The Philosophy of Social Research
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The Philosophy of Social Research

John A. Hughes, W. W. Sharrock

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eBook - ePub

The Philosophy of Social Research

John A. Hughes, W. W. Sharrock

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This fully revised, updated and extended edition of a successful text, introduces some of the important philosophical issues arising from social research practices and historical research in the social sciences. Since its initial publication the field of social research and philosophy has been widely debated, and this expanded version incorporates the most recent discussion and theories. In this edition John Hughes and Wes Sharrock carefully analyse the research implications of the great sociological thinkers, and stress that depending upon the researcher's philosophical leanings, there are a range of possible interpretations of the 'facts' uncovered by the researcher.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781317883692

CHAPTER 1
The philosophy of social research

Introduction

The relationship between philosophy and what we now refer to as the social sciences has a long history. Indeed, the social sciences have often envisaged themselves as following the natural sciences which originated by separating themselves from philosophy, with the social sciences appropriating as their scientific issues the last unsolved problems of philosophy. Unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences have not, for the most part, been able to dissociate themselves from philosophy. Although the social sciences vary in this respect, philosophical issues continually provide the fundamental questions these disciplines ask about the nature of their appropriate subject matters, their intellectual provenance, their investigative rationales, and above all about the nature of their valid and proper methods. Sociology, for example, seems to consist almost entirely of a succession of approaches and perspectives most of which bear a heavy philosophical tone and which have as their main focus a continuing struggle with philosophical problems, many of which are of nineteenth century origin. As we say, the social sciences vary in this regard, with sociology, perhaps, being the most salient case, existing in near perpetual crisis about its fundamental status and self-conception as a discipline. But, others are by no means exempt. It is common, for example, for training in political science to include courses in political theory, for economics to include the history of economic thought, both heavily philosophical, and for methodological training across the spectrum of the social sciences to include courses in philosophical ideas about appropriate methods predominantly organised under the aegis of the philosophy of science.
We note the involvement of the social sciences with philosophy not by way of complaint but simply to bring to attention the fact that philosophical issues remain of continuing concern in the social and the human sciences. What else this might indicate about their intellectual character is a matter of debate, but it is a central fact about their intellectual life. Nor is this surprising if we look at the formative influences. In sociology, for example, the founding trinity of Marx, Weber and Durkheim spent a considerable amount of their efforts establishing and refining the philosophical bases for their own ideas, the results of which still massively shape sociological debates, not least because of the differences between the three of them.1 For them, and this is still probably more typical of the European traditions of social science than it is of the American, philosophical questions had to be settled in advance of empirical enquiries. Given this heritage, and the immense difficulty of bringing philosophical controversies to any kind of conclusive resolution, purportedly fundamental questions at the heart of the human sciences remain unresolved and continually stimulate the necessity to remain engaged with philosophy.
Of course, the nature of the entanglement between philosophy and the human sciences has not remained constant over time. As mentioned, the human sciences largely originated in philosophical inquiry but they were then different kinds of enterprises from those we know today. The distinctions between metaphysical inquiries, what we now commonly regard as philosophy, and empirical inquiries, were not so sharply made as they are today. Prior to the establishment of the natural sciences, philosophy was regarded as the mode of intellectual inquiry and embraced much of what we now treat not only as separate disciplines but as very different modes of study to those of philosophy. The emergence of the natural sciences not only shifted philosophy from its throne as the supreme form of knowledge but thereby provoked changes in the conception of philosophy itself. Philosophy became more focused as a metaphysical endeavour rather than an amalgam of the metaphysical and the, empirical. Empirical inquiries into the nature of the universe became very much the province of the natural sciences with philosophy left with questions which were not empirical in character.2

