The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science

Lee McIntyre, Alex Rosenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315410074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science is an outstanding guide to the major themes, movements, debates, and topics in the philosophy of social science. It includes thirty-seven newly written chapters, by many of the leading scholars in the field, as well as a comprehensive introduction by the editors. Insofar as possible, the material in this volume is presented in accessible language, with an eye toward undergraduate and graduate students who may be coming to some of this material for the first time. Scholars too will appreciate this clarity, along with the chance to read about the latest advances in the discipline. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science is broken up into four parts.

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• Historical and Philosophical Context

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• Concepts

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• Debates

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• Individual Sciences

Edited by two of the leading scholars in the discipline, this volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of social science, and its many areas of connection and overlap with key debates in the philosophy of science.

Part I

HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT

1

COMTE AND THE POSITIVIST VISION

Vincent Guillin

A spectre has long been haunting the philosophy of social science—the spectre of positivism. Once the dominant view on the nature and prospects of scientific inquiry and its application to the study of social phenomena, it gradually appeared obvious to many that this conception failed to capture the defining characteristics of science, so much so that the very label “positivism” has become “a term of abuse” (Giddens 1977, 29). Yet, despite its demise, that positivist view of science still remains influential today, albeit in a somewhat paradoxical manner, to the extent that it provides a convenient representation of an obsolete methodological ideal that generally serves as a foil for social science and the different disciplines it encompasses (for a classic formulation of that position, see Hayek 1979). It is important to point out, however, that “logical positivism,” the modern incarnation of the positivist idea—which has been rightfully criticized for its uncritical reliance on the analytic-synthetic distinction, its unsatisfactory verification criteria for cognitive meaningfulness, and its inability to come up with a clear theory of the confirmation of empirical statements—is a far cry from the original vision entertained by Auguste Comte, the very philosopher to whom it owes its name.

Unfortunately, contemporary critics of positivism tend to overlook such a distinction and think of positivism as one monolithic view. Accordingly, the “positivist persuasion” (Alexander 1996, 649) is often condensed as a few guiding principles held to mark out and govern the scientific enterprise as a whole. Applied to the study of social reality, these principles are generally summarized as follows (for convergent accounts of that methodological paradigm, see Blaikie 2004 and Williams 2006):

•The scientific study of social phenomena must emulate the approach and methods successfully developed in the natural sciences.

•Just as there are laws of natural phenomena, there are laws of social phenomena, conceived as general statements specifying the existence of constant conjunctions between kinds of events or entities.

•The discovery of these laws depends primarily on observation, both as the source of data from which nomological generalizations are derived and as the empirical benchmark against which to test for their truth or falsity.

•Mathematical tools are given pride of place in the formalization of social data, whilst quantitative methods play a crucial role in the verification, experimental and non-experimental, of social scientific statements.

•Scientific progress is gauged both by reference to the subsumption of individual instances under general laws, and to the gradual reduction of the specific laws governing the diversity of social facts to a limited set of higher-level lawlike statements, the derivation of the latter from the most fundamental biological and physical laws of nature being regarded as a heuristic standard, if not a practical possibility.

•Any statement, hypothesis, or theory that cannot be reduced to observational terms or assessed factually is deemed unscientific; accordingly, since normative statements are not amenable to verification because of their lack of empirical content, they are to be excluded from the purview of scientific discourse.

In other words, a positivist social science is naturalistic in approach, committed to empiricism, driven by a search for general laws, mathematically informed and quantitatively oriented, longing for nomological reduction or at least theoretical unification, and axiologically neutral.

Now, what is striking about that so-called “positivist” conception of social science is the extent to which it diverges from the views actually advocated by Auguste Comte. Of course, some key tenets of the “positivist persuasion” were indeed present in Comte’s Positive Philosophy, primarily those bearing on the general aspects of scientific investigation (the importance of observation, the pursuit of nomological knowledge). But this modern-day version of positivism sits ill with many of the most distinctive aspects of Comte’s views on the nature and methods of social science, a whole field he not only provided with its name—the barbarous but now time-proven “sociology”—but which he also almost singlehandedly attempted to establish theoretically and methodologically. Accordingly, in what follows, after a quick perusal of Comte’s general philosophy of science—perhaps the only part of his intellectual inheritance reclaimed by other positivists such as Mill, Spencer, or the logical empiricists—I will draw attention to the most original dimensions of his philosophical and methodological contributions to social science, namely his intellectualism, his historicism, his holism, his refusal to apply mathematics to social phenomena, his anti-reductionism, and his axiologically laden conception of social science. As I hope to show, in many respects, Auguste Comte was not exactly your regular type of positivist.

