The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Lewis White Beck
*
The “Natural Science Ideal” in the Social
Sciences
Scientific Monthly,
68 (6June 1949, 386-394
THE ORIGIN OF THE “NATURAL
SCIENCE IDEAL”
IMAGINE a man who builds a house like the
Joneses, at considerable inconvenience to himself because actually he needs
something quite different. As soon as
he gets the foundations laid, the Joneses begin tearing down parts of their
house, adding new wings, and overhauling its foundations.
Our poor social climber has committed
himself; he has to continue to build according to his plans whether he likes
them or not. To comfort himself, he
says he has the kind of house the Joneses have and ignores the fact that they
are doing a big job of renovating.
This little fable of keeping up with the Joneses
fits the relations existing until a short time ago between the social and the
natural sciences. The climbers, the
social scientists, have tried to imitate the Joneses, the natural scientists.
Now the social sciences have an
immense house much of which is not very useful; it lacks many of the modern
conveniences; but it seems to be scientific, just the same, and that often
seems to be enough. But the social
scientist might be far happier in his house, or he might be more successful in
renovating it to meet modern needs, if he gave up pursuing the past glory of
the great edifice of nineteenth-century physics.
When splitting off from philosophy in order to
become scientific, the social studies took a bad moment to imitate the natural
sciences. They did so just before the
natural sciences themselves began to undergo major changes.
The result is that many social
scientists pride themselves on being natural scientists or regret that they
cannot be, whereas the science they emulate or would like to emulate became
obsolescent fifty years ago.
In imitating the natural sciences, the social
sciences attempted to follow both the methods and the metaphysics of the
former. The social studies tried to
attend only to observable and measurable entities and to connect these by
simple causal or functional laws. If
the social scientists thought that they were like the natural scientists in
studying “reality,” they became mechanists or materialists.
If they feared equating their verified
hypotheses with “reality,” as many natural scientists did, they became
positivists. In either case they took
over ready-made philosophies of the nature of scientific objects.
But there was no unanimity on the
philosophical foundations current among the natural scientists, and the “unity
of the natural sciences,” by virtue of which they might have served as an
unequivocal model, was an illusion even before the death of Comte.
The social sciences, therefore, neither emerged
from, nor could they later merge into, a homogeneous body of natural science
doctrine. The natural science ideal,
which many social scientists wished to pursue but which was vehemently
rejected by others, was much more ambiguous than it appeared to be in the work
of Comte and Spencer. By the time of
Dilthey, with his emphasis on the function of sympathetic imagination in
social studies, the opposition of the natural and the social sciences was
predicated upon an almost complete misunderstanding of the methodological
foundations and metaphysical implications of the natural sciences.
It would have been much more to the
point to have compared the status of the new social sciences with that reached
by physics in the time of Galileo than to compare these nascent sciences with
a physics already showing signs of passing through the change of life.
The contrasts between explanation and
description, between nomothetic and ideographic procedures, and between the
ideals of a beschreibende and a verstehende psychology were not
so much contrasts between the natural science ideal and the ideals perhaps
more germane to the social studies, as they were signs of problems which every
science, whether it be natural or social, must face in the early stages of its
development.
It is consequently beside the point to contrast
the natural and the social sciences in the language used in the early part of
this century. Neither the
* Dr. Beck (Ph.D., Duke, 1937) who has taught
philosophy at Emory University, the University of Delaware, and at George
Washington University, is now professor of philosophy at Lehigh.
His article is based on a lecture he gave last year before the Delaware
Psychological Association.
386
natural nor the social sciences were homogeneous
bodies of doctrine in simple conflict with each other.
No clear-cut decision could have been
intelligently made between the alternative of following or rejecting the
natural science ideal. There were
analogous conflicts within both bodies of knowledge between opposing
strategies. In each case these
conflicts have been resolved in analogous ways during the present century.
There is now a continuity of method
and philosophy in the two branches of science that could not have been dreamed
of even by the most naturalistic of social scientists of the time of Spencer,
because this continuity is a consequence of a rapprochement in which
both sciences have actively participated. We
shall see this in detail throughout this essay; at the moment let it suffice
to mention the vocabularies of the two. It
would not be possible, upon looking into the index of a scientific book, to
tell whether it was a book on natural or social science if it contained only
the following entries: constitution, dimension, experiment, field, migration,
population, prediction, probability, space, statistics, vector.
