Illinois Institute of Technology Philosophy Teleological Explanations Question

Philosophy of Social Science
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Philosophy of
Social Science
Alexander Rosenberg
Duke University
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rosenberg, Alexander, 1946Philosophy of social science / Alexander Rosenberg, Duke University. — Fifth
edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8133-4973-2 (paperback) — ISBN 978-0-8133-4990-9 (e-book) 1.
Social sciences–Philosophy. I. Title.
H61.R668 2015
300.1–dc23
2015007880
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the memory of Blanca N. Rosenberg,
mentor and teacher to two generations of students
in the School of Social Work, Columbia University, 1958?1979
Contents
Preface to the Fifth Edition
ix
1 WHAT IS THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE?
1
2 THE METHODOLOGICAL DIVIDE:
NATURALISM VERSUS INTERPRETATION
11
3 THE EXPLANATION OF HUMAN ACTION
35
4 ACTIONS, INTENTIONALITY, AND THE
MIND? BODY PROBLEM
55
5 BEHAVIORISM IN THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
73
6 PROBLEMS OF RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY
93

7 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE
CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIETY
121
8 EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
143
9 HOLISM AND ANTIREDUCTIONISM IN
SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY
173
10 FUNCTIONALISM AS A RESEARCH PROGRAM
195
11 SOCIOBIOLOGY OR THE STANDARD
SOCIAL SCIENCE MODEL?
211
vii
viii
Contents
12 THEORIES OF CULTURAL EVOLUTION
237
13 RESEARCH ETHICS IN SOCIAL INQUIRY
257
14 FACTS AND VALUES IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES
283
15 SOCIAL SCIENCE AND THE ENDURING
QUESTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY
307
Bibliography
Index
323
329
Preface to the Fifth Edition
A generation is a lifetime in the history of a textbook. I wrote the first edition
of this work in the late 1980s, long before the advent of online resources and
well before the current proliferation of handbooks, encyclopedias, companions, and guides to every discipline and subdiscipline. Four revisions later,
however, this old-fashioned introduction to the philosophy of social science
is holding its own in the online informational environment of the twentyfirst century. What is the reason for this? Some hypotheses are disobliging
and disconfirmed: it can?t be that no one cares enough about the subject;
there are, after all, by Google Scholar?s account, a dozen books with titles
that are variations on The Philosophy of Social Science. Nor can it be that no
one plugged into the web is interested in this subject or my take on it: I once
had to threaten legal action to get a plagiarized version of the second edition
taken down from a website.
To explain the persistence of this book across twenty-four years and four
editions, I propose this hypothesis: its particular approach to the philosophy of social science has persisted because of the merit of the book?s central
premises?that social scientists must take sides on philosophical problems,
whether they like it or not, even whether they know it or not, and that the
problems of the philosophy of social science are all versions of one or another fundamental problem of philosophy: problems of metaphysics, of epistemology, of ethics.
Its central premise?that the philosophy of social science is a way of coming to grips with the perennial problems of philosophy?makes this volume
different from the other works that share its title. It does not pretend to be
a tour guide through isms and fashions, nor a pr?cis of major theories and
findings in social science. This is a work of philosophy as well as a textbook.
A great deal has changed in the social sciences since the 1980s, when the
first edition was gestating. Economics, for example, has greatly changed,
owing to events in the economy and changes in the social sciences that it
ix
x
Preface to the Fifth Edition
has refused to take seriously, especially in cognitive social psychology, experimental economics, and evolutionary game theory. Even since the fourth
edition, a new subdiscipline has gone mainstream: neuroeconomics. Economics has also succumbed to attacks on its moral neutrality and indifference to application in human development. These too have made the field
recognizably more like the other social sciences it once feigned to distain.
Meanwhile, anthropology, sociology, and social psychology, along with
politics, have been swept up in a tsunami of Darwinian analysis originating
from tectonic changes in evolutionary biology and biological anthropology.
Owing to the zeal?perhaps trop de z?le?of the second and third generation
of sociologists, evolutionary psychologists, and gene-culture coevolutionary
theorists, there is still, after thirty or forty years, no end in sight to the Darwinization of the social sciences.
Another great change in social science since the first edition of this book
is the increasing willingness of European students of human affairs to be
influenced by naturalistic, empirical, and data-based approaches to social science. The empiricist and quantitative approaches to the sciences of
human affairs had their origins in European thinkers?Durkheim, Weber,
Walras. But that approach was eclipsed and effaced in the middle years of
the twentieth century by Marxism, the Frankfurt School, phenomenology,
structuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, and critical theory. Now the
European philosophy of social science is moving back toward an appreciation of the older European tradition of social research that English-language
social science maintained through the twentieth century. But the Europeans
bring their intellectual tradition along to this new exchange. This raises
questions of compatibility that few address.