The nature of philosophy

There have been many definitions of philosophy and as many different philosophical styles as definitions. From the point of view of securing a definition of philosophy, matters are made worse by the fact that there are special difficulties about defining philosophy that we shall not be in a position to understand until we examine philosophical problems about definition in general. This is not untypical of the way in which philosophy seems to proceed. Its questions quickly seem to assume an aggravating idependence on other questions before we can even begin to see what an answer might be. What look to be fairly straightforward and inoffensive questions such as 'What is reality?', 'Are there other minds?' rarelyget answers of the form, 'Reality is such-and-such' or 'Yes, there are other minds'. More often than not such questions will invite other questions: 'What is meant by...?', 'How could we determine whether or not there are other minds?', 'What criteria could we use to distinguish the real from the unreal?', and so on.
Philosophical questions can look simple enough but it quickly becomes hard to know what kind of answer can ever be given to them, not least because the business of philosophers largely seems to consist in disagreeing with each other about what kind of answers could possibly be acceptable. Philosophical questions about the nature of matter are not the kind of questions physicists, say, can answer. Philosophical questions about other minds are not the kind of questions which psychologists might devise experiments to explore. Philosophical questions about the nature of truth are not answerable by lawyers. Physics, psychology, and law - to stay with the examples - have to assume precisely the kind of things that philosophy wants to ask about. It is physics' task to tell us about the structure of the material world, what it is composed of, why it behaves in the ways that it does, and so on; it is not its task to question the real existence of an external world. Philosophy can accept all that physics tells us about the nature of the material universe and still want to ask its questions whether or not, for example, physics give us its final answer as to the nature of reality. Much contemporary philosophical thought, especially that which affects the social sciences, revolves around the question of whether 'science' occupies a special, privileged place in human thought about reality; whether, that is, science represents a superior form of knowing and, if so, by what means? Let us illustrate with a mundane example.
Occasionally, when driving around the British countryside, one comes across lorries with the word 'Milk' painted on their rear and sides. A fairly obvious conclusion to draw on seeing such a lorry is that this is a vehicle designed to carry milk going about its business picking up milk from the farms for delivery to the dairy. But what is the basis of this inference? The fact that 'Milk' appears on the lorry? More than likely, but what does this presumption depend on? It depends, for one thing, on knowing that 'Milk' refers to what the lorry carries. Yet, as we well know, lorries can have names or words on them which do not refer to what they carry. Sometimes the name of the firm or owner is blazoned on the side, or the name of some product. So, how do we know that the lorry referred to carries milk? 'Milk' may have been the owner of the lorry, or a firm, or even the make of a lorry. How can we be sure about the claim? What kind of claim is it? Is it a claim about what we believe or about what we know? There are, of course, lots of reasons we could provide to substantiate the claim: it was a tanker lorry; 'Milk' is not a usual surname; it is not, as far as we know, the name of a firm, and it would be strange to use it as a pet name, and so on. And, perhaps, an accumulation of such reasons might 'add up' to a conviction that we are right: this lorry does carry milk. But why?
The reasons just adduced include reference to our personal experience, our personal knowledge, the practices of vehicle manufacturers, transportation firms, lorry drivers, and more. How far do we need to go before the link between the sign 'Milk' and the function of the lorry is established beyond doubt? It could be argued that no amount of personal beliefs and reasons are sufficient; what we need to do is look inside the lorry. Again, what makes the results of looking any more certain or corroborative than the reasons we have already offered? We may still be deceived. What should we conclude if the lorry was full of whisky instead of milk? Accuse the driver of smuggling? Conclude tha we had misunderstood the label all along and that milk refers to a bright brownish liquid that comes from Scotland and not to a white thick liquid that comes from cows?
But whatever the conclusion arrived at, the point is that we would be embroiled in questions about the nature of evidence and, through these, about the nature of the world: how we know certain things, believe others, how we know things to be true or false, what inferences can legitimately be made from various kinds of experiences, what inferences consist in, what sorts of things make up the world, and so on? Of course, in doing so we begin to lose something of our sense of direction; familiar experiences become doubtful and even the most seemingly self-evident, certain, common-sensical facts appear open to doubt.
Note that these questions arose out of an everyday ability of persons to understand, in this case, what the label on the side of a lorry meant. As such, it does not involve the use of any kind of esoteric knowledge, though we might want to say that it does involve culturally acquired knowledge.3 We can make such connections routinely and normally without overmuch hesitation. The ability to read road signs, labels on packets or bottles, headlines, street names, and so on, are part and parcel of our everyday competences. In which case why ask the kind of questions just raised?
Of course, at one level there is no reason whatsoever why we should do so. Certainly it is unlikely that philosophical discussion of this ability will make very much difference to the way in which it enters and affects our daily lives. Nonetheless, these philosophical questions continue to exercise a worrying influence, engendering and perpetuating puzzle and anxiety about possible sources of intellectual authority.

