Courtesy of Mixing Memory comes the announcement of a conference at AlphaPsy on methodology and the social sciences, which raises an interesting thought. Is the use of scientific methodology and the naturalising of the social sciences a threat to those disciplines?
This is an old debate, though. It has been claimed for yonks that the human sciences have their own special methodology, usually called "hermeneutics", in which knowledge of the meaning of human institutions and mindsets is irreducible to physical, psychological and biological causes that might be investigated using the standard methods of those disciplines (except in psychology, where the two approaches really compete).
Is a discipline defined by its methodology? Or is it defined by its subject matter no matter what methodology is employed? It seems to me that in the physical sciences, methodology is both universal (geologists, for example, don't have a special geological set of tools and inferences, but a set of physical techniques that are contingently specialised to deal with terrestrial phenomena) and special (the techniques used are those that apply well to the domain under investigation). In principle, all geological methods are reducible to physics and chemistry. In practice, there are protocols used, including inferential methods, that are not widely used by physicists, to reconstruct the history of a particular geological formation. But the logical of inference in geology is the same as the logic of inference in any physical science.
And it is widely recognised that scientists are methodological opportunists, as Alberto on AlphPsy calls it, or are "methodological anarchists" as Feyerabend called them. [Almost] anything goes, so long as it gets results. There is no one set of protocols of technique that all and only scientists use. So why should psychology and the other human sciences be threatened by the use of general physical methods? Why should they need to have a sui generis set of methods, qualitatively different from the physical sciences?
There are several reasons for this, I think. One is that we think that human cognitive and social phenomena are themselves sui generis, and the methodologies should therefore be distinct. Those in favour of naturalising the human sciences think that this is just a case of what Dennett called the "white picket fence" around human experience. Human phenomena just are different, qualitatively, say the antinaturalists. But history teaches us that a decreasing amount of human phenomena are in fact distinct, either from the rest of the living world, or from physical phenomena. And that just as geology did not cease to be a distinct research tradition when it was freed from assumptions of divine causation, neither will sociological and psychological sciences, when they are freed from the assumption that there is something that cannot be investigated using the techniques of physiology and neurology.
"Reductionism" is a dirty word in the social sciences. I don't know why, exactly. In most other sciences, to reduce a domain to a more fundamental one is regarded as a good thing. For example, when organic chemistry was reduced to ordinary chemistry and the "vitalist divide" was shown to be a difference of complexity rather than of kind, organic chemistry took off. It was hailed as a major breakthrough in that subject, and today organic chemistry is a major discipline, because, in part, it has predictive and explanatory capacities of the properties of organic molecules in terms of valence theory and atomic properties.
But when it comes to the human sciences, to call someone a reductionist is to imply they are rigid, of loose morals, and dress badly. Reductionism is a "threat". It should not be, but instead be seen as a way of freeing the human sciences from the errors of folk psychology and sociology. To be sure, human phenomenology is complex, and the simplistic use of reductionist inferences has been in the past unsuccessful in many areas, notably those involving intention and meaning in history and anthropology, but it was similarly unsuccessful in organic chemistry, until Wöhler synthesised urea, and people started to make progress towards valence theory. But we have seen large subdomains of the human sciences get successfully explained, and progress is rapid in the further investigation of such things as emotion, cognition, and the genetic control (if not determination) of behaviour.
The concern of the antinaturalists is broader than just using genetics or evolution to explain human activities, however. They think that understanding motivations, meaning in society and language, and so forth are always going to be irreducible, just like qualia are in philosophy of mind. But I don't think this is necessarily true. Qualia derive from a folk psychology that is increasingly unsupported by neuropsychology, and intensional accounts of human behaviour in societies need not be permanently sui generis, either. This "semantic or experiential divide" will eventually go the way of the vitalist divide.
It's my opinion that the apparent irreducibility of human experience lies not in the phenomena themselves, but in the way they are divided up for investigation. It's almost impossible to hold all but one or two variables constant in such complex systems as the brain, let alone the interactions between individuals with brains. It may turn out, for example, that while most people have a more or less constant experience of "red" and cognate terms, each person individual develops "red experience" in different physical ways. The term from philosophy of mind, due to Jaegwon Kim, is "supervenience" - if any two physical systems are in the same state, they have the same supervenient property, but that property can be realised in many different ways. So why is "red" a property at all? I think it has to do with the fact that the relevant state includes the use of "red terms" in the social context. In short, we need to expand, when necessary, the state description to include the set of conventions of the "red experiencer's" social context, linguistic, practical and biological.
So reductionism, which in practice means the state of the individual under investigation, lacks the broader set of constraints. Progress will occur when we expand our reference classes to the point where they do "carve nature at its joints". Then reductionism will be the way to proceed, if the phenomena are tractable, by which I mean, we can isolate the variables, and do the inferential work. It may be that we will never be able to process the information completely - in fact I think that is a given. But we should be able to account for the broad classes of phenomena even if that means we cannot make accurate predictions for all human behaviours and processes.
