Social sciences,
philosophy of:
the study of the logic and methods of the social sciences. Central topics
include: What are the criteria of
a good social explanation? How (if
at all) are the social sciences distinct from the natural sciences? Is there a distinctive method for
social research? Through what
sorts of empirical procedures are social science assertions to be
evaluated? Are there irreducible
social laws? Are there causal
relations among social phenomena?
Do social facts and regularities require some form of reduction to facts
and regularities involving only the properties and actions of individuals? The philosophy of social science aims
to provide an interpretation of the social sciences that permits answers to
these questions.
The
philosophy of social science, like the PHILOSOPHY OF NATURAL SCIENCE, has both
a descriptive and a prescriptive side.
On the one hand, the field is about the social sciences--the explanations,
methods, empirical arguments, theories, hypotheses, and so forth, that actually
occur in the social science literature, past and present. This means that the philosopher needs
to have extensive knowledge of several areas of social science research, in
order to be able to formulate an analysis of the social sciences that corresponds
appropriately to scientists' practice.
On the other hand, the field is epistemic: it is concerned with
the idea that scientific theories and hypotheses are put forward as true or probable, and are
justified on rational grounds (empirical and theoretical). The philosopher therefore wants to be
able to provide a critical evaluation of existing social science methods
insofar as these methods are found to be less truth‑enhancing than they
might be. These two aspects of the
philosophical enterprise suggest that philosophy of social science should be
construed as a rational reconstruction of existing social science practice--a
reconstruction that is guided by existing practice but that goes beyond that
practice by identifying faulty assumptions, forms of reasoning, or explanatory
frameworks.
Philosophers
have disagreed over the relation between the social and natural sciences. One position is NATURALISM, according
to which the methods of the social sciences should correspond closely to those
of the natural sciences. This
position is closely related to PHYSICALISM, the doctrine that all higher-level
phenomena and regularities--including social phenomena--must be ultimately
reducible to physical entities and the laws which govern them. (See also UNITY OF SCIENCE.) On the other side is the view that the
social sciences are inherently distinct from the natural sciences. This perspective holds that social
phenomena are metaphysically distinguishable from natural phenomena because
they are intentional--they depend on the meaningful actions of individuals. On this view, natural phenomena admit
of causal explanation, whereas social phenomena require intentional
explanation. The anti-naturalist
position also maintains that there is a corresponding difference between the
methods appropriate to natural and social science. Advocates of the VERSTEHEN method hold that there is a
method of intuitive interpretation of human action which is radically distinct
from methods of inquiry in the natural sciences.
One
important school within the philosophy of social science takes its origin in
this fact of the meaningfulness of human action. INTERPRETIVE SOCIOLOGY maintains that the goal of social
inquiry is to provide interpretations of human conduct within the context of
culturally specific meaningful arrangements. This approach draws an analogy between literary texts and
social phenomena: both are complex systems of meaningful elements, and the goal
of the interpreter is to provide an interpretation of the elements that makes
sense of them. In this respect
social science involves a HERMENEUTIC inquiry: it requires that the interpreter
should tease out the meanings underlying a particular complex of social
behavior, much as a literary critic pieces together an interpretation of the
meaning of a complex literary text.
An example of this approach is Max Weber's treatment of the relation
between capitalism and the Protestant ethic. Weber attempts to identify the
elements of western European culture that shaped human action in this
environment in such a way as to produce capitalism. On this account, both Calvinism and capitalism are
historically specific complexes of values and meanings, and we can better
understand the emergence of the latter by seeing how it corresponds to the
meaningful structures of the former.
Interpretive
sociologists often take the meaningfulness of social phenomena to imply that
social phenomena do not admit of CAUSAL EXPLANATION. However, it is possible to accept the idea that social
phenomena derive from the purposive actions of individuals, without
relinquishing the goal of providing causal explanations of social
phenomena. For it is necessary to
distinguish between the general idea of a causal relation between two
circumstances and the more specific idea of "causal determination through
strict laws of nature." It is
certainly true that social phenomena rarely derive from strict laws of nature;
wars do not result from antecedent political tensions in the way that
earthquakes result from antecedent conditions in plate tectonics. However, when we admit the possibility
of non-deterministic causal relations deriving from the choices of individual
persons, it is evident that social phenomena admit of causal explanation, and
in fact much social explanation depends on asserting causal relations between
social events and processes--for example, the claim that the administrative
competence of the state is a crucial causal factor in determining the success
or failure of a revolutionary movement.
Central to causal arguments in the social sciences is the idea of a
causal mechanism--a series of events or actions leading from cause to effect.
