Conceptual Foundations of Social Research Methods

David Baronov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317265016
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

One of the common frustrations for students trying to make sense of the various debates and concepts that inform contemporary educational and social science research methods such as structuralism, postpositivism, hermeneutics, and postmodernism is that most books introducing these topics are written at a level that assumes the reader comes to this material with a basic grasp of the underlying ideas. Too often, fundamental concepts and theories are presented without adequate preparation and without providing practical examples to illustrate key elements. When the first edition of "Conceptual Foundations of Social Research Methods" was published, it represented a sharp contrast with these other approaches and received much praise. In this revised and expanded second edition, David Baronov further develops his critically acclaimed treatment of the core conceptual tools of social research informing education and the social sciences, updating his discussion of the current literature, and adding a new chapter that explores the role of pragmatism. Features of the Second Edition"

1
Embryonic Positivism

WHAT IS EMBRYONIC POSITIVISM?

The strengthening birth pangs of nineteenth-century positivism signaled the first systematic effort to adapt those research methods originally developed for the physical sciences to the study of society. While conceding certain basic differences, the excited enthusiasts of the emerging positivist era were adamant that the methods perfected for the study of the physical world provided equally powerful tools for the study of the social world. The rationale for this was straightforward. The most advanced and sophisticated research methods of the day had been developed and had proven their worth in the physical sciences. It was therefore only logical that the study of human society should begin with the most potent techniques of investigation available.

What followed was a mad rush to apply the standards of investigation of the physical sciences to the social world. It was hoped, and wholly expected, that in short order all social phenomena would be explained and reduced to a single, uniform set of general laws—just as Newton’s three laws of motion had been applied to the physical world. While many attempts ended in folly, it can certainly be argued that these early architects of the social world remain the primary influence upon those who study society today. At the apex of such efforts was a slightly self-absorbed French intellectual. Auguste Comte’s (1798–1857) public career may have ended with the rejection of his generous offer to serve as the high priest of his newly devised universal religion unifying all of humanity. However, while most were as yet unprepared to trust their soul to Comte, many took heed of his insightful descriptions of society and the novel methods he devised for its investigation. This was the origin of embryonic positivism.

Embryonic positivism represented an early stage in the development of a distinct approach to understanding society. The specific methods of investigation included empirical observation, comparisons of conditions, and experimental verification of hypotheses and theories. It was hoped that through careful, systematic observation, comparison, and experimentation certain general laws about society would be uncovered. Owing to the undeveloped nature of embryonic positivism, the primary emphasis was on empirical observation and the nature of what one could properly conclude from it. In particular, the promoters of embryonic positivism struggled to remove all remnants of metaphysical reasoning. Metaphysics referred to systems of knowledge that relied upon assumptions about the world that were not immediately observable. For example, for embryonic positivism, the claim that the world had been created by God amounted to a fanciful fiction and, while it gave comfort to its inventors, such reasoning was without empirical foundation and unworthy of scientific consideration.

The broad and lasting influence of Comte and others in this regard is undeniable. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) in England, Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) in France, and Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) in Germany, among other luminaries of social thought, drew direct inspiration from these works. However, as will be seen later in this book, by the close of the early twentieth century, Comte’s grand vision of positivism came to be regarded more as a mere passing, adolescent phase.

WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OF EMBRYONIC POSITIVISM?

The seeds of embryonic positivism were first sown in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its story marries two traditions: British empiricism and the scientific revolution. British empiricism is a broad and complex philosophical tradition that survives to this day. The basic tenets of empiricism revolve around the nature of how one makes observations and how one experiences and understands the world. Its advocates argue that all one can know about the world is limited to that which we experience through our five senses. Empiricists begin by formulating statements that describe these observations or experiences. However, there is a great deal of controversy surrounding just how one moves from descriptions of the world based on our five senses to explanations of the world based on our powers of reasoning and conjecture. The inductive method was developed by empiricists to move from observation to explanation and, within embryonic positivism, this was a central tool of investigation.

