Introduction to

Epistemological Issues in
the Social Sciences
LECTURE I: THE VALIDITY AND LEGITIMACY OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCED IN THE
SOCIAL SCIENCES
 ‘EPISTEME’ – KNOWLEDGE

Epistemology ‘LOGOS’ – RATIONAL

EXPLANATION / ACCOUNT
Epistemology

 Epistemic values:
 Justification – concerned with arriving at certainty
 Knowledge is considered as “Justified-true-belief”
 Methods of justification: demonstrating logical proof / consistency / validity; providing
empirical evidence; etc.
 In response to dogmatism or skepticism.

 Explanation – concerned with arriving at an understanding

 Knowledge is considered as “True belief with logos”
 Methods of explanation: hermeneutics; phenomenology; narrative; genealogy; critical
theory; etc.
 May result to relativism.
Epistemology

 A philosophical study of knowing and other desirable ways of believing

and attempting to find the truth.
 Links the two most important objects of philosophical inquiry: ourselves and
the world.
 If there is no knowledge, if it is impossible or unattainable, we are forced
into solipsism.
 Some philosophers have been accused of imposing conditions on
knowledge that are unreasonably stringent.
 If knowledge on some account turns out to be unattainable, there might
be something wrong with that account.
Epistemology

 The state of knowing is a state that puts us in cognitive contact with reality.
 Knowledge is something that humans naturally desire to have.
 Knowing is a form of believing. When we know, there is an object of
thought to which we assent. (Most of the time, this object of thought is a
proposition.)
 Knowledge is something the subject is aware of. (Knowledge about
knowing something.)
Epistemology

 Epistemic Demands:
 Knowledge must be true for it to be valuable.
 Knowledge must either have justificatory / explanatory power or predictive
ability.
 Knowledge in relation to believing must be something conscientiously arrived at.
 Knowledge requires self-trust and a community of epistemic trust.
What counts as knowledge in the
social sciences?

Social Science – the main source and object of knowledge is the Society
Natural Science – the main source and object of knowledge is Nature
Knowledge in the Social Sciences

 But the question “What counts as knowledge in the Social Sciences?” is

intimately linked with the legitimacy or validity of the “method” used to
arrive at a ‘social scientific knowledge.’
 This epistemological issue takes the discourse at the heart of the so called
divide between natural science and social science.
 For a long time, a field in social science is ranked higher if it resembles
more closely the “exact sciences.” (For which, Economics would rank
higher than Sociology or Political Science or Anthropology. Early
Economists for instance tried to demonstrate how its calculations can be
likened to calculations in Physics. In Sociology on the other hand, thinkers
tried to adopt concepts in Biology in their explanation and analysis.)
Knowledge in the Social Sciences

 However, “the correctness of the analogues, homologues, and metaphors

used by social scientists has never proved to be a guarantee of the validity
or usefulness of any social science. Nor is a social science less valid if it
does not in any way attempt to imitate a particular natural science, to be
like physics or like biology.” (Cohen, 1994)
 In the end, “the ultimate criteria for the validity of any social science and
the grounds of its usefulness must be independent of the question of
whether it is a subject like physics or like biology.” (Cohen, 1994)
 “Much more important in any evaluation is whether this subject has its own
integrity, whether it is internally coherent, whether its results are testable,
and whether its assumptions are of the sort demanded by rational
explanation.” (Cohen, 1994)
Knowledge in the Social Sciences

 IDENTIFY METHODS YOU USE IN YOUR FIELDS OF STUDY:

Natural and Social Sciences

Purification – maintain the strict divide between social and natural

Translation – translate the accuracy / precision of natural science to social
science, and the human values in social science to natural science
Natural and/or Social

 The work of Purification: the creation of two entirely distinct ontological

zones.
“No sooner had I started my research, however, than I quickly discovered
that I was mistaken on all the above counts. There was precious little
literature, if any, that took account of the ways in which social scientists of the
past three centuries had interacted with their fellow natural scientists or had
attempted to use concepts, principles, theories, or methods of the natural
sciences at large. Additionally, the reverse interaction - the influence of social
sciences on the development of the natural sciences - was all but completely
ignored and in some cases even denied.” (Cohen, 1994)
- Robert Boyle and His Objects - Thomas Hobbes and His Subjects
- Laboratory - Leviathan
- Science - Politics
- Universality by exception - Universality by inclusion
- Nature - Culture
- Nonhuman - Human
 Natural and/or Social