And the list of common terms is
growing year by year.
It would be going too far to say that there is
no difference between the two groups of sciences, but we should not
overemphasize their differences, as was frequently done early in the century,
or underestimate them, as has been fashionable since then.
It is sound scientific procedure to
substitute differences of degree for differences in kind whenever apparent
differences in kind can be interpreted as consequences of variation of some
common factor. The common variable
that I believe will account for both the unmistakable differences and the
current rapprochements between the natural and the social sciences is
“complexity of subject matter.” It is
my belief that the major differences between them are due to the greater
complexity of the subject matter of the social sciences, and that differences
of method and interpretation of results are due primarily to awareness of this
difference.
If this is correct, we should be able to test it
empirically, by seeing whether the social sciences, when they deal with simple
subject matters, are able to approach the natural science methods, and whether
the natural sciences, when, they deal with complex subject matters,
appropriate social science methods. Let
us, then, turn to an examination of their respective subject matters in order
to answer the question: Will
differences in complexity account for differences in their observational,
experimental, and conceptual techniques?
SUBJECT MATTER OF
NATURAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
When we think of the social sciences as only the
“poor relations” of the natural sciences, we forget that an insight into the
order of society was prior to that into nature.
Every primitive people sees nature by
an analogy with its social organization. Science
began when laws, like those given by governments and tribunals, were projected
into nature.
The great Greek philosophers approached nature
with the anticipation that it would conform to simple principles, some aspects
of their society providing them a model for the interpretation of nature.
Anaximander (ca. 550 B. C.), in
an epoch-making analogy, held that changes in nature are regulated by
justice, anticipating the function later ascribed to laws.
Henceforth nature was to be seen
as a cosmos.
But in searching for regularity and simplicity
and lawfulness, the philosophers and early scientists found that they had to
work with abstractions from observations and not with complex observations
themselves. From the time of Galileo,
at the latest, we feel that the “right abstractions” were made, because he
chose to report those aspects of his observations which could be related to
each other by simple mathematical laws.
Since Galileo, the subject matter of the natural
sciences has been relatively simple and repetitive series of simple events.
Such series are repetitive because
they can be isolated from many other events and understood without reference
to them. The natural sciences deal
with isolated systems, because the variables they choose to observe are
controllable by means of varying other chosen variables.
Solely for this reason are simple
experiments possible. Only a small
number of variables have to be known for us to give functional laws relating
one to another.
Certainly every event in nature is related to
untold number of others, perhaps even to every-
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thing else in nature.
But by abstraction and material
isolation, we are able to reduce the effects of most of the others to
negligible quantities, and to attend only to the functional relations of
certain chosen events. In the natural
sciences, lack of repetitiveness in a series of events, as this occurs when an
experiment “turns out wrong,” is always taken as evidence that the systems
were not isolated, and we thereupon carry through a process of successive
approximations toward complete isolation.
Nature not only has serial orders which can be
studied in relative isolation; the things of nature also come in “vertical”
arrangements, or wholes with contemporaneous parts.
Field concepts, rather than merely
serial concepts, apply to this aspect of nature.
Because we can isolate systems, we can
determine the boundaries of these fields, and eliminate the factors which
would make our study of a given whole unmanageably complex.
By moving the “isolation partitions,”
we can determine experimentally the effects of parts on wholes and wholes on
parts, even though we never deal with an entity which is not a part of some
whole.
The subject matter of the social sciences, on
the other hand, consists of highly complex constellations of complex events in
systems that are only poorly isolated. Instead
of indistinguishable atoms, as the chemist considers his subject matter, the
social scientist must deal with societies of individuals of almost infinite
internal complexity and variability. No
one has yet made the fortunate discovery comparable to that of Galileo in
physics: though we know that science cannot deal with an unlimited number of
variables, no social scientist has yet shown us precisely which ones to choose
to interrelate and which ones may be safely neglected.
