Philosophical Foundations of the Three Sociologies

Ted Benton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317651413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

An extended historical and philosophical argument, this book will be a valuable text for all students of the philosophy of the social sciences. It discusses the serious alternatives to positivist and empiricist accounts of the physical sciences, and poses the debate between naturalism and anti-naturalism in the social sciences in new terms. Recent materialist and realist philosophies of science make possible a defence of naturalism which does not make concessions to positivism and which recognizes the force of several of the anti-positivist arguments from the main anti-naturalist (neo-Kantian) tradition.

The author presents a critical evaluation of empiricist and positivist theories of knowledge, and investigates some classic attempts at using them to provide the philosophical foundation for a scientific sociology. He takes the Kantian critique of empiricism as the starting point for the main anti-positivist and anti-naturalist philosophical approaches to the social studies. He goes on to investigate the inadequacy of post-Kantian arguments from Rickert, Weber, Winch and others, both against non -positivist forms of naturalism and as the possible source of a distinctive philosophical foundation for the social studies.

The book concludes with a critical investigation of the Marxian tradition and an attempt to establish the possibility of a materialist and realist defence of the project of a natural science of history, which escapes the fundamental flaws of both positivist and neo-Kantian attempts at philosophical foundation.

1 Introduction

Ted Benton

DOI: 10.4324/9781315763484-1

There are (at least) two questions which readily arise in the minds of sociology students when they begin courses in the philosophy of social science: why should sociologists have to study philosophy? and what is philosophy, anyway? These are good questions, and like most good questions they are difficult to answer. Partly the difficulty arises from the controversial nature of the questions and the sheer diversity of ways in which they have been answered, but the diversity of answers is itself a mark of the difficulty of the questions. I shall not attempt to give definitive answers, but at least I had better make out as good a preliminary case as I can for the relevance of philosophy before I lose my sceptical readers (the ones I particularly want to keep).

What is philosophy?

It is a (rightly) much respected intellectual practice to begin by defining one's terms, and so it would seem that my first task should be to define ‘philosophy’. However, in the specific case of philosophy there are strong reasons for refusing even to attempt a definition at this stage. I shall explain what these reasons are by comparing philosophy with some other intellectual disciplines.

First, the ‘natural’ sciences. The revolutionary significance of the physical theories of Copernicus, Newton and Einstein, or of the biological theory of Darwin is sometimes expressed by saying that they imposed a new definition on their respective disciplines. On one modern conception of the history of these sciences (to be discussed in more detail later)¹ each science progresses by long periods of relatively unproblematic and uncontroversial ‘normal science’ punctuated by episodes of sharp intellectual crisis during which the very definition of the science – its very conception of its subject-matter – becomes a centre of controversy. In the ‘social’ or ‘human sciences’, by comparison, there is a state of what might be called ‘continuous revolution’. These disciplines are split into contending ‘schools’ or ‘traditions’ of thought, the research practice of which seems to presuppose a number of radically different conceptions of what it is to study societies. This lack of consensus over fundamentals seems to have characterised the social studies since their inception, so that there never has been a time when a definition of, say, sociology could be expected to gain the assent of any more than one faction of the practitioners of the discipline. In this respect, philosophy resembles the social studies more nearly than the natural sciences. In philosophy, too, there does not exist, and there probably never has existed, consensus about what philosophy is. This, then, is one good reason for not giving a definition of philosophy at the outset.

By why not just give my definition of philosophy and carry on regardless? To do this would be to neglect another important aspect of philosophy – an aspect in which it appears to differ from the social studies. Though I just characterised the social studies as being in a state of ‘continuous revolution’, and as lacking in consensus over fundamentals, a survey of the sociological literature, for example, does not reveal it to be overwhelmingly devoted to debate over fundamental questions of method and explanation, to controversy over the nature of a science of society. Most sociologists are primarily concerned with the more down-to-earth problems of ‘studying society’ – or, rather, particular regions or aspects of it: ‘Role-distance in jazz musicians’, ‘Class attitudes to dental treatment’, ‘The sociology of the betting shop’ (followed by) ‘Observations on debt collection’. This (not, admittedly, quite random) sample of article-titles, from the more respected sociological journals does not bespeak a discipline racked with internal dissent. Nevertheless, anyone who reflects on the explanatory models, the techniques of enquiry, the sets of concepts used in these empirical studies will readily understand that each one presupposes a certain conception of what it is to investigate social reality. This is so even if the researcher does not make his or her more fundamental commitments explicit. By contrast with this, in philosophy there is a considerable amount of explicit controversy over basic questions as to the nature of philosophy and what it is to practise it (I am not, of course, denying that many of the respected philosophical publications are also largely devoted to trivia). Not only does the philosophical practice of the competing schools and traditions of philosophy presuppose conflicting notions about what philosophy is, but a large part of that philosophical practice is itself an enquiry into the nature of philosophy. So we can characterise this difference between philosophy and, say, sociology by saying that whereas in neither of these disciplines is there consensus about the nature of the discipline, sociology does not, unlike philosophy, take controversy about its own nature as part of its recognised subject-matter. A conception of philosophy, then, such as might be embodied in a definition, can only be the result of a philosophical enquiry; it cannot be a starting-point.