So I agree with Alberto's comment:
Social sciences should be defined by their interest in social facts and not by their methods at all (which could make or not sense or be reliable or not only relative to specific questions, not disciplinary fields), so the fact that methods traditionally confined to natural sciences prove increasingly fruitful is...well...just a fact!
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BG, how could I disagree with any of this? Of course arrogance between disciplines is to be avoided (and is, at the same time, inevitable, in both directions). A lot of the time the physical scientists are just reinventing old techniques or reviving old debates gone through in the social sciences decades or even generations ago. This is forgivable, in that not everybody has learned everything, but if you're going to make a contribution to another discipline, it pays to learn what that other discipline has done before.
Moreover, I am not arguing that reductionism is going to work in every case now. Human sociality is massively complex - the number of variables aren't even clearly stated yet, so simplistic attempts to make sociological or cultural phenomena into an undergraduate physics problem will fail outright, and we are right to be suspicious of that.
B ut I have two concerns about the "attack on naturalising human phenomena" - one is that we really ought to revise our prior assumptions on the basis of actual results. It's clear to me, for example, that the usual taxonomy of emotions is so culturally based as to be almost useless, but still we have social scientists investigating "shame" and "anger" as if these were uncontentious categories. We have people trying to explain behaviours in terms of social contexts when we know from biological work that many behaviours really are biologically constrained in our relatives. It's as if the existence of culture and society and language is supposed to insulate humans from the rest of the world.
And progress is being made. My other objection to the antinaturalist school is that they won't even give time for the methodologies to pay off. It is not easy to investigate any domain - why should we reject naturalising humanity because so far only a few results have borne substantial fruit?
Consider the discovery of unconditioned reflexes. At one time all human action was regarded as choice driven, and people were hel responsible for all their action. When Marshall Hall tried to publish his ideas on the reflex action, he was thwarted by his Royal Society colleagues who thought that the very idea was false. But now we admit that this "reductionist" approach is not only fruitful, but unquestionably true. In a historical perspective, that was earth shattering. The social sciences can only benefit from accepting that the other sciences have major, if not yet exclusive, benefits to offer to them.
I agree with much of what you say. I have two comments:
(1) I agree that reductionism need not be a threat. It has been enormously successful in a variety of domains, and there are many reasons to think it will continue to be succesful. However, part of what the reaction of the social sciences seems to be that reductionism, as it is usually understood by, say, physicists, is reductionism to the exclusion of all other perspectives. A plurality of approaches, including those that aren't reductionistic in approach or methodology, seems to me to be a better approach. The Feyerebendian 'anything goes' idea should be taken to mean 'try everything AND don't exclude anything'. I seee no reason why both current social science methods and physical science methods can't BOTH be used to understand the same phenomena. Human behavior and society are such complex phenomena that a multitude of methodological approaches seems like a better way attacking these issues.
(2) Physicists and other 'natural' scientists are often quite arrogant when it comes to the non-natural scientists. This is quite regrettable. If we endorse a pluralistic approach (from (1)), there is no need for this arrogant attitude. To endorse the methodology of the natural sciences is not to deny the methodology of the social sciences. The fear of reductionism and other methodological stances on the part of social scientists is at least somewhat justified, given the attitude of scientists such as E.O. Wilson. His book 'Consilience' was, at times, quite inflammatory, and there is no real need for this, I think, so long as we are not methodological dogmatists. Part of the issue that social scientists have about natural science methodologies as applied to human behavior is the idea that this behavior can be 'carved at the joints'. That is to say, much of human behavior seems to be contingent on cultural/environmental factors, and by describing this behavior as natural, there is the worry that this description will be taken as an endorsement of that behavior. For instance, there has been some work in evolutionary psychology to naturalize rape. The worry is that such an understanding inevitably ends up as an endorsement of such behavior, and, if my undergraduate classes are any indication, such a fear is well justified. Of course, this does not mean we should not neglect the possibility that it IS natural, but we should be very careful about such issues, and we should not ignore other perspectives that don't place as much emphasis on reduction and 'naturalness'.
Ok. That was a lot of stuff to cover! I hope I don't come across as some sort of naive post-modernist. ;-). Really, all I hope to have argued for is that pluralism seems like the best stance to take.
It's worth remembering that for the current workers in a given field, any major paradigm changes look pretty threatening! As the old saying goes, sometimes "science advances one funeral at a time", and that goes for the natural sciences almost as much as the social sciences.
That said, every time you try to increase the rigor of a given field of study, you're going to shake out some folks who can't hack the new rules. Some of those will be well-meaning but confused, but others will be classic bullshitters, who had a good thing going. They'll all scream bloody murder....
There is an interesting discussion going on right now at Pure Pedantry about the distinction between "cognition" and "neurophysiology".
http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2006/10/dilbert_creater_recovers_f…
This is, of course, also all about reductionism and emergent properties of complex systems. The common fallacy (engaged in by some in that discussion) is to conclude that because emergent properties cannot be predicted solely on the basis of the intrinsic autonomous properties of the elements of the system, that therefore those emergent properties do not arise out of the intrinsic properties of the elements and their interactions.