PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

By the time this edition leaves the printers, it will have been fully twenty years since the death of my co-author, Ian Craib. Ian and I had taught philosophy of social science together for some twenty-five years, and we saw the book as a setting down of the current state of an ongoing debate between us and our students on the many topics in the discipline.

Those who do best in psychotherapy are those who can learn to think about their inner lives, often think the unthinkable, who can learn to tolerate anxiety, contradiction, paradox and uncertainty and internal conflict and make something out of it all.

(Craib, Appendix 1 of this book)

The chapters Ian wrote for this book were infused with his own, very particular, grasp of these aspects of personal life, and they presented me with some difficulties in continuing with subsequent editions after his death. First, I am so far from a comparable grasp of those dimensions of our lives that to revise anything Ian wrote would be absurd. Second, his arguments in the book represent a certain point in his intellectual journey, and in our arguments with one another, that were worth retaining as a record. So, for both the second and, now, the third edition, the editors and I agreed that the original text should remain unaltered.

But even in a sub-field of the ancient discipline of philosophy, the world does not stand still. A new edition should attempt to monitor the significant changes and, if necessary, to mark critical distances. In both the second and this edition a postscript was added to chapters where it seemed that the debate had been carried forward. This might simply be the addition of new references or, in some cases, might involve extending the argument.

In the second edition I took the liberty of adding a new chapter (12) taking up a wide range of newer contributions to the field, including newer work on hermeneutic approaches, most especially the work of Peter Winch. In this I took a rather different line of argument from that given in Ian's contribution to the first edition. In addition, the critical realist approach had by that time become more widely adopted both philosophically and as a guide to substantive research, so a significant part of the new chapter was devoted to a review of some of the issues posed by that tradition.

In this edition I have both corrected and developed some of the themes in that chapter, taking into account important new work by Margaret Archer and her colleagues, by the analytical philosopher of social science David Little, and several others.

The most extensive new contribution in this edition is the addition of two new chapters (13 and 14) that centre on the question of the relation between social science and nature. In many ways the arguments presented in these chapters are prefigured in the earlier editions. Both Ian Craib and I were opponents of what some call ‘sociological reductionism' (or ‘sociological imperialism') - a tendency to extend sociological analysis beyond the boundaries of its legitimate application - either into the deep recesses of mental life or, externally, into the proper terrain of the natural sciences. We both saw, in critical realism, an approach that recognized the complex, multilayered character of reality, accessible only partially by any disciplinary matrix - many different conceptual and methodological resources would be needed, each with its own distinctive insights.

For me, this meant, especially, the requirement for sociological analysis to be able to work collaboratively with natural science disciplines, especially the life sciences - notwithstanding the risks that involved. In the period since the first edition of this book, that requirement has become ever-more urgent, as the existential threats of climate change and biodiversity loss have at long last moved to centre stage politically. These threats are far too serious to be left to the physical scientists alone, as they pose major challenges to existing social and economic orders. Equally, they are too serious to be left to social and political scientists who work with concepts of the social as an autonomous order, unanchored in any natural conditions of existence. Chapters 13 and 14 both attempt to deal with the challenge of bringing these different ‘takes' on the world together. At the centre of Chapter 13 is a sympathetic engagement with the view of human nature presented in the work of Andrew Sayer. The thoroughly social view of our nature advocated by him is endorsed, but an attempt is made to situate it within a broader conception of humans as an evolving species, whose nature is essentially bound up with their living and non-living natural conditions of existence and flourishing. Chapter 14 attempts to correct a limitation of earlier editions by reflecting philosophically on economic analysis. Economics was arguably the first of the social science disciplines to take account of the crisis in our relations to nature. This makes sense, as it is through the economy, as the social organization of our need-meeting interactions with nature, that our ecological problems arise. However, the currently dominant modes of economic analysis are open to question and have been more rigorously challenged since the financial crisis of 2007/8. Chapter 14 examines the resources of ‘orthodox' economics and introduces some alternatives, in relation to their attempts to grasp our relation to (the rest of) nature.

These chapters present arguments, mostly pointing to a need for radical social and economic change, but those arguments are not conclusive: they are presented as contributions to a dialogue. Here I can echo Ian Craib's insistence on the central importance of learning to think and to argue. That was the ethos of the department and university in which we worked, and it is sad that the conditions for such free-thinking, open dialogue are under growing threat, even in our universities.

Ted Benton