Ontology, epistemology and intellectual authority

One of the principal reasons why philosophy and social research remain deeply interconnected is because of the way in which social scientists have adhered to the philosophical view known as 'foundationalism'. This view treats epistemology - the inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of knowledge - as prior to empirical research. The possibility of empirical knowledge needs to be secured against persistent sceptical doubt, the kind of doubt which raises arguments to the effect that we can never truly know anything about the real, external world, can never legitimately, and with full confidence, claim to know anything. To protect against this kind of scepticism it is argued that the possibility and the actuality of knowledge need to be conclusively demonstrated by identifying sound, unchallengeable means, or methods, of acquiring knowledge. If we are to be assured of our entitlement to the confidence that, for example, we often feel about our scientific knowledge, then we need to be able to demonstrate that our system of knowledge is built upon sound foundations. Foundationalism, then, is the view that true knowledge must rest upon a set of firm, unquestionable set of indisputable truths from which our beliefs may be logically deduced, so retaining the truth value of the foundational premises from which they follow, and in terms of which our methods of forming further ideas about the world and investigating it can be licensed.
The influence of foundationalism is sufficiently strong in the social sciences for the priority of the foundations to be deemed not merely logical but also temporal. Thus, it is common for philosophical, especially epistemological, issues to be regarded as the first, preliminary ones that need to be addressed in order that sound methods for enquiry can be laid down in advance of the empirical research itself. As we shall shortly see, conceptions of the nature and organisation of social research are often themselves derived from one or other philosophical conceptions about the nature of scientific enquiry. As a result, research approaches and techniques are often developed as implementations and demonstrations of the philosophical preconceptions. Accordingly, the aim of much of social research is, in effect, to show what difference the adoption of a particular philosophical point of view, especially on epistemological matters, makes. The result is that criticism of research results, and the methods which generate them, is often directed through them against the philosophical conceptions underlying them and often made from a different, conflicting philosophical position. Thus, it is difficult to regard the social sciences as representing disciplines which produce cumulative empirical findings: findings which build upon each other within frameworks which are more or less settled. Instead, what we have, to varying degrees, are philosophical arguments based around and provoked by putative empirical findings.
'How is it possible, if it is, for us to gain knowledge of the world?' is the question which provides the main business of epistemology. Related to it is the equally momentous question, 'What kinds of things really exist in the world?': a question which belongs to that branch of philosophy known as ontology. Epistemology is, to put it briefly, concerned with evaluating claims about the way in which the world can be known to us and, as such, involves issues as to what it is to know anything.
As philosophical questions these are not so much questions about particular methods of investigation or techniques of data collection or even about specific matters of fact. They are purportedly general questions which ask about these particular methods of techniques, or the facts which are purportedly established by their use, whether they satisfy the general requirements for being able to say that we do, indeed, know something. Such questions, of course, presuppose that we can identify those general requirements, and epistemological controversies are all about the nature of these supposed requirements.
Quite clearly ontological and epistemological issues are not unconnected. Presumably the capacity of whatever methods or procedures give us knowledge of what there is must depend, in part, upon what there is to be known about. It is important to emphasise, however, that ontological and epistemological questions are not to be answered by empirical enquiry since they are engaged in examining, among other things, the general nature and significance of empirical inquiry. We cannot empirically inquire into the question of whether or not there are such things as 'empirical facts'. We can, it seems, establish some particular facts - such as what the suicide rate in the United Kingdom was in 1973 - but asking what justifies that claim is very different from asking whether there really are any facts at all and, if there are, whether our ordinary ways of finding things out could possibly provide the basis for establishing their existence? This is not an empirical question, for to suppose that one could answer it by assembling facts would be to beg the very question itself. Instead, it invites a response in terms of reflecting on the very presuppositions of knowledge and the identity of facts. This reflection obviously cannot be carried out in terms of facts, for the point is to ask whether there are, indeed, any facts, what characterises something as a fact (if there are any), and how those facts may be correctly identified.
