The Book and Its Arguments

It is important to emphasize that this is going to be a book of arguments - arguments about the nature of the social sciences that are not settled, and perhaps by their nature cannot be.

The second way to approach the book is as a sort of language primer, an introduction to often difficult ideas and arguments which take time to learn and which are best learnt through participating in the arguments. In an everyday sense we are all philosophers, and as you read you should reflect on your own ideas about the subject you are studying: for example, does the way in which you think about your subject, whether it be geography, sociology, economics, psychology, history or whatever, place it near to or far away from the natural sciences?

We will in fact start by examining the philosophy of natural science. The natural sciences are not as monolithic or simplistic in their approach as critics often seem to assume. Even within the most influential philosophy of natural science, known as ‘empiricism, we can find a number of different approaches, and there has been a serious questioning of principles and accepted views of scientific progress from within the philosophy of natural science and the natural sciences themselves.

It might seem strange to start a book on the philosophy of the social sciences with three chapters on the natural sciences, but the two are intimately related. It is not possible to grasp the development of philosophical debates in the social sciences or indeed the development of the social sciences themselves without a knowledge of the way in which the natural sciences have thought about themselves, and the way philosophers have thought about them, as they have developed. These chapters are centrally concerned with empiricist views of natural science, and with the critics of empiricism. The most telling criticisms of empiricism as an account of natural scientific knowledge have come from approaches which recognize the sciences as historically and socially located practices. However, sociological and historical approaches to the understanding of science themselves make knowledge-claims, use empirical methods of research and so on. So to treat their findings about science as authoritatively true would beg the central questions of this book. As we will see in Chapter 4, attempts to construct sociological and historical accounts of science as alternatives to the empiricist view remain controversial. The divisions and debates in the field of social studies of science, or science studies, have many connections with, and often directly reflect, the more general debates about the nature of social scientific knowledge which make up our theme in this book. The main approaches we will introduce in Chapter 4 are selected partly by virtue of the influence they have had on debates in the philosophy of social science, and partly because of their importance as background to the discussion in later chapters. In most cases, we have had space to provide only a brief introductory outline, and you are advised to follow up approaches which interest you with further reading.

We will move from this discussion to an examination of those positions and writers that argue that the social sciences, or some social sciences, are scientific but not in the same way as the natural sciences. The social sciences study human beings, and human beings are different from the objects of physics or chemistry - they know they are being studied, they can understand what is said about them and they can take the scientists’ findings into account and act differently.

This approach is more closely linked to the rationalist tradition, although in the social sciences it is often referred to as ‘interpretivist’. There are in fact several such interpretivist positions and several different conceptions of rationality to be found in the social sciences: the simple instrumental rationality of rational choice theory to be found in some forms of economics and some forms of sociology; the more complicated instrumental rationality of Weberian sociology and the descendants of G. H. Mead’s pragmatism; the idea of rationality as rule-following, stemming from anthropology and the philosophy of Wittgenstein and Peter Winch; and the notion of dialectical or critical rationality developed from the Marxist interpretation of the German idealist philosopher G. W F. Hegel. We will be exploring and comparing all of these approaches.

This will take us on to more recent developments, which move in two directions. One development of some of the arguments about positivism in the natural and social sciences has been the development of modern critical realism, particularly in such disciplines as geography, sociology, politics, economics and psychology. Whereas positivism is primarily concerned with epistemology, the theory of knowledge, realism is primarily concerned with ontology, the theory of what exists in the world. This enables a reopening of the debate about the relationship between the social and natural sciences, in a way which suggests that there are both similarities and differences between the two - a more sophisticated view than we will have come across before.

The second development has been towards a systematic relativism. In this book we will trace this through the development of identity politics and in particular feminism. Some feminists have tried to develop a feminist epistemology, basing their arguments on the work of the early twentieth-century Marxist philosopher George Lukacs, who argued that the proletariat, the working class, had a privileged position as far as knowledge of the social world was concerned precisely because of their underprivileged position in that world. To put it very crudely, they had nothing to lose by acknowledging the truth. Lukacs was of course more sophisticated than this might suggest, as are the feminist philosophers who tried to develop his ideas to argue the same point about women. There is a continuing debate between advocates of various versions of this ‘standpoint’ epistemology and their post-modernist critics.

We will follow this first through the development of post-structuralism. The first generation of structuralist theorists developed the idea of underlying structures in society and social life, using a linguistic analogy. Realism developed the idea further, but post-structuralism has moved away from this concern to become part of what is now known as the ‘linguistic turn’ in twentieth-century philosophy. This approach sees the social world as constituted in and by language, or different ‘discourses’. In much post-structuralist philosophy we find the development of a relativist position - the idea that no one discourse is more right, or scientific, than another. This approach has been particularly influential in sociology, cultural studies and social psychology and the study of literature, but it can also be found in history. Post-modernism takes this movement even further, almost to the point of abandoning philosophy altogether - or more accurately using philosophical arguments against philosophy.