philosophy of social science

philosophy of social science, branch of philosophy that examines the concepts, methods, and logic of the social sciences. The philosophy of social science is consequently a metatheoretical endeavour—a theory about theories of social life. To achieve their end, philosophers of social science investigate both the practice of the social sciences and the nature of the entities that the social sciences study—namely, human beings themselves. The philosophy of social science can be broadly descriptive (unearthing the fundamental conceptual tools in social science and relating them to the tools employed in other human endeavours), prescriptive (recommending that a certain approach be adopted by the social sciences so that they can accomplish what the recommender thinks social science ought to accomplish), or some combination of the two.

Historically, many philosophers of social science have taken the basic question of their discipline to be whether the social sciences can be “scientific” in the same way that the natural sciences are. The approach that answers this question affirmatively is called naturalism, whereas that which answers it negatively is known as humanism, though a number of theories attempt to combine these two approaches. Given this framework, the term philosophy of social science is arguably misleading, because it suggests that the discipline is concerned with the social sciences insofar as they are sciences or scientific; thus the term seems to imply naturalism. To avoid this suggestion, practitioners sometimes denominate their field of inquiry: “philosophy of social inquiry” or “philosophy of social studies.” By whatever name the field is called, it ought to be clear that whether or how the study of human social behaviour is scientific is an open question that is part of the business of the philosopher of social sciences to address.

Naming the area to be studied “social studies” calls attention to how wide the field of inquiry into human behaviour and relations is. In addition to the core disciplines of economics, political science, anthropology, and sociology, the social studies also include such disparate disciplines as archaeology, demography, human geography, linguistics, social psychology, and aspects of cognitive science, among others. This should indicate the range of the field that the philosophy of social sciences encompasses and how diverse the questions, methods, concepts, and explanatory strategies are within the field.

Meanings and causes of human behaviour

Human actions can be described as self-evidently meaningful; they are typically performed for a purpose and express an intention, and they also often follow rules that make them the kinds of action they are. Thus, people do not simply move their limbs or emit sounds, they vote or marry or sell or communicate, and, when they do, their actions and relations appear to be different in kind from the behaviour of other animals, especially nonconscious animals (such as sponges). Philosophers mark this difference by saying that humans act, whereas entities that lack consciousness or that lack the capacity to form intentions merely move.

How should the interpretation of the meanings of actions fit into the study of human behaviour? Does it introduce elements that make such a study different in kind from studying entities whose movements are not meaningful? Those who give an affirmative answer to the latter of these questions insist that social science must either be an interpretive endeavour or must at least provide a role for the interpretation of meanings within it; for them, meaning is the central concept of the social sciences. German theorists of the late 19th century initially developed this line of thought by conceiving of social science as the study of “spirit” (Geisteswissenschaften). The term spirit harkens back to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), in which “spirit” referred in part to the broad intellectual and cultural dimensions of a people. Philosophers such as Heinrich Rickert and Wilhem Dilthey argued that human phenomena are the product of conscious and intentional beings who became so by means of enculturation (the assimilation of a culture, including its values and practices), and this means that the human sciences must concentrate on meaning and its interpretation as they attempt to understand human life.

This line of thought continued into the 20th century and beyond. Most notable was the application of hermeneutics to the study of human social life. The term hermeneutics derives from the Greek word hermeneuein (“to interpret”), which in turn comes from the Greek word for the god Hermes, who carried messages from the other gods. Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation, originally of written texts and later of all forms of human expression. It originated in the modern period in reflections on the interpretation of the Bible. A number of hermeneutical theories of the social sciences have been developed, the most significant being that of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, presented in his masterpiece Wahrheit und Methode (1960; Truth and Method), and that of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, discussed in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation (1981). Hermeneuticists argue that human actions are the expressions of ideas and feelings and as such are essentially meaningful phenomena. To understand them is more akin to interpreting a text or a painting than it is to dissecting the contents of a cell and the causes that produced them. Meaning, not cause, and understanding (meaning), not (causal) explanation, is the rallying point for philosophers of social science of this persuasion, though they offer varied accounts of what is entailed in interpreting meaning.

A cognate line of thinking developed largely in England and in the United States out of the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, as represented especially in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), a work that argued for the essentially social nature of linguistic meaning, which it parsed in terms of rule following. Analytic philosophers, most notably Peter Winch in The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (1958), applied this idea to the social sciences, hoping to show that the study of human beings involves a scheme of concepts and methods of analysis that are wholly unlike those in the natural sciences.

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Phenomenology is another branch of philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness of beings who are conscious and who know that they are. The German philosopher Edmund Husserl founded the phenomenological movement in the early 20th century. A number of important thinkers, most notably the American sociologist and philosopher Alfred Schutz and the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, developed Husserl’s insights, suitably changing and refining them to make them applicable to the study of human social life. Phenomenologists focus on the fact that human doings are consciously undertaken and are thus essentially intentional in character. They have an “inside” that phenomenologists argue cannot be ignored when they are studied. For this reason, humans cannot be studied in the way in which plants and molecules are; instead, the structures of human consciousness must be unearthed and shown how they are expressed in human relations and actions. Human acts are typically gestural in that they express some psychological state and cultural orientation, and much of what humans do is shaped by their culture and psychological states—motives, desires, goals, feelings, and moods as well as the life-world (the world as immediately or directly experienced), in which psychological beings necessarily exist. The study of human life consequently involves such things as empathy, attempting to relive what others have experienced and to grasp their subjective states, and the like. This way of thinking has underwritten a variety of approaches in the social sciences, the most well-known being ethnomethodology, a school of sociology formulated by the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel in his classic work Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). Ethnomethodology seeks to uncover the “taken-for-granted” structures of everyday life and to delineate how they are maintained and changed over time.

The social sciences that figure most saliently in humanist approaches, which centrally feature the interpretation of meaning and consciousness, are anthropology, history, and those parts of sociology that focus on the margins of mainstream society. The reason for this emphasis in sociology is that, when confronting the behaviour of those whose linguistic, cultural, and conceptual worlds are significantly different from their own, social analysts cannot ignore questions of meaning. Moreover, these disciplines strikingly confront a host of questions that trouble philosophers of social science, questions that are grouped around the topic of relativism (the doctrine that either experience, assessments of value, or even reality itself is a function of a particular conceptual scheme; these views are called, respectively, epistemological, moral, and ontological relativism).

But not all philosophers of social science believe that meaning is something on which the social sciences should focus. Despite the fact that human actions and relations are clearly meaningful on the surface, some philosophies of social science have denied that meaning ultimately has (or should have) a fundamental role to play in the social sciences. One of the most noteworthy of these approaches is behaviourism, which dispenses with inner mental states and cultural meanings altogether. Instead, human behaviour is conceived as a series of responses to external stimuli, responses that are regulated by the patterns of conditioning that have been inculcated into the organism.

Other approaches that deny that the interpretation of meaning is of fundamental import in the social sciences include systems theory and structuralism. Systems theory conceives of society as an entity each of whose various parts plays a certain role or performs a certain function in order to maintain society or to keep it in equilibrium; such roles are played by those who inhabit them, whether they know that they are doing so or not. Structuralism asserts that agents do not create the structure of meanings through which they act; rather, as social subjects, they are “created” by this structure, of which their acts are mere expressions. As a result, the purpose of social science is to unearth the elements of this structure and to reveal its inner logic. In both systems theory and structuralism, the meaning that behaviour has for those engaging in it is ultimately irrelevant to its explanation. Behaviourists, systems theorists, and structuralists base their approaches on the assumption that human behaviour is the result of prior causes in the same way that the behaviour of plants and animals is.