“Hobbes defines a naked and calculating citizen who constitutes the Leviathan, a mortal
god, an artificial creature. On what does the Leviathan depend? On the calculation of
human atoms that leads to the contract that decides on the irreversible composition of
the strength of all in the hands of a single one. In what does this strength consist? In the
authorization granted by all naked citizens to a single one to speak in their name. Who is
acting when that one acts? We are, we who have definitively delegated our power to
him. The Republic is a paradoxical artificial creature composed of citizens united only by
the authorization given to one of them to represent them all. Does the Sovereign speak in
his own name, or in the name of those who empower him?...It is indeed the Sovereign
who speaks, but it is the citizens who are speaking through him. He becomes their
spokesperson, their persona, their personification. He translates them; therefore he may
betray them. They empower him: therefore they may impeach him. The Leviathan is
made up only of citizens, calculations, agreements or disputes. In short, it is made up of
nothing but social relations. Or rather thanks to Hobbes and his successors, we are
beginning to understand what is meant by social relations, powers, forces, societies.”
 Natural and/or Social

“But Boyle defines an even stranger artifact. He invents the laboratory within which artificial
machines create phenomena out of whole cloth. Even though they are artificial, costly and
hard to reproduce, and despite the small number of trained and reliable witnesses, these
facts indeed represent nature as it is. The facts are produced and represented in the
laboratory, in scientific writings; they are recognized and vouched for by the nascent
community of witnesses. Scientists are scrupulous representatives of the facts. Who is
speaking when they speak? The facts themselves, beyond all question, but also their
authorized spokespersons. Who is speaking, then, nature or human beings?...In themselves,
facts are mute; natural forces are brute mechanisms. Yet the scientists declare that they
themselves are not speaking; rather, facts speak for themselves. These mute entities are thus
capable of speaking, writing, signifying within the artificial chamber of the laboratory or
inside the even more rarefied chamber of the vacuum pump. Little groups of gentlemen
take testimony from natural forces, and they testify to each other that they are not
betraying but translating the silent behavior of objects. With Boyle and his successors, we
begin to conceive of what a natural force is, an objects that is mute but endowed or
entrusted with meaning.
Natural and/or Social

“How can a society be made to hold together peacefully, Hobbes asks

indignantly, on the pathetic foundation of matters of fact? He is particularly
annoyed by the relative change in the scale of phenomena. According to
Boyle, the big questions concerning matter and divine power can be
subjected to experimental resolution, and this resolution will be partial and
modest. Now Hobbes…demands a macroscopic response to his ‘macro’-
arguments, a demonstration that would prove that his ontology is not
necessary, that the vacuum [pump] is politically acceptable. Now what does
Boyle do in response? He chooses, on the contrary, to make his experiment
more sophisticated, to show the effect on a detector – a mere chicken
feather!…Hobbes raises a fundamental problem of political philosophy, and
his theories are to be refuted by a feather in a glass chamber inside Boyle’s
mansion!
Natural and/or Social

“Boyle is not simply creating a scientific discourse while Hobbes is doing the
same thing for politics; Boyle is creating a political discourse from which
politics is to be excluded, while Hobbes is imagining a scientific politics from
which experimental science has to be excluded. In other words, they are
inventing our modern world, a world in which the representation of things
through the intermediary of the laboratory is forever dissociated from the
representation of citizens through the intermediary of the social contract.
Natural and/or Social

“In their common debate, Hobbes’s and Boyle’s descendants offer us the
resources we have used up to now: on the one hand, social force and power;
on the other, natural force and mechanism. On the one hand, the subject of
law; on the other, the object of science. The political spokespersons come to
represent the quarrelsome and calculating multitude of citizens; the scientific
spokespersons come to represent the mute and material multitude of objects.
The former translate their principals, who cannot all speak at once; the latter
translate their constituents, who are mute from birth.” (Latour, 1991)
Natural and/or Social

 The work of Translation: the creation of mixtures between entirely new

types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture.
“One may say that whereas the earlier decades were marked by an attempt
to model the social sciences on the natural sciences, the decades from 1960
– 1980 were marked by the reverse trend: how were the typical concerns of
the social sciences with human action, rationality, social and historical
practices and structures, to be brought to bear upon the characterization of
the natural sciences themselves? How were causal and statistical models of
explanation to be tempered by considerations of freedom, choice, social
values and interests, in understanding the growth of knowledge itself?”
(Cohen and Wartofsky, 1983)
Natural and/or Social

“In the seventeenth century James Harrington modeled his theory of society on
William Harvey's new physiology. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the
economist William Stanley Jevons proposed a new economics based to some
degree on the model of Newtonian rational mechanics. In three examples from the
last hundred years it was the scientists themselves who designated an area of the
social sciences in which their work might be fruitfully applied. The German physical
chemist, Wilhelm Ostwald, endeavored to create a new form of social science
based on energetics; he called this science "Kulturwissenschaft" instead of the
accepted "Sozialwissenschaft." In a somewhat similar fashion the American
physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon essayed an extension of his research on self-
regulating processes of the human body to social theory, attempting to transform
and revitalize the traditional concept of the body politic. In our own time we have
seen E. O. Wilson develop sociobiology by generalizing his studies of evolutionary
biology and of the group behavior of ants.
Natural and/or Social

