Introduction: Two Ways to Criticize Positivism

So far, we have discussed the broad outlines of the empiricist view of human knowledge, and of scientific explanation. We have seen that ‘positivism’ in social science can be seen as an attempt to put the study of human social life on a scientific footing by extending the methods and forms of explanation which have been successful in the natural sciences.

We now come to our consideration of some of the criticisms which have been made of positivism in social science. These criticisms are of two main kinds, and we will be dealing with them in separate chapters. The criticisms which have been most widely made and accepted among social scientists themselves concern the extension of scientific methods to the domain of human social life. Anti-positivists who take this line of argument point out that there are fundamental differences between human social life and the facts of nature which are the subject-matter of the natural sciences. These differences include the alleged unpredictability of human behaviour, which stems from our unique possession of free will; the ‘rule-governed, as distinct from law-governed, character of social life; and the role of consciousness and meaning in human society. Connected with these ontological differences between the natural and the social worlds, it is argued, the relations between social scientists and their subject-matter are very different from those between natural scientists and the things and processes they study. One such difference has to do with the way moral or political values enter into the selection of topics for investigation. Social scientists will be guided by value orientations to seek explanations of particular social phenomena or historical processes, so that social explanation will be ‘value-relevant’, and concerned with particulars.

These arguments are, of course, very persuasive, and we will return to investigate them and their implications in more depth (especially in Chapters 5, 6 and 7). However, for the moment we will be considering a quite different line of criticism of positivism. The key point here is not so much whether it makes sense to extend the methods of science to the study of society, but what account of science one draws on in doing that. As we saw, the empiricist account of science is broadly accepted by positivists as the model for a scientific approach to society. But there are some serious and unresolved difficulties in the empiricist account of science (see especially Keat and Urry 1975; Benton 1977, 2015; Quine 1980; Halfpenny 1982; Chalmers 1999), and there are now, in addition, some quite well-established alternative accounts of science. These are based more on historical studies, and on sociological investigation of science in action, and we will discuss some of these in Chapter 4. It is very important to explore these further because they open up more possibilities for thinking about what the social sciences are or could be. In particular, it has been (and still is) very common for philosophers of social science to contrast positivist with interpretivist views, as if this exhausted all the alternatives. But there are other alternatives. For example, it is possible to reject positivism because of its empiricist account of science, but still keep open the possibility that society might be studied scientifically, drawing on an alternative account of what natural science is like. Of course, even with an alternative view of what science is, it may still be held that human society cannot be studied scientifically. But to ask this question with alternative models of science in mind is likely to raise new and interesting issues about just where the differences and similarities lie between natural science and the study of society.