Philosophy of Social Science: Lecture 3, Interpretative Social Science
1. Basic Doctrines
The ‘standard model,’ well explicated by Rosenberg, sees explanation in the physical
sciences as causal, and analyses causality in terms of constant conjunction – that is, in
terms of events being brought under a covering law that states ‘if an event of type A
occurs, it is invariably followed by an event of type B.’ [‘Cyanide kills’ is, if it is a
causal law, analysed as ‘if someone drinks cyanide that person dies.’] Believers in this
view explain the gap between a full explanation and what we ordinarily proffer as an
explanation in terms of everyday speech involving explanation sketches: we know
that we could – but needn’t – fill out the explanation. Whence the first week’s
question whether there are ‘social laws’ and if so, what they are.
We’ve seen the immediate response to the search for ‘a real science of society’ so
construed: the denial that social life is or can be amenable to causal analysis: whence
the ‘cause vs meaning,’ controversy. It is difficult to provide a genuine historical
pedigree for the view that the Geisteswissenschaften [the sciences of ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’
or ‘culture’] are logically, conceptually, or categorically different from the
Naturwissenschaften because that lures us back to Vico and his Scienza Nuova and
then to Hobbes and Descartes. The simplest thought is that until there were some
nascent social sciences to argue about – 18th and 19th century political economy for
instance – the contrast is not easy to explicate. One important point to remember is
that the contrast between the cultural and the natural is not Mill’s contrast between
the ‘physical’ and the ‘moral.’ I evade the history of ideas by saying a very little about
Weber and verstehen – only to contrast him with both Marx and Durkheim – then leap
headlong to Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science
a. Weber held that the object of social science was to explain actions to
which a social meaning is attributed by the actors under investigation;
Weber thought this implied methodological individualism and meant that
there was no clear boundary between history and sociology. Weber
distinguishes between explanations adequate on the level of meaning and
explanations adequate on the level of causality. (As shall I at the end of
this lecture.) The contrasts between meaningless and meaningful, and
between causal adequacy and intelligibility are not difficult to draw. We
could (though it is hard to say why) give an account of metal tokens
passing from hand to hand, but only when we know that the pieces of
metal count as coins can we know that someone is paying someone for a
good they have bought. Again, you may see me insult a colleague and ask
why I did it; I say he insulted my wife and thereby achieve meaningadequacy; but if I have no wife it can’t really be the cause and fails the
causal-adequacy test. Weber’s emphasis on meaning-adequacy is what is
much-discussed as the doctrine of Verstehen. And his emphasis on causal
adequacy is exceedingly good sense.
b. There are many puzzles about Verstehen; is it a form of ‘empathetic’
understanding, and if not, what; does it play a basic role, or is it only a
decorative supplement to ‘real’ explanations. Weber was eager to avoid
what he thought of as Idealism (the thought that history is driven by
thought) – see The Protestant Ethic – but it remains unclear quite where
the verstehende level fits.
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c. What is clear is that Weber thought the Durkheimian determination to
produce causal accounts that did not invoke social meanings or individual
intentions was a non-starter. (Not that Durkheim really manages to do it:
contrast the methodological prescriptions of Suicide with the text of the
explanations.) And Weber thought that vulgar Marxism, with its insistence
on deterministic ‘iron laws’ was a non-starter. (Not that this is the only
interpretation of which Marx is susceptible.) So, one interesting question is
whether a Winchian/Taylorian emphasis on the role of interpretation in
social science picks up the practice of real sociology – as many of us think
– or is wholly at odds with sociological practice – as Gellner, for instance,
thought. This requires us to look for the most satisfactory interpretation of
what interpretivism maintains.
d. Winch, recapitulated, holds the following views: that social science
explanation rests on the concept of meaning not that of cause, or in the
diluted form, that the social sciences rely more on meaning than cause;
what an action means is given by the local way of life; there is no higher
court of appeal beyond that of the local way of life in assigning a meaning
to an action; that is, practitioners say what counts as a move in chess, a
part of the mass, a dishonourable advance to a lady, and so on. What this
entails for the practice of the social sciences is importantly and on Winch’s
account, nothing. It’s important to see why nothing follows by
distinguishing two concepts of methodology: in the first, we offer
cookbook recipes to people doing research, and their practice is the
immediate focus; in the second, we discuss the meaning of the results.