The extraordinary discoveries and breakthroughs of the scientific revolution opened people’s eyes to new understandings of the physical world. The remarkable tools for these discoveries—though at the time still evolving—were referred to in shorthand as the scientific method; this was believed to be the surest path to a true understanding of the world as it actually functioned. Most importantly, the startling claims and revolutionary insights derived from this new scientific method could be demonstrated. The claims of science were not mere pronouncements but resulted in concrete and practical innovations that people could see and that ultimately came to reshape their daily lives.

Bacon, Hume, and British Empiricism

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was among the earliest thinkers in a long line of British empiricists. He made three principal contributions to embryonic positivism. First, Bacon carried on an unrestrained and devastating critique of the Aristotelian scientific tradition then in vogue. Second, he insisted on judging the value of all new knowledge, ultimately, by the criterion of its social utility—its ability to directly advance technological progress. Third, in dismissing the Aristotelian deductive method as hopelessly empty, Bacon promoted an alternative inductive method as the best means available for making new discoveries about the world.

Above all, he sought to finally and definitively supplant the Aristotelian tradition of deductive reasoning as the standard method of scientific investigation. The deductive method consisted of first stating a claim and then logically deducing statements that would follow from this. This took the popular form of a syllogism—a type of argument based upon a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion that follows therefrom. A common syllogism at the time was: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. This may be true, Bacon and others assuredly agreed. However, it was truth at the expense of knowledge. Deduction added nothing new to our original base of knowledge. The purpose of science, Bacon maintained, was not simply to derive simple truths from basic logic but to make new discoveries about the world.

Bacon published Novum Organum in 1620. This can be roughly rendered “New Methodology of Science” and was explicitly written to replace Aristotle’s Organum. Like an idol, Bacon argued, the old science had no substance and survived as a mere image, unworthy of worship. Bacon’s dismissal of Aristotelian science as a form of idol worship was critical insofar as it represented a definitive historical turning point in which the physical sciences made a break from previous, long-revered methods of investigation.

Bacon launched his vitriolic attack against idol worship on four fronts: the Idols of the Tribe, the Idols of the Cave, the Idols of the Marketplace, and the Idols of the Theatre. The Idols of the Tribe concerned the deceptive role of wishful thinking. Bacon argued that there was a general human tendency to overvalue that which agrees with one’s preconceptions and to overlook that which disagrees. To the extent that this was allowed to interfere with scientific inquiry one was easily led astray. The Idols of the Cave pointed to the subjective nature of individual understanding and how this distorted scientific thinking. Bacon argued that one of the principal challenges of science was to develop a method of inquiry that allowed scientific knowledge to grow beyond a random collection of individual beliefs and to create a common base of knowledge. The influence of individual bias and prejudice had to be somehow filtered out so that all fair-minded persons would reach the same conclusion when confronted with similar facts.

The Idols of the Marketplace critiqued the imprecise and ambiguous use of language. In describing physical properties, Bacon maintained, it was important to move beyond words that convey a general sense (such as heavy or light) and move to a more exact language (such as forty pounds or ten pounds). He was one of the first in a long line of modern scientific thinkers to yearn for a precise language for science. The Idols of the Theatre took on the predominant philosophical systems of the day, such as Aristotelianism and Scholasticism. Here, Bacon’s critique was without mercy. These were the principal influences that shaped people’s worldviews; they precluded the discovery of the world as it truly was because they claimed to already know its true nature. In their place, Bacon sought to advance systematic observation, comparison, and experimentation.

Bacon was convinced that the true purpose of science was social progress and technological utility. He was particularly upset with those who toiled in the Aristotelian tradition because they had made little if any contribution to the technological advances that marked important developments in society (such as printing, gunpowder, or the magnet). The measure of true science, according to Bacon, was its ability to yield further inventions for society. This was the marriage of empiricism and reason. Empiricism provided a window into the world, while reason allowed one to organize knowledge of this world, thus leading to progress.

