CHAPTER 11 CONCLUSION TO THE FIRST EDITION: IN DEFENCE OF PHILOSOPHY (1ST EDITION, 2001)
In the course of this book, we have set out a number of different but often related philosophical positions, and we have argued various positions of our own; it is now time to go back over these positions and arguments in a way that (we hope) joins up loose ends and emphasizes the most important points that we would want to get across.
Perhaps to begin with it is important to make some very general points about the value of philosophical argument. The contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor, in his work on modern conceptions of the self (Taylor 1991), has pointed to the increasing dominance of instrumental thinking in the modern world, and one thing we can learn from the philosophical arguments that we have presented in this book is that there is more to intellectual life than simple instrumentality. We also argue about things not simply in order to find the most efficient method of doing something, of achieving some practical end. We also argue about values, about what amounts to a ‘good’ or a desirable way of living. If we take the way of looking at the world that we can find in Adorno or Gadamer or Alasdair MacIntyre and compare it with the stricter versions of rational choice theory it is possible to see what we are talking about.There are particular values carried by the arguments we have explored here. One is respect for the complexity of scientific and philosophical investigations, whether in the natural or the social sciences. It is too easy to say that the social sciences are in no way like the natural sciences rather than ask what they might have in common and where the differences might be; it is too easy to adopt a conventionalist position on both natural and social sciences, and avoid thinking about backing up our ideas with argument and evidence. It is too easy to adopt an interpretivist or phenomenological position without asking how we interpret, how we understand what people tell us.
Do we have to take what they say for granted? Do we have to place their statements in a wider context, etc.? And it is too easy to adopt an interpretivist position without asking difficult ontological questions about the nature of social reality. The message of this is that there is a value in thinking itself, in recognizing the subtleties, depths and paradoxes of the ideas we use, and of the world we study, in not avoiding difficult issues because there is no clear answer to them.We have presented a complex picture of the social sciences, certainly collectively, but also, we would argue, individually as well - they work with different methods, different forms of knowledge, and different criteria by which that knowledge is judged. More important, the social world itself is complex, involving a number of different objects which do not fall easily into the province of any one social science - economics, history, sociology, social psychology and psychology all study interactions between human beings, from different perspectives and with different ends in view. Human beings are all also objects of biology and other natural sciences which produce their own knowledge of the social world.
In Chapters 2 and 3 we set out the positivist approach to natural science and examined the way in which such an approach has been used by social scientists - Durkheim being the classic example. It would be difficult to rule out of court the practice of this sort of investigation - it is one of the ways we find out about what is going on in society, although it does not necessarily explain what is going on. Historically, such studies have been important guides to political reform and the amelioration of social problems, and social research organized along positivist lines still has its role to play.
The critiques of positivism we examined in Chapters 3 and 4 do not lead to the conclusion that positivist investigations are pointless or that the knowledge that they produce is somehow wrong.
Rather they mean that we have to be careful about explaining the information that they produce. For example, the investigation which reveals a link in British society between sex and mental illness - women are more inclined to depression and men to schizophrenia - should not be regarded as establishing a biological cause for mental illness which is different in men and women. The information is a starting point. Not all women are depressed and not all men are schizophrenic, so there might be psychological variables which have to be taken into account. There may be cultural differences in the ways in which men and women deal with unhappiness and there may be cultural differences in the way that unhappy men and women are perceived by their families and the medical and other caring professions. In other words, the investigation of what we learn from the positivist-based study leads us to interpretivist theorizing, but without that study we have nothing to think about. And of course we can design other studies which can offer us a guide to the adequacy of our interpretive theorizing.It is always important to avoid seeing issues in black and white. There is perhaps still a tendency among students and the wider population to think that the natural sciences produce knowledge which is somehow absolutely and definitely true, for all time and all places. Unfortunately, some natural scientists seem to make that assumption, but no natural scientist who is worth listening to would claim such an absolute status for what he or she is proposing: knowledge, whether it is produced by the social or the natural sciences, is always provisional, always there to be questioned and investigated further.
