Philosophy of Social Science

Alexander Rosenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429974472
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Philosophy of Social Science provides a tightly argued yet accessible introduction to the philosophical foundations of the human sciences, including economics, anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology, history, and the disciplines emerging at the intersections of these subjects with biology. Philosophy is unavoidable for social scientists because the choices they make in answering questions in their disciplines force them to take sides on philosophical matters. Conversely, the philosophy of social science is equally necessary for philosophers since the social and behavior sciences must inform their understanding of human action, norms, and social institutions.

The fifth edition retains from previous editions an illuminating interpretation of the enduring relations between the social sciences and philosophy, and reflects on developments in social research over the past two decades that have informed and renewed debate in the philosophy of social science. An expanded discussion of philosophical anthropology and modern and postmodern critical theory is new for this edition.

CHAPTER ONE

What Is the Philosophy of Social Science?

Most sociologists and anthropologists agree on the definition and the domain of their disciplines; the same holds true for many psychologists, political scientists, and almost all economists. The same cannot be said for philosophers and philosophy. Philosophy is a difficult subject to define, which makes it difficult to show social scientists why they should care about it—the philosophy of social science in particular. This chapter provides a definition of philosophy that makes the subject inescapable for the social scientist. It shows that, whether as an economist or an anthropologist, one has to take sides on philosophical questions. One cannot pursue the agenda of research in any of the social sciences without taking sides on philosophical issues, without committing oneself to answers to philosophical questions. At a minimum, social scientists need to recognize this fact about themselves. It is even better if the choices made are based on evidence and argument.

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

Philosophers do not agree among themselves on the definition of their subject. Its major components are easy to list, and the subjects of some of them are relatively easy to understand. The trouble is trying to figure out what they have to do with one another, why combined they constitute one discipline—philosophy—instead of being parts of other subjects, or their own independent areas of inquiry.

The major subdisciplines of philosophy include logic, the search for well-justified rules of reasoning; ethics (and political philosophy), which concerns itself with right and wrong, good and bad, justice and injustice, in the conduct of individuals and states; epistemology or the theory of knowledge, the inquiry into the nature, extent, and justification of human knowledge; and metaphysics, which seeks to determine the most fundamental kinds of things that exist in reality and what the relations between them are. Despite its abstract definition, many of the questions of metaphysics are well-known to almost all people. For example, Is there a God? or, Is the mind just the brain, or something altogether nonphysical? or, Do I have free will? are metaphysical questions most people have asked themselves.

But these four domains of inquiry don’t seem to have much to do with one another. Each seems to have at least as much to do with another subject altogether. Why isn’t logic part of mathematics, or epistemology a compartment of psychology? Shouldn’t political philosophy go along with political science, and isn’t ethics a matter ultimately for people who deliver sermons? Whether we have free will or the mind is the brain is surely a matter for neuroscience. Perhaps God’s existence is something to be decided upon not by an academic inquiry but by personal faith. The question thus remains: What makes them all parts of a single discipline, philosophy?

The answer to this question organizes this book, and it is pretty clear. Philosophy deals with two sets of questions: first, questions that the sciences—physical, biological, social, behavioral—cannot answer now and perhaps may never be able to answer; second, questions about why the natural and social sciences cannot answer the first set of questions.

There is a powerful argument for this definition of philosophy in terms of its historical relationship with science. The history of science from the ancient Greeks to the present is that of one compartment of philosophy after another breaking away from philosophy and emerging as a separate discipline. But each of these separated disciplines has left philosophy with a set of distinctive problems, issues the discipline cannot resolve, but must leave either permanently or at least temporarily for philosophy to deal with. Mathematics leaves to philosophy questions like, What is a number? Physics leaves to philosophy questions like, What is time? There are other questions science appears to be unable to address—the fundamental questions of value, good and bad, rights and duties, justice and injustice—that ethics and political philosophy address. Questions about what ought to be the case, what we should do, and what is right and wrong, just and unjust, are called normative. By contrast, questions in science are presumably descriptive or, as is sometimes said, positive, not normative. Many of the normative questions have close cousins in the social and behavioral sciences. Thus, psychology will interest itself in why individuals hold some actions to be right and others wrong; anthropology will consider the sources of differences among cultures about what is good and bad; political science may study the consequences of various policies established in the name of justice; economics will consider how to maximize welfare, subject to the normative assumption that welfare is what we ought to maximize. But the sciences—social or natural—do not challenge or defend the normative views we may hold.