When we try to isolate systems in the social
sciences, we therefore do not know what to include in them and what to try to
eliminate. We cannot move our
partition boundaries at will, because the contexts within which we find human
beings are not variable to such an extent that we can try out many different
wholes for a single part. We cannot
isolate a child from all social environments to see where the partition
between eliminable and noneliminable environmental factors should be drawn.
Until we do so, however, we have no
generally acceptable rule by which we can decide what factors to include in
our descriptions of the relevant environment or social field.
We have parts always within wholes;
and, though the social sciences have advanced on the basis of this
recognition, which has often in the past not been given sufficient weight, it
is hard to specify the relevant part-whole relation because it always
obtains.
Let us not overlook the fact that these
differences are differences of degree, and that as the social sciences
approach the stage where they may be able to decide which few variables may be
most profitably observed, the natural sciences are undergoing developments of
techniques for taking more and more variables into account.
It is now recognized that the high
regularities of the physical sciences are only statistically simple; as the
physical scientist gets closer to the individual object, as it were, the
complexities that had been neglected before reappear.
Instead of attending only to serial
collocations of simple events, the physicist is now finding it necessary, in
spite of all his efforts, to deal with field concepts and probabilities as
ineluctable parts of his conceptual system. We
should not forget that “statistics” is originally a concept and technique of
social science, and its use in physical science signifies an often overlooked
appropriation of social science methodology.
OBSERVATIONAL
TECHNIQUE IN NATURAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Observation in the natural sciences differs
widely from that of everyday life. Most
observations in natural science are instrumental results, usually observations
of pointer readings. The major part of
natural science work is not the taking of observations, but deciding what to
observe and constructing instruments to make the observation.
The observations of the natural
scientist, therefore, are never the raw data or brute facts of common sense;
they come to him already conceptually transformed and instrumentally
abstracted from irrelevancies. They
are what Loewenberg has aptly called “postanalytical data.”
In getting these postanalytical data,
the scientific instrument reduces the subjective contribution of the observer
almost to zero and “narrows the field of vision” to a specific observable
event uniquely correlated with some unobservable we are interested in
measuring.
Until about a century ago, observations in the
social sciences hardly differed at all from those of everyday life.
The student of social phenomena
observed the phenomena of society as a physician would observe a patient if he
had no thermometer or laboratory reports. The
data of the social studies were “preanalytical.”
Where the contribution from the object
ended and that from the observer began, no one could tell.
Because there was no standardized instrument to narrow the field of
vision to specific and relevant phenomena, the facts of so-
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cial science might vary from common-sense
observations to the narrow observations of a man with an idée fixe.
The facts of the social studies
were about as objective as journalistic observation, and no science could be
based on such unstable and disputable facts.
As the social studies became scientific, they
did so in part by the use of instruments. Usually
these were not “brass instruments,” but conceptual devices that served
comparable purposes - reducing the subjective contribution to observations,
and abstracting the desired observable from irrelevant data normally given
along with it. But these conceptual
devices served the same purpose as physical instruments: they gave an
indisputable post-analytical datum which seemed to be uniquely correlated with
some vague preanalytic observation or with some wholly unobservable entity in
which the scientist was interested.
Consider an intelligence test, perhaps the most
nearly perfect of all social science instruments.
For a quality not directly observable
but the object of many common-sense judgments, the test substitutes a
postanalytical datum, a ratio between two observed quantities, namely, age and
a set of marks on a paper. The set of
marks and this ratio are obtained by standardized and conventional procedures.
“Intelligence” is not only measured by
this instrument; it is operationally defined by the methods used to measure
it. Until the test is devised,
“intelligence” is not a part of scientific vocabulary at all.
Even with this instrument, the results still
differ widely in scientific standing from those obtained with, say, a
galvanometer. The galvanometer
substitutes a postanalytical datum, a number, for a preanalytical datum, the
shock we all feel when we hold a wire under some conditions.
The galvanometer standardizes the
conditions, eliminates subjective differences between observers, disregards
irrelevancies such as the “appearance” of the circuit, and gives us a “hard”
and indisputable datum. With a
galvanometer, we can forget all about the original shock we felt.
