Social Theory and Political Practice (RLE Social Theory)

Brian Fay

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138782525
• eBook ISBN: 9781317652281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the question of how our knowledge of social life affects, and ought to affect, our way of living it. In so doing, it critically discusses two epistemological models of social science – the positivist and the interpretive – from the viewpoint of the political theories which, it is argued, are implicit in these models; moreover, it proposes a third model – the critical – which is organised around an explicit account of the relation between social theory and practical life. The book has the special merit of being a good overview of the principal current ideas about the relation between social theory and political practice, as well as an attempt at providing a new and more satisfactory account of this relationship. To accomplish this task, it synthesises work from the analytic philosophy of social science with that of the neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt school.

1

Introduction: Theory and Practice

This is a short book which tries to accomplish two things at once: on the one hand it is intended as an overview of the principal current ideas about the relationship between social theory and political practice; and, on the other, it is an attempt to develop a critical stance towards these ideas, with the hope of providing a new and more satisfactory account of this relationship. These two aims are not unrelated to one another. As will become apparent in the text, one of the major themes that emerges from the description I give of the main positions which have been taken on this matter is the intimate connection that exists between the ideas that we have and the sort of life that we lead, and it is in the light of this that I could not maintain a neutral attitude towards the ideas I had to discuss. What is at stake in these matters is not merely certain academic questions about how to conduct social inquiry, but also socially relevant ideas which have a direct bearing on the question of how our social life is to be conducted.

The general question with which this book is concerned is how our knowledge about social life affects, or ought to affect, our living of it.¹ Normally these notions are not considered together: on the one side there is social theory which seeks to explain social behaviour, on the other there is political philosophy which proposes ways in which our social theories may be used to change social behaviour, but no necessary connection is thought to exist between them. One is quite accustomed to seeing sharp divisions being drawn between knowledge and the uses of knowledge, between questions in the philosophy of social science and those in political philosophy, between scientific activity and political activity, and between theory and practice.

These are, of course, not all distinctions of the same type, but they are all rooted in the conventional approach which separates ‘theoretical matters’ from ‘practical matters’, which drives a wedge between questions about what is the case from questions about what ought to be done. One of the central claims of this book is that as long as this conventional approach is employed both our understanding of the nature of social theory and our understanding of the way in which such theory is related to practical action will be seriously impaired; moreover – in the light of my remarks in the first paragraph – it is also one of the chief arguments of the book that these misunderstandings themselves will have important political consequences.

Even on an introductory and intuitive level, however, the neat divisions which are usually drawn or assumed in analysis might sound somewhat implausible: for men are not generally schizoid in their thought, such that they view social life in one way when they wish to study it, and in a quite different way when they come to questions as to how the knowledge they have gained is relevant to the practical problems which confront them. But, of course, the issue is not simply whether certain ideas are interrelated, but whether they are necessarily so, and, if so, in precisely what ways. And it is just this notion of necessity which modern conventional wisdom denies; for it distinguishes between the two different roles a man may play-a scientist who is a seeker of truth, and a political actor engaged in practical activity – with the idea being that in principle these roles are distinct even though in practice they may be interrelated in some way. It is just this bit of ‘common sense’ that I hope to undermine and to replace with an account of social science which starts from a radically different premise, namely, one which is rooted in an explicit theory of how this social science is related to political practice.

The account to which I am referring is the ‘critical model’ which I develop in Chapter 5. But prior to this I also give an account of two other, more familiar, models of social science, the positivist model and the interpretive model. Actually, given what I have just asserted – that implicit in ideas about the nature of social theory is a latent conception of how this theory is related to practice – it will be necessary for me to give somewhat different descriptions of these more familiar models than are usually given. The reason for this is that the conventional descriptions, which fail to make explicit this latent conception, are seriously inadequate, and this inadequacy I hope to have overcome.