In addition to normative questions that the sciences cannot answer, there are questions about the claims of each of the sciences to provide knowledge, or about the limits of scientific knowledge, that the sciences themselves cannot address. These are among the distinctive questions of the philosophy of science, including questions about what counts as knowledge, explanation, evidence, or understanding. The philosophy of science is that subdiscipline of philosophy devoted to addressing these questions.

PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

If there are questions the sciences cannot answer and questions about why the sciences cannot answer them, why should a scientist, in particular a behavioral or social scientist, take any interest in them? The reason is simple. Though the sciences cannot answer philosophical questions, individual scientists have to take sides on the right answers to them. The positions scientists take on answers to philosophical questions determine the questions they consider answerable by science and choose to address, as well as the methods they employ to answer them. Sometimes scientists take sides consciously. More often they take sides on philosophical questions by their very choice of question, and without realizing it. The philosophy of science may be able to vindicate those choices. At the least, it can reveal to scientists that they have made choices, that they have taken sides on philosophical issues. It is crucial for scientists to recognize this, not just because their philosophical positions must be consistent with the theoretical and observational findings of their sciences. Being clear about a discipline’s philosophy is essential because at the research frontiers of the disciplines, it is the philosophy of science that guides inquiry.

As Chapter 2 argues, the unavoidability and importance of philosophical questions are even more significant for the social scientist than for the natural scientist. The natural sciences have a much larger body of well-established, successful answers to questions and well-established methods for answering them. As a result, many of the basic philosophical questions about the limits and the methods of the natural sciences have been set aside in favor of more immediate questions clearly within the limits of each of the natural sciences.

The social and behavioral sciences have not been so fortunate. Within these disciplines, there is no consensus on the questions that each of them is to address, or on the methods to be employed. This is true between disciplines and even within some of them. Varying schools and groups, movements and camps claim to have developed appropriate methods, identified significant questions, and provided convincing answers to them. But among social scientists, there is certainly nothing like the agreement on such claims that we find in any of the natural sciences. In the absence of agreement about theories and benchmark methods of inquiry among the social sciences, the only source of guidance for research must come from philosophical theories. Without a well-established theory to guide inquiry, every choice of research question and of method to tackle it is implicitly or explicitly a gamble with unknown odds. The choice the social scientist makes is a bet that the question chosen is answerable, that questions not chosen are either less important or unanswerable, that the means used to attack the question are appropriate, and that other methods are not.

Chapter 2 outlines the alternative choices, bets, and wagers about the best way to proceed that face the social scientist. When social scientists choose to employ methods as close as possible to those of natural science, they commit themselves to the position that the question before them is one that empirical science can answer. When they spurn such methods, they adopt the contrary view, that the question is different in some crucial way from those addressed in the physical or biological sciences. Neither of these choices has yet been vindicated by success that is conspicuous enough to make the choice anything less than a gamble.

Whether these gambles really pay off will not be known during the lifetimes of the social scientists who bet their careers on them. Yet the choices must be justified by a theory, either one that argues for the appropriateness of the methods of natural science to the question the social scientist addresses, or one that explains why these methods are not appropriate and supplies an alternative. Such theories are our only reasonable basis for choosing methods of inquiry in the social sciences.

But these theories are philosophical, regardless of whether the person who offers them is a philosopher or a social scientist. Indeed, social scientists are in at least as good a position as philosophers to provide theories that justify methods and delimit research. In the end, the philosophy of social science not only is inevitable and unavoidable for social scientists, but it must also be shaped by them as much as by philosophers.

The traditional questions of the philosophy of social science reflect the importance of the choice among these philosophical theories. And in this book we will examine almost all of those questions at length. By contrast with this approach to social science, which very self-consciously takes its inspiration from the natural sciences, there are disciplines that make the meaning and intelligibility of human affairs central to their explanations. These social scientists (and the philosophers who embrace their aims and methods as the right way to proceed) contrast their commitment to understanding with demands for prediction. They are indifferent or hostile to the notion that their disciplines should provide predictive knowledge about individuals or groups. In Chapters 7 and 8 we look at this approach.

