Philosophy of social sciences
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The philosophy of social science is the study of the logic, methods, and foundations of social sciences (
psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...
, cultural anthropology,
sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...
, etc...). Philosophers of social science are concerned with the differences and similarities between the
social Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not. Etymology The word "social" derives from ...
and the natural sciences, causal relationships between social phenomena, the possible existence of social laws, and the
ontological In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exi ...
significance of structure and agency.


Auguste Comte and positivism

Comte first described the epistemological perspective of positivism in ''
The Course in Positive Philosophy The ''Course of Positive Philosophy'' (''Cours de Philosophie Positive'') was a series of texts written by the French philosopher of science and founding sociologist, Auguste Comte, between 1830 and 1842. Within the work he unveiled the epistemo ...
'', a series of texts published between 1830 and 1842. These texts were followed by the 1848 work, '' A General View of Positivism'' (published in English in 1865). The first three volumes of the ''Course'' dealt chiefly with the natural sciences already in existence (
geoscience Earth science or geoscience includes all fields of natural science related to the planet Earth. This is a branch of science dealing with the physical, chemical, and biological complex constitutions and synergistic linkages of Earth's four sphere ...
,
astronomy Astronomy () is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, nebulae, g ...
,
physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
, chemistry,
biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...
), whereas the latter two emphasised the inevitable coming of
social science Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of so ...
. Observing the circular dependence of theory and observation in science, and classifying the sciences in this way, Comte may be regarded as the first
philosopher of science A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...
in the modern sense of the term. For him, the physical sciences had necessarily to arrive first, before humanity could adequately channel its efforts into the most challenging and complex "Queen science" of human society itself. His ''View of Positivism'' would therefore set-out to define, in more detail, the empirical goals of sociological method. Comte offered an account of social evolution, proposing that society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to a general 'law of three stages'. The idea bears some similarity to Marx's view that human society would progress toward a communist peak. This is perhaps unsurprising as both were profoundly influenced by the early
Utopian socialist Utopian socialism is the term often used to describe the first current of modern socialism and socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Robert Owen. Utopian socialism is often de ...
,
Henri de Saint-Simon Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (17 October 1760 – 19 May 1825), often referred to as Henri de Saint-Simon (), was a French political, economic and socialist theorist and businessman whose thought had a substantial influence on p ...
, who was at one time Comte's teacher and mentor. Both Comte and Marx intended to develop, scientifically, a new secular ideology in the wake of European
secularisation In sociology, secularization (or secularisation) is the transformation of a society from close identification with religious values and institutions toward non-religious values and secular institutions. The ''secularization thesis'' expresses the ...
. The early sociology of
Herbert Spencer Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, psychologist, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist famous for his hypothesis of social Darwinism. Spencer originated the expression " survival of the fi ...
came about broadly as a reaction to Comte. Writing after various developments in evolutionary biology, Spencer attempted (in vain) to reformulate the discipline in what we might now describe as socially Darwinistic terms (although Spencer was a proponent of
Lamarckism Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. It is also calle ...
rather than Darwinism). The modern academic discipline of sociology began with the work of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). While Durkheim rejected much of the detail of Comte's philosophy, he retained and refined its method, maintaining that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisting that they may retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality.Wacquant, Loic. 1992. "Positivism." In Bottomore, Tom and William Outhwaite, ed., ''The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought'' Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at the
University of Bordeaux The University of Bordeaux (French: ''Université de Bordeaux'') is a Lists of universities in France, public university based in Nouvelle-Aquitaine in Southern France, southwestern France. It has several campuses in the cities and towns of Bor ...
in 1895. In the same year he argued, in ''
The Rules of Sociological Method ''The Rules of Sociological Method'' (french: Les Règles de la méthode sociologique) is a book by Émile Durkheim, first published in 1895. It is recognized as being the direct result of Durkheim's own project of establishing sociology as a p ...
'' (1895):Gianfranco Poggi (2000). ''Durkheim.'' Oxford: Oxford University Press. " r main goal is to extend scientific rationalism to human conduct... What has been called our positivism is but a consequence of this rationalism."Durkheim, Emile. 1895. ''The Rules of Sociological Method''. Cited in Wacquant (1992). Durkheim's seminal monograph '' Suicide'' (1897), a case study of suicide rates amongst
Catholic The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
and
Protestant Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century against what its followers perceived to b ...
populations, distinguished sociological analysis from
psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...
or philosophy. The positivist perspective, however, has been associated with ' scientism'; the view that the methods of the natural sciences may be applied to all areas of investigation, be it philosophical, social scientific, or otherwise. Among most social scientists and historians, orthodox positivism has long since fallen out of favor. Today, practitioners of both social and physical sciences recognize the distorting effect of observer bias and structural limitations. This scepticism has been facilitated by a general weakening of deductivist accounts of science by philosophers such as
Thomas Kuhn Thomas Samuel Kuhn (; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American philosopher of science whose 1962 book '' The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term ''paradig ...
, and new philosophical movements such as critical realism and
neopragmatism Neopragmatism, sometimes called post-Deweyan pragmatism, linguistic pragmatism, or analytic pragmatism, is the philosophical tradition that infers that the meaning of words is a result of how they are used, rather than the objects they represent. ...
. Positivism has also been espoused by ' technocrats' who believe in the inevitability of
social progress Progress is the movement towards a refined, improved, or otherwise desired state. In the context of progressivism, it refers to the proposition that advancements in technology, science, and social organization have resulted, and by extension wi ...
through science and technology. The philosopher-sociologist Jürgen Habermas has critiqued pure
instrumental rationality "Instrumental" and "value rationality" are terms scholars use to identify two ways individuals act in order to optimize their behavior . Instrumental rationality recognizes means that "work" efficiently to achieve ends. Value rationality recogni ...
as meaning that scientific-thinking becomes something akin to ideology itself. Durkheim,
Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
, and Weber are more typically cited as the fathers of contemporary social science. In
psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...
, a positivistic approach has historically been favoured in
behaviourism Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual ...
.


