Positivism, Naturalism, and General Social Laws

There is a strong current of positivism in sociology. Other paradigms exist - feminism, Marxism, comparative historical sociology, and ethnographic sociology, to name several. But the claim of science is generally couched in terms of a positivist theory of science and inquiry.

The grip of positivism on sociology has been at the center of much recent analysis and debate within the social sciences themselves in recent years (Wallerstein 1999, Adams, Clemens, and Orloff 2005, Steinmetz 2005). Some of the most valuable methodological and epistemological writing that is currently appearing in the social sciences is focused on the goal of broadening the palette of tools through which social scientists analyze and explain the social world (McDonald 1996, Ortner 1999, Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003).

The positivist program in sociology might be summarized in these terms: identify a set of units for study; measure a selected set of properties of these units; use statistical techniques to discover correlations and regularities among the units; and attempt to arrive at causal hypotheses about the relation­ships that are observed among the variables. The units may be individual persons (voters, criminals, social workers), or they may be higher-level social entities (cities, national governments, types of social or political structures). These methodological presuppositions led to a strong preference for quantitative methods in social science, in which the ideal research result is a large data set upon which the researcher has successfully conducted statistical analysis leading to a discovery of associations among some of the variables. And favored tools of inquiry include survey research and large-n studies based on large data sets constructed by national agencies. (Andrew Abbott (1998, 1999) refers to this as the variables paradigm.)

An associated methodological premise - adopted with admiring glances at physics and economics - is a preference for formal mathematical models of the social situations that are being studied. Here the method­ological ideal is to identify a set of abstract axioms that constitute the “theory ” of the field. These axioms may be drawn from mathematical decision theory or game theory. Then, the theorist undertakes to construct a model of the empirical phenomena based on these premises with the goal of explaining outcomes as equilibrium solutions to the axioms given the antecedent conditions. But all too often the elegance of the mathematics overshadows the real empirical challenges of the investigation. (Ian Shapiro (2005) encapsulates his criticisms of this formalistic predilection with the title The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences.) Critics such as Shapiro argue that it is important for the disciplines (including his own, that is, political science) to re-emphasize empirical studies that include detailed, careful descriptions of various social phenomena - e.g., legislatures, labor unions, or social service agencies.

This positivistic ideal for social science research devalues several other approaches to social investigation: qualitative or ethnographic research, com­parative “small-n” research, and case-study research (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Alternative approaches to sociological research include at least these:

Qualitative research. Considers the individuality and particularity of the actors who are the subject of investigation. Borrows from the methods of anthropology, making use of ethnographic methods and findings. Makes use of field research and participant-observer methods. Makes a rigorous effort to discover and understand features of the lived human experience of the social actors who make up the social unit under examination.

Comparative research. Identifies a small number of complex and similar cases (revolutions, social welfare systems, labor unions). Carefully structures the definitions of the characteristics to be observed. Identifies the outcome to be explained (occurrence of ethnic conflict). Uses a variety of methods of controlled comparison to sort out causal connections (for example, Mill's methods of similarity and difference to sort among the antecedent conditions as “necessary,” “sufficient,” or “null”).

Historical research. Places the social institutions, organizations, or move­ments into historical context; discovers some of the conjunctural and path-dependent circumstances that shaped their current characteristics (Thelen 2004).

Some of the best work in sociology today combines all of these approaches; for example, C.K. Lee's multi-stranded approach to the task of understanding the roles of gender, class, and management goals within Chinese factories (Lee 1998), or Leslie Salzinger's treatment of similar issues in the maquiladoras in Mexico (Salzinger 2003).

Naturalism is a poor guide for social science inquiry.

My view is that this is a question that needs to be approached very carefully. As a bottom line, I take the view that there are no “social laws” analogous to “laws of nature,” even though there are some mid-level regu­larities that can be discovered across a variety of kinds of social phenomena. But care is needed because of the constant temptation of naturalism - the idea that the social world should be understood in strong analogy with the natural world. If natural phenomena are governed by laws of nature, then social phenomena should be governed by “laws of society.” But the analogy is weak.

In fact, there are few law-like generalizations about social entities and processes (Little 1993). The deepest basis for this judgment is ontological. Social phenomena do not fall into fixed and distinct “types,” in which the members of the type are homogeneous. We can generalize about “water,” but not about “revolution,” for the simple reason that all samples of pure water have the same structure and observable characteristics; but not so for all “revolutions.” The category of “revolution” is not a “kind,” and we should not imagine that we can arrive at a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in this group. Each revolution, for example, proceeds according to a historically specific set of causes and circumstances. And there are no genuinely interesting generalizations across the whole category.

Of course there are observable regularities among social phenomena. Urban geographers have noticed a similar mathematical relationship in the size distribution of cities in a wide range of countries. Durkheim noticed similar suicide rates among Catholic countries - rates that differ consistently from those found in Protestant countries. Political economists notice that there is a negative correlation between state spending on social goods and the infant mortality rate. And we could extend the list indefinitely.

But what does this fact demonstrate? Not that social phenomena are “law-governed.” Instead, it results from two related facts: first, there are social causal mechanisms; and second, there is some recurrence of common causes across social settings.

Take the mechanism of “collective action failures in the presence of public goods.” Here the heart of the mechanism is the analytical point that rationally self-interested decision makers will take account of private goods but not public goods; so they will tend to avoid investments in activities that produce public goods. They will tend to become “free-riders” or “easy-riders.” The social regularity that corresponds to this mechanism is a “soft” generalization - that situations that involve a strong component of collective opportunities for creating public goods will tend to demon­strate low contribution levels from members of affected groups. So public radio fundraising will receive contributions only from a small minority of listeners; boycotts and strikes will be difficult to maintain over time; and fishing resources will tend to be over-fished. And in fact, these regularities can be identified in a range of historical and social settings.

However, the “free-rider” mechanism is only one of several that affect collective action. There are other social mechanisms that have the effect of enhancing collective action rather than undermining it. For example, the presence of competent organizations makes a big difference in eliciting voluntary contributions to public goods; the fact that many decision makers appear to be “conditional altruists” rather than “rationally self­interested maximizers” makes a difference; and the fact that people can be mobilized to exercise sanctions against free-riders affects the level of contribution to public goods.

The conclusion that can be drawn from this is pretty simple. It is that social regularities are “phenomenal” rather than “governing”: they emerge as the result of the workings of common social causal mechanisms, and social causation is generally conjectural and contingent. So the regularities that become manifest are weak and exception-laden - and they are des­criptive of outcomes rather than expressive of underlying “laws of motion” of social circumstances.

And there is a research heuristic that emerges from this discussion as well. This is the importance of searching out the concrete social causal mechanisms through which social phenomena take shape. We do a poor job of understanding industrial strikes if we simply collect a thousand instances and perform statistical analysis on the features we have mea­sured against the outcome variables. We do a much better job of under­standing them if we put together a set of theories about the features of structure and agency through which a strike emerges and through which individuals make decisions about participation. Analysis of the common “agent/structure” factors that are relevant to mobilization will permit us to understand individual instances of mobilization, explain the soft regularities that we discover, and account for the negative instances as well.

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