Posts tagged philosophy of social science

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Posted 1 year ago
More generally, qualitative methods such as interactive interviews and ethnography are necessary to abstract the causal mechanisms of which quantitative/statistical methods are oblivious. It should not be expected that these abstract causal mechanisms can explain events directly without any need for empirical research into the contingency of the concrete. To do so is to commit the error of ‘pseudo-concrete research’ that is common in radical structuralism such as Marxism (Sayer, 1992). Quantitative methods, on the other hand, are particularly useful to establish the empirical regularities between objects. Although these concrete regularities are not causal relations, they can inform the abstraction of causal mechanisms. Quantitative methods are also useful in drawing attention to the external and contingent relations between objects. Inferential statistical analysis can throw light on, for instance, the external relations between objects (e.g., employment and poverty) in society from a sample. One should bear in mind that these statistical generalizations are only ‘universal’ at a specific temporal-spatial intersection. A serious problem of reductionism is incurred if one attempts to treat these contingent generalizations as necessary causal mechanisms.
Henry Wai-chung Yeun, “Critical realism and realist research in human geography: a method or a philosophy in search of a method?” Progress in Human Geography 21,1 (1997) p. 57
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Posted 1 year ago
Analytical Marxism? Causation? Area Studies? Collective Action? Generalization? All in one book? It’s like a dream come true. Zoom

Analytical Marxism? Causation? Area Studies? Collective Action? Generalization? All in one book?

It’s like a dream come true.

Quote 7
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Posted 1 year ago
…but it is harmful to overlook the fundamental identity of the social sciences with history, and to mutilate research into human affairs by remodeling the social sciences into deformed likenesses of physics.

Alan Donagan, “Historical Understanding and the History of Philosophy”

The writings on the philosophy of geography are pretty thin on the ground, but it seems that many approaches from the philosophy of history are relevant to the research I want to do. History and geography deal with the same conceptual schema in many cases: constraining structures, environmental and social conditions, agency, etc. Donagan’s work seems like a good place to start.

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Posted 1 year ago

Conversations with History: John Searle

“I think my problem, as is a problem for every philosopher, is to do philosophy well, you have to know everything.”

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Posted 1 year ago
We need not so much a philosophy of the social sciences of the present and the past as we need a philosophy for the social sciences of the future, and indeed, for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of social phenomena.

John Searle, Making the Social World, p. 5

This book is going to be the central text upon which my History & Theory of Geography term paper is built. It is exactly what I want: an analytic approach to social phenomena that avoids the needless reductionism of many other works of analytic philosophy on the same topic.

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Posted 1 year ago

Notes on externalism

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Externalism About Mental Content

“Many of our mental states such as beliefs and desires are intentional mental states, or mental states with content. Externalism with regard to mental content says that in order to have certain types of intentional mental states (e.g. beliefs), it is necessary to be related to the environment in the right way. Internalism (or individualism) denies this, and it affirms that having those intentional mental states depends solely on our intrinsic properties. This debate has important consequences with regard to philosophical and empirical theories of the mind, and the role of social institutions and the physical environment in constituting the mind. It also raises other interesting questions concerning such matters as the explanatory relevance of content and the possibility of a priori self-knowledge.”

Also worth noting is Tyler Burge’s version of externalism, which he distinguishes as anti-individualism:

“individuating many of a person or animal’s mental kinds … is necessarily dependent on relations that the person bears to the physical, or in some cases social, environment” 

The theory presents some interesting and potentially fruitful applications for left politics:

  • If thoughts and mental states are more than the product of a single individual subject’s intrinsic properties, then claiming ownership of an idea is very difficult indeed. The beliefs and propositional attitudes that led to the design of an invention would not only be influenced by social and material factors, but essentially related to them. This undermines the idea of genuine inspiration or individual achievement that forms the philosophical basis for intellectual property.
  • More radical is the implication for conventional conceptions of property in general. Most often, the notion of “individual property rights” places emphasis on a single subject’s choices. But if those choices are essentially tied to physical and social realities, and the mind that makes them is the product of more than just an individual brain, can a single person “own” something in the usual sense?
  • From a social perspective, this puts greater emphasis on interconnectedness. This allows us to look much more closely at the social basis for certain phenomena (crime, inequality) rather than reductively assuming these are due to “individual choices.” This gives a very robust basis for the ideas of early social scientists like Marx and Weber.
  • In that vein, the idea also undermines the concept of methodological individualism in the philosophy of social science. With mental states and attitudes essentially related to the physical and social environment, the basis of the “individual, rational utility-maximizer” is obliterated. This concept, still central in conventional neoclassical economics, is also being undermined by neuro- and behavioral economics. 
  • Externalism also grounds the notion of praxis (discarded by most analytic philosophers, even those sympathetic to socialist/left politics) in a substantial theory of mind. If connections to material and social realities are central to our minds and understandings of the world, a true understanding of egalitarianism will only be achieved once we begin to put it into practice. 

The possible problem with my interpretation is that I take the potential implications of this theory of mind much too far. But it does seem to dovetail nicely with the empirical claims and recent work of behavioral economists, as well as some of the observations of those still working in the tradition of dialectical materialism, such as David Graeber. As always, however, I find it useful that this theory of mind avoids the unnecessary contradiction implied by the term “dialectic” while still preserving an emphasis on interconnectedness.