All the social sciences have become much more sensitive to, and much
more influenced by, theories and findings that reflect the experience and perhaps also the special information?if not exclusive knowledge?of women,
ethnic, racial, and other largely marginalized groups. How to incorporate
these new voices and thoughts remains a vexed matter. In this fifth edition,
I devote more discussion to this question.
However, these changes in the social sciences have brought along with
them not so much changes in the philosophical questions they raise, but a
new vocabulary for addressing the persistent philosophical questions that
face the social scientist. This edition reflects the new vocabulary of the
human sciences, while continuing the previous editions? insistence that the
problems social science faces are old wine in new bottles, but just as intellectually intoxicating as ever.
The fourth edition added much new material on the role of models and
equilibrium explanations in economics; new discussions of how speech acts
Preface to the Fifth Edition
xi
create norms and thus construct social practices and institutions; the problem of spontaneous order in the creation of institutions; and the relationships of Rawls?s moral theory to social research and Sen?s capacity theory to
the broad problem of how facts and values intersect. Besides a fuller treatment of feminist philosophy of science, this fifth edition adds a discussion of
the ethics of care that sometimes accompanies feminist views, a discussion
of how advances in neuroscience bear on the social sciences, not just in
neuroeconomics, along with an exposition of postmodernist approaches to
knowledge.
Feedback on the usefulness of previous editions has suggested that instructors often skip over Chapter 4, on the nature of intentionality, because
the chapter proceeds at a level of abstraction from the immediate methodological concerns of social scientists. But it is intentionality that makes the
difference between the methodologies of the social and the natural sciences.
To encourage faculty and students to plow through this philosophically sophisticated but difficult material, I have rewritten parts of Chapter 4 and
signposted its importance elsewhere in the book. You can skip this chapter
without losing the thread of the argument. But readers need to return to it
to see why the problems of the philosophy of social science are instances of
the perennial problems of philosophy going all the way back to Plato.
As in previous editions, I begin with an explanation of why philosophy
is relevant to the human sciences, and then I explore the problems raised by
alternative explanatory strategies of the human sciences. In the twentieth
century these problems spawned familiar theoretical and methodological
movements: behaviorism, structuralism, and a variety of interpretational
theories including critical theory, to name only a few. Even among social
scientists who accepted no labels for their views, these problems facing
their explanations led to significant shifts in the aims and methods advocated for the social sciences. Despite the changes described briefly above,
the challenges facing social science in the twenty-first century remain the
same as those that confronted sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and
Claude L?vi-Strauss, psychologists such as B. F. Skinner, economists such as
Milton Friedman, and cultural theorists such as Michel Foucault or Pierre
Bourdieu. The thinking of these figures and others is sketched in this book,
where it confronts fundamental problems of method and theory raised by
the philosophy of science.
Previous editions mention my debts to many scholars?social scientists
and philosophers. The ones whose lessons have stuck with me the longest
include David Braybrooke, Donald T. Campbell, Martin Hollis, Jonathan
Bennett, Dan Hausman, Harold Kincaid, Martin Trow, Alasdair McIntyre,
and Amartya Sen.
CHAPTER ONE
What Is the Philosophy
of Social Science?
Most sociologists and anthropologists agree on the definition and the domain of their disciplines; the same holds true for many psychologists, political scientists, and almost all economists. The same cannot be said for
philosophers and philosophy. Philosophy is a difficult subject to define,
which makes it difficult to show social scientists why they should care about
it?the philosophy of social science in particular. This chapter provides a
definition of philosophy that makes the subject inescapable for the social scientist. It shows that, whether as an economist or an anthropologist, one has
to take sides on philosophical questions. One cannot pursue the agenda of
research in any of the social sciences without taking sides on philosophical
issues, without committing oneself to answers to philosophical questions. At
a minimum, social scientists need to recognize this fact about themselves.
It is even better if the choices made are based on evidence and argument.
WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
Philosophers do not agree among themselves on the definition of their subject. Its major components are easy to list, and the subjects of some of them
are relatively easy to understand. The trouble is trying to figure out what
they have to do with one another, why combined they constitute one discipline?philosophy?instead of being parts of other subjects, or their own
independent areas of inquiry.
