Abstract
The concept of ‘social science’ is the most salient feature of the Enlightenment Project. If there could be social science then we could derive from it the social technology that is the ultimate practical objective of the Enlightenment Project. In this chapter we show how the Enlightenment Project survives and functions within analytic social science. Specifically, we argue (1) that the unity of science thesis exemplifies the Project; (2) that during its eliminative phase analytic social science adheres not only to a covering law model of explanation but to a methodological individualism that makes social science derivative from psychology; (3) that during its subsequent exploratory stage, methodological individualism gives way to a social theory of meaning; and (4) that exploration achieves its Hegelian moment within the Enlightenment Project by leading to Marxism. Finally, we indicate what social thought as explication would be as an alternative to the Enlightenment Project in social science. The analytic understanding of human beings as outlined in the previous chapter and this one, and its reflection of the Enlightenment Project of a social technology, will be crucial for the analytic understanding of ethical and political philosophy in the subsequent chapters.
Social thought must be distinguished from social science. Social thought includes any reflection on the human predicament that recognizes the cultural embededness of human nature. On the other hand, social science is the notion that social thought can be modeled along the lines of the physical sciences. The failure of the social sciences to illuminate the human predicament should not obscure the extent to which social thought has continuously and successfully done so throughout history. We must also keep in mind that advocates of social science have frequently contributed to that illumination in their writings on social thought even when they have taken the additional step, mistakenly in our judgment, of trying to buttress their social thought with an appeal to an alleged social science. The same writer is often capable of both illuminating and obfuscating the human predicament, and the obfuscation is largely but not always a product of the attempt to buttress social thought by appeal to social science.
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Notes (Chapter 8)
Social thought must be distinguished from social science. Social thought includes any reflection on the human predicament that recognizes the cultural embededness of human nature. On the other hand, social science is the notion that social thought can be modeled along the lines of the physical sciences. The failure of the social sciences to illuminate the human predicament should not obscure the extent to which social thought has continuously and successfully done so throughout history. We must also keep in mind that advocates of social science have frequently contributed to that illumination in their writings on social thought even when they have taken the additional step, mistakenly in our judgment, of trying to buttress their social thought with an appeal to an alleged social science. The same writer is often capable of both illuminating and obfuscating the human predicament, and the obfuscation is largely but not always a product of the attempt to buttress social thought by appeal to social science.
This article originally appeared in the Journal of Philosophy (1942), and was reprinted in Feigl and Sellars (eds.), (1949). Hempel’s position was refined even further in (1948), reprinted in Feigl and Brodbeck (eds.), (1953). Popper anticipated as well as articulated Hempel’s position in Popper (1950), n.7 to ch. 25, pp. 720–723.
See Dray (1957) and Weingartner (1961). Hempel’s position was reasserted by Nagel (1961) and Rudner (1966).
According to Fodor (1980), Block (1986), and Stalnaker, any claim about how an external environmental factor, including the larger social context, determines the inner states of individuals can be “factored out” of the organism-environment relationship by a proper scientific psychology. Moreover, Fodor makes the claim that any attempt to formulate nomological relationships between the organism and the environment will not work until we know everything about the environment. Hence, any social science beyond psychology depends upon possessing total knowledge.
We have not “arrived at rock-bottom explanations of... large-scale phenomena [e.g., inflation or unemployment] until we have deduced an account of them from statements about the dispositions, beliefs, resources and inter-relations of individuals” Watkins (1991) [1957], p. 734.
Rudner (1966), p. 71. For a good summary of how the proponents of Hempel’s eliminativism and the opponents to it talked past each other, see Weingartner (1961).
Popper (1950), p. 291. For another classic statement, see Watkins (1991) [ 1957 ].
Watkins, op.cit.,explicitly draws attention to the extent to which methodological individualism is derived from seventeenth-century mechanism. For a more thorough history see Lukes (1973).
As we have already seen in previous chapters, there are problems with introspection. We can anticipate that the rejection of introspection will lead to shifts within analytic social science.
This terminology is borrowed from John Shotter who has greatly influenced my thought on these matters both in discussion and through his now classic book (1975).
The analogue to this in analytic ethics is rational choice theory; within the social sciences the analogue to this is neo-classical economics.
Analytic philosophers distinguish between first person and third person ascriptions.
See Harre (1971) on “Joynson’s Dilemma.”
See Manicas (1987), p. 243.
Harre and Secord (1972).
Manicas and Secord (1983).
Bhaskar (1975). See the 1978 Harvester Press edition with postscript.
Harre and Madden (1975). Like many readers of Hume, Harre and his followers “forget” that Hume had three criteria for causal ties: in addition to constant conjunction, there must be spatial contiguity and temporal priority. Once spatial contiguity is admitted as part of Hume’s conception of causation, there will be no difference between what Hume means and what Harre and Madden mean by generative causality. Unfortunately, “generative causality” is not equivalent to necessary connection in the old Aristotelian sense. Hence, despite the claim that they are restoring a strong causal tie, Harre and his followers have a position that is no different from the position of most analytic philosophers on causation. Harre and his supporters misrepresent Hume because they really want to argue against phenomenalism (which they call idealism). In phenomenalism, causation could only be constant conjunction. The reason Harre and his followers object to phenomenalism is that it leads, they contend, to the deductive-nomological conception of explanation. They sincerely believe that the deductive-nomological conception of explanation was a consequence of phenomenalism. In this, they are also historically mistaken since the notion dates back to Aristotle.