Suppose it is held that the extension of a trolley line from the central city
to the periphery caused the deterioration of public schools in the central
city. In order to make out such a
claim it is necessary to provide some account of the social and political
mechanisms that join the antecedent condition to the consequent.
An
important variety of causal explanation in social science is MATERIALIST
explanation. This type of
explanation attempts to explain a social feature in terms of features of the
material environment in the context of which the social phenomenon occurs. Features of the environment that often
appear in materialist explanations include topography and climate; thus it is
sometimes maintained that banditry thrives in remote regions because the rugged
terrain makes it more difficult for the state to repress bandits. But materialist explanations may also
refer to the material needs of society--for example, the need to produce food
and other consumption goods to support the population. Thus KARL MARX holds
that it is the development of the "productive forces" (technology)
that drives the development of property relations and political systems. In each case the materialist
explanation must refer to the fact of human agency--the fact that human beings
are capable of making deliberative choices on the basis of their wants and
beliefs--in order to carry out the explanation; in the banditry example, the
explanation depends on the fact that bandits are intelligent enough to realize
that their prospects for survival are better in the periphery than in the
core. So materialist explanations
too accept the point that social phenomena depend on the purposive actions of
individuals.
A
central issue in the philosophy of social science involves the relation between
social regularities and facts about individuals. METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM is the position that asserts
the primacy of facts about individuals over facts about social entities. This doctrine takes three forms: a
claim about social entities, a claim about social concepts, and a claim about
social regularities. The first
version maintains that social entities must be reducible to ensembles of
individuals--as an insurance company might be reduced to the ensemble of
employees, supervisors, managers, and owners whose actions constitute the
company. Likewise, it is sometimes
held that social concepts must be reducible to concepts involving only
individuals--for example, the concept of a social class might be defined in
terms of concepts pertaining only to individuals and their behavior. Finally, it is sometimes held that
social regularities must be derivable from regularities of individual
behavior. There are several
positions opposed to methodological individualism. At the extreme there is METHODOLOGICAL HOLISM--the doctrine
that holds that social entities and facts are autonomous and irreducible. And there is a position intermediate
between these two that holds that every social explanation require
microfoundations-‑an account of the circumstances at the individual level
that lead individuals to behave in such ways as to bring about the observed
social regularities. If we observe
that an industrial strike is successful over an extended period of time, it is
not sufficient to explain this circumstance by referring to the common interest
that members of the union have in winning their demands. Rather, we need to have information
about the circumstances of the individual union member that induce him or her
to contribute to this public good.
This position does not require, however, that social explanations be
couched in non-social concepts; instead, the circumstances of individual agents
may be characterized in social terms.
Central
to most theories of explanation is the idea that explanation depends on general
laws governing the phenomena in question.
Thus the discovery of the laws of electrodynamics permitted the
explanation of a variety of electromagnetic phenomena. But social phenomena
derive from the actions of purposive men and women; so what kinds of
regularities are available on the basis of which to provide social
explanations? A fruitful research
framework in the social sciences is the idea that men and women are rational, so it is possible to
explain their behavior as the outcome of a deliberation about means of
achieving their individual ends (see RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY). This fact in turn gives rise to a set
of regularities about individual behavior that may be used as a ground for
social explanation. We may explain
some complex social phenomenon as the aggregate result of the actions of a
large number of individual agents with a hypothesized set of goals within a
structured environment of choice.
Social
scientists have often been inclined to offer FUNCTIONAL explanations of social
phenomena. A function explanation
of a social feature is one that explains the presence and persistence of the
feature in terms of the beneficial consequences the feature has for the ongoing
working of the social system as a whole.
It might be held, for example, that sports clubs in working-class
Britain exist because they give working class men and women a way of expending
energy that would otherwise go into struggles against an exploitative system,
thus undermining social stability.
Sports clubs are explained, then, in terms of their contribution to
social stability. This type of
explanation is based on an analogy between biology and sociology. Biologists explain traits in terms of
their contribution to reproductive fitness, and sociologists sometimes explain
social traits in terms of their contribution to "social"
fitness. However, the analogy is a
misleading one, because there is a general mechanism establish functionality in
the biological realm that is not present in the social realm. This is the mechanism of natural
selection, through which a species arrives at a set of traits that are locally
optimal. There is no analogous
process at work in the social realm, however; so it is groundless to suppose
that social traits exist because of their beneficial consequences for the good
of society as a whole (or important sub-systems within society). So functional explanations of social
phenomena must be buttressed by specific accounts of the causal processes that
underly the postulated functional relationships.
The
Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by Robert Audi (Cambridge University
Press, 1995)