Winch’s views affect the second, not the first. On Winch’s view,
Durkheim’s belief that social facts are things and operate coercively upon
individuals must be false because it is an ontological claim in the second
category; but the injunction in the Rules of Sociological Method to ‘treat
social facts as things’ may be less obviously bad advice, because it may be
that we ought to collect and analyse data in that spirit. Still, it must follow
that Durkheim’s ambition in Suicide to explain differential suicide rates in
different countries by means of ‘suicidogenic currents’ is misguided.
e. What follows? That the identification of action in the first instance is given
by the conceptual schema of the way of life investigated. Less follows
about the explanation of the action so identified. A particular step in the
celebration of Mass is identified by reference to the prescribed way of
celebrating Mass; at one level, the explanation of that step is also
explained by reference to the Mass, and the Mass is what the worshippers
say it is. But nothing follows about the answer to such questions as: why
do people celebrate Mass at all; why are there religions at all, in any
society – if indeed there is a religion in some particular society? Why do
some societies have no sense of the numinous and others a strong sense of
it? Now, it’s clear enough that the say-so of the local priests etc is decisive
about what follows step by step in the Mass; but equally clear that they
have no authority over comparative anthropology while Mary Douglas, in
Natural Symbols, might tell one a bit.
2. Sophisticated Versions
a. Winch paints a broad brush picture, dependent rather heavily on setting up
a Mill-like account of a causal naturalism as the stalking horse. It’s clear
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that any idea of explaining the Mass by looking for correlations between
drinking glasses of wine and then kneeling down would be foolish, and
that Winch is quite right that i) we need to identify actions before we can
think about generalisations, and ii) we have to do that using a lot of
background knowledge that amounts to interpreting the local cultural
setting.
b. But this leaves two questions: first whether there are ways of
explaining how interpretive explanation works, and second what backing
to interpretive explanations we can arrive at. The first question leads
towards the discussion of the fussion of horizons, a notion associated with
Gadamer’s Truth and Method. No discussion of Gadamer can do justice to
the subtlety of the way he thought, but the elementary suggestion is this:
when we look at a painting from another epoch, a Giotto fresco for
instance, we try to put ourselves in a situation in which we think we can
see the painting as the artist saw it. To understand it ‘from the inside’ we
must fuse the horizon of our understanding of the world with his. We can’t
know that we have done this successfully – this is the sociological version
of the hermeneutic circle – since there is no third place to stand. The
difficulty with Gadamer’s idea in practice is that it suggests what one
might call a quietist methodology; we are to learn from them, not to think
they were irrational or superstitious or whatever. It is this Habermas, for
instance, will not accept, and that leads him to reject a Gadamerian
interpretivism.
c. As to backings, we might take one of three views. The first is to deny
the need for them. If we today understand Giotto as he understood his own
work, we have done all we can – we may ask different questions about the
paintings and about him, but within that circle of explanation we know
what there is to be known. The second is to suggest that we can change the
subject; within the conventions of art, the religious beliefs of the day, and
the techniques that a painter had available, we can ask why the subject
matter, style, audience and patrons were chosen as they were. We don’t in
a narrow sense improve our understanding of the painting, but we improve
our understanding of the act of painting it. The third is to suggest a more
radical change of subject; we can ask large questions about the economic,
political, and other causes of the evolution of styles of painting and of
these paintings in particular. Habermas, for one, seems to argue that
Gadamer restricts us in such a way that we cannot ask these third sorts of
question.
3. Complaints
a. Gellner objects that Winch’s account of what social science can do simply
restricts the activities of social scientists in a way they couldn’t tolerate.