“A somewhat different example is provided by the British philosopher George

Berkeley who - in the eighteenth century - was also working from natural science to
social science. He sought to prove that Newtonian rational mechanics might be
applied to produce a science of social interactions. This may be likened to the
attempt by John Craig, Newton's contemporary, to find a social analogue for law of
universal gravity. Adolphe Quetelet, the nineteenth-century pioneer of social
statistics, was a professional astronomer who saw in the domain of social numbers a
fruitful field for the application of statistical modes of investigation. The opposite path
was followed by Emile Durkheim, who discerned in the social numerical data of
suicides a statistical base for a science of society.
Natural and/or Social

“Hugo Grotius, whose intellectual ideal was Galileo's new physics of motion, displayed
the influence of the mathematical way of thinking in his celebrated treatise on
international law. In this climate the French engineer Vauban saw the need for a
numberbased statecraft. Perhaps the most easily discerned effect of this mathematical
climate is the development by Graunt and Petty and their eighteenth-century
successors of a numerical approach to the problems of government which Petty
named political arithmetic.
Natural and/or Social

“In the late eighteenth century, the scientific climate was in some respects even
more mathematical. In this era mathematics had two different implications for the
natural sciences: to apply actual mathematical procedures in order to derive
principles of science from sound axioms and to base science on numbers or on
quantitative considerations. Even natural history, that least mathematical subject
within the natural sciences, began to incorporate some quantitative features, as we
may see in Buffon's celebrated Histoire naturelle, where the discussions of
anthropology featured the statistical studies of mortality made by Jean-Pierre Emile
Dupre de Saint-Maur.27 The development of a mature science of probabilities,
remarkably advanced by Laplace's Theorie analytique des probabilites of 1812, was
another very significant aspect of the quantitative scientific climate at this time. It
had a notable counterpart, of course, in the collection of all sorts of demographic
data and social statistics. (Cohen, 1994)
Natural and/or Social

 “The emulation of the natural sciences by a social science carries with it a

validation of the methods used and a legitimation of the enterprise in question.
 Claude Menard has expressed this beautifully by referring to the "polemical
function of an analogy," explaining that analogy "aims at persuasion, looking to a
recognized science for a prestigious answer, for the glamour and security of an
argument endorsed by the learned and the revered."
 An example is the authority carried by a report in the social sciences that has the
same formal appearance as one produced in chemistry or physics. In the end,
however, the worth of the result will not be gauged by its resemblance to, or even
direct kinship with, one or another of the natural sciences so much as by the
degree to which it serves its own discipline or by its applicability to the solution of
some practical problem.
Natural and/or Social

 Ever since the Scientific Revolution, a high value has been set on giving social
science the solid foundation of the natural sciences. This goal has traditionally
had two very different aspects.
 One, the subject of this chapter, has been of a limited kind: to make use of the
concepts, principles, methods, and techniques of some one of the physical or
biological sciences.
 The other has been greater than merely constructing social theories by
introducing analogues or homologues of a particular natural science at a
particular time. Adopting the metaphor of the natural sciences traditionally has
meant taking on certain features of what was known as the scientific method -
supposedly characterized by healthy skepticism, reliance on experiment and
critical observation, avoidance of pure speculation, and in particular a specific
ladder of steps that would lead (usually by induction) from "facts" to "theory," to
a knowledge of the eternal "truths" of nature.
Natural and/or Social

 This second goal, which might from one point of view seem a more
obviously useful aim, has actually become increasingly problematic.
 Twentieth-century philosophers and historians of science, aided by
scientists themselves, have dispelled any belief in "the" scientific method.
 Moreover, it is widely recognized today that continuous change (usually
characterized as "advance") is a principal feature of the natural sciences.
 The result is that the particular aspects of any natural science being
emulated by social sciences will, often without warning, undergo a radical
transformation.
Natural and/or Social

 It is admittedly of general interest and major historical concern to discern

whether the economic thought of Adam Smith or of François de Quesnay
was in part based on Newtonian or on Cartesian principles of science, but
the validity and usefulness of their concepts is not dependent on the
present validity of the natural science that originally inspired them.
 Similarly, the worth of Darwinian evolutionary ideas in sociology or in
anthropology has been judged primarily in relation to their use for those
social sciences and has not exactly paralleled the ups and downs of
scientific consensus on the Darwinian concept of natural selection.”
(Cohen, 1994)
Natural and/or Social

 The Social Sciences can produce knowledges based on the

methodologies, practitioners in the field, see to be capable of achieving
the objectives of their research and providing answers to their specific
questions.
 The epistemological validity of the social sciences would no longer have to
depend on its analogy or homology to the natural sciences.
 The appropriateness of methods, practices, analyses, and sources, would
have to depend on the nature of the very field of study that employs
them.