Philosophy and the Social Sciences
Philosophy and the social sciences are usually seen to be separate subjects, so why should students of the social sciences be interested in philosophy? We hope that this question will have answered itself by the end of our book, but we can make a start with it right away.
At the time when modern science was in the process of emergence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was very difficult to say where the boundary between philosophy and science should be placed. It was only later that it became more conventional to see a separation between the two. As this separation took place, there were two basic models of the relationship. In one view, philosophy could arrive at certain knowledge by rational argument. The most fundamental truths about ourselves and the nature of the world we live in, as well as the rules for arriving at such knowledge, could be established by philosophers. In this way, philosophy provided ‘foundations' for the research done in the particular scientific specialisms. This is sometimes called the ‘masterbuilder' or ‘master-scientist' view of philosophy, and it is associated with an approach to philosophy called ‘metaphysics'. In metaphysics, philosophers try to give an account of the universe, the world and everything in it. Nowadays philosophers tend to be a bit more modest.The alternative view of the relation between philosophy and the sciences is sometimes called the ‘underlabourer' view. On this view, it is accepted that armchair speculation about the nature of the world cannot give us certain or reliable knowledge. Knowledge can come only from practical experience, observation and systematic experimentation. So, the special sciences don't need to wait for philosophers to provide them with foundations, or to tell them what they should think. On the underlabourer view, philosophy should be there to provide help and support to the work of the scientists, as they get on with the job of discovering how nature works.
But what sort of help can philosophy give? There are various different views on this. One view is that in our common-sense thinking there are prejudices, superstitions and unquestioned assumptions which are obstacles to scientific progress. Philosophy can perhaps play a part in exposing these and criticizing them, so as to set science free. This is a bit like clearing away the dead leaves on the railway line to let the trains run on.Another sort of help might be to provide a map of the pattern of existing scientific knowledge, so that scientific specialists can get some idea about where they are in the wider field of knowledge. A third possibility is that the philosophers can use their expertise in logic and argumentation in refining the methods of investigation which scientists use.
In this book, philosophy will be used in all these ways, but most importantly it will be used to provide underlabouring in yet another way. To see what this sort of help might be, we can remind ourselves that philosophy is not just an academic discipline. In everyday life people use the word to mean something rather different from its use in academic contexts. We sometimes say that someone who has had to face up to very distressing circumstances, such as a job loss, or bereavement, that they were ‘philosophical’ about it. Certainly, most of us do not spend a great deal of time soul-searching about the meaning of life, or the ultimate basis of our values and attitudes. However, there are moments in everyone’s life when we are faced with serious moral dilemmas, or with such life-challenging events as losing a job, or a loved one, or being diagnosed with a serious illness. It is at times like these when we are forced to reflect on these questions of fundamental meaning and value in our lives. It is in this sense that, as the Italian Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci (Gramsci 1971) said, ‘Everyone is a philosopher.’ But if we are philosophers at these times of crisis, it is also true that in the way we interact with each other in our everyday lives, in the way we choose to spend our free time, in the jobs we choose (if we are lucky enough to have that choice) and so on, we are still implicitly philosophers.
Our lives display or represent, whether we are generally self-conscious about it or not, a philosophical orientation to the world. We can think of this as a tacit or practical philosophy of life.So, how does this relate to the question we started out with - the relationship between philosophy and social science? If we go back to the map analogy, it is obvious that people don’t usually refer to a map if they are confident they already know where they are going, and how to get there. In everyday life, when things are going on smoothly, with no major problems, we aren’t forced to question our basic attitudes and priorities in life. But in the social sciences, things do not run along smoothly. (As we will see, the natural sciences don’t run along smoothly either, but most of the time this fact is less obvious.) The social sciences are often derided by public figures and in the media, and social scientists themselves tend to be less confident about their achievements than are natural scientists: they can’t prove their success by generating new and impressive technologies, for example. Moreover, social scientists are themselves divided about what is the nature of their disciplines. Many, for example, would not agree that their work is scientific in the same sense as the natural sciences are. Even the ones who do will often disagree about what science is. For this reason, social scientists, and sociologists in particular, tend to be more reflexive about their subjects than natural scientists - that is, they are more likely to spend time thinking about just what kind of activity sociology (or political science or anthropology or any other such subject) is, what sort of methods it should use, what sort of relationship it should have with its subject-matter and so on. The kinds of questions we ask when we are being reflexive in this way about our own disciplines are philosophical questions. They are not imposed on us from outside, as in the masterbuilder view, but they arise from within our subjects, as a result of the special difficulties and deep disagreements that we find there. So, the main job of underlabouring we will be doing in this book will be an attempt to address the question: ‘What are we doing when we attempt to study human social life in a systematic way?' Depending on how we answer that question, further questions arise: what are the proper methods of investigation of social processes? Can there be objective knowledge of society when the investigators as well as the subject-matter are all part of society? What role do moral and political values play in our work? How should we view the fact of continuing disagreement among social scientists about basics? Is this perhaps a sign of the immaturity of the social sciences, or is it something we should expect as a permanent fact of life, and even welcome? And so on.