This leads me to say something about the term ‘positivist social science’. I use this term to refer to that metatheory of social science which is based on a modern empiricist philosophy of science often referred to as the hypethetico-deductive model of science. Its principal contemporary exponents are Carl Hempel,² Karl Popper,³ and Ernst Nagel,⁴ though there are, of course, from certain points of view, important differences among them. For my purposes there are four essential features of this metatheory: first, drawing on the distinction between discovery and validation, its deductive-nomological account of explanation and concomitant modified Humean interpretation of the notion of ‘cause’; second, its belief in a neutral observation language as the proper foundation of knowledge; third, its value-free ideal of scientific knowledge; and fourth, its belief in the methodological unity of the sciences. There are a number of secondary claims which are made by this model – e.g. having to do with the nature of theories – as well as an entire epistemology and metaphysics rooted in a philosophy of meaning which underlie and support this metatheory, but it is not necessary for me to detail these here. At this point all I wish to do is to locate the positivist model; how I understand its four central features, and how they comprise a model of social inquiry, will only become clear in the course of the argument presented in Chapter 2.⁵

In connection with the use of the term ‘positivist social science’, there is also a possible confusion in the term I use to characterise its political theory, namely the term ‘policy science’. This is an ambiguous term, not because I use it in a variety of ways, but because it has two closely related meanings only one of which is relevant to my purposes. Sometimes⁶ by a ‘policy science’ is meant that process of analysis by which the various consequences of particular courses of action are spelled out in terms of their monetary costs and benefits so that a decision-maker may be well informed as to the possible outcomes of his alternatives. A policy science in this sense is intended, to use the current jargon, to ‘map the decision space’ in which the policy maker is going to act. This is not the meaning of ‘policy science’ as I use the term in this book.

The other meaning of ‘policy science’ which is how I use the term here is that set of procedures which enables one to determine the technically best course of action to adopt in order to implement a decision or achieve a goal. Here the policy scientist doesn’t merely clarify the possible outcomes of certain courses of action, he actually chooses the most efficient course of action in terms of the available scientific information. In this regard, the policy scientist really is a type of social engineer who makes instrumental decisions on the basis of the various laws of science – in this instance, social science – which are relevant to the problem at hand. The policy engineer, if I may use this phrase, is one who seeks the most technically correct answer to political problems in terms of available social scientific knowledge.

With these perhaps somewhat obscure remarks out of the way, I think the body of the text is more or less self-explanatory. In section 2.1 I set out a quite common notion of how the knowledge gained from a social science positivistically conceived is to be applied to social life, and then I attempt in section 2.2 to show that these two ideas – an idea of science and an idea of its use – are conceptually linked, that, in other words, it is no accident that the positivistic model leads to what I call a technological view of politics. My general claim in section 2.2 is that, contrary to the value-free ideal of the positivist tradition, the scientific enterprise understood positivistically contains within itself an implicitly instrumentalist notion of how theory and practice are related, and that, with regard to the social sciences, there is consequently an implied political theory as an element in its account of what it means to understand social life.

It ought to be clear from what I have just said, as well as in the actual argument of section 2.2, that even though I concentrate on the case of social science, the general argument that I make does not rest on a claim that the social sciences are ethically biased in ways in which the natural sciences are not. Quite the contrary; the argument that I adduce there is equally applicable to both enterprises. Of course, this does not preclude the possibility that the social sciences might be value non-neutral in ways which the natural sciences are not, but that is another question which I do not examine.

Moreover, it should be noted, my claim as to the ideological content of a model of science is not one of those most often heard in discussions about values in the social sciences:⁷ it is not the claim that certain values (such as simplicity, elegance, systematic integrity, quantitativeness, etc.) are inherent in the very process of scientific analysis itself; nor is it the claim that a scientist’s values will help to determine what questions he asks, what areas he studies, etc. (so that, e.g., an economist analyses the conditions of growth because he holds the value that material enrichment is a good); nor is it the claim that it is only by agreeing to certain value-judgements that one can accept the truth claims of a particular social scientist (so that, e.g., it is only by making the judgement as to the goodness of the communist state that one can accept the Marxian analysis of modern society). None of the arguments and counter-arguments about these traditional claims is what I have in mind when I discuss the question of the ideological bias of a model of social science.