But with an intelligence test, we
still think that it is measuring something that we already knew about, and if
its results conflict too widely with those of our common sense, we decide the
instrument must be changed. The social
scientist simply does not trust his instruments as much as the natural
scientist trusts his. The social
scientist rightly reserves some insight against the reduction that his
instrument would effect. However much
the instruments of social science localize and control the subjective
contribution to observations, the design, choice, and evaluation of
instruments still depend upon the same kind of insight that social
philosophers have always possessed or claimed; otherwise the results of
instrumental observation may be very neat and elegant, but they have no
noticeable relevance to the prescientific problems which led to the
development of these, rather than other instruments.
Hence the social scientist, equipped with the
finest batteries of tests, is still in the position of the legendary people
who wished to weigh a pig very accurately. They
planed the board to which the pig was to be tied until it was of identical
thickness, measured in “milli-micro-mulahs,” throughout its length; they used
as counterweights stones whose sphericity had been established within limits
of one “milli-micro-mulah” they carefully balanced the pig and board against
the stones - then they asked the first stranger who came along to estimate the
weight of the stones.
Because the operational definitions of the
objects of natural science are applied to terms of no great emotional
significance, and are definitions of which there are no counterparts in
everyday language, we tend to forget that the way in which the natural
scientist has obtained them is logically not unlike that of the social
scientist or the legendary pig-weighers. The
natural scientist’s objects themselves do not determine what aspects shall be
observed. The instruments he uses are
extensions or projections of the questions he asks.
With other questions, there would be
other instruments and other data. The
choice of his instruments is not ultimately determined by the object, but by
the kind of answers he wants. In this
respect he is exactly like the social scientist.
But here, again, the natural scientist knows
better what he is looking for. As he
is interested in correlating his data in simple functional laws, he is
interested only in an instrument whose reading will be a variable in an
equation by which he can predict what the reading on another instrument will
be. He uses only those types of
instruments which will give him such results; even further, he uses only those
specific instruments which will give him those results, and sends the
others to the shop. The social
scientist, however, is lucky
389
if he possesses even a single instrument for
getting data. Outside a few fields,
such as that of factor analysis in psychometrics, he must correlate his
instrumental results with his vague common-sense preanalytical observations;
he therefore has little or no check on the accuracy of his instruments.
In consequence, although the
introduction of instruments into the armory of social sciences has given
intersubjectively valid data which the social scientist did not formerly have,
it has not permitted him to state categorically what is the conceptual
significance of his results. He must
still “estimate the weight of the stones.”
Hence observation in both the natural and the
social sciences necessarily involves a subjective element of choice of
observable variables. But, whereas in
the natural sciences this choice is constantly modifiable by reference to
other chosen observations, in the social sciences the choice is usually
corrigible only by reference to the “enlightened common sense” of the
observer, which tells one social scientist (but unfortunately often him alone)
what weight is to be attached to the results, which observations are worth
getting, and which ones are not. We
can see the reason for this in the differences in complexity of the sciences:
the instrumental “sieving” of the facts of nature is very precise and
fine-grained, whereas the facts of society are large-grained and recalcitrant
to narrow abstractive procedures, whether instrumental or conceptual.
EXPERIMENTAL TECHNIQUES IN THE NATURAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Often the contrast between the natural and the
social sciences is as succinctly drawn as that between experimental and
observational sciences. But there are
nonexpenimental natural sciences, and there are experiments in the social
sciences. This contrast, therefore, is
not perfect; but it throws light on another consequence of the different
complexity of the two kinds of science.
The natural sciences, as we have said, can
establish physically isolated systems in which only a small number of
variables play a significant role; therefore, an experimental determination of
their correlation is possible. The
social sciences cannot physically or temporally isolate their subjects.
Though experiments may be performed under conditions of imperfect
isolation, neither in physics nor in sociology would we know how much of the
object we were experimenting with. The
physicist can meet this objection by moving his partition boundaries; the
sociologist cannot. An experiment on
children puts the boundary, let us say, at 9: 00 AM, in a classroom; but the
previous history of the child, the home conditions, the hereditary conditions,
and so on are uncontrolled variables from which the subjects of the experiment
are by no means isolated. The
social scientist, therefore, has to perform the same experiment over and over
again with the idea that the uncontrolled variables will be randomly
distributed in the series and thus cancel each other out.
