Manicas

Unfinished Work with Peter Manicas of Hawaii - has to do with methodology of social sciences -- see also: Manicas

Methodological Mistakes and Philosophy of Science

It is an error to take the idea of science for granted. In what follows, we identify two competing philosophies: Logical positivism and Realism. Both have histories, sketched below. Each can be characterized in terms of three principles. We begin with Logical Positivism

N1: It is the goal of science to search for laws. A scientific law is a strict regularity or a pattern in the collection of observations.

N2: The scientific method looks for patterns and regularities in collections of data. There are many ways to find patterns. If a pattern enables prediction, it is a candidate for a scientific law.

N3: Explanation (and prediction) in science proceeds by appeal to scientific laws.

We shall argue that all of these widely believed ideas about the nature of science are fundamentally wrong. A realist understanding of science is based on the following three alternatives:

R1: A scientific law identifies causal effects in operation between objects, observable and not observable, which exist in the real world.

R2: Scientific methodology consists of using abductive inference from experience to develop and test hypotheses about causal mechanisms, observable and nono-observable, at work in the world.

R3: Explanation in science is causal explanation: We can often can often explain when it would have been impossible to predict.

An uncritical reading of these six ideas suggests that the quarrel is of little importance, perhaps an argument among philosophers but bearing little on scientific practice. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, it is easy to show that the realist understanding of science conforms neatly to the actual practices of the physical sciences and that the social sciences have been profoundly shaped by “positivist” ideas about science. We cannot in this brief easy prove that actual practice in the physical sciences is realist. But in Part 2 we show that most quantitative work in economics—the most sophisticated of the social sciences --is grounded on positivist principles and that a realist alternative provides a sound productive alternative methodology. This situation is, indeed, puzzling, but it can be explained. We offer here the barest a sketch of some of the relevant history.

The first critical move was the idea that metaphysics –the study of what is “real” (what exists)—was no part of science. Remarkably, Descartes’ ( ) method of doubt offered that only the existence of his own self was certain: the existence of all else –including God and the mind-independent external world-- could be doubted. This idea---perhaps bizarre to the modern mind, was addressed by Bishop Berkeley’s philosophical idealism and David Hume’s skeptical empiricism. Emanuel Kant rightly saw that on Hume’s premises, science was impossible: On his premises the appeal to experience could not sustain the idea of causes as “productive powers. As Moliere was to note: the so-called productive powers of opium to put one to sleep reduces to nothing more than the generalization that if one takes opium one goes to sleep. As we shall see, this became the fundamental problem for all subsequent empiricisms.

“Awakened from his dogmatic slumber” by the work of Hume, if science could not be grounded in Hume’s premise, a “transcendental idealism” would suffice. The solution was in distinguishing two worlds, “the phenomenal “ and “noumenal.” The phenomenal world was the empirical world, the world of experience, ordered by mind-determined concepts—including causality. It was the proper province of science and could be known. The “noumenal” world was the world of “the thing-in-itself. It was the province of God, Freedom and the Immortal Soul, a condition for science, but as non-empirical –as metaphysics, not knowable! Thus talk of God or the immortal soul is the proper concern of theologians and philosophers but it could not figure in scientific explanations.

what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence. Wittgenstein Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

While this was not a problem for the “natural philosophers” of the early modern period, Newton (as others) did worry that could find no convincing argument in favor of the causal pertinence of, for example, gravity or of Boyles’s “corpusles.” In the 1830’s, August Comte introduced and provided all the principles which since have defined the term “positivism.” But these ideas lay more or less fallow until the last decades of the 19th century when, with the advance of chemistry, the culmination of classical physics and the development of industrialized science, the precise nature of a genuine science became a critical problem, hotly debated by an eminent group of philosopher/physicists in Germany, France and England. G.R. Kirchhoff's Principles of Mechanics (1874), Ernst Mach's Science of Mechanics (1883), and Wilhelm Ostwald's General Chemistry (1888) were among the first blasts toward establishing a stringently anti-metaphysical empiricist philosophy of science.[1] These writers were joined by Ludwig Boltzmann and Heinrich Hertz in Germany, by Pierre Duhem and Henri Poincaré in France, and in England by W.K. Clifford and, following the path of Mach, by Karl Pearson. Thus, Mach and Duhem took Comte’s deductivist view of explanation to its logical conclusion and held that science does not even try to explain; it only describes. Writing in 1906, Pierre Duhem offers that "to explain...is to strip reality of the appearances covering it like a veil, in order to see bare reality itself," but this is metaphysics. For him, "A physical theory is not an explanation. It is a system of mathematical propositions deduced from a small number of mathematical principles, which aim to represent as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a set of experimental laws."[2] Much of this new philosophy was not new. What was new, however, was that, with the industrializing of the physical sciences and with the manifest practical applications which attended it, these men could command an authority which would have made Bacon envious.

The Positivist misunderstanding of the nature and methodology of physical science had no effect on the physical sciences. It did, however, propel vigorous efforts by philosophers to secure the “foundations of science” against Cartesian skepticism. Bertrand Russell and the mathematicians provided a powerful mathematical logic and the idea of logical construction. Thus, “a causes b” means, “If a, then b” with “if…then” construed in the extensionalist logic of Principia Mathematic. Rudolph Carnap and the “Vienna Positivists” could then shift what was an ontological problem to a problem of meaning. Thus, a T-term was meaningful only if it can be given reference in O-terms (Suppe, 1977).

Given this understanding, a physical theory could explain if we acknowledged that theory was a deductive system of experimental laws which explained by subsumption: the DN or covering law model (Hempel).

Indeed, beginning in the 1950’s, even while all the key elements of positivism were being undermined, it seemed to social science that the problem of existence had been trumped. [3]The fact that physicists continued to believe in electrons, gravity, electro-magnetic forces and the like was not of concern. In contrast, the social sciences were deeply affected by this positivist misunderstanding of physical science. This led to the following principles being widely adopted as fundamental principles of social science in the second quarter of the twentieth century:

S1. Unobservable entities cannot be invoked as explanatory factors. Social science, like the physical sciences, must be built around quantifiable and measurable concepts.

S2. Morals, values, ideals are unobservable and hence unscientific. Activism, or efforts to create a better society are not part of scientific activity. Social scientists must act as neutral, detached observers seeking to describe laws of motion for human and social activities.

The consequences of adopting these principles have been extremely harmful for the development of social sciences. It is ironic that these principles are based on a misunderstanding of science promoted by logical positivism. Scientists freely utilize unobservables like the strings of string theory, black holes, different types of subatomic particles with strange and unusual properties, whenever necessary to explain observable phenomena. Social scientists strictly avoid the use of unobservables, in an effort to be scientific. Similarly, aesthetic values like elegance and simplicity are often invoked in selection of scientific theories. However social scientists try to maintain an appearance of neutrality and “scientific” objectivity in areas where even the choice of research topic is dictated by value judgments regarding its relevance and importance to human beings.

[1] J. Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, Rev. Ed., (New York: Basic Books, 1966), Chapter 14.

[2] Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory [1906], (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 7, 19. Anti-positivists included, prominently, Hermann von Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell and J.J. Thomson. For example, Helmholtz insisted that “the word Ursache (which I use here precisely and literally) means that existing something [Bestehende] which lies hidden behind the changes we perceive. It is the hidden but continually existent basis of phenomena” (Helmholtz, 1971: 521).

[3] See Manicas (1987, 2006).