of science (see Popper 1963, 1968). Popper pointed out the fundamental difference between confirming, or proving, the truth of a scientific law, on the one hand, and disproving or ‘falsifying’ it, on the other. Any number of observations of dragonfly emergence which were consistent with the law would still not prove it to be true, but a single case of dragonflies emerging at lower temperatures, or during shorter day lengths, would be enough to conclusively disprove the law. On this basis, Popper argued that we should not see science as an attempt to establish the truth of laws, since this can never be done. Instead, we should see science as a process whereby researchers use their creative imaginations to suggest explanations – the more implausible the better – and then set out systematically to prove them false. The best that can be said of current scientific beliefs is that they have so far not been falsified. So, for Popper, the testability of a statement is a matter of whether it is open to falsification. Unfortunately, as Popper himself acknowledged, this doesn’t solve all the problems. As we saw above, evidence which appears to count against a belief or even to disprove it may itself be open to question. Countless experiments conducted in school science labs ‘disprove’ basic laws of electricity, magnetism, chemistry and so on, but scientists don’t see this as a reason for abandoning them. The assumption is that there were technical defects in the way the experiments were set up, instruments were misread or results were wrongly interpreted. Whether we view testability as a matter of verification or falsification, it cannot be avoided that judgements have to be made about whether any particular piece of evidence justifies abandonment or retention of existing beliefs. For 20
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this reason, Popper argued that in the end the distinguishing feature of science was not so much a matter of the logical relation between hypotheses and evidence as one of the normative commitment of researchers to the fallibility of their own knowledge-claims. The empiricist aim of establishing the distinctive character and status of science implies separating out types of statements which can be scientific from those which cannot. We already saw that this means excluding statements which look like factual statements, but in the empiricist view are not, because they are not testable by experience (for example, statements of religious belief, utopian political programmes and so on). Moral or ethical judgements pose special problems for empiricists. They are not obviously factual, but when someone says that torture is evil, for example, they do seem to be making a substantive statement about something in the world. Empiricists have tended to adopt one or another of two alternative approaches to moral judgements. One is to accept them as a special kind of factual judgement, by defining moral concepts in terms of observable properties. Utilitarian moral theory is the best-known example. In its classical form, utilitarianism defines ‘good’ in terms of ‘happiness’, which is defined, in turn, in terms of the favourable balance of pleasure over pain. So, an action (or rule) is morally right if it (tends to) optimize the balance of pleasure over pain across all sentient beings. However, in more recent empiricist philosophy of science it has been much more common to adopt the alternative approach to moral judgements. This is to say that they get their rhetorical or persuasive force from having a grammatical form which makes us think they are saying something factual. However, this is misleading, as all we are really doing when we make a moral judgement is expressing our subjective attitude to it, or feelings about it. This, interestingly, implies that there are no generally obligatory moral principles, and so leads to the position referred to in Chapter 1 as moral relativism.
Positivism and Sociology The nineteenth-century French philosopher Auguste Comte is generally credited with inventing both of the terms ‘positivism’ and ‘sociology’ (see Andreski 1974; Keat and Urry 1975; Benton 1977, 2015; Halfpenny 1982). Comte was very much influenced in his early days by the utopian socialist Saint Simon, and he went on to develop his own view of history as governed by a progressive shift from one type of knowledge, or belief-system, to another. There are three basic stages in this developmental process. The initial, theological stage gives way to the metaphysical, in which events are explained in terms of abstract entities. This, in turn, is surpassed by the scientific stage, in which knowledge is based on observation and experiment. Writing in the wake of the French Revolution, and desiring the return of normality and social stability, Comte was inclined to explain continuing conflict and disorder in terms of the persistence of outdated metaphysical principles such as the rights of man. Such concepts and principles were effective for the ‘negative’ task of criticizing and opposing the old order of society, but in the post-revolutionary period what was needed was ‘positive’ knowledge for rebuilding social harmony. 21