Rationality and the Social Sciences (RLE Social Theory)

Contributions to the Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences

S.I. Benn, G.W. Mortimore

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138984554
• eBook ISBN: 9781317651260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The concepts of rationality that are used by social scientists in the formation of hypotheses, models and explanations are explored in this collection of original papers by a number of distinguished philosophers and social scientists. The aim of the book is to display the variety of the concepts used, to show the different roles they play in theories of very different kinds over a wide range of disciplines, including economics, sociology, psychology, political science and anthropology, and to assess the explanatory and predictive power that a theory can draw from such concepts.

Part One

Rationality in belief

1

Rationality in belief

G.W. Mortimore and J.B. Maund*

A Introduction

This paper will be concerned with belief, in the very broad sense which embraces religious convictions, ‘common-sense’ beliefs about the natural and social world, business expectations, and the acceptance of a theory by a scientist. Admittedly, in accepting a theory a scientist’s epistemic attitude may be more tentative than accepting as true; nevertheless it will be convenient to use ‘belief to cover such cases.

Concerns with rationality in belief are broadly of two kinds. The social scientist may be concerned to characterize and explain rationality in belief as an individual or cultural trait. Examples are Piaget’s developmental account of rationality in belief,¹ and anthropologists’ accounts of the degrees of rationality in belief to be found in non-European cultures² (discussed by R.S. Peters and J.B. Maund respectively in Chapters 12 and 2). Alternatively, the social scientist may be interested in characterizing and explaining individual beliefs; and here he may be concerned with any of three questions. He may be interested in how individuals extend their range of beliefs; how, for instance, an entrepreneur forms his expectations for the next planning period about likely market conditions and the consequences of certain pricing policies.³ A social psychologist, by contrast, may be concerned with how individuals adapt existing beliefs which are perceived to conflict in some way with ‘incoming’ experience or information, with other areas of belief, or with attitudes and actions.⁴ Third, anthropologists are interested in how individuals continue to hold beliefs such as beliefs in witchcraft that survive unfulfilled prophecies and inefficacious spells.⁵

The aim of this paper is to explore the content of some historically prominent conceptions of rationality in belief that are methodologically relevant to the social scientist. We shall concentrate on the ways in which individual beliefs may be characterized and explained as rational. This will also provide the broad lines of an account of rationality in belief as an individual and cultural trait.

We can distinguish two ways in which we might assess the rationality of a man’s beliefs. We can first assess the degree to which an individual has practical reasons for his activities in adapting or retaining his beliefs, and for holding such beliefs. Consider a man who, in order to preserve his reputation, desperately embraces a series of ad hoc hypotheses to save a theory that experiment after experiment suggests is false. Given his wish to preserve his reputation and his belief that his reputation hangs on the theory’s survival, he has reasons to act and believe as he does. To be sure, they are not reasons which bear on the truth of his beliefs, for they are practical reasons—propositions about the relationship of activities and belief to his ends. The notion of a person’s exhibiting practical rationality in choosing on the basis of good practical reasons will be discussed in Chapter 4. Some would object that the notion cannot happily be extended to belief, since an individual cannot choose to believe p rather than something else. We shall not pursue this issue, however, since our concern is with a second notion of rationality in belief—epistemic rationality. The degree of epistemic rationality which a man exhibits is wholly independent of the ends he may happen to have. The standards of epistemic rationality can, however, be understood to depend on a conception of the proper epistemic concerns for a credent—the concern to believe what is true and to avoid false belief, and the concern to understand.

We shall be considering two extremely influential accounts of epistemic rationality. On the justificationist view (discussed in section B), rationality in belief consists in believing for reasons which provide a certain kind of justification for the belief; the credent’s reasons must bear on the truth of his beliefs, unlike the practical reasons considered above. On the falsificationist view (discussed in section C) rationality in belief consists in the credent’s adopting towards his beliefs certain attitudes and policies.

B The justificationist view

1 Reasons for belief

It will be convenient to expound the justificationist view as a view about rationality in forming a belief either through extending one’s range of beliefs or adapting an existing belief; the account can be readily extended to cover rationality in continuing to hold a belief. On the justificationist view, coming to believe p is taken to involve accepting p as true, and we assess the credent’s rationality in coming to believe p by examining the reasons why he believes, and considering whether those reasons provide an epistemic justification for his belief. There has been continuing philosophical controversy over what kinds of reasons for belief do provide grounds for an ascription of epistemic rationality. In this paper I shall concentrate on an historically influential account with which the justificationist view is often associated.⁶ On this account, there are two ways in which we can display the rationality of a credent’s beliefs by characterizing the reasons why he believes.

