At about the same time when C. Wright Mills tried to chart a course between what he called "this statistical stuff and heavy duty theoretical bullshit" by publishing The Sociological Imagination, the British philosopher Peter Winch also declared war on the pretensions of physics envy based on a caricature of physics. In The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958) Winch did not mince words:
"That the social sciences are in their infancy has come to be a platitude amongst writers of textbooks on the subject. They will argue that this is because the social sciences have been slow to emulate the natural sciences and emancipate themselves from the dead hand of philosophy; that there was a time when there was no clear distinction between philosophy and natural science; but that owing to the transformation of affairs round about the seventeenth century natural science has made great bounds ever since. But, we are told, this revolution has not yet taken place in the social sciences, or at least it is only now in process of taking place. Perhaps social science has not yet found its Newton but the conditions are being created in which such a genius could arise. But above all, it is urged, we must follow the methods of natural science if we are to make any significant progress....I propose, in this monograph, to attack such a conception of the relation between the social studies, philosophy, and the natural sciences. [...] It will consist of a war on two fronts: first, a criticism of some prevalent contemporary ideas about the nature of philosophy: second, a criticism of some prevalent contemporary ideas about the nature of the social studies. The main tactics will be a pincer movement: the same point will be reached by arguing from opposite directions. To complete the military analogy before it gets out of hand, my main war aim will be to demonstrate that the two apparently diverse fronts on which the war is being waged are not in reality diverse at all; that to be clear about the nature of philosophy and to be clear about the nature of the social studies amount to the same thing. For any worthwhile study of society must be philosophical in character and any worthwhile philosophy must be concerned with the nature of human society."
Under different guises and names, overtly and covertly, positivism continues to thrive even in areas where one would least expect it. This year, a new book by Robert Biernacki titled Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry: Decoding Facts and Variables (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) provides a trenchant critique of the attempt by some sociologists to codify, quantify and measure culture and meaning.
The book has also been selected by sociologist (and colleague of Biernacki at UCSD) Andrew Scull as one of the Times Literary Supplement's "book of the year.
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"That the social sciences are in their infancy has come to be a platitude amongst writers of textbooks on the subject. They will argue that this is because the social sciences have been slow to emulate the natural sciences and emancipate themselves from the dead hand of philosophy; that there was a time when there was no clear distinction between philosophy and natural science; but that owing to the transformation of affairs round about the seventeenth century natural science has made great bounds ever since. But, we are told, this revolution has not yet taken place in the social sciences, or at least it is only now in process of taking place. Perhaps social science has not yet found its Newton but the conditions are being created in which such a genius could arise. But above all, it is urged, we must follow the methods of natural science if we are to make any significant progress....I propose, in this monograph, to attack such a conception of the relation between the social studies, philosophy, and the natural sciences. [...] It will consist of a war on two fronts: first, a criticism of some prevalent contemporary ideas about the nature of philosophy: second, a criticism of some prevalent contemporary ideas about the nature of the social studies. The main tactics will be a pincer movement: the same point will be reached by arguing from opposite directions. To complete the military analogy before it gets out of hand, my main war aim will be to demonstrate that the two apparently diverse fronts on which the war is being waged are not in reality diverse at all; that to be clear about the nature of philosophy and to be clear about the nature of the social studies amount to the same thing. For any worthwhile study of society must be philosophical in character and any worthwhile philosophy must be concerned with the nature of human society."
Under different guises and names, overtly and covertly, positivism continues to thrive even in areas where one would least expect it. This year, a new book by Robert Biernacki titled Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry: Decoding Facts and Variables (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) provides a trenchant critique of the attempt by some sociologists to codify, quantify and measure culture and meaning.
The premise of coding is that meanings are entities about which there can be facts. But we all know that novel questions and contexts elicit fresh meanings from sources, which is enough to intimate that meaning is neither an encapsulated thing to be found nor a constructed fact of the matter. It is categorically absurd to treat a coding datum as a discrete observation of meaning in an object-text. My preference is to think of “meaning” as the puzzle we try to grasp when our honed concepts of what is going on collide with the words and usages of the agents we study. Describing meaning effectively requires us to exhibit that fraught interchange between cultures in its original: the primary sources displayed in contrast to the researcher’s typifying of them (p.131)
This volume has shown that humanist inquiry on its own better satisfies the “hard” science criteria of transparency, of retesting the validity of interpretations, of extrapolating from mechanisms, of appraising the scope of interpretations, of recognizing destabilizing anomalies, of displaying how we decide to “take” a case as meaning something, of forcing revision in interpretive decisions, of acknowledging the dilemmas of sampling, and of separating the evidence from the effects of instrumentation (p.151)
The book has also been selected by sociologist (and colleague of Biernacki at UCSD) Andrew Scull as one of the Times Literary Supplement's "book of the year.
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