Philosophy and the sciences

So far my argument has been negative in intent. But having tried to establish what cannot be done at this stage, I shall attempt a more positive characterisation of the central concern of this book: the relationship of philosophy and sociology. But I shall approach this relationship via a discussion of the more general relationship between philosophy and the sciences. I shall distinguish four conceptions of this relationship (not an exhaustive classification, but one which, I think, captures the most important historical alternatives) and proceed from a critical discussion of each to presenting the outlines of the approach which informs the present work.

First, to adopt the terminology revived by Peter Winch in his important book The Idea of a Social Science, are the ‘under-labourer’ and ‘master-scientist’ conceptions of the relationship of philosophy to scientific knowledge. Although these conceptions are classical opponents, they have, as will later emerge, underlying assumptions in common.

The under-labourer conception

The under-labourer conception affects to give the philosopher a very modest role – but this humility is, I shall argue, misleading. The seventeenth-century English philosopher, John Locke, was one of the earliest and most eloquent of the ‘under-labourers’, and his ‘Epistle to the Reader’ from the Essay Concerning Human Understanding is an oft-quoted source: It is the task of men like Newton, Boyle and Sydenham to advance the sciences, but their success is limited, and the progress of science impeded by certain obstacles that lie ‘in the way to knowledge’. The humble task of the philosopher is to clear away these obstacles to make way for science to progress once more. But what are these obstacles, and what – if any – are the necessary skills of the philosopher/under-labourer? Primarily, the rubbish which must be removed consists of ‘learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences …’. Such terms hinder the advance of science because they pass for genuine knowledge, whilst in reality covering up ignorance: If this is the rubbish that must be cleared away, then the skills required to clear it away will be logical and analytical. The philosopher must be able to recognise nonsense when he sees it, and be able to dispense with it in his own discourse. But now the under-labourer begins to look a little less humble. Why can a man as great as Newton or Boyle not recognise nonsense when he sees it? Why should natural scientists be at a loss when they confront a conceptual or analytical problem, and helplessly call on the philosopher? At work in the under-labourer conception is a narrow and inadequate view of the practice of science itself: scientists concern themselves with factual questions – often of a very general or recondite kind, but factual none the less – whilst concepts are the province of philosophy.⁴ I shall return more than once to this distinction between factual and conceptual questions, and the conception of science which goes together with it, for they form part of the most pervasive and influential of all the traditions of thought on the nature of scientific knowledge. For now, suffice it to say that the ‘division of labour’ between science and philosophy outlined by Locke still has many adherents,⁵ and is often expressed in terms of yet another distinction, closely allied to the factual/conceptual distinction. The factual questions tackled by scientists are, it is said, questions ‘in’ science, and they are to be distinguished from the conceptual questions ‘about’ science which philosophers ask. The factual questions of the scientist are ‘first order’ questions; the conceptual ones that the philosopher poses about science are ‘second-order’ questions.⁶ Of course, it is usually recognised that scientists are sometimes forced to confront conceptual questions, for example, about the status of their explanations, but in doing so they are said to be engaging in philosophy.⁷

Vague and insignificant forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard and misapplied words, with little or no meaning, have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them that they are but the covers of ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge.³

in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some other of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.²

I shall be developing arguments against the narrow and defective conception of scientific practice involved in these distinctions later, but already it should be clear that they cannot adequately characterise the relations between philosophy and science. There are, for instance, many sorts of questions ‘about’ the sciences which are not conceptual (though any answer to them may involve conceptual clarification and revision) – questions about the institutionalisation of the sciences in different periods and in different countries, questions about the structural relations between industry, government and scientific research, about the career patterns of professional scientists and so on. Are these political, sociological and historical questions, then, second order? And of what ‘order’ are the many sorts of questions that can be asked ‘about’ these disciplines themselves? Similarly, many of the problems which arise in, and constitute the sciences themselves are conceptual problems. Concept-formation and revision, the defence and criticism of concepts and systems of concepts are activities without which the experimentation and observation conducted in most of the sciences would have no sense at all. To take an example that would have been close to Locke's heart: the criticism of vitalist concepts in French physiology in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The opponents of vitalism frequently echoed Locke's ‘Epistle’ in their claims that the so-called ‘vital principle’ was no more than a meaningless term designed as a cover for ignorance. But effective criticism (i.e. criticism which had the effect of eradicating vitalism from at least this area of biology) did not come from a philosophical source at all. It came from the physiologist Claude Bernard, who was able to demonstrate by his construction of a new scheme of physiological concepts that the very problems which vitalist concepts purported to solve were false problems.⁸