(a) We may first indicate something about the credent’s grasp of the status or content of p. Thus, we might attempt to show that his belief is rational by displaying the logically necessary truth of p. The least controversial case is that of a man’s accepting a proposition such as ‘Every triangle has three sides’, which is true by virtue of the content or definition of its terms.

(b) Alternatively, we can describe the credent’s reasons for believing p, referring to either of two kinds of reason:

(i) Experience Where an individual believes p because he has seen, heard, smelt, etc. that p, I shall say that he holds an experiential belief.

(ii) Antecedently believed propositions Where he believes p because he inferred p from m and n, I shall say that he holds an inferential belief.⁷

Experiential beliefs figure in a variety of ways in the social sciences. A social scientist who takes the description of what is there to be experienced as unproblematic may be interested in accounting for the degree of match with what has actually been experienced; or he may try to account for the degree of match between what has been experienced and what is reported by the observer. A typical experiment will explore the ways peer group pressures or expectations influence the sincere reports of individuals who have witnessed a violent crime.⁸ Other studies are concerned with the ways the perceptions of individuals in a given culture are conditioned by their linguistic resources, norms, or background beliefs.⁹

Alternatively, the social scientist can explore the more radical question of whether what is there to be experienced is itself a function of such factors as the credent’s conceptual scheme and resources, or his expectations. In Chapter 2, Barry Maund explores the view that radically different conceptual schemes structure different realities, and that beliefs formed within any given conceptual scheme are to be appraised only in terms of the reality associated with it. In this paper, however, I shall concentrate on the justificationist account of inferential belief and (in section C) Barry Maund will discuss the falsificationist alternative to it.

2 Rational inferential belief

On the justificationist view, to explain a belief in p as the outcome of a rational inference is to attribute the belief to:

(i) the credent’s antecedently believing a set of propositions A (let us call this the credent’s propositional base);

(ii) his grasping that A provides adequate support for p;

(iii) (an implication of (ii)) his grasping that A constitutes an adequate reason for believing p.

In characterizing his inference as rational, we also endorse his judgments under (ii) and (iii). For the belief to be rational, moreover, the beliefs in A must also be rational. This condition seems to threaten a regress. We will not here pursue the question of how the justificationist might terminate it; though one obvious possibility would be to require that the regress ends with a rational experiential belief.

The justificationist requirement outlined above, that the agent’s reasons adequately support his belief, may seem to be too strict. For surely, it might be suggested, a man’s belief in God may be rational even though the arguments that led him to that belief are invalid, as long as he has given adequate consideration to counterarguments and as long as his logical errors are of a fairly sophisticated rather than an elementary kind. It seems that we need the looser condition that it was reasonable for him to regard his reasons for belief as good ones. I shall suggest, however, that there are advantages in conceiving of epistemic rationality more strictly than this—as requiring that the credent has made no error in regarding certain considerations as good reasons for belief. For we can then understand the standards for rationality in belief to embrace standards of both epistemic and practical rationality. Our standards for rationality in belief are less strict precisely because we allow that it may be practically rational for a credent to give less critical attention to counter-arguments than is necessary for full epistemic rationality. The looser condition that it be reasonable for him to regard his reasons for belief as good reasons is, then, sufficient condition for rational belief, though not for epistemic rationality, and the standards of reasonableness largely concern the degree to which a reasonable man can justifiably fall short of full epistemic rationality because of its costs in terms of time, energy, resources and foregone ends.

(a) Rational activity prior to belief

We cannot think of the standards of epistemic rationality as solely concerned with the degree of support given to propositions by antecedently accepted premises. They also demand, at least in cases of belief about fairly complex matters, a variety of activities (let us call them research activities) prior to the formation of belief:

(i) increasing the number of possibly relevant considerations which the credent has at his disposal—for example, by research, the collection of data, inference from what he already knows or believes;

(ii) expanding his view of the possible relevance of such considerations—for example, by informing himself of arguments which have been advanced on the question;

(iii) widening the range of propositions which are candidates for belief—for example, by considering alternative positions or constructing and exploring h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One Rationality in belief
• Part Two Rationality in action
• Part Three Rational persons
• Part Four Social rationality
• Index