In our daily lives, and in our professional investigative practice, we have plenty of bases on which we are prepared to assert and defend our claims to know something. These ways may variously include reference to experimental methods, correct procedures of analysis, authoritative sources, spiritual inspiration, age, experience, and so on: that is, by reference to those procedures collectively accredited as 'good reasons' for knowing. It is this public collective licensing from.which the intellectual authority of our knowledge practically derives, though drawing on this licence is not always a sufficient guarantee that one does know. What is being stressed here is the grounded nature of our knowledge claims and the way in which particular grounds have, under appropriate conditions, an authoritative status; but, in the nature of grounds, they can be challenged and may be refuted. To put it another way, there may be, in the case of any particular knowledge claim, reasons why normally 'good grounds' are not 'good enough'. Seeing if the grounds upon which we ordinarily rely will withstand more intensive questioning is one objective which motivates philosophy.
But how, if we recall the example of the milk tanker, could there be any doubt about the facts of the matter, that it carried milk, or doubts about how we could find out what the facts are? In the practical sense already mentioned, there is no reason at all, except in the cases where, for example, there is suspicion of smuggling, deceit or whatever, cases which are, again, also very practical ones. In cases like these we are merely taking for granted, and not sceptically reflecting on a framework of standards within which we make our judgements, as to whether this is relevant and sufficient evidence to establish facts like these. But such claims, and the evidence on which they depend, are only articulable once there is in place some framework for underpinning them as claims and evidence and about which it is reasonable to ask, ' While this framework may be good enough for all practical purposes, is it really sufficient for establishing an unquestionably true identification of the way things in the world really are?'
In a practical sense, of course, we learn such frameworks as part of what we learn about the world. Philosophically, however, this really gets us nowhere because it is possible that what we learn may be wrong, and systematically so. We might be dreaming, deluded, blinded by personal prejudice or have learned cultural practices and beliefs that are false. In other words, it is deemed possible to be 'deeply sceptical' about the whole framework within which our specific judgements are sited.4 We can doubt, that is, our whole way of finding out about the world and, in the most extreme, sceptical case, can doubt whether it is ever possible to know anything at all! After all, one can simply point to the variety of views and conceptions about the world which are or have been held by various historical societies - beliefs in witchcraft, gods sitting on mountain tops, procreation as the result of jumping over fires, the power of magic and many more - to suggest that we cannot afford to be complacent about the validity of our own conceptions, for we also might be wrong. In which case, then, questions arise about how we can possibly tell whether the world, in itself, is really the way in which it appears to us; whether, that is, our own beliefs are sound. It cannot be done by offering what, in other contexts, we would count as conclusive empirical evidence, since it is just our reliance upon such supposed evidence that is being questioned. After all, the gods of ancient Greece, for example, were just as real, just as much unquestionable facts, to the members of that society, who might in turn have regarded the facts of our world, such as the internal combustion engine, television, or aircraft, as some species of magic. But, just what this difference might imply about the nature of knowledge in general is by no means clear. Were the ancient Greeks deluded, and how can we show that they were and, even more importantly for us, that we are not as deluded in our way as they in theirs? What entitles us to pronounce against the ancient Greeks given that, to all intents and purposes, the facticity of their gods was something it was impossible for them to doubt? What makes our own certainties any more secure than those equally ferventl...

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