1“Treating Politics in a Scientific Manner”: Naturalism and Social Science

A former student of the prestigious École Polytechnique, where he had been introduced to the latest developments in both the mathematical and physical sciences—the teaching of the former providing him with his only and somewhat precarious means of subsistence for most of his life (on Comte’s biography, see Pickering 1993–2009)—Auguste Comte, who was also well acquainted with recent advances in biology and medicine, can undoubtedly be counted amongst those who were convinced, in the first half of the 19th century, that science had become the one and only source of genuine knowledge about the world. Yet he also acknowledged that a whole domain of reality had so far eluded the reach of scientific investigation, namely social phenomena. And if science really aimed at universality, the only way to achieve it was by “complet[ing] the system of observational sciences by the foundation of social physics” (Comte 1988, 1st Lesson, 13) or, as he would later dub it, sociology (Comte 1975, II, 47th Lesson, 88).

Such a project, which Comte had entertained as early as his 1822 Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société, a programmatic sketch in which he first ventured “to treat politics in a positive manner” by raising it “to the rank of the sciences of observation” (Comte 1998, 86 and 81), took its definitive shape in his monumental six-volume Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42), the “first purpose” (Comte 1988, 1st Lesson, 13) of which was the foundation of sociology (for general accounts of Comte’s sociology, see Gane 2006 and Wernick 2001). There, Comte appeared straightforwardly naturalistic: drawing on a philosophical appraisal of the history of mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology, which occupied the first three volumes of the Cours and which spelled out how the scientific mind had approached the various kind of phenomena and the different methods it relied upon for doing so, Comte then extended—in the last three volumes—the methodological bounty he had harvested from his patient survey of the natural sciences to the study of social phenomena. Yet, right from the start, Comte had a pretty good idea of what the scientific or positive spirit consisted in: “recognizing the impossibility of obtaining absolute truth, [it] gives up the search after the origin and hidden cause of the universe and a knowledge of the final causes of phenomena”; it endeavours “only to discover, by a well-combined use of reasoning and observation, the actual laws of phenomena—that is to say, their invariable relations of succession and likeness”; finally, it constantly tends, “although in all probability it will never attain such a stage,” towards the establishment of a system in which “we could look upon all the different observable phenomena as so many particular cases of a single general fact” (Comte 1988, 1st Lesson, 2–3). Such was the “positive method” sociology had to take up if it wanted to become a science worthy of that name.

In many respects, Comte’s famous “law of the three states” offered a prime example of the way the positive method applied to social phenomena. For, Comte claimed, that sociological generalization about human intellectual development, which stated that “each branch of our knowledge … passes in succession through three different theoretical states”—“the theological or fictitious state, the metaphysical or abstract state and the scientific or positive state”—resulting in “three methods of philosophizing, whose characters are essentially different and even radically opposed to each other” (Comte 1988, 1st Lesson, 1–2), was clearly vindicated by different kinds of empirical facts. On the one hand, Comte argued, “its accuracy [was] immediately verified by all those who are fairly well acquainted with the general history of the sciences,” which plainly evidenced how, in the theological state, the human mind primarily “directs its researches mainly toward the inner nature of beings, and towards the first and final causes of all the phenomena it observes” and “represents these phenomena as being produced by the direct and continuous action of more or less supernatural agents,” before it replaces, in the metaphysical state, “the supernatural agents … by abstracts forces, real entities or personified abstractions, inherent in the different beings of the world,” which give “rise by themselves to all phenomena observed,” eventually reaching the positive state in which all phenomena are considered “subject to invariable natural laws,” the “discovery of these laws and their reduction to the least possible number constitut[ing] the goal of all our efforts” (Comte 1988, 1st Lesson, 2 and 8). On the other hand, Comte continued, since “the starting point [is] necessarily the same in the education of the individual as in that of the species,” the observation of the “development of the individual intelligence” bears witness that “each of us … has been successively—as regards the most important ideas—a theologian in childhood, a metaphysician in youth, and a natural philosopher in manhood.” “This verification of the law,” Comte concluded, “can easily be made by all who are on a level with their era” (Comte 1988, 1st Lesson, 4). Everything considered, it seems that Comte’s major—by own lights—empirical contribution to sociology complied with the demands of his very definition of the positive method: the “law of the three states” was an informative generalization accounting for the evolution of human ideas globally, both at the level of the species (historically) and the individual (genetically, so to speak), thereby explaining a wealth of heterogeneous facts; different sources of evidence (based on historical and psychological observation) were invoked for its corroboration; and it even licensed some definite instances of rational prediction that could confirm its exactitude (the advent of sociology itself serving, in a somewhat paradoxical manner, as a crucial test of the validity of its first law).