Epistemology

In any discipline, there will always be a number of underlying philosophical predispositions in the projects of scientists. Some of these predispositions involve the nature of social knowledge itself, the nature of social reality, and the locus of human control in action. Intellectuals have disagreed about the extent to which the social sciences should mimic the methods used in the natural sciences. The founding positivists of the social sciences argued that social phenomena can and should be studied through conventional scientific methods. This position is closely allied with scientism, naturalism and physicalism; the doctrine that all phenomena are ultimately reducible to physical entities and physical laws. Opponents of naturalism, including advocates of the ''
verstehen ''Verstehen'' (, ), in the context of German philosophy and social sciences in general, has been used since the late 19th century – in English as in German – with the particular sense of the "interpretive or participatory" examination of socia ...
'' method, contended that there is a need for an interpretive approach to the study of human action, a technique radically different from natural science. The fundamental task for the philosophy of social science has thus been to question the extent to which positivism may be characterized as 'scientific' in relation to fundamental epistemological foundations. These debates also rage ''within'' contemporary social sciences with regard to subjectivity, objectivity,
intersubjectivity In philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, intersubjectivity is the relation or intersection between people's cognitive perspectives. Definition is a term coined by social scientists to refer to a variety of types of human interac ...
and practicality in the conduct of theory and research. Philosophers of social science examine further epistemologies and methodologies, including
realism Realism, Realistic, or Realists may refer to: In the arts *Realism (arts), the general attempt to depict subjects truthfully in different forms of the arts Arts movements related to realism include: *Classical Realism *Literary realism, a move ...
, critical realism,
instrumentalism In philosophy of science and in epistemology, instrumentalism is a methodological view that ideas are useful instruments, and that the worth of an idea is based on how effective it is in explaining and predicting phenomena. According to instrumenta ...
, functionalism, structuralism, interpretivism,
phenomenology Phenomenology may refer to: Art * Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties Philosophy * Phenomenology (philosophy), a branch of philosophy which studies subjective experiences and a ...
, and
post-structuralism Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques ...
. Though essentially all major social scientists since the late 19th century have accepted that the discipline faces challenges that are different from those of the natural sciences, the ability to determine
causal relationships Causality (also referred to as causation, or cause and effect) is influence by which one event, process, state, or object (''a'' ''cause'') contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an ''effect'') where the cau ...
invokes the same discussions held in science
meta-theory A metatheory or meta-theory is a theory whose subject matter is theory itself, aiming to describe existing theory in a systematic way. In mathematics and mathematical logic, a metatheory is a mathematical theory about another mathematical theory ...
. Positivism has sometimes met with caricature as a breed of naive empiricism, yet the word has a rich history of applications stretching from Comte to the work of the
Vienna Circle The Vienna Circle (german: Wiener Kreis) of Logical Empiricism was a group of elite philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, ch ...
and beyond. By the same token, if positivism is able to identify causality, then it is open to the same critical rationalist non- justificationism presented by Karl Popper, which may itself be disputed through
Thomas Kuhn Thomas Samuel Kuhn (; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American philosopher of science whose 1962 book '' The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term ''paradig ...
's conception of epistemic paradigm shift. Early German hermeneuticians such as Wilhelm Dilthey pioneered the distinction between natural and social science ('
Geisteswissenschaft ''Geisteswissenschaften'' (, "sciences of mind", "spirit science") is a set of human sciences such as philosophy, history, philology, musicology, linguistics, theater studies, literary studies, media studies, and sometimes even theology and ju ...
'). This tradition greatly informed Max Weber and Georg Simmel's