Hence in the experiments of social
science there is a large inductive element lacking in the interpretation of
good experiments in the natural sciences.
In recent years the social scientists,
especially Lewin, have developed techniques for deriving results from only one
or a very small number of experimental situations.
This is possible when there are a
large number of variables within the “field,” so that some interconnection
between them can be found and little or no recourse has to be made to
relatively unknown variables outside the field.
Work of this kind, in which the
conceptual apparatus is adequate to the complexity of the subject matter, is
one of the most encouraging signs of a further affiliation between the natural
and the social science techniques. In
contrast, when the external trappings of a natural science experiment are
imitated so that only a few highly abstract data are obtained, the lack of
isolation of the variables being measured really prevents the experiment from
being comparable to those of the natural sciences.
There is another difference between the
experiments of the two branches of science which is dependent upon differences
in their complexity. Isolation from
the operator is difficult to achieve in the social sciences; the adventitious
circumstances of the experimental setup, the isolation partitions themselves,
function as significant causal variables. From
the experimental results we can extrapolate to “normal situations” only with a
wide margin of error, since these variables may be very important in the
experiment and wholly absent in the situation we wish to make predictions
about.
In experiments in natural sciences, the
experimental situation is comparable to the normal, or at least the effects of
the experimental situation can usually be estimated and conceptually
eliminated. Certainly putting a new
meter into a functioning circuit affects the circuit as a whole, but this
effect can be measured in other experiments on the meter itself and we can
eliminate the interference.
As the physical sciences come to deal more and
more with the “individual physical object” - e.g.,
390
a single particle - it is found that the
experimental conditions may play a more disturbing role which cannot be
eliminated. The Heisenberg principle of uncertainty is illustrative of this
comparatively unusual situation in the natural sciences, but one very common
in the social. The study of individual
members of a population of electrons may suffer from many of the same
disabilities as the study of human individuals in society.
As physics turns its attention to the
complexities of the individual case, and sociology finds itself able to deal
with large numbers of cases, their operational conditions and results become
more nearly comparable.
Each science begins with “middle-sized” facts,
those which are within range of convenient observation.
The middle-sized facts of physics have
a specious simplicity because individual differences have been statistically
canceled out; if physics, like the human sciences, had begun with the
individual case, it is likely that it would have made no more rapid progress
than sociology. The middle-sized fact
of sociology is the small community, and this is more complex and variable
than the individual particle in physics.
As sociology approaches statistically evened-out states of affairs, it
may approach the simplicity of classical physics, which dealt only with its
evened-out, middle-sized facts.
THEORETICAL
STRUCTURE OF THE NATURAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
The differences between the theoretical
structures of the natural and the social sciences are even more obviously
contingent: upon differences of complexity in their subject matter.
We shall see this in two respects: the
parsimony of the two systems, and the modes of explanation in the two systems.
First, a word about the theoretical structure of
any science. In scientific research
there are three types of hypotheses functioning.
First, there is the substantive
hypothesis, the hypothesis being tested. Second,
there is an operational hypothesis, stating that if such and such
things are done, such and such observable results should be attained, provided
the substantive hypothesis is true. The
operational hypothesis is always formulated as a basis for experiment or
observation, and it is chosen in the light of the substantive hypothesis we
wish to test. Finally, there are
collateral hypotheses, which are not being tested at the moment, but which
provide the route by which the mind moves from the substantive to the choice
of the operational hypothesis.
To illustrate these hypotheses, let us take an
exceedingly simple example. We
have the substantive hypothesis “Salt is soluble in water.”
We test it by performing an experiment
based on an operational hypothesis: “If I put the crystals from this bottle
into water, they will disappear.” How
do we move from the former to the latter hypothesis, by which it is to be
tested? We do so by means of certain
collateral hypotheses, viz., “These crystals are salt,” “This liquid is
water.”
A given hypothesis is not inherently substantive
while another is always collateral. We
may subject any one of them to test. In
our previous example, for instance, we could test the hypothesis “These
crystals are salt,” using the other hypothesis, “Salt is soluble in water,” as
collateral.
