A Philosophical Toolkit
To help us be more systematic in our reflexive investigation, we can call in the help of the academic discipline of philosophy. There are some very valuable ideas and arguments we can draw upon, but always, of course, to answer questions posed by the problems we face as would-be social scientists.
There are four sub-disciplines, or fields, within philosophy from which we can most usefully draw. These are:Theory of Knowledge
The technical term for this is ‘epistemology’. In the seventeenth-century disputes about philosophy and science there were two main alternative views, in opposition to each other. Generally, the masterbuilders had a ‘rationalist’ view of the nature of knowledge. They were very impressed by mathematics, which seemed to arrive at absolutely certain conclusions by formal reasoning. The seventeenth-century French philosopher Descartes (1641, 1931) is perhaps the best known of the rationalists. His method of systematically doubting everything that could be doubted led him to the conclusion that even as he doubted he must at least be thinking. So what could not be doubted was his own existence as a thinking being. This provided the certain foundation from which he was able (at least to his own satisfaction!) to begin the task of reconstructing the whole edifice of knowledge.
The rival theory of knowledge, generally associated with the underlabourer view, was ‘empiricism’. For the empiricist philosophers (see Honderich 1999), the sole source of knowledge about the world was the evidence of our senses. At birth, they held, the human mind is a blank sheet, as it were, and our knowledge is acquired subsequently, through learning to recognize recurrent patterns in our experience, and attaching general ideas to them. Genuine knowledge (as distinct from mere belief, or prejudice) is limited to the statement of these patterns in experience, and what can be inferred from them.
The apparent certainty of the conclusions of mathematical and logical arguments, which the rationalists were so impressed by, is due to the fact that they are true by definition. So the certainty of such statements as ‘All bachelors are male,' or ‘2+2=4, tells us nothing we didn't already know about the world. They are statements in which we make explicit the implications of the way we define certain words, or mathematical operations.As we will see, the empiricist view of knowledge has been the one that most natural and social scientists have appealed to when making out their claims to provide genuine or authoritative knowledge. It is also the view of knowledge which is closest to most people's common-sense intuitions: ‘Seeing is believing,' ‘I saw it with my own eyes.'
Ontology
This is a technical term in philosophy, and unfortunately it is used in very different ways in different traditions of philosophical thinking. In the sense we use the term here, an ‘ontology' is the answer one would give to the question: ‘What kinds of things are there in the world?' In the history of philosophy the many different ways of answering this question can be loosely divided into four main traditions. ‘Materialists' have argued that the world is made up entirely of matter (or ‘matter in motion'), and the different characteristics of material objects, living things, people, societies and so on can in principle be explained in terms of the greater or lesser complexity of the organization of matter. By contrast, ‘idealists' have argued that the ultimate reality is mental, or spiritual. This may be because they, like Descartes, think that their experience of their own inner, conscious life is the thing they can be most certain of. If one begins with this, then it can seem reasonable to think of the material objects and other bodies one encounters as constructs of one's own inner thought processes. As we will see, ‘constructivist' views of the external world, with historical roots in Descartes's philosophy, have become fashionable in sociology and related disciplines.
But idealists do have difficulty in being fully convincing when they deny the independent materiality of the external world, and, similarly, materialists have difficulty being fully convincing in explaining away the distinctive character of subjective experience. This is why a third option has been quite popular in the history of philosophy. This is referred to as ‘dualism'. Again, Descartes is a convenient and well-known example. Having convinced himself of his own existence as a thinking being, it seemed to him that there was a further question as to whether he existed as an embodied, material being. Eventually, he was able to be certain of that, but in the process came to see body and mind as two quite different kinds of thing, or ‘substance'. So human individuals were, for him, a rather mysterious and contingent combination of a mechanical body with a ghostly mind, or soul (see Ryle 1949, 2002).
In Descartes especially we see a close connection between epistemology, or theory of knowledge, on the one hand, and ontology, on the other: what is accepted as existing depends on how confident we can be about our knowledge of it. For some philosophers, the apparent difficulty of being sure about the nature of anything beyond the limits of our own conscious experience leads them to ‘agnosticism'. This is not just the don't-know option in the philosophers’ public opinion poll. Rather, it is the positive doctrine that the nature of the world as it exists independently of our subjective experience just cannot be known.
This rather crude division of philosophers into rival materialist, idealist, dualist and agnostic traditions does have some relevance to debates in the social sciences, and we can find many echoes of the debates among philosophers here. However, the disputes in the social sciences tend to be more localized in character. They usually concern not philosophical ontology, but what we might call regional or special ontology. So, instead of asking ‘What kinds of things are there in the world?’, we might, as biologists, ask ‘What kinds of things are living organisms made up of, and how are they put together?’ As chemists, we might ask: ‘How many elements are there, what are their properties, how do they interact?’ and so on.