The major subdisciplines of philosophy include logic, the search for welljustified rules of reasoning; ethics (and political philosophy), which concerns
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itself with right and wrong, good and bad, justice and injustice, in the conduct of individuals and states; epistemology or the theory of knowledge,
the inquiry into the nature, extent, and justification of human knowledge;
and metaphysics, which seeks to determine the most fundamental kinds
of things that exist in reality and what the relations between them are. Despite its abstract definition, many of the questions of metaphysics are wellknown to almost all people. For example, Is there a God? or, Is the mind just
the brain, or something altogether nonphysical? or, Do I have free will? are
metaphysical questions most people have asked themselves.
But these four domains of inquiry don?t seem to have much to do with
one another. Each seems to have at least as much to do with another subject
altogether. Why isn?t logic part of mathematics, or epistemology a compartment of psychology? Shouldn?t political philosophy go along with political
science, and isn?t ethics a matter ultimately for people who deliver sermons?
Whether we have free will or the mind is the brain is surely a matter for
neuroscience. Perhaps God?s existence is something to be decided upon not
by an academic inquiry but by personal faith. The question thus remains:
What makes them all parts of a single discipline, philosophy?
The answer to this question organizes this book, and it is pretty clear.
Philosophy deals with two sets of questions: first, questions that the sciences?physical, biological, social, behavioral?cannot answer now and perhaps may never be able to answer; second, questions about why the natural
and social sciences cannot answer the first set of questions.
There is a powerful argument for this definition of philosophy in terms
of its historical relationship with science. The history of science from the
ancient Greeks to the present is that of one compartment of philosophy
after another breaking away from philosophy and emerging as a separate
discipline. But each of these separated disciplines has left philosophy with
a set of distinctive problems, issues the discipline cannot resolve, but must
leave either permanently or at least temporarily for philosophy to deal with.
Mathematics leaves to philosophy questions like, What is a number? Physics
leaves to philosophy questions like, What is time? There are other questions science appears to be unable to address?the fundamental questions
of value, good and bad, rights and duties, justice and injustice?that ethics
and political philosophy address. Questions about what ought to be the case,
what we should do, and what is right and wrong, just and unjust, are called
normative. By contrast, questions in science are presumably descriptive or,
as is sometimes said, positive, not normative. Many of the normative questions have close cousins in the social and behavioral sciences. Thus, psychology will interest itself in why individuals hold some actions to be right and
others wrong; anthropology will consider the sources of differences among
Philosophical Problems of Social Science
?
cultures about what is good and bad; political science may study the consequences of various policies established in the name of justice; economics will
consider how to maximize welfare, subject to the normative assumption that
welfare is what we ought to maximize. But the sciences?social or natural?
do not challenge or defend the normative views we may hold.
In addition to normative questions that the sciences cannot answer, there
are questions about the claims of each of the sciences to provide knowledge,
or about the limits of scientific knowledge, that the sciences themselves cannot address. These are among the distinctive questions of the philosophy of
science, including questions about what counts as knowledge, explanation,
evidence, or understanding. The philosophy of science is that subdiscipline
of philosophy devoted to addressing these questions.
PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
If there are questions the sciences cannot answer and questions about why
the sciences cannot answer them, why should a scientist, in particular a
behavioral or social scientist, take any interest in them? The reason is simple. Though the sciences cannot answer philosophical questions, individual
scientists have to take sides on the right answers to them. The positions scientists take on answers to philosophical questions determine the questions
they consider answerable by science and choose to address, as well as the
methods they employ to answer them. Sometimes scientists take sides consciously. More often they take sides on philosophical questions by their very
choice of question, and without realizing it. The philosophy of science may
be able to vindicate those choices. At the least, it can reveal to scientists that
they have made choices, that they have taken sides on philosophical issues. It
is crucial for scientists to recognize this, not just because their philosophical
positions must be consistent with the theoretical and observational findings of their sciences. Being clear about a discipline?s philosophy is essential
because at the research frontiers of the disciplines, it is the philosophy of
science that guides inquiry.
As Chapter 2 argues, the unavoidability and importance of philosophical questions are even more significant for the social scientist than for the
natural scientist. The natural sciences have a much larger body of wellestablished, successful answers to questions and well-established methods
for answering them. As a result, many of the basic philosophical questions
about the limits and the methods of the natural sciences have been set aside
in favor of more immediate questions clearly within the limits of each of the
natural sciences.