When an observational result differs from the
prediction from a set of hypotheses, it is always possible to choose whether
we shall consider (a) the operational hypothesis to have failed
(experimental error); (b) the substantive hypothesis, the one we
intended to test, to be wrong; or (c) some collateral hypothesis, by
virtue of which we choose this experiment, to be in error (systematic error).
If we decide on the first alternative, we are in
effect “testing a fact by a theory.” This
is sometimes necessary in even the best-organized sciences in order to avoid
renegade instances and to give credit to the obvious fact that not all
observations are equally trustworthy. But
science becomes dogmatic if this procedure is always followed, because then
there can be no occasion to modify a theory once adopted.
We have already seen the difficulty of
eliminating experimental error in the social sciences, and consequently in
them frequent recourse is had to this expedient; if the result is not as
predicted, we can always say that there were disturbing and uncontrolled
factors, or the observer was inaccurate, or the like.
Assuming that the experiment has been done well,
we then have a choice as to which of the other hypotheses is to be modified or
rejected. In the natural sciences this
choice can be made by performing still other experiments involving different
collateral hypotheses (in our example, we could use crystals from another
bottle), or by undertaking other experiments in which the collateral
hypothesis is tested without reference to the hy-
391
pothesis in which we were originally interested.
(In our example, we could undertake a
chemical analysis of the crystals in the bottle to see if they are sodium
chloride.) The result of this
multiplicity of approach is that in the natural sciences there need be no
untestable hypotheses, and every well-performed experiment is crucial for
some hypothesis in the body of the science.
Because of the complexity of each hypothesis in
the social sciences, testing seriatim is rarely possible.
For instance, we wish to determine the existence or nonexistence of
racial differences in intelligence. We
give a test to a group of children of different races.
Their marks differ significantly.
Does that prove the hypothesis that
there are significant differences? Not
unless we assume the collateral hypothesis, namely, that the test is
independent of cultural differences. Can
we test that experimentally? Only by
devising a test in which the different cultural groups make approximately the
same marks. But usually we cannot
independently control the racial and cultural components; therefore, we do not
know which hypothesis - a hypothesis about our particular intelligence test,
or a hypothesis about the intelligence of different races- -must be rejected.
Because some assumptions are untested in our
experiment, there will be disagreement about them.
The result is that we have “schools”
of psychology and sociology (e.g., “racial theories” and “cultural theories”)
that are distinguished by disagreement about collateral hypotheses which
function as “presuppositions.” Crucial
experiments which might resolve controversies between schools are thus almost
unknown in the social sciences. The
route by which we move from a substantive hypothesis to an observation or
experiment is so circuitous, and involves so many assumptions, that
experiments can usually be cited equally well by both sides in a controversy.
The hypotheses of the natural sciences are so
simple that they can be tested seriatim; those of the social sciences are so
complex and interpenetrating that we have to take them in families.
Nevertheless, here again the
difference is one of degree, and recent science is narrowing the distance
between the two theoretical structures. The
natural scientist now realizes that no hypothesis can be tested without
assuming others, and ultimately a circle in testing is completed.
There now exist in physics several
alternative families of hypotheses in which the circle has been completed.
All the observations of one are
translatable into results of the other, though the two sets are not logically
equivalent, and future observations may lead to decision between them.
At present, the choice must be made in
terms of their relative parsimony. Yet
the estimation of the degree of parsimony involves aesthetic, procedural, and
subjective considerations of elegance, ease of inference, and the like.
The philosophy of science during this
century has largely emphasized subjective elements in even the most objective
sciences, and we find a prominent physicist speaking of science as “nature
refracted through human nature.” If
the subject matter of physics were as complex as that of the social sciences,
this human refractivity and selectivity would be more obvious than it is.
If the subject matter of physics
permitted the same variety of abstractions to be parsimoniously organized, it
is likely that the conceptual structure of the natural sciences might appear
as arbitrary as that of sociology or political science.