The role of reason was to provide insight into abstract relationships on the basis of empirical observations. If these abstract relationships were general truths, then they would yield information beyond the empirical observations and lead to the prediction of future observations. From this follows Bacon’s oft-repeated maxim, Knowledge is power. In a clever analogy, Bacon likened the purely rationalist approach to that of a spider who weaves a web from a substance of its own creation. The empiricist who operates without rationality was compared to the ant that gathers and uses materials with little sense of how to organize and sort them. The empiricist who deftly combines observations with rationality was likened to the bee that gathers and digests material, adding its own substance and creating a new product of higher value.

Bacon’s importance as an inspiration for embryonic positivism followed largely from his critique of the emptiness of science linked to the dominant Aristotelian tradition and his insistence that true science must lead to technological progress and social utility. In addition, Bacon introduced and further developed a highly influential method of scientific investigation, the inductive method—one of his principal contributions to the history of science. This followed from his critique of the deductive method. If the deductive method did not lead to the development of new knowledge, Bacon concluded, it could not be the basis for science. The inductive method was, therefore, required. Importantly, the deductive method was by no means simply discarded. In fact, it came to represent the essential rationalist component that allowed one to derive general truths from individual observations.

Bacon’s basic insight was that deductive logic alone was not sufficient to move from observed facts to general truths and specific predictions about future observations. He discarded Aristotle’s empty syllogism that ends with the notion that “Socrates is mortal.” In its place, he constructed inferential statements. In inferential statements, the conclusion is not necessarily contained in the statement. An inferential statement takes past observations and extends them to future observations. The conclusion is not guaranteed. For example: All frogs observed thus far have been green. Therefore, all frogs are green. In this case the conclusion (all frogs are green) is not guaranteed by the premise (all frogs observed thus far have been green). The conclusion that “all frogs are green” is an inductive inference and can only be verified or falsified by future observation. The use of the inductive method was a shattering break from the original standard of absolute, certain knowledge based on mathematical precision as established by the Greeks and marked a new era of scientific inquiry.

The person to most fully develop the inductive method (and its internal contradictions) was another British empiricist, David Hume (1711–1776), laboring in Bacon’s long shadow. Hume’s principal contribution to the development of embryonic positivism was his unsettling critique of pure empiricism as a standard of absolute, certain knowledge. This argument was most fully developed in one of the most influential works of the age, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, published by Hume in 1748. Hume began with the simple claim that the only basis for any knowledge was either rationalism (analytical knowledge) or empiricism (empirical knowledge).

Analytical knowledge was based on deduction. Empirical knowledge relied upon the inductive method, as developed by Bacon. Hume observed that a unique feature of the inductive method—not true for the deductive method—was that one could imagine a conclusion to be false while the premise remained true. Returning to the previous example, it was argued that because all previously observed frogs were green, we could expect that all future frogs would likewise be green. However, logically speaking, it was possible to imagine that the conclusion was false (that, in fact, a future frog would not be green) while the premise (that all previously observed frogs had been green) remained true. Hume concluded from this that the inductive method did not imply logical necessity, as did rationalism and the deductive method.

Hume, in fact, had uncovered a rather troubling circular logic within the inductive method. One believed in induction simply because induction had worked in the past. (We believe that all future frogs will be green because all past frogs have been green.) This led to Hume’s second troubling conclusion. The truth of conclusions based on the inductive method cannot be accepted with absolute certainty. Therefore, any inferences based on the inductive method are suspect. A fundamental dilemma arose for empiricists and presented two options. The first option was to become a pure empiricist and admit no statements unless they were either (a) rationalist in nature (based on deduction) or (b) derived directly from observation and experience. As a result, the pure empiricist would have to forfeit the ability to predict future events. Rationalism was based on a deductive method that yielded no new knowledge (and therefore foretold no future happenings) while strict observation led only to baseless speculation about yet-to-occur events.