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The social and behavioral sciences have not been so fortunate. Within
these disciplines, there is no consensus on the questions that each of them
is to address, or on the methods to be employed. This is true between disciplines and even within some of them. Varying schools and groups, movements and camps claim to have developed appropriate methods, identified
significant questions, and provided convincing answers to them. But among
social scientists, there is certainly nothing like the agreement on such claims
that we find in any of the natural sciences. In the absence of agreement about
theories and benchmark methods of inquiry among the social sciences, the
only source of guidance for research must come from philosophical theories. Without a well-established theory to guide inquiry, every choice of
research question and of method to tackle it is implicitly or explicitly a gamble with unknown odds. The choice the social scientist makes is a bet that
the question chosen is answerable, that questions not chosen are either less
important or unanswerable, that the means used to attack the question are
appropriate, and that other methods are not.
Chapter 2 outlines the alternative choices, bets, and wagers about the best
way to proceed that face the social scientist. When social scientists choose to
employ methods as close as possible to those of natural science, they commit
themselves to the position that the question before them is one that empirical science can answer. When they spurn such methods, they adopt the
contrary view, that the question is different in some crucial way from those
addressed in the physical or biological sciences. Neither of these choices
has yet been vindicated by success that is conspicuous enough to make the
choice anything less than a gamble.
Whether these gambles really pay off will not be known during the lifetimes of the social scientists who bet their careers on them. Yet the choices
must be justified by a theory, either one that argues for the appropriateness of
the methods of natural science to the question the social scientist addresses,
or one that explains why these methods are not appropriate and supplies an
alternative. Such theories are our only reasonable basis for choosing methods of inquiry in the social sciences.
But these theories are philosophical, regardless of whether the person
who offers them is a philosopher or a social scientist. Indeed, social scientists
are in at least as good a position as philosophers to provide theories that
justify methods and delimit research. In the end, the philosophy of social
science not only is inevitable and unavoidable for social scientists, but it
must also be shaped by them as much as by philosophers.
The traditional questions of the philosophy of social science reflect the
importance of the choice among these philosophical theories. And in this
Philosophical Problems of Social Science
?
book we will examine almost all of those questions at length. By contrast
with this approach to social science, which very self-consciously takes its
inspiration from the natural sciences, there are disciplines that make the
meaning and intelligibility of human affairs central to their explanations.
These social scientists (and the philosophers who embrace their aims and
methods as the right way to proceed) contrast their commitment to understanding with demands for prediction. They are indifferent or hostile to
the notion that their disciplines should provide predictive knowledge about
individuals or groups. In Chapters 7 and 8 we look at this approach.
In Chapters 8 through 10 we also turn to questions about whether the
primary explanatory factors in social science should be large groups of people such as social classes or communities and their properties?so-called
structural properties, as Marx, Durkheim, and other social scientists have
argued?or whether explanations must begin with the choices of individual,
often ?rational? human agents, as contemporary economists and some political scientists argue. The differences between the various social sciences,
especially economics and sociology, on this point are so abstract and general that they have long concerned philosophers. The social scientist who
holds that large-scale social facts explain individual conduct, instead of the
reverse, makes strong metaphysical assumptions about the reality of groups
independent of the individuals who compose them. Such a theory?called
holism?also requires a form of explanation called functionalism, which
raises other profound questions about differences between the explanatory
strategies of social and natural science. As a theory that gives pride of explanatory place to social wholes, holism might seem quite unappealing. But
the alternative to it, individualism, as advanced by economists, political scientists, and biologically inspired social scientists, for instance, also faces
equally profound philosophical questions.
Problems of functionalism, holism, and individualism are exacerbated by
the ever-increasing influence of biological science, and especially Darwin?s
theory of natural selection, on all the social and behavioral sciences. This
is the subject of Chapters 11 and 12, which report on several lively debates
at the intersection of biology and the social sciences and their philosophies.
In Chapters 13 and 14 we turn to the relation between the social sciences
and moral philosophy. We examine whether we can expect the social sciences themselves to answer questions about what is right or fair or just or
good. Many philosophers and social scientists have held that no conclusions
about what ought to be the case can be inferred even from true theories about
what is the case. Others have asserted the opposite. No matter who is right, it
will still turn out that alternative approaches to social science and competing
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moral theories have natural affinities to, and make strong demands on, one
another as well. We must also examine the question of whether there are
morally imposed limits to legitimate inquiry in the social sciences.
Finally, in Chapter 15 I try to show why the immediate choices that social
scientists make in conducting their inquiry commit them to taking sides on
the most profound and perennial questions of philosophy. If this is right,
then no social scientist can afford to ignore the philosophy of social science
or any other compartment of philosophy.
ONE CENTRAL PROBLEM OF THE
PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
The central philosophical dispute about the scope, aim, and prospects for
each of the social sciences taken separately, and all of them together, is what
sort of knowledge they should or can seek. The debate takes place against
a background argument about the nature of understanding in the natural
sciences. There it is widely held that increases in understanding are certified
by improvements in prediction.