Finally, we come to the general strategy of
explanation in the two branches of science. I
do not refer to the age-old problem of mechanical vs. teleological
explanation, for this metaphysical controversy appears in both types of
science. I refer rather to the logic
of explanation. In the natural
sciences, the chief mode of explanation is description of the more pervasive
and abstract features of the situation, whereby prima-facie different states
of affairs are described in the same terms. For
instance, a freely falling body and the moon are special cases falling under
Newton’s laws. Explanation in the
natural sciences is therefore analytic or reductive, through discovery of
common and simple conditions of diverse effects whose prima-facie description
would involve a very large vocabulary. Hence
a phenomenon in chemistry is explained when it is described in the simpler
terms of physics; the motions of the planets and of bodies rolling down an
inclined plane are explained when a common set of variables is discovered in
the description of each phenomenon.
Certainly this relation between explanation and
description is met with also in the social sciences.
We would, for instance, describe war
and migration in quite diverse terms; but we might explain them in terms of a
condition not obvious in either but underlying both, e.g., “population
pressure.” We shall, in the following
section, deal with the limits of this type of explanation as one of the
unsolved problems in the logic of the social sciences.
Still, it must be admitted that at
least at present the common mode of explanation in the social sciences is not
reductive and analytic, but synthetic. That
is, we predict some event in terms of psychology alone; but for more complex
events we have to add to the psychological causes suffi
392
cient factors to get to the effect we actually
find. Thus we say that we must attend
not only to the psychological conditions, but draw in also the sociological,
the economic, and the like. What would
be called explanation in the natural sciences is all too often seen as
“oversimplification” in the social sciences.
The extent to which reductive techniques should
be universally employed, especially in psychology in its relation to
physiology, is one of the crucial problems in the philosophy of social
science. Just as physiological
description is translated into physiological explanation, it is often held
that the logically simpler is everywhere the explanation of the more complex,
and psychology must be “reduced” to physiology.
If this is the case, then of course
there is no autonomous social science; it is simply a division of labor to be
tolerated only until the natural sciences are able to effect a reduction.
Such reducibility, if it exists,
strengthens the thesis that the difference between the two branches of science
lies in their differing complexity. The
argument of the reductionist is that in the future the natural sciences will
become better able to deal with states of affairs of high complexity, and the
social sciences will have succeeded in conceptually diminishing the complexity
of societal facts, so that the transition can be made.
At present it cannot be done, perhaps
because of the great disparity in degrees of complexity.
Whether it can and should be done is
one of the unsolved problems to which we now turn.
SOME UNRESOLVED
QUESTIONS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE STRATEGY
There are two problems we have lightly touched
on, but which deserve more than passing notice even in a brief discussion.
The first is strictly metaphysical:
Are there any indigenous and
irreducible categories of societal nature (e.g., culture, personality) that
will successfully resist all attempts at reduction?
Is the only difference between
societal and natural reality a difference in complexity?
I have called this question metaphysical rather
than scientific, for, whatever answer we give to it, the effect on scientific
procedure will be the same. Different
answers to this question will affect only the philosophical evaluation of the
findings and procedures of the social sciences.
Admitting irreducible categories would
not in the least exempt the social scientist from reducing all that he can in
order to increase the likelihood that the remaining ones are
irreducible and not simply nonreduced. He
would still do everything in his power to diminish the scope and importance of
the not-yet-reduced concepts. Following
the principle of parsimony, he would and should try to account for as much as
possible by means of reductive explanation.
Analogous questions are met with in the natural
sciences. The world of nature is not
prima facie homogeneous, but has manifold discontinuities, levels of
organization, and emergent properties. Acceptance
of these with “natural piety” would have arrested the development of science.
Yet the natural scientist does not
have to explain them away in order to be scientific; he has only to attempt to
explain them by showing the conditions under which they occur.
Inasmuch as the necessary, but not the
sufficient, conditions of life have been found in chemical studies, there
still remains a task for the biologist - the description of his own
phenomena, and the interrelation of them under unreduced biological
categories. There can thus be purely
biological explanation if he is successful in elaborating a general system of
biological categories.
Similarly, in the social sciences it may be
argued that, though it is important to know the natural conditions of societal
phenomena, the social sciences have an indigenous subject matter, their own
categories for its elaboration (e.g., “meaning” or “value”), and their own
techniques for dealing with them (e.g., “understanding”).
Much can be said for this point of
view so long as it is not allowed to arrest the reductive procedures by which
societal phenomena can be related to those of non-human nature.
