Socit qubcoise de science politique

Review: [untitled]
Author(s): J. W. Grove
Source: Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, Vol. 18,
No. 4 (Dec., 1985), pp. 809-811
Published by: Canadian Political Science Association and the Socit qubcoise de science
politique
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3228075
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Recensions /Reiie?vs 809

However, their conception of 'experience" is reminiscent of the "life-world"

of continental philosophers, and arguments like this one are sometimes seen as
points of contact between the analytical and the phenomenological traditions. It
is important to understand that Manning and Robinson are not interested in
building bridges. They are concerned instead to defend a distinction between
philosophical investigation into what they call the form of an activity and
dogmatic reflection on right and wrong conduct within an activity. It is a
distinction which pre-empts the possibility that successive rounds of
interpretation could serve as a critique of ideology, clarifying the agent's lived
experience.
Such a distinction often appears in the guise of a disjunction between theory
and practice, ideology coming onto the scene as practical reasoning
masquerading as theory, a vulgar imposture corrupting to theory and practice
alike. The real interest of this book lies in its authors' attempt to maintain this
distinction while defending ideology as reasoning singularly appropriate to,
indeed constitutive of, an activity such as politics. In their view, ideology is "a
form of thinking... which is in a significant way, logically necessary to the
concepts of political legitimacy, association and activity" (16).
To paraphrase a rich and detailed argument, the authors give an account of
political activity in terms of a distinction between making and doing. The latter,
which always entails participant understanding in terms of noninstrumental
rules, requires the concept "doing well." Ideology is that form of reflection
which issues in prescriptions specifying what it is to do well in politics. It is
therefore ethical in nature, part of practical reasoning but not instrumental
reasoning. As a language of commitment and not a language of representation,
ideology can never be convicted of failing to represent political life accurately. It
makes no attempt to do so.
One consequence of this view, which the authors concede, is that the
manifest absurdity of a doctrine such as scientific racism cannot provide a good
reason for a man not to be a racist. It might be objected that while such a man's
commitment is in no sense grounded on a social theory, it is not entirely without
significance if this defence of his commitment should prove incoherent. His
incoherence says something about the quality of his political judgment which
fails to be captured in the authors' pragmatic claim that "the objectivity of
political judgement is established by the success of the committed in creating ...
relationships acknowledged to be legitimate..." (118). In short, ideologies are
only partly constitutive of political life, containing much low-level social
theorizing referring to an independently specifiable political reality.
Manning and Robinson would doubtless dismiss this objection as a hopeless
fudge. The great merit of their book is to argue the case for a fully constitutive
ideological language with such vigour. Some regrettable stylistic lapses and a
rash of misprints only marginally blunt the force of their message.
JEREMY RAYNER Lakehead University

Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective

Karl-Otto Apel
Translated by Georgia Warnke
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984.,pp. xxii, 293
This book published in German in 1979 now appears in translation in the series
Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought edited by Thomas McCarthy,
well known as an expositor of the ideas of Jurgen Habermas. "Contemporary
German social thought," in this context, means thought that takes as its starting
8!10 Recensions / Reviews