It is usual now, particularly among sociologists, to assume that, because it can be shown that scientific knowledge is not in some sense final or absolute, and that it is influenced by the values of the surrounding culture, it is no different from any other way of looking at the world.
Some sophisticated versions of this view were examined in Chapter 4, and we argued there that there is a clear case that we cannot absorb everything into discourse or culture. Our contemporary culture has its own view of the naturalworld but that natural world has an existence that is independent of our view of it. The laws of gravity existed before Newton, and they would still exist tomorrow even if the whole of humanity were suddenly wiped out by some strange new disease.
We argued that this sort of issue is at the moment best understood in the development of critical realism - in distinctions such as that between transitive and intransitive dimensions of knowledge. The existence of scientific activity implies the existence of an intransitive reality, of different levels of a reality independent of our conceptions; and there is also a transitive area, a cultural area which, as the conventionalists point out, influences the nature of scientific investigations and explanations. Given what seems to be the increasing dominance of conventionalist and constructionist arguments in social science, perhaps this is one of the most important points we have to make here. Importantly, it is a point that depends on a real philosophical argument - not on the empirical investigation of any one discipline or science, but through reflection on what scientists do.
When in Chapter 5 we moved on to the interpretive traditions, we presented them as holding the position that whatever the adequacies or inadequacies of positivism as a philosophy of the natural sciences, the social sciences were different. This is generally the way they have been presented to students and it is half true, but it should have become apparent from the sort of criticisms that we developed, and the logic of their own arguments, that there is more at work than the cultural or discursive dimensions of understanding. Those theorists we presented as employing an instrumental rationality imply the existence of a real external world, a world that is independent of our concepts, an implication which is there on a common-sense level.
For the pragmatists, for example, the validation of our knowledge comes from its effectiveness in achieving our ends in the world, an everyday empirical testing and revision of knowledge. Weber's distinction between meaning and causal adequacy indicates that there is something more at work than the cultural validation and coherence of explanation; the phenomenologists begin with a basic sense experience that is not produced by consciousness but is worked on by it.When we move on to the more elaborate hermeneutic approaches, which call on the authority of cultures or traditions or communities as a basis for knowledge, we move further away from the concerns of the natural sciences, and it is perhaps easier to see all knowledge as a product of discourse. But even here there are problems with these approaches, or there are implications, which indicate that there is more to be taken into account. For example, Winch's identification of birth, death and sexual relations as points of contact between cultures indicates that it might be possible to construct trans- cultural knowledge areas, and this is even more the case if we add production to his list. If we accept Charles Taylor's argument, and Winch's own implication, for example, that the Azande are better at providing coherent identities to the individual lives of members of their culture while Western societies are better at understanding and controlling the physical world, then there must, in principle, be shared standards by which these judgements can be made. And those shared standards will have to come to grips with all the issues raised in the book.
Gadamers hermeneutics and dialectical thinking generally indicates that it is possible to argue through to agreements about the nature of the world and of knowledge, and we will return to this shortly. For the moment there is another implication of these positions. We led into them through looking at the individualist arguments of Weber and the pragmatists and rational choice theory, but apart from Weber they all imply the existence of something over and above the individual - the culture or tradition or community in relation to which, in the case of Gadamer, the individual is profoundly unimportant.
There is, however, a third area, which sociologists have worked with since the nineteenth century and which we have already touched on in our discussion of positivism in sociology: there are ‘social facts', or in other versions ‘society' or ‘social structure', something which is, like culture, over and above the individual, but, unlike culture, not a matter of language or ideas. It is perhaps arguable that the positivism of Comte and Durkheim, and the instrumental aspects of Marx's work, were necessary to identify the existence of such an area, and we came across it in Chapter 7, in our examination of critical theory and the later developments of Habermas's work. The latter identifies a contradiction and a struggle between what we could crudely call the area of culture, of values and ways of thinking about the world that members of a society share and work with together with a degree of freedom, and the social system, the social structure which rests on an instrumental rationality.In fact, Habermas offers a complex and subtle way of thinking about the relationship between the natural and social sciences, each with their origin in a different cognitive interest, but each overlapping at various points: some aspects of the social sciences will be like the natural sciences, and the natural sciences will of course be related to the same culture as the social sciences, but he assumes the existence of the different realms, building on work that has gone before. The most rigorous philosophical warrant for the idea of a ‘society' different from a culture can be found in critical realism.