We have to deal here with two basic
principles of method.
In the logic of science there is a principle as
important as that of parsimony: it is that of sufficient reason.
The former directs us to look for
simplest causes; the latter cautions us not to simplify so far that the
explanation is inadequate to the facts to be explained.
Opposition to the hegemony of
reductionism, insisting on the autonomy of social science categories,
emphasizes the importance of the maxim that the adduced reasons shall be
sufficient, rather than that they shall be parsimonious.
Parsimony is not itself a simple
criterion of a good methodology; we cannot simply count the factors of
explanation and say that the theory containing
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the smallest number is the best,
The ideal of parsimony cannot be
expressed without the proviso that the conditions for which it is a norm shall
themselves be adequate. But if
simplicity is difficult to define adequately, how far from simple it is to
define adequacy!
Whether an explanatory system is adequate
depends in the final analysis on what we want of an explanation.
No one holds a brief -for an
“autonomous chemistry” and for the “indigenous and irreducible facts of
chemistry” and thus fights physicalistic reduction.
But for practical, even if not for
metaphysical, reasons, a comparable reduction of social science concepts to
those of natural science may be quite legitimately resisted.
Even if we overlook the possibility of nnetaphysical discontinuities
between nature and man, the social sciences, if they are to be of use either
practically or for the sake of an insight into social problems, are
inextricably tied to enlightened common sense with its terminology.
Operational simplification of
sociological terms may be oversimplification in the sense that the problems as
solved in the reduced vocabulary of natural science are not practically or
intuitively equivalent or germane to the problems that originally led to the
undertaking of the study. It may be
that we ask for the bread of social insight and are given stones of natural
science. It may be that an explanation
of societal events in natural terms will have to be translated back into
original language before anyone will admit that the explanation is adequate to
the problem at hand,
Translations of this kind seem trivial and
inadequate to the understanding of the initial problem.
At the present stage of social
sciences, then, it is quite defensible to hold that the explanatory concepts
shall be germane to the motivating problem and not simply statements of
correlations between societal and nonsocietal phenomena.
This being the case, the tasks of the
social sciences are the determination of adequate germane categories, such as
culture, meaning, function, and value; their rigorous definition within the
context of social science phenomena; their theoretical elaboration into
parsimonious explanatory systems; and the establishment of rigorous procedural
rules for their empirical application. For
these tasks, the history of the more highly developed sciences may provide
useful cues, but no more,
The second problem, though closely related to
the former one, is logically independent of any answer we give to that
question. Assuming that reduction will
be practiced as far as possible, we still have to decide the proper procedures
with respect to the concepts and hypotheses which have not yet been reduced.
It is a question of the strategy of
theorizing in the social sciences themselves.
To be more specific: The social scientists now debate the question as
to whether the chief desideratum is a general overarching theory or a series
of particularistic hypotheses of relatively low degrees of generality.
The history of the natural sciences provides a
valuable guide to the answer to this strategic problem.
The physicists kept their hypotheses
as close to observations as possible; their theories were integrations of
hypotheses, not highly abstract summaries of concrete facts all on the same
level. Galileo and Kepler had to do
their theoretical as well as observational work before there could he
Newton’s. But, we may be told, the
social scientists now have almost as many hypotheses as facts; more unkindly,
they may be said to be long on hypotheses and short on facts,
The mind of man, however, is not so prodigal of
imaginative hypotheses that it can generate an infinite variety of them.
Hypotheses show an inner kinship of
common parentage in a given milieu and in the inventiveness of the social
scientists - the demonstration of this being one of the great accomplishments
of the sociology of knowledge. Hypotheses
are increasing in number, but the variety of their types may be diminishing.
General theory is not to be built by
addition of hypotheses, except indirectly; it arises from their analysis and
reduction,
Hence it may be expected that when a plethora of
facts is elaborated in hypotheses of low generality, the broad outlines of an
overarching theory may be subtly adumbrated. But
in view of the complexity of subject matter, the looseness of theoretical
structure, and the uncontrolled character of many of the observations of
society, it is too soon to expect - indeed, it is too soon to be impatient for
- a Newton of the social sciences.
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