point the work of, for example, Heidegger, Adorno, Marcuse and Gadamer. It
constitutes a "moment' in a long tradition of German anti-Kantian idealism
stretching back to Hegel. Apel himself is a professor of social philosophy at the
University of Frankfurt and a colleague of Habermas.
This book originated in a colloquium held in Helsinki in 1974 to discuss
Georg von Wright's Explanation and Understanding (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1971)and it is constructed around a critique of that work. In turn,
von Wright wrote in the preface to his book that his thinking had been "deeply
affected by Charles Taylor's The Explanation of Behaviour (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1964), which immediately suggests a very different provenance
from that of Apel, one which Apel characterizes, and criticizes, as
neo-Wittgensteinian. Both books, von Wright's and Apel's, are concerned with
a resolution of the seemingly interminable debate over explanation and
understanding in the social sciences; but, whereas von Wright seemed content to
explicate the differences between two types of understanding-understanding
through explanation in terms of causes and understanding through explanation
in terms of intention and teleology-and to leave it at that, Apel's programme is
much more ambitious. In brief it is to subsume both types of understanding
within a hermeneutic account. The problem is the applicability of natural science
methodology to the study of society. The line of attack is that taken by
intellectual forebears such as Horkheimer and Marcuse and currently by
Habermas, namely to raise the issue of the lack of "self-understanding" on the
part of natural science and to show that natural science rests on presuppositions
which remain unexamined by science but can be "shown" by philosophy. The
translator, Georgia Warnke, states the position succinctly in her introduction to
the book. Apel, she says, seeks to reverse the thrust of the argument that the
natural sciences possess a monopoly on the "meaning" of science and
objectivity. "'The notions of science and objectivity need not be abandoned to
the natural sciences [by social science]; what is required instead is an expanded
conception of scientific rationality" (xvi [emphasis mine]).
All critiques such as that of the Frankfurt School rest on a
misunderstood-indeed, in itself, scientistic-view of the nature of natural
science; or, more precisely, on the unquestioning acceptance of an influential
but mistaken paradigm. Apel's book is full of such misunderstandings: that the
Hempelian "subsumption-theoretic covering law model" of explanation is still
an adequate element in philosophy of science (if, indeed it ever was adequate);
that "causal laws," properly understood, embody natural necessity (that
"caused" means determined); that scientific practice is a priori instrumental and
technological; that the essence of science is prediction and control, and so forth.
It is significant that wherever Apel notes divergences from the old paradigm in
the post-positivist (indeed anti-positivist) methodology of science of critical
rationalism deriving from the work of Karl Popper, he re-interprets them back
into the old positivist mould.
Understanding and Explanation is a work of considerable erudition and its
early parts provide an informative exposition and critique of the historical
phases through which the controversy has passed in the course of its evolution.
But Apel's own reconstruction and attempted resolution of the controversy
"from a transcendental-pragmatic perspective" has left at least one reader
dissatisfied and unconvinced. That there are "absolute limits [to] any
programmefor objective-explanatory science" (xvii) (that is, that there are limits
to what can be understood by science) should come as no surprise to any but
those who are fossilized in a positivist past. Science does not claim finality.
Indeed it is one of its strengths, as against certain kinds of dogmatic
philosophizing, that it does not. Nor is it a revelation of any great value to be told
Recensions /Reviews 811

that the social sciences have a dual interest: an "interest" in explaining in causal
terms and another "interest" in understanding the meaning of actions in terms
of cultural norms and subjective intentions. Nor, again, is it news to be told that
"transcendental-pragmatic reflection on the conditions of the possibility of
causal explanation" precludes the claim "that such explanation is the sole
scientific approach to human action" (xvii). These are the translator's words,
not Apel's, but they seem to me to represent accurately the nub of Apel's
conclusions.
That there must be significant differences in the way we study society and
the way we study the natural world (including ourselves considered solely as
part of the natural world) is scarcely worth contesting. It is true that the "unity of
the sciences" through common method meant for most of its advocates the
subjection of the social sciences to the natural sciences. Equally repugnant is the
attempt to subject the natural sciences to a philosophy which purports to dictate
the grounds which make them possible.
J. W. GROVE Queen's University

Basic Dilemmas in the Social Sciences

Hubert M. Blalock, Jr.
Beverly Hills: Sage, 1984, pp. 184
In this monograph, Hubert M. Blalock, Jr. addresses the "perennial problems
that all social scientists face: Why aren't we doing better, and how can we
improve?" (11). The dissatisfaction can be traced back to "a number of tough
intellectual challenges stemming from the complexity of the social world,"
which include problems of probabilistic phenomena, multiple causation, and
measurement error. The other source of the problem is "our own diverse
intellectual backgrounds, interests, and behaviors" (14), which encompass the
experiential, "critical" social scientific tradition. Social scientists, in the pursuit
of "science," often ignore the inherent biases in their work and their
implications. Blalock believes that bias can be evaluated as misspecification and
that a "good starting point in this process is exposure to well-known principles of
multivariate analysis and scaling and measurement theory" (32).
Chapters two to five of the monograph deal with the evaluation of bias and
misspecification from the point of view of statistical practice in the social
sciences. The chapters cover such topics as multiple causation, measurement
error, aggregation bias, and theory construction. Each chapter is clear, concise,
and nontechnical. This portion of the monograph provides a simple introduction
to some of the more difficult and controversial areas in social scientific modelling
and data analysis.
Throughout these chapters, Blalock raises the problems of misspecification
and bias. He considers, by way of example, the dilemmas raised by errors of
measurement in a causal analysis. The question is "how much does one simplify
reality and proceed as though the answers provided are accurate ones?" (59).
Depending upon the analyst's intellectual and ideological predilections, the
statistical bias can be ignored, dismissed as inconsequential, or noted but not
accounted for in the discussion of the results. A similar dilemma arises in using
aggregate data. Here, the data (typically census data) may be previously
aggregated for the user, who may not know how certain individuals came to be
aggregated. This can lead to a very biased result and analysis. As was the case
with measurement error in causal analysis, the level of intellectual honesty in
confronting this problem must be raised.