In Chapters 8, 9, 10 we also turn to questions about whether the primary explanatory factors in social science should be large groups of people such as social classes or communities and their properties—so-called structural properties, as Marx, Durkheim, and other social scientists have argued—or whether explanations must begin with the choices of individual, often “rational” human agents, as contemporary economists and some political scientists argue. The differences between the various social sciences, especially economics and sociology, on this point are so abstract and general that they have long concerned philosophers. The social scientist who holds that large-scale social facts explain individual conduct, instead of the reverse, makes strong metaphysical assumptions about the reality of groups independent of the individuals who compose them. Such a theory—called holism—also requires a form of explanation called functionalism, which raises other profound questions about differences between the explanatory strategies of social and natural science. As a theory that gives pride of explanatory place to social wholes, holism might seem quite unappealing. But the alternative to it, individualism, as advanced by economists, political scientists, and biologically inspired social scientists, for instance, also faces equally profound philosophical questions.

Problems of functionalism, holism, and individualism are exacerbated by the ever-increasing influence of biological science, and especially Darwin’s theory of natural selection, on all the social and behavioral sciences. This is the subject of Chapters 11 and 12, which report on several lively debates at the intersection of biology and the social sciences and their philosophies.

In Chapters 13 and 14 we turn to the relation between the social sciences and moral philosophy. We examine whether we can expect the social sciences themselves to answer questions about what is right or fair or just or good. Many philosophers and social scientists have held that no conclusions about what ought to be the case can be inferred even from true theories about what is the case. Others have asserted the opposite. No matter who is right, it will still turn out that alternative approaches to social science and competing moral theories have natural affinities to, and make strong demands on, one another as well. We must also examine the question of whether there are morally imposed limits to legitimate inquiry in the social sciences.

Finally, in Chapter 15 I try to show why the immediate choices that social scientists make in conducting their inquiry commit them to taking sides on the most profound and perennial questions of philosophy. If this is right, then no social scientist can afford to ignore the philosophy of social science or any other compartment of philosophy.

ONE CENTRAL PROBLEM OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

The central philosophical dispute about the scope, aim, and prospects for each of the social sciences taken separately, and all of them together, is what sort of knowledge they should or can seek. The debate takes place against a background argument about the nature of understanding in the natural sciences. There it is widely held that increases in understanding are certified by improvements in prediction.

Among social scientists who accept the requirement that their discipline provide the kind of knowledge natural science provides—demographic sociologists, econometricians, experimental social psychologists, or political scientists interested in voting behavior, for instance—there is a strong commitment to improving prediction as the mark of increasing understanding. Among social scientists there are debates about how reliable and precise their respective disciplines’ predictions can be and whether they can get better. But other social scientists reject the demand that their discipline provide the same kind of understanding natural science offers. These social scientists offer alternative explanations of why their subjects cannot, and should not, seek predictive knowledge and improvements in it. They provide quite different accounts of what the aims and objectives of their disciplines can be.

The question centers on the fact that it is human beings, in groups and individually, whose behaviors, actions, and their consequences we are trying to understand that make the difference between natural and social science. It is what shapes the nature and scope of the knowledge social science can provide. Should the subject matter of these disciplines make the aims and methods of the social sciences as a whole radically different from those of the natural sciences?

The natural sciences are often alleged, especially by natural scientists and others impatient with social science, to have made far greater progress than the social sciences. Questions naturally arise as to why that is so and what can be done to accelerate the progress of social science toward achievements comparable to those of natural science. But one should notice that these two questions have controversial philosophical presuppositions: they presuppose (1) that we know what progress in natural science is and how to measure it; (2) that, based on our measurements, the natural sciences have made more progress; and (3) that the social sciences aim for the same kind of progress as the natural sciences.

If you agree that progress in the social sciences leaves much to be desired compared with the natural sciences, then you must be able to substantiate those three presuppositions. However, if you consider that the social sciences cannot or should not implement the methods of natural science in the study of human behavior, you will reject as misconceived the invidious comparison between the natural and the social sciences, along with the presuppositions on which it is based. But if you conclude that the study of human action proceeds in a different way and is appraised with different standards than the natural sciences, then you will have equally strong presuppositions about the aims and achievements of social science to substantiate.

Chapters 2, 3, 4 of this volume outline the arguments both for and against the claims that the social sciences have failed to progress and that this failure needs explanation. Both arguments have one view in common: a neat compromise is impossible. Such a compromise would suggest not that social science has made as much progress as have the natural sciences, but that it has made some. It would suggest that very broadly the methods of the social sciences are the same as those of natural science, though their specific concepts are distinctive and the interests the social sciences serve are sometimes different. The compromise view holds that the lack of progress in social science is a consequence of the complexity of human processes, which is much greater than that of natural processes. It also identifies limits on our understanding that stem from the regulations, mores, and inhibitions barring controlled experiments on human beings. If this view is right, the problems of social science are mainly practical instead of philosophica...