Each discipline has its own regional ontology, its own way of listing, describing and classifying the range of things, relations or processes it deals with; this is the range of things which it claims to give us knowledge of.In the case of the social sciences, there are deep, ongoing controversies about what the constituents of the social world are. One of the most basic disputes has to do with whether society itself is an independent reality in its own right (a ‘reality sui generis’ as Durkheim put it). So-called ‘methodological individualists’ argue against this. For them, society is nothing over and above the collection of individual people who make it up. Another ontological dispute concerns whether sociologists are justified in referring to social and economic structures and processes which exist independently of the symbolic or cultural meanings of social actors. Are we justified, for example, in talking sociologically about social classes and class interests in societies where individual social actors have no concept of themselves as belonging to social classes?
Logic
So far we’ve often referred to the disputes, disagreements, arguments and so on which go on among philosophers and social scientists. If we examine the texts in which these disputes are conducted, we will often find stereotyping and caricaturing of one another’s views, outright misrepresentation, questioning of political motives, allegations of bias and so on. While these tactics might have a lot of rhetorical and persuasive force, they are not the same thing as good arguments. The discipline of logic is an attempt to set down in a systematic way what makes the difference between a good and a bad argument. When we construct an argument we are usually attempting to show why a particular statement (our ‘conclusion’) should be accepted as true. In order to do this, we bring together other statements, which give an account of the relevant evidence, or other considerations, which provide the grounds for believing the truth of the conclusions.
These statements are the ‘premisses’ of the argument. A ‘valid argument’ is one in which the conclusion follows from the premisses. It is one in which anyone who accepts the premisses must accept the conclusion. This does not mean that the conclusion itself must be true, only that it is as reliable or as well established as the premisses from which it is derived. For example:If there is a peace settlement in Ireland, this government has at least one great achievement to its credit.
There is a peace settlement in Ireland.
Therefore: This government has at least one great achievement to its credit.
This is a valid argument, because the conclusion does follow from the premisses. However, the conclusion could still be false, because there might turn out not to be a peace settlement in Ireland, or because even if there is, it might not be an achievement of the government. Interestingly, the conclusion could also turn out to be true, even though the premisses turned out to be false, because the government might, for example, have failed to settle the Irish question, but have found a permanent solution to the problem of unemployment instead.
What the validity of the argument does rule out is the possibility that both premisses could be true and the conclusion false.
However, this is not a book on formal logic, and most of the time we will have to rely on our intuitive sense of when an argument is or is not valid. The important thing to keep in mind is that the validity of an argument is a matter of the logical relationship between sets of statements. It is not a matter of how good or bad the evidence is for or against any particular factual claim (though, confusingly, in research methods courses, there is a completely different use of the term ‘validity’ to refer to the adequacy of a measure to quantify the thing it is supposed to be measuring).
Ethics and Moral Philosophy
Ethical questions arise at many points in the course of social scientific research.
Sociologists are often involved in uncovering information about the beliefs and practices of the people they study which might put those people at risk. Sometimes this might be because the practices concerned are socially stigmatized, and the researcher might be concerned not to jeopardize the anonymity of her or his informants. Alternatively, the researcher might well feel that her discovery of corrupt or unjustly discriminatory practices in official organizations ought to be made public. But doing so would at the same time be a betrayal of trust, and might also jeopardize the possibility of further research. Often, too, researchers may be employed to carry out research for projects they did not design, or for organizations whose aims they might not sympathize with. To what extent should they keep quiet about their reservations in order to keep their career prospects open?These are moral quandaries which frequently arise in the course of research practice. There are other ethical questions which are intrinsic to the research process itself. These have to do with the power relations between researcher and researched. In most social research there is inequality of social status between the two, and even where there is not, the social scientist is implicitly claiming the authority to interpret and represent the beliefs or attitudes of those who are the objects of study. Where there are class, gender, ethnic or other social differences between researcher and researched, such ethical issues necessarily arise.
Finally, sociologists and anthropologists, especially, are constantly confronted by the enormous diversity of human cultures and subcultures. Part of this diversity is diversity in moral values. Because of the ethnographic requirement to interpret other cultures in terms available to the participants in those cultures, these social scientists must be able to suspend their own judgements. The ethical sensitivity which goes along with this, and reflexivity about the power relations between researcher and researched, leads many sociologists and anthropologists towards a position of ‘moral relativism’. That is to say, they tend to resist the idea that there are universally obligatory moral values, applicable across all cultures. Morality comes to be seen as a matter of what participants in each culture take to be acceptable or unacceptable. No one culture has a right to dictate to any other what rules it should live by.
On the other hand, closer examination shows that cultures themselves tend not to be so consensual internally as this picture assumes. If there are ethical conflicts within a culture, the relativist view is not much help. Also, it can be argued that the relativist position itself rests on a universal principle - that all cultures have a right to their own autonomy and integrity. Finally, it is much easier to adopt the stance of a moral relativist in the abstract than when confronted with a real moral issue. When they encounter cultures in which systematic torture, female circumcision, endemic racism or capital punishment is accepted as morally proper, most social scientists are liable to find their capacity to suspend judgement sorely tested.
So, there seems to be plenty of room for the help of moral philosophy in the work of the social sciences!