So, if we take the under-labourer at his word, and concede that the job of philosophy in relation to science is merely clearing up conceptual confusion in the latter, then it follows not that philosophy is ‘parasitic’ on the sciences (as some critics of the under-labourer conception have claimed)⁹ but that the sciences appear as predators upon philosophy. Philosophy is in danger of altogether losing its raison d’être. But there is another way of characterising the task of philosophy which is only implicit in Locke's ‘Epistle’, but which becomes much more explicit in the body of his Essay, and remains very popular with those who today share Locke's philosophical tendency. If it is the job of philosophy to expose and eliminate the use of insignificant terms in science, then it might be thought (incorrectly) that in order to do so philosophy requires a general theory of the distinction between significant and insignificant uses of language. This is, in fact, what Locke attempts to give. Generally, a word is a sign for some idea or combination of ideas. If there is no idea corresponding to a word, then the word lacks significance. This is combined in Locke with the doctrines that the source and foundation (Locke did not adequately distinguish these) of ideas or concepts is in experience (of external objects, through sensation, and of the workings of our own minds, through ‘reflection’) and that it is these ideas which form the raw materials for the whole of our knowledge. The ‘humble’ task, then, of clearing away the rubbish which lies in the way to knowledge becomes transformed into the much less humble one of setting criteria for significance and insignificance in the use of language, and thence of erecting standards by which all claims to knowledge are to be judged. Philosophy becomes the last arbiter on questions as to the difference between knowledge and belief, and between these, faith and error. In particular, of course, it was Locke's preoccupation to establish the credentials of physical science as a source of knowledge, and to establish criteria for distinguishing genuine from spurious claims to scientific knowledge. In recent times this has taken the form of a search for a ‘criteria of demarcation’ between science (implicitly, the only genuine knowledge) and non-science (in Locke's day the principal targets for exclusion were theology and speculative metaphysics, today they have become psychoanalysis and historical materialism). The difficulties for this characterisation of the function of philosophy begin to multiply as soon as philosophy is asked to present its credentials for its claim to authority in examining the credentials of others. More on this later.

The master-scientist, or metaphysical conception

This conception of the relationship between philosophy and science proposes the awe-inspiring enterprise of constructing – or, rather, reconstructing – the whole of (acceptable) human knowledge into one massive logically connected and internally consistent system of propositions. As with the under-labourer conception, this notion of the task of philosophy has its source in sceptical doubt concerning the adequacy of claims to knowledge. Doubt is pushed as far as it can logically go – until, that is, an unshakable bedrock is found upon which the whole edifice of human knowledge can be reconstructed, discarding all the previously unfounded rubble. As with the under-labourer conception, there is an attempt to give general criteria by which genuine knowledge can be distinguished from spurious claims to it. But here genuine knowledge is whatever can be deduced from a small number of self-evident and indubitable axioms or premises. For the French philosopher Descartes (to whose thought much of Locke's philosophy was a critical response), his own existence as a thinking being served as an indubitable premise from which, given certain (also self-evident) rules of inference, he could deduce the existence of God. From the existence of a perfectly good, omniscient and omnipotent God, Descartes was able to deduce the general characteristics of that God's creation, and so logically found the principal laws of the physical sciences.¹⁰ Leibniz and Spinoza were two other classical master-scientists, and by now it should be clear in what respects their conception of the relationship between philosophy and science resembled that of Locke and others of his tendency. Their conceptions differed centrally in that whilst for Locke experience was the source of all knowledge, for the master-scientists deductive reasoning and self-evidence were the hallmarks of true knowledge. Indeed it was precisely the pretensions of system-builders such as these which Locke's conception was designed to deflate – particularly when they insisted on founding science on theology, and mistook self-evidence for innate knowledge.

The master-scientist conception is no longer widely held among philosophers and seems unlikely to be revived (although it is by no means absent from much of the spontaneous philosophising of scientists themselves, and in philosophy, too, a rather more modest variant of the enterprise has been revived under the title of ‘descriptive metaphysics’).¹¹ I shall not delay long in criticising it, save to suggest, following Kant, that something must be wrong with a discipline in which answers to its central questions may be just as easily proved as their contradictories.¹²

Two historical conceptions

One presupposition common to under-labourer and master-scientist alike is that the question ‘what is the relation between philosophy and science?’ has a single answer – the same for all sciences and for all historical epochs. I shall now consider two modern conceptions which challenge this assumption and attempt to characterise the relationships between philosophy and science as subject to historical change.

The first of these conceptions is present in the enormously influential work of Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, appeared in 1962 and presented a set of concepts for understanding scientific activity which challenged the hitherto dominant traditions of thought in the history, philosophy and sociology of science. Its impact on these disciplines has been enormous, but ripples have spread as far afield as economics and political science. I shall have occasion to discuss Kuhn's work in later chapters, and so for the moment I shall confine myself to those aspects of his work which are of the most immediate relevance. Against the dominant tradition in the history of science, according to which science is thought of as progressing gradually by the accumulation of empirical knowledge, steadily giving rise to increasingly elaborate theoretical construction, Kuhn poses a conception of the history of science as, like the history of society itself, discontinuous – as punctuated by conceptual leaps and transmutations which Kuhn calls ‘scientific revolutions’. What Kuhn gives, in effect, is an elementary periodisation for the history of any science. After its foundation a science will be characterised by a series of periods of unspecified length in which some major scientific achievement provides the methods, conceptual apparatus, standards of validity and so on which govern the...