antipositivism In social science, antipositivism (also interpretivism, negativism or antinaturalism) is a theoretical stance that proposes that the social realm cannot be studied with the methods of investigation utilized within the natural sciences, and that ...
, and continued with critical theory.Outhwaite, William, 1988 ''Habermas: Key Contemporary Thinkers'', Polity Press (Second Edition 2009), p.22 Since the 1960s, a general weakening of deductivist accounts of science has grown side-by-side with critiques of " scientism", or 'science ''as ideology. Jürgen Habermas argues, in his ''On the Logic of the Social Sciences'' (1967), that "the positivist thesis of unified science, which assimilates all the sciences to a natural-scientific model, fails because of the intimate relationship between the social sciences and history, and the fact that they are based on a situation-specific understanding of meaning that can be explicated only hermeneutically … access to a symbolically prestructured reality cannot be gained by observation alone." ''Verstehende'' social theory has been the concern of phenomenological works, such as Alfred Schütz ''Phenomenology of the Social World'' (1932) and
Hans-Georg Gadamer Hans-Georg Gadamer (; ; February 11, 1900 – March 13, 2002) was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 ''magnum opus'', '' Truth and Method'' (''Wahrheit und Methode''), on hermeneutics. Life Family ...
's '' Truth and Method'' (1960). Phenomenology would later prove influential in the subject-centred theory of the post-structuralists. The mid-20th-century
linguistic turn The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relations between language, langua ...
led to a rise in highly philosophical sociology, as well as so-called " postmodern" perspectives on the social acquisition of knowledge. One notable critique of social science is found in Peter Winch's Wittgensteinian text ''The Idea of Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy'' (1958). Michel Foucault provides a potent critique in his archaeology of the human sciences, though Habermas and
Richard Rorty Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic ...
have both argued that Foucault merely replaces one such system of thought with another. One underlying problem for the
social psychologist Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people or by social norms. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the rela ...
is whether studies can or should ultimately be understood in terms of the meaning and consciousness behind social action, as with
folk psychology In philosophy of mind and cognitive science, folk psychology, or commonsense psychology, is a human capacity to explain and predict the behavior and mental state of other people. Processes and items encountered in daily life such as pain, pleasure ...
, or whether more objective, natural, materialist, and behavioral facts are to be given exclusive study. This problem is especially important for those within the social sciences who study qualitative mental phenomena, such as
consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
, associative meanings, and
mental representation A mental representation (or cognitive representation), in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality, or else a mental process that ...
s, because a rejection of the study of meanings would lead to the reclassification of such research as non-scientific. Influential traditions like psychodynamic theory and symbolic interactionism may be the first victims of such a paradigm shift. The philosophical issues lying in wait behind these different positions have led to commitments to certain kinds of methodology which have sometimes bordered on the partisan. Still, many researchers have indicated a lack of patience for overly dogmatic proponents of one method or another.Slife, B.D. and Gantt, E.E. (1999) Methodological pluralism: a framework for psychotherapy research. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 55(12), pp1453–1465. Social research remains extremely common and effective ''in practise'' with respect to political institutions and businesses.
Michael Burawoy Michael Burawoy (born 15 June 1947) is a sociologist working within Marxist social theory, best known as the leading proponent of public sociology and the author of '' Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism ...
has marked the difference between
public sociology Public sociology is a subfield of the wider sociological discipline that emphasizes expanding the disciplinary boundaries of sociology in order to engage with non-academic audiences. It is perhaps best understood as a ''style'' of sociology rath ...
, which is focused firmly on practical applications, and ''academic'' or ''professional'' sociology, which involves dialogue amongst other social scientists and philosophers.