We have already mentioned the distinction between transitive and intransitive dimensions of knowledge; critical realism also talks about there being different types of being in the social world - there is, if you like, a ‘variegated' ontology of the social world. It is not made up of one type of thing, and there are a number of different levels; what we see is less than what there is, whereas for most interpretive approaches what we see is what we get.
In Chapter 1, we talked about the intimate link between philosophy and politics. This has emerged at various points in the course of our arguments. Critical theory and critical realism argue that it is possible to provide a basis for moral and political argument, although the basis which each would argue for is different. Critical realism is closer to the radical impetus of the empiricist tradition, arguing that the firmer our knowledge of the social world the firmer the moral and political arguments that we are able to develop. Critical theory uses one form or another of the idea of rationality itself for the basis of moral argument. One might say that the former is more rooted in what is and the latter more in what might be, but they both see the social sciences as being in some way critical.
Another way in which the social sciences have been argued to be political is on the basis of knowledge representing the interests of a particular social group. We saw that the Marxist Georg Lukacs argued that because of its social position and the universality of its interests, the working class was able to develop a superior knowledge, and, also in the first half of twentieth century, the sociologist Karl Mannheim (1936) made the same claim for ‘free floating intellectuals’. In this book, in Chapter 9, we have discussed a similar claim by some contemporary feminists. It is clear that the concerns of some groups - women, ethnic and sexual minorities and others - can be hidden or ignored by the social sciences, and that it is important that their experience and knowledge of their lives must be taken in account. Such knowledge cannot be treated as better knowledge simply on the grounds that it comes from a particular group, any more than it can be discounted because it comes from that same group. Experience and ideas from these groups need to be included in our arguments about what we know and how we know it.
The significance of this debate is perhaps the most important message of the book, and takes us on to the ambivalent politics and ambivalent attitude towards philosophy found in post-structuralism and post-modernism. West's description of Derrida’s attitude to philosophy - ‘It can’t go on and it must go on’ - seems to us quite precise. Derrida participates in a debate the presuppositions of which he is criticizing; it is rather like somebody walking along the road denying that she had any legs. One of the several paradoxes of post-structuralism is that it has rekindled the interest of many students in philosophical issues and provoked one of the more interesting debates in contemporary philosophy, namely that with Habermas. The attitude of some post-modernists, however, is more disturbing. They tend to be sociologists or social psychologists rather than philosophers and tend to argue that the sort of philosophical argument carried on in this book is no longer relevant. It involves an argument that there is no point to argument, which is a self-refuting position. Whereas the philosopher Derrida is well aware of the paradoxical implications of his position and attempts to grapple with them, the social psychologist Kenneth Gergen or some of the sociologists of scientific knowledge discussed in Chapter 4 seem happy to argue for a position which denies the possibility or usefulness of argument. The attempt to dissolve philosophical issues into sociological analyses confuses what we called in Chapter 2 the context of discovery and the context of justification; the latter takes ideas out of their original context and subjects them to testing, including the testing of argument.
One of the achievements of Habermas is to move the activity of argument back to the centre of the philosophical stage as far as the social sciences are concerned and to put arguments about the good life and the just society back into social theory. The structure of arguments from the dialecticians and the hermeneuticists shows that we cannot avoid meta-narratives, nor can we avoid the complexity of the specific. They both keep alive the idea that can be found in Hellenistic philosophy, that there is something good about argument itself, for the community and the individual, and it is important that the social sciences maintain that insight. None of the arguments we have discussed in the book are finished, and there are replies to our own that we have to go on thinking about. We have therefore concentrated on the larger issues, on ontology and epistemology, ethics and politics rather than the technical nuts and bolts which sometimes pass as philosophy in the empirical disciplines. Given the much-noted fragmentation of experience and argument in the contemporary world, this in itself is a political act which we are happy to be associated with.