2A Qualified Empiricist: Intellectualism and Historicism in Comte

Yet, in the process of assessing the plausibility of that law, Comte insisted on one consideration that seriously qualified his endorsement of empiricism. For, as he himself underlined, what the law of the three states also revealed was that there existed a “logical necessity” (Comte 1988, 1st Lesson, 5) according to which observation must depend on a theoretical framework that defines, among the indefinite number of empirical facts available, those that are epistemologically relevant, which in turn explained why the human mind first adopted “theological philosophy,” the only intellectual scheme that precisely addressed “the most insoluble questions—such as the inner nature of objects, or the origin and purpose of all phenomena … [it] proposes to itself, in preference to all others, in its primitive state” (ibid.). More generally, Comte argued, this showed that theories could not be derived inductively from mere observations, but that they necessarily preceded them, since the former made possible the latter in the first place: “[f]‌or if, on the one hand, every positive theory must necessarily be founded upon observations, it is, on the other hand, no less true that, in order to observe, our mind has need of some theory” (ibid.). In other words, Comte was no doubt an empiricist in matters of verification (see Comte 1975, I, 28th Lesson, 456–64, for his “Fundamental theory of hypotheses”), but he surely was no inductivist as to theory construction, especially in sociology, and clearly endorsed the view that observations are necessarily theory-laden. Hence Comte’s dissatisfaction with the work of historians, who had so far contented themselves, as the Plan claimed, with compiling “annals, that is to say descriptions and chronological arrangements of a certain sequence of particular facts,” whereas “true history, conceived in a scientific spirit,” should consist in “the investigation of the laws governing the social development of the human race,” that is “proceed from the general to the particular” (Comte 1998, 142) and not the other way round.

But, if so, what was the theoretical framework appropriate to a positive sociology? The Plan made it clear that the positivization of the study of social phenomena required both the acknowledgment that “social organization [is] intimately tied to the state of civilization [i.e. the advancement of knowledge] and determined by it” (Comte 1998, 90) and the endorsement of the idea that “the progress of civilization develops according to a necessary law” (93), a view that was both given content to and corroborated by the law of the three states. In other words, for Comte, positive sociology was both “intellectualistic,” to the extent that it assumed that the primary explanatory factor of human progress was the development of the mind, and “historicist” (in the sense of Popper 1957), since it presumed that this intellectual development necessarily consisted in a long-term historical trend that could be captured by laws similar to those governing natural phenomena. As Comte himself pointed out, the elaboration of that conceptual scheme both demanded that, from a historical point of view, social phenomena had reached a stage of their development advanced enough as to display clearly the progressive nature of their evolution (a threshold definitively crossed, according to Comte, with the advent of the French Revolution), and, from an epistemological perspective, that the human mind had matured enough so that it could deal positively with those phenomena, drawing on the decisive contributions of Aristotle (whose empirical investigations of the constitution of the Greek polis privileged observation over imagination), Montesquieu (who, in the Esprit des lois, distinctly conceived “political phenomena as being necessarily subjected to invariable natural laws” [Comte 1975, II, 47th Lesson, 85]), and Condorcet (who saw clearly that “civilization is subjected to a progressive course all of whose stages are rigorously connected to each other according to na...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• Notes of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Historical and Philosophical Context
• Part II Concepts
• Part III Debates
• Part IV Individual Sciences
• Index