This may or may not be true.
b. A common objection from Gellner and Hollis is that prioritising the say-so
of the folk on the ground does not have the consequences Winch thinks.
Thus, if the natives come to say they were mistaken but we may not
second guess them, we either have the view that in following their view we
deny their view or in denying their view we follow their view. (Imagine a
member of the Azande announcing that they used to believe in the witch
oracle but now they don’t; if Winch is right and the meaning of what they
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believed is unchallengeable, then the present Azande are wrong; but the
theory says that the native informants are right…) There are in fact some
elegant examples of native informants holding views that are much more
sophisticated than the simple ‘form of life’ account can cope with.
c. Much else is hard to pin down. Habermas objects that Gadamer forbids a
critical social science; but it is not obvious that this is true. One may think
with Charles Taylor mode that the interpretative exploration of a way of
life shows up its flaws, so that a critically empathetic stance is not only
possible but so commonplace as to be almost inevitable. There are large
questions about whether the explanatory stance from which we judge a
practice as irrational is to come from inside or outside the practice itself,
and another large question whether the ‘inside/outside’ distinction is
ultimately viable or only an initial shorthand device. Of course, sometimes
there is a simple jurisdictional answer – Catholicism possesses a means of
deciding what is to believed by Catholics de fide – but can there be a
jurisdictional answer to the question of what counts as a religion at all?
d. But the widest objection is simply that it shortcuts the possibilities of
explanation. Gellner always held that a loose functionalism was
inescapable in social science, and thought that Winch had ruled it out a
priori. Winch thought he had not done so; but then it becomes hard to see
what we are arguing about. Or, again, we may agree that some sort of
interpretation is needed even if we go on to invoke rational-choice in our
explanation of why people are doing what they do – thus, we know we
aren’t to count sneezes and sniffles as actions, we know that this is a game
of Monopoly and not the real thing, we know that it’s a church service not
a party… but we then go on to explain the activities in terms of utilitymaximisation.
e. And it can shortcut the full sophistication of actors on the ground; we talk
about the beliefs of the Azande, but do we have a clear view of what we
are after? To infer that the Azande ‘believe in witches’ because they
employ a witch-detector to discover whose fault it is that someone is ill
may be a bit quick. Quesalid the shaman in Levi-Strauss’s account, has a
wonderfully complicated atttude towards his own success as a healer. To
engage in a simple ‘in the practice/outside the practice’ dichotomisation
loses that subtlety.
4. Compromises
a. The object is to explain why things do and don’t happen; interpretaivism
tells us how to identify what happens rather than why. This means that
‘dualists’ like Lessnoff have to say something about how the interpretation
gets into the causality of the happening. Many do not.
b. The answer is to rely on Popper’s concept of ‘the thing to do.’ When
explaining human behavior we show that what an agent does is the thing to
do (or a botched attempt at it.) There is no a priori limit on the ways in
which something can be the thing to do, and the concept itself is a matter
of modal logic not ethics. (The thing to do if you want to be an effective
cut-throat is to start by getting a really sharp knife…) This is situational
logic and covers the various sorts of Weberian rationality.
c. But, there is a superfluity of things to do in any given situation and too
many ways of explaining conduct as ‘the thing to do.’ So the final thing to
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insist on is that the interpretation is the one with the causal purchase on
events. In which case, it isn’t a conflict between cause and meaning but an
insistence that cause runs through meaning – this produces dualism in one
sense because it invokes an emphasis on perspectives, but monism in
another because it insists that explanations adduce causes.
d. The advantage of the compromise position is that it leaves open the great
subject of ‘adduced causes’ versus ‘real causes,’ and with it issues of
deception, self-deception, ideology and much else; only if we avoid
drawing too sharp a contrast between reasons and causes can we even raise
such issues – which are evidently central to the study of politics. Take any
piece of political science research and you can dissect it for ‘thing to do’
explanations embedded in other accounts of why something was, or
seemed to be, the thing to do, how people acquire their beliefs and how
they acquire their values.
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