The second option was to simply proceed with the inductive method while freely admitting that the inferences drawn therefrom—those not immediately based on observation and experience—were not empirical. One had abandoned pure empiricism as a standard of truth. The predominant belief of Hume’s age held that true knowledge—knowledge contributing to a greater understanding of the world—must produce reliable predictions about events in the world or it was useless. Hume demonstrated that pure empiricism cannot yield true knowledge; therefore, with Hume, empiricism entered into a period of deep crisis. As the definitive statement on the limitations of the inductive method, Hume’s work pointed to the emerging recognition that a new standard of knowledge was required for modern science.

Galileo, Newton, and the Scientific Revolution

The scientific revolution was notable for more than the new scientific facts that were added to the store of human knowledge (such as Galileo’s uniform rates of falling bodies or Newton’s three laws of motion). Such discoveries, admittedly, were astounding and advanced humankind’s understanding exponentially. However, equally remarkable was the particular manner by which such discoveries were made. Galileo, Newton, and others had not merely stumbled upon novel descriptions of the physical world. They had created a method of discovery that would serve as a blueprint for the physical sciences for generations to come.

In this regard, it is helpful to organize discussion around the works of two of the greatest contributors to the scientific revolution, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727). In the case of Galileo, his influence encompassed several areas: (1) his insistence upon the need for experimental confirmation, (2) his development of the hypothetico-deductive method, and (3) his rejection of teleological explanations. Newton’s impact on the scientific method, no less dramatic than Galileo’s, revolved around his efforts (1) to foster further advances in experimental confirmation and (2) to develop the hypothetico-deductive method in greater detail.

Galileo completed The Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems in 1632 and Discourses on Two Sciences in 1638. In these works, he set out a range of scientific discoveries. Using a hand-crafted telescope, Galileo had been able to sketch the surface of the moon, observe the moons of Jupiter, record sunspots, and further distinguish between planets and stars. For his advocacy of the Copernican view of the universe (further verified by the mathematical calculations of Johannes Kepler) Galileo was forced—upon pain of excommunication—to declare that the earth and not the sun was at the center of the universe. For good measure, he was forced to spend the final decade of his life under virtual house arrest.

At the core of his work was the conviction that the structure of the physical world was not random. Galileo argued that the physical world operated according to a recognizable order and regular pattern. For this reason, variations in the physical world occurred in a consistent manner. This allowed for comparisons and generalizations. It also allowed for verification through experimentation. Galileo further argued that, given the fact that the physical world exhibited a consistent order and regular pattern, it was possible to view the physical world in a systematic manner that allowed scientists to describe this regular pattern according to precise mathematical formulas. In Galileo’s words “the book of nature is written in mathematical language.” Galileo developed mathematical laws for both the movement of the planets and the movement of bodies on Earth. Dropping cannonballs of unequal weight from the Leaning Tower of Pisa—the actual veracity of this story notwithstanding—was an example of Galileo’s determination to experimentally test a hypothesis. His experimentation with falling bodies laid the groundwork for the modern practice of designing experiments to test hypotheses derived from mathematical formulas.

Toward this end, Galileo popularized an approach to scientific discovery known as the hypothetico-deductive method. The hypothetico-deductive method constructs an explanation by beginning with a mathematical hypothesis. A set of observable facts is then deduced from this hypothesis. This method was commonly used in the explanation of astronomical observations. For example, with both a phenomenal grasp of mathematics and rare access to the astronomical findings of his mentor, Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was able to accurately chart the elliptical orbit of the planets around the sun. A furthe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• New to This Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction and Fair Warning
• Chapter 1 Embryonic Positivism
• Chapter 2 Logical Positivism
• Chapter 3 Postpositivism
• Chapter 4 Structuralism
• Chapter 5 Hermeneutics
• Chapter 6 Pragmatism
• Chapter 7 Antifoundationalism
• Chapter 8 Yes, But … Now What?
• Index
• About the Author