Ontology

Structure and agency In the social sciences there is a standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behaviour. ''Structure'' is the recurrent patterned arrangements which influence or limit the choices and opportunities available. ''Agency' ...
forms an enduring debate in social theory: "Do social structures determine an individual's behaviour or does human agency?" In this context ' agency' refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and make free choices, whereas ' structure' refers to factors which limit or affect the choices and actions of individuals (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, and so on). Discussions over the primacy of structure or agency relate to the very core of social ontology ("What is the social world made of?", "What is a cause in the social world, and what is an effect?"). One attempt to reconcile postmodern critiques with the overarching project of social science has been the development, particularly in Britain, of critical realism. For critical realists such as
Roy Bhaskar Roy is a masculine given name and a family surname with varied origin. In Anglo-Norman England, the name derived from the Norman ''roy'', meaning "king", while its Old French cognate, ''rey'' or ''roy'' (modern ''roi''), likewise gave rise to ...
, traditional positivism commits an 'epistemic fallacy' by failing to address the ontological conditions which make science possible: that is, structure and agency itself.


See also

*
Hard and soft science Hard science and soft science are colloquial terms used to compare scientific fields on the basis of perceived methodological rigor, exactitude, and objectivity. Roughly speaking, the formal sciences & natural sciences are considered "hard", whe ...
* Intercultural philosophy *
Philosophy of economics Philosophy and economics studies topics such as public economics, behavioural economics, rationality, justice, history of economic thought, rational choice, the appraisal of economic outcomes, institutions and processes, the status of highly i ...
* Philosophy of history * Philosophy of psychology *
Political philosophy Political philosophy or political theory is the philosophical study of government, addressing questions about the nature, scope, and legitimacy of public agents and institutions and the relationships between them. Its topics include politics, ...
*
Social constructionism Social constructionism is a theory in sociology, social ontology, and communication theory which proposes that certain ideas about physical reality arise from collaborative consensus, instead of pure observation of said reality. The theor ...
*
Social fact In sociology, social facts are values, cultural norms, and social structures that transcend the individual and can exercise social control. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim defined the term, and argued that the discipline of sociology should ...
*
Social philosophy Social philosophy examines questions about the foundations of social institutions, social behavior, and interpretations of society in terms of ethical values rather than empirical relations. Social philosophers emphasize understanding the social ...
*
Sociology of sociology Sociology of sociology is an area of sociology that combines social theories with analysis of the effect of socio-historical contexts in sociological intellectual production. For the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the task of the sociology ...


References


Bibliography

* * Bunge, Mario. 1996. ''Finding Philosophy in Social Science.'' New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. * * * * Kaldis, Byron (ed.) (2013) ''Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences'', Sage


Journals

* '' Philosophy of the Social Sciences''


Conferences


Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable

EUROPEAN NETWORK FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES


Books


Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, Byron Kaldis, SAGE, 2013

Philosophy of Social Science by Alexander Rosenberg

The Philosophy of Social Science: An Introduction by Martin Hollis

Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science: A Multicultural Approach by Brian Fay

Philosophy of social science: the methods, ideals, and politics of social inquiry by Michael Root


External links

*
Philosophy of social sciences
(From Robert Audi's ''Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy'')
Philosophy of social sciences
(Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online) {{Authority control Soc