The reason for this is that all of these claims concern the role of values within the framework of scientific activity, whereas I am concerned with the role which values have as part of the conceptual framework which defines what it is to have real, i.e. scientific, knowledge about some phenomenon. I am claiming that implicit in the theories of knowledge which I examine (the positivist in Chapter 2, the interpretive in Chapter 4, and the critical in Chapter 5) is a certain conception of the relation between knowledge and action, and that such a conception, when elaborated in the context of social life, is a political theory. It is in this, I think much deeper, way that I argue that there is an ideological content to what I call models of social science.⁸

In Chapter 3 I set out some criticisms of the positivist view, moving from a consideration of its ideas about theory and practice in sections 3.1 and 3.2, to a consideration of its views about the nature of social theory in section 3.3. In Chapter 4 I develop, and then criticise, an alternative model of social science which contains within it an alternative view about how social knowledge is to be translated into action. I do this for two reasons: the first is to highlight the assumptions of the positivist model; the second is to lay the groundwork for the critical model which I outline in Chapter 5.

It is in Chapter 5 that all of the general points I have been making while examining the problems of social theory and politics in the positivist and interpretive models are taken into explicit account in the construction of a model of social science. I believe that this model, at least in the way I argue for it and explicate it, is novel, and also that it goes some way beyond the current discussions in the philosophy of social science as found in the analytic tradition. Moreover, in keeping with my appreciation of the political significance of theories about social science, I also hope that this critical model establishes the foundation for a type of inquiry that is truly liberating.

Appendix

There is developing today another metatheory of social science modelled on the philosophy of science associated with the names of Kuhn and Feyerabend, and it seems relevant to discuss how my remarks relate to this metatheory. Because Kuhn explicitly restricts his analysis to a discussion of theories within sciences, whereas Feyerabend wishes to speak about ‘comprehensive ideologies’ of which science itself is an example, I will confine myself to Feyerabend. (Of course, the two ought not to be equated with one another; indeed, the difference I cite between them is self a symptom of important differences in philosophical interests and positions; on this, cf. Feyerabend, ‘Consolations for the Specialist’ in Lakatos and Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge.)

Perhaps the most important point for my purposes is that Feyerabend believes that there is an ideological ingredient in any large-scale theory or basic paradigm; indeed, in his most recent work, ‘Against Method’, he approvingly quotes Fichte’s remark that ‘the choice between comprehensive theories rests on one’s interests entirely’ (p. 128). It is because of this that Feyerabend urges that ‘the connection between theory and politics must always be considered’ (p. 109,. It is in this spirit that he himself discusses the effects of a positivist metatheory of science and epistemology on human communication, as well as focusing attention on the social importance of the principle of proliferation which derives from his ‘anarchist epistemology’.

It is on the basis of these specific features, as well as on the general argument of his theory of knowledge, that I think it is fair to say that a follower of Kuhn or Feyerabend would never call for the development of a policy science in the way a positivist would (and which I present in section 2.1), i.e. he would never equate such a development with objective truth coming to rationalise human affairs. On the other hand, the argument which I present in section 2.2, in which I seek to show that there is a conceptual connection between an instrumentalist account of how knowledge is related to action and a certain view, characteristic of modern science, of what knowledge consists of, is precisely in the spirit of Feyerabend’s admonitions. For what I am doing in that section is attempting to describe and analyse the political commitments of the global para...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction: Theory and Practice
• 2. Positivist Social Science and Technological Politics
• 3. Criticisms of the Positivist View of Social Science and Politics
• 4. An Alternative View: Interpretive Social Science
• 5. The Future: Development of a Critical Social Science
• Bibliography
• Index