Among social scientists who accept the requirement that their discipline
provide the kind of knowledge natural science provides?demographic sociologists, econometricians, experimental social psychologists, or political
scientists interested in voting behavior, for instance?there is a strong commitment to improving prediction as the mark of increasing understanding.
Among social scientists there are debates about how reliable and precise
their respective disciplines? predictions can be and whether they can get better. But other social scientists reject the demand that their discipline provide
the same kind of understanding natural science offers. These social scientists offer alternative explanations of why their subjects cannot, and should
not, seek predictive knowledge and improvements in it. They provide quite
different accounts of what the aims and objectives of their disciplines can be.
The question centers on the fact that it is human beings, in groups and
individually, whose behaviors, actions, and their consequences we are trying
to understand that make the difference between natural and social science.
It is what shapes the nature and scope of the knowledge social science can
provide. Should the subject matter of these disciplines make the aims and
methods of the social sciences as a whole radically different from those of
the natural sciences?
The natural sciences are often alleged, especially by natural scientists and
others impatient with social science, to have made far greater progress than
the social sciences. Questions naturally arise as to why that is so and what
One Central Problem of the Philosophy of Social Science
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can be done to accelerate the progress of social science toward achievements
comparable to those of natural science. But one should notice that these two
questions have controversial philosophical presuppositions: they presuppose
(1) that we know what progress in natural science is and how to measure it;
(2) that, based on our measurements, the natural sciences have made more
progress; and (3) that the social sciences aim for the same kind of progress
as the natural sciences.
If you agree that progress in the social sciences leaves much to be desired
compared with the natural sciences, then you must be able to substantiate
those three presuppositions. However, if you consider that the social sciences
cannot or should not implement the methods of natural science in the study
of human behavior, you will reject as misconceived the invidious comparison between the natural and the social sciences, along with the presuppositions on which it is based. But if you conclude that the study of human action
proceeds in a different way and is appraised with different standards than
the natural sciences, then you will have equally strong presuppositions about
the aims and achievements of social science to substantiate.
Chapters 2 through 4 of this volume outline the arguments both for and
against the claims that the social sciences have failed to progress and that
this failure needs explanation. Both arguments have one view in common:
a neat compromise is impossible. Such a compromise would suggest not
that social science has made as much progress as have the natural sciences,
but that it has made some. It would suggest that very broadly the methods
of the social sciences are the same as those of natural science, though their
specific concepts are distinctive and the interests the social sciences serve
are sometimes different. The compromise view holds that the lack of progress in social science is a consequence of the complexity of human processes,
which is much greater than that of natural processes. It also identifies limits
on our understanding that stem from the regulations, mores, and inhibitions barring controlled experiments on human beings. If this view is right,
the problems of social science are mainly practical instead of philosophical.
Though this is a possible view, much of the work of philosophers and social
scientists who have dealt with the philosophy of social science suggests that
this nice compromise is a difficult one to maintain. Most of the rest of this
book expounds arguments that one way or another attempt to undercut this
philosophically deflationary compromise. We will reconsider it often.
Some philosophers and social scientists reject as uninteresting or unimportant the question of whether the social sciences have progressed as fast as
natural science. They hold that the question is peripheral to the philosophy
of social science. On their view, the social sciences raise distinctive philosophical problems that have nothing to do with any comparison to other
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disciplines. On this view, the chief goal of the philosophy of social science is
to understand the disciplines involved, without casting an eye to comparative questions that are at best premature and at worst a distraction.
Those social scientists and others who demand predictive improvement
as the litmus test of advancement in the social and behavioral sciences
condemn this attitude as complacent: it is indifferent to human needs and
aspirations, which social science is called upon to serve, for the extent to
which social science can ameliorate and improve the human condition is a
function of its similarity to natural science as a source of predictively useful
knowledge that can be applied in the way physics is applied to engineering.
There are several controversial counterarguments to this demand that
social science show the sort of predictive improvement that natural science
manifests and provide us with the sort of technological mastery that natural
science confers.
First, this demand seems to assume that the social sciences are all of one
piece, and most stand or fall together in regard to their predictive powers.
It may be that some social sciences are rightly viewed as potential sources
of predictive knowledge if conducted according to the ?right methods.? But
in others, the appropriate methodology may not by any means aim at or
produce this sort of technologically applicable information about human
affairs. Not all the social sciences should be assessed along the same limited
set of dimensions.
Second, demanding that the social sciences show persistent increases in
predictive power can?t make them do it. If there are any impediments to
predictive success and technological applica