Harre and Secord (1972), p. 29.
Ibid., p. 67.
Ibid., p. 67.
Ibid., p. 12.
Ibid., p. 265.
Bhaskar (1975), p. 25.
The best example of the attempt to make social epistemology cohere with realism and without going as far as Hegel, is to be found in Margolis ( 1986 ). See also, Margolis, Manicas, Harre, and Secord (1986).
See Manicas and Secord (1983), and Harre and Madden (1975).
Manicas and Secord (1983), pp. 403, 410.
Ibid., p. 403.
Ibid., p. 411.
This is a criticism persistently made against exploration by K. Gergen and M.M. Gergen (1982).
Harre and Secord (1975), p. 84.
Ibid., chapter six.
Ibid., pp. 6, 85.
Ibid., p. 228.
Characteristically, Harre also speaks about “just wanting to” as an example of British “bloody-mindedness”, and later he speaks about the tendency in Anglo-Saxon culture to “treat all internal stimuli as potentially resistible” (Ibid.,p. 260). It would seem as if his own works reflects here a cultural liberal bias rather than an entailment of exploration in social science. Further evidence of the intrusion of background values in Harre’s exposition is the notion that conflicting participant accounts are resolved through negotiation. This sounds more like a liberal conception of parliamentary democracy than an exposition of what is entailed by a realist conception of science, especially one which subscribes to the existence of hidden structures. Our purpose here is not to challenge Harre’s values but to indicate the extent to which one liberal paradigm operates within the analytic preconception of social science.
Manicas and Secord (1983), p. 408.
Harre and Secord (1972), p. 9. The original conception of ethogeny goes back to John Stuart Mill. See Capaldi (1973).
Stockman (1983), p. 213: “chwr(133) Harre and Secord here confuse the rules for the argumentative testing of truth claims in discourses. with the constitution of object-domains of physical objects and symbolically pre-structured meaning-systems, accessible to sensory and communicative experience respectively. It is the latter distinction which Harre and Secord had originally noticed; but since their commitment to metaphysical realism forbids them a theory of knowledge which could reflect the conditions in which object-domains are constituted, their insight is lost and falls victim to their insistence on the principles of the realist theory of sciencechwr(133). We can see, therefore, that realism’s objectivism leads to its inability to justify its own version of naturalismchwr(133).”
Manicas and Secord (1983), p. 403.
There is a curious parallel here. Eliminativists who defend methodological individualism (e.g., Popper, E. Nagel) tend to be classical liberals. Proponents of exploration tend to be modern liberals who refuse to embrace the collectivism that seems to be required by a consistent development of their views. The refusal to deal with the implications of total conceptualization has been noted earlier with regard to Nozick’s metaphysics. Marxists are the exception in being consistent.
Harre seems to believe that social practices have a deep structure not unlike the deep structure that ordinary language philosophers attributed to language. All of the Wittgensteinian arguments against deep linguistic structure are applicable to the notion of deep social structures of any kind.
For a serious attempt to do this see Bhaskar (1989), Chapters Five and Six.
Generally speaking, those in the Platonic tradition in modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant and onwards have maintained dualism, which clearly originated in Plato. Recall here Socrates’ assertions in the Phaedo. Moreover, the Platonically oriented moderns (Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, etc.) have uniformly insisted on the freedom of the will. It is no surprise then that they should resist reductionism to physical science and unified science.
A similar response is to be found in Miller (1983).
Hempel (1963), p. 223. Stockman (1983), p. viii: “I have therefore sketched out a synthesis of ideas drawn from all three antipositivist theories of the sciences, the core of which is the thesis that rules of scientific method, while not arbitrary conventions, do change historically in relation to changes in both the material and the social conditions of scientific inquiry. The implication of this thesis seems to me to be quite different for the social sciences than for the natural sciences, and to reinforce the `antinaturalism’ of the critical theorists rather than the `naturalism’ of many scientific realists.”
Winch (1958), p. 95.
Maclntyre (1970), p. 129, criticizes Winch on the grounds that Winch makes it impossible to “go beyond a society’s own self-description.” Maclntyre misses the dynamics of explication.
This view is expressed by Wittgenstein in (1958) but most especially in (1969). It derives, ironically enough, from a point made long ago by Frege, who distinguished between a rule and the principle of its application.
Margolis believes that we come to know ourselves by successive attempts to understand the act of understanding. He objects to the suggestion that we can come to know ourselves by attending to action (“We Do”) on the grounds that there are problems to the “recovery of the past, problems that Gadamer and Foucaultchwr(133) have already shown to require a further argument” Margolis (1988), p. 214, reprinted from (1986). To the best of my knowledge, these so-called problems are problems of providing a definitive conceptualization of the past.
Hence, Maclntyre’s charge that in explication we cannot go beyond a society’s image of itself is either trivially true or misconstrues the fluid nature of tradition.
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Capaldi, N. (1998). The Enlightenment Project in Analytic Social Science. In: The Enlightenment Project in the Analytic Conversation. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3300-7_9
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