Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science: A History (Third Edition). Thomas J. Hickey
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or “interpretative understanding”. But all romantic social scientists deny that social theory can be developed by data analysis exclusively or by observation of overt behavior alone.
Romantics therefore oppose their view of the aim of science to that of the positivists’ such as the sociologist George Lundberg and the behavioristic psychologist B.F. Skinner. Romantics say they explain consciously purposeful and motivated “human action”, while the behaviorists say they explain publicly observable “human behavior”. Some romantics call the study of human action “hermeneutics”.
Criticism:
The romantic criterion for criticism is “convincing” “interpretative understanding” that “makes substantive sense” of conscious motivations, which are deemed to be the underlying “causal mechanisms” of observed human action.
Causality is an ontological concept, and all romantics impose their mentalistic ontology as a prior criterion for criticism, while making empirical or statistical analyses at most optional and supplementary.
Furthermore many romantic social scientists demand the criterion that a social theory must be identifiable in the particular investigator’s own introspectively recognized subjective personal experience. In Max Weber’s terms this is called verstehen. It is the thesis that empathetic insight is a special and valuable tool in the study of human behavior, which is without counterpart in the physical sciences. It effectively makes all sociology what has been called “pop sociology” or “folk sociology”.
Explanation:
Romantics maintain that only “theory” that describes subjective motives can “explain” conscious human action.
Motives are the “mechanisms” identified in “causal” explanations, which are also therefore called “theoretical” explanations. Observed regularities are deemed incapable of “explaining”, even if they enable correct predictions.
Some formerly romantic social scientists such as the Institutionalist economist Wesley Mitchell and the functionalist sociologist Robert Merton have chosen to focus on objective outcomes rather than subjective motives.
2.02 Positivism
Historically positivism was a reaction against romanticism, but more recently it is has been relegated to history of philosophy. Positivism’s origins are in the eighteenth-century British empiricist philosophers including notably David Hume. But not until the late nineteenth century did positivism get its name from the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who also founded sociology.
The “neopositivists” were the last incarnation of positivism. They attempted to use the symbolic logic fabricated by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead early in the twentieth century, because they had fantasized that the Russellian truth-functional symbolic logic could serve philosophy, as mathematics has served physics. They are therefore also called “logical positivists”.
Contrary to romantics, positivists believe that all sciences including the social sciences share the same philosophy of science. They therefore reject the romantics’ dichotomy of sciences of nature and sciences of culture. And the positivists’ ideas about science originated in their reflection upon Newtonian physics.
Aim of science:
For positivists the aim of science is to produce explanations having objectivity grounded in language describing observations.
Their concept of the aim of science is thus also called a “foundational agenda”, although the required foundation is quite different from that of the romantics. Their foundation is observation.
Discovery:
Positivists believed that empirical laws are inferentially discovered by inductive generalization based on repeated observations.
They define empirical laws as universally quantified statements containing only “observation terms” describing observable entities and/or phenomena.
Early positivists such as Ernst Mach recognized only empirical laws for valid scientific explanations. But after Einstein’s achievements neopositivists such as Rudolf Carnap recognized hypothetical theories for valid scientific explanations, if the theories could be linguistically related to language used to report the relevant observations.
Positivists believed that theories are discovered by creative imagination, but they left unexplained the creative process of developing theories.
The neopositivists define theories as universally quantified statements containing any “theoretical terms”, i.e., terms that do not describe observable entities or phenomena.
Criticism:
The positivists’ criterion for criticism is publicly accessible observation expressed in language containing only “observation terms”.
They believed that empirical laws indirectly and tentatively warrant theories, when the laws can be logically derived from the theories.
Like Hume they deny that either laws or theories can be permanently validated empirically, but they require that the general laws be founded in observation as a condition for the objectivity needed for valid science. They maintain that particularly quantified observation statements describing singular events are incorrigible and beyond revision.
Unlike empirical laws, theories are not produced by induction from singular observations.
Theories are indirectly and tentatively warranted by empirical laws, when valid laws can be logically derived from the theories.
Positivists reject the romantics’ verstehen thesis of criticism. They argue that empathy is not a reliable tool, and that the methods of obtaining knowledge in the social sciences are the same as those used in the physical sciences. They note that subjective verstehen may easily involve erroneous transfer of the idiosyncrasies of the observer’s experiences to the subject of observation.
Explanation:
Positivists and specifically Carl Hempel advocate the “covering-law” schema for explanation.
According to Hempel’s “covering-law” thesis of explanation, statements predicting observable individual events are derived deductively from observation-language statements describing observable individual events together with “covering”, i.e., universal empirical laws.
This concept of explanation has also been called the “deductive-nomological model”.
Positivists also maintained that theories explain laws, when the theories are premises from which the empirical laws are deductively derived as theorems by the mediation of “correspondence rules”, also called “bridge principles”. Correspondence rules are sentences that relate the theoretical terms in a theory to the observation terms in the derived empirical laws.
2.03 Contemporary Pragmatism
We are now said to be in a “post-positivist’ era in the history of Western philosophy, but this term merely says that positivism has been relegated to history; it says nothing of what has replaced it. What has emerged in reaction to positivism is a new coherent master narrative appropriately called “contemporary pragmatism”, which was occasioned by reflection on quantum theory, and is currently the ascendant philosophy in American academia.
This new pragmatism had earlier versions in the classical pragmatists, notably those of Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Some theses in classical pragmatism such as the importance of belief have been carried forward into the new.
In contemporary pragmatism belief is strategic, because it controls relativized semantics, which signifies a correspondingly realistic ontology to the degree that a belief is empirically