Why social sciences are natural ones (2)

Isaac Reed, the author we quoted in our previous entry, contrasts his caricature of positivist social science with his own preferred, hermeneutic proposal, one in which the ‘context of investigation’ and the ‘context of explanation’ overlap to a certain extent, in a way that allows the scientist to ‘share’ the meanings that constitute the basic stuff the social world is made of:

the context of investigation is structured culturally—by a set of meanings we know as “social theory.” The various contexts that the researcher encounters are also structured culturally—by meanings that are different in different times and place, but that tend to be much less abstract and much more pragmatically organized than “theory.” The contexts are brought into contact with each other when the researcher uses concepts from the context of investigation to describe and interpret the context of explanation she is studying (Reed, 2010, 34-35).

I have nothing to oppose to this view, only that it is completely coherent with a non-caricaturesque view of ‘positivism’ (I mean, one which included the sophisticated reflections of Popper, Lakatos, or even the late Hempel and Carnap). In the same way as ‘educated’ concepts in the natural sciences (as ‘matter’, ‘heat’, ‘measurement’, ‘nutrition’… ) have a history that connects them with ‘common sense’ and ‘local’ notions, the same happens with ‘scientific’ concepts in the social sciences; real scientists start at the point they can with the concepts and meanings they have, and try to critically improve them in order to offer better explanations of social facts than what could be attained just by using the ‘common sense’, ‘bar talk’ theories and meanings that ordinary people employ in their ordinary lives. The Reichenbachian ‘context of discovery’ is simply, amongst other things, the door through which ‘common meanings’ enter into the realm of social research. But what is important in science is what is done with these concepts, how they are (successfully or unsuccessfully) rationally transformed by the process of investigation in a new theoretical network sagaciously articulated with empirical observations.

Of course, one peculiarity of the objects that constitute Reed’s ‘context of explanation’ is that they (contrarily to galaxies, molecules or trees) can also absorb the symbolic products of that scientific process and transmogrify them again into ‘ordinary meanings’. But a honest positivist will recognise as a real empirical fact that people do this, and will try to develop a social theory that allows to explain how this absorption is possible and what theoretical and empirical consequences it actually has. Hence, Reed’s proposal to replace the positivist schema of how social science works by a ‘hermeneutic’ schema can really be read as a vindication of a (knowledgeable) positivist method. Even when he ends by claiming that his position “also has the advantage (or, for some, the disadvantage) of offering a clear break between natural-scientific and social-scientific knowledge (because…) in social science, the role of meaning in structuring human action takes place both in the context of investigation and the context of explanation” (op. cit., 36), we must simply point to the fact that meanings (and the behaviours triggered by them) are as natural as any other component of the world’s furniture; of course they have properties that other things don’t have, but this is exactly true of every type of entity.

Perhaps what Reed and other hermeneuticists want to say is that usually social scientists do not need to assume any particular theory about how nature permits the emergence of something as ‘meanings’, only some understanding of how meanings ‘work’ (and very often perhaps not even the latter). This is right, of course, but it is in the best case a half truth: in some (or even most) research contexts it does not matter how the symbolic capacity of humans is grounded on their biological cognitive architecture, but surely there will be research areas in the social sciences where the psycho-biological ‘fundamentals’, or some of their observable effects, are relevant (e.g., in studying the social effects of cognitive biases, learning capacity, motivation, and so on). And, what is more important, it would be appallingly hubristic the pretension that no empirical discovery about ‘how the mind works’ (and the body, to say it all) might ever have the tiniest chance of affecting the fundamental hypotheses of social theorising! Just as a symptom of intellectual modesty, the door of social sciences should be permanently open to such a possibility, particularly in these times when interdisciplinary research is becoming the norm rather than the exception.

But the most important criticism that can be done to this attempt to demarcate the social from the natural science by resource to considering the former as essentially engaged to a symbolic reality is not, from my point of view, that it ignores the possibility of ‘naturalising’ symbolic behaviour and meanings (a topic to which I shall devote the next entries), but that it seems to ignore an important part of what social scientists actually can do with the ‘meanings’ they ‘share’ with their objects of study. For social science has not just the goal of interpreting what ordinary people say and do, in such a way as if a piece of social science research could only consist in something like a ‘edited translation’ of the lives of individual men and women. Far from this, many of the work in the social sciences consists in the attempt to discover those causal structures, processes or mechanisms that, on the basis of the symbolic capacities of individuals and other relevant factors, might explain and predict what is ‘observed’ to happen in the social world. Concepts like ‘market equilibrium’, ‘class structure’, ‘strategic games’, or ‘social networks’ may of course have been ‘derived’ (usually through a rather tortuous path) from lebensweltliche notions, though, in order to construct theories that are reasonably capable of offering respectable explanations of whatever they were intended to explain, social researchers have been forced to transform them so thouroughly that they are now as different from their common sense origins as nightingales are from their pre-dinosaur ancestors.

The social world is much more than just what ordinary individuals believe and say about it (if it were not, one might start doubting of the very need of a social science); it also consists in the ways in which those beliefs and actions are mutually interdependent and dependent of other causal factors or constraints, and we ordinary people may be as ignorant about the real working of those ways of interdependence as we are about the chemistry of protein digestion, no matter how much we happen to eat. This is the reason why not only positivism, but also some kind of realism is necessary in the understanding of the functions and methods of the social sciences. Of course, social theories are ‘symbolic -and interest laden- social constructs’, but at least one of their goals is to make us tentatively know how the social world works, how some things in it depend on other things. And regarding the relevance of this goal, there is absolutely no difference between the social and the natural sciences.

References

Reed, I. (2010) Epistemology Contextualized: Social Scientific Knowledge in a Post-Positivist Era. Sociological Theory. 28, 61-80.

The post Why social sciences are natural ones (2) appeared first on Mapping Ignorance.