The modern Methodenstreit?

Jaspers’ account of the distinction between understanding and explanation connects together some suggestive ideas. Understanding, by contrast with explanation, is connected to empathy, to a shared subjectivity and imaginative projection. But whilst these are suggestive, it is not clear that they permit a clear distinction. The most influential set of arguments for a distinction between human and natural sciences were developed in the 1960s drawing on the work of the Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). One such influential work was by the philosopherPeter Winch (1927-98) in his The Idea of a Social Science.

Winch argues that there could be no such thing as a social science modelled on natural science. Human understanding cannot and should not be modelled on the natural sciences because it employs a different form of intelligibility. Winch argues that a central element of understanding meaningful behaviour is an understanding of the nature of rules. For this he draws on Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule following in the Philosophical Investigations, §§139-239. This type of rule-following action can be as simple as a patient filling out a health history form. There are rules of veracity and restrictions against wild speculation concerning past diseases involved in providing a useful form.

Rules have a further important feature evident in this example. They are normative: they prescribe correct and incorrect behaviour. This is not the same as saying that most history forms are filled in at a particular time of day or night or by a particular socio-economic proportion of the patients with varying levels of usefulness. That may be discovered by empirical study. But the normative rules that characterise an event as an act of history-form completion are not provided by any such statistical generalisations. With these claims in place, Winch goes on to argue that the kind of understanding usually thought to make up social science is fundamentally dissimilar to natural science.

Winch followed Wittgenstein who had a profound influence on philosophy in the UK but much less so in the USA. But similar arguments are implicit in the work of US philosophers. Wilfrid Sellars (1912-89), for example, argued for a fundamental distinction between a natural scientific view of the world (or ‘scientific image’) and the ‘manifest image’. Building on Sellars’ work, John McDowell contrasts the logical space of reasons with the realm of law or of natural science. Donald Davidson draws a related distinction between the essential rationality of the mental realm and the physical. The former is governed by a ‘constitutive principle of rationality’ which ‘has no echo in physical theory’.

According to this group of philosophers, normativity cannot be accounted for in natural scientific descriptions of the world. Thus, on Winch’s assumption that the social or human sciences chart the rules that shape human behaviour, there is a fundamental distinction between them and natural science.

This session will examine arguments for this view. It will start, briefly, with Winch's basic claim that understanding meaningful social behaviour is a matter of relating it to rules. But we will also look at Davidson's argument that understanding people requires the assumption that they are largely rational. This will require consideration of a thought experiment (about 'radical interpretation' by a marooned anthropologist) which may seem some distance from everyday interpretation. But if it is right, it has implications for the fundamental rationality of understanding and that has consequences for understanding psychopathology and echoes of Jaspers. How can an assumption of rationality be squared with conditions which undermine rationality?

The slides for the session are here.

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Further reading

Bortolotti, L. (2005) ‘Delusions and the background of rationality’ Mind and Language 20: 189-208

Davidson, D. (1973) ‘Radical Interpretation’ Dialectica, 27: 314–28; reprinted in his (2001) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn

McDowell, J.(1985a) ‘Functionalism and Anomalous Monism.’ in LePore E and McLaughlin, B.P. (eds) Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Oxford: Blackwell

Sellars, W. (1963) ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’ in Science, Perception and Reality, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Thornton, T. (2009) ‘On the interface problem in philosophy and psychiatry’ in Bortolotti, L. and Broome, M. Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 121-136

Travis, C. (2006) Thought's Footing, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Winch, P. ([1958] 1990). The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, London: Routledge