People and Societies

Rom Harré and Designing the Social Sciences

Luk van Langenhove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781138882034
• eBook ISBN: 9781135279738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Rom Harré has pushed the boundaries of our thinking about people and societies and has challenged the orthodox philosophy of science and social psychology. His countless books and articles have inspired generations of scholars in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science and social theory. The diversity of his work makes that some see him as a leading figure in the critical realist school of philosophy of science, other as a key player in developing a social constructionist approach to psychology. The present volume brings together a careful selection of his key writings and presents them in a framework that stresses the evolution of his thinking as well as the place of his thinking in ongoing debates in different disciplines. The overall theme is the study of people and their ways of life. This is the first book that gives readers a systematic introduction in the conceptual universe of this towering figure.

1
Rom Harré and the exploration of the human umwelt

Luk Van Langenhove

The writings of Rom Harré are centred around three major clusters of projects: (i) the development of a realist philosophy of science, (ii) dealing with controversies in the philosophy of physics and (iii) developing adequate theories and methodologies for the social sciences (Bhaskar 1990). It led him once to say that at the end of the day there are only persons and their conversations and charges and their fields in the universe.

Within each cluster, the concept of model takes a central role. In Rothbart (2004) the key publications of Harré on models and modelling have been brought together. In that volume many different topics were dealt with (ranging from model making in engineering to computational models in psychology). In the present book, a similar exercise is conducted for Harré’s work in the social sciences. After 40 years of work, one can say that Harré has created a very complex and diverse corpus that together can be regarded as an attempt to build a truly transdisciplinary approach to what he calls himself ‘the study of people and their ways of life’ (Harré 1990c: 340). The present volume aims to present a synthesis of that work by bringing together some of his key publications along with my overview chapters.

Harré was born in 1927 in Apiti, New Zealand, where he started his academic career by teaching mathematics and physics. In the mid-1950s he completed an M.A. in Philosophy followed by postgraduate work in philosophy at Oxford. There he studied with J.L. Austin and P.F. Strawson taking a B. Phil. in Philosophy. It was the start of a long career as a researcher, teacher and writer in the philosophy of science and later in social sciences and psychology. He held appointments in various universities including teaching mathematics at the University of the Punjab in Pakistan before returning to Oxford as university lecturer in the Philosophy of Science at Oxford in 1960. He became a fellow of Linacre College at Oxford in 1965. Harré now holds posts in Washington DC as distinguished research professor at Georgetown University, as well as giving courses at the American University. He has received honorary doctorates from Brussels, Helsinki, Aarhus and Lima. Since 2007 he has also been the Director of the Lakatos Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences at the London School of Economics.

The literary productivity of Rom Harré has always been exceptional. When he became lecturer in the Philosophy of Science at the age of 34, he had already published an imposing number of articles and books on some central issues of contemporary philosophy of science. His most important publication of that period was certainly An Introduction to the Logic of the Sciences (1960), a book that contained a blueprint for an original, non-positivist and realist epistemology of the natural sciences.

Earlier books of Rom Harré further developed his realist approach to science, notably Theories and Things (1961), The Principles of Scientific Thinking (1970) and Causal Powers (with E.H. Madden, 1975). These undermined the deductivist conception of causality and developed a realist concept of natural necessity. Harré’s work on Realism was of considerable influence on Roy Bhaskar, whom Harré supervised. Quite obviously, this new realist epistemology could be extended, beyond the natural sciences, to the social sciences and particularly to social psychology.

When Harré started to study psychology and other social sciences he immediately became dismayed by what seemed to be the poor scientific quality of most of the contemporary work:

When I first began attending classes in social psychology and reading the standard material I must confess to having a feeling of incredulity

(Harré 1990c: 342)

Ever since his first acquaintance with psychology and sociology somewhere in the early 1970s, Rom Harré became very sceptical about them:

Since the first attempts to extend what were taken to be the methods of the physical sciences to the study of human affairs, which I suppose really dates from the beginning of the nineteenth century, it seems to me that these and most subsequent versions of the ‘human sciences’ have been shot through with sophistry and illusion.

(Ibid.: 341)

It was this scepticism and his belief that an alternative is possible that brought him to work on designing and advocating a realist philosophy of science approach to the social sciences. In doing so, Harré has been extensively influenced by his own teachers such as J.L. Austin (the founder of Speech Act philosophy), F. Waismann and P. Strawson. Subsequently, the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein can be seen throughout Harré’s work.

In 1972, Harré published together with Paul Secord The Explanation of Social Behaviour. This book has exerted a considerable influence as it indicated exactly where the problems of psychology lay and advanced proposals to how those problems could be solved. It was the start for the development of a new innovative approach to doing psychological research. As a matter of fact, Harré and Secord saw their book as part of a ‘double-pronged attack on the discipline’ (1990: 294). The other part of that attack being the creation of The Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. This journal was conceived to mobilize support for a new direction in social psychology. Both the book and journal became big successes. The book is now widely recognized as one of the foundation sources of modern social psychology and was selected as a citation classic.

Following Harré and Secord (1972) emerged a steady flow of papers and books in which Harré together with many different co-authors continued criticizing ‘mainstream’ psychology, advocating alternative approaches and applying those approaches to a wide range of issues such as nicknames (Morgan, O’Neill and Harré 1979), football hooliganism (Marsh, Rosser and Harré 1978), emotions (Harré 1987) and biographies (De Waele and Harré 1979).

Gradually, the discursive aspects of psychological phenomena occupied an even more prominent role in Harré’s work as can be illustrated by The Discursive Mind (Harré and Gillett 1994) and Discursive Psychology in Practice (Harré and Stearns 1995). In the 1990s, Harré and collaborators developed a new interactionist theory of discursive ‘positioning’ in which social structure is conceived as fluid patterns of ‘positioning’ (Harré and Van Langenhove 1991, 1999; Harré and Moghaddam 2003).

Throughout his career, Rom Harré has chosen to present his ideas in a variety of ways using different pedagogical tools. Next to the journal already mentioned there has been The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychology (Harré and Lamb 1983), edited books to be used for teaching (such as Rethinking Psychology and Rethinking Methods in Psychology, Harré, Smith and Van Langenhove 1995a, 1995b) and textbooks on Cognitive Science (Harré 2002a) and on Wittgenstein (Harré and Tissaw 2005). And in One Thousand Years of Philosophy, (Harré 2000a) and Key Thinkers in Psychology (Harré 2006) he places the discursive approach to the social sciences in a broad and world-wide historical overview of philosophy and psychology.

As noted by Wallerstein (1991) and many others – see Van Langenhove (2007) for an overview – the social sciences have entered since the late 1960s into a total and irreversible crisis:

Established in the last third of the nineteenth century, and having been deployed during the first half of the twentieth century, this particular ‘epistemé’ regarding the social domain – which conceived the latter as a sum or aggregate of spaces, segmented, distinct and even autonomous among one another; spaces that in turn corresponded to the different and equally autonomous social sciences or disciplines – was progressively questioned.

(Rojas 2000: 750)

The work of Harré has been crucial not only in questioning the disciplinary divides and the influence of positivism upon the social sciences. It also represents a continuous effort to design workable alternatives to study the social realm.

His concern to support innovative approaches to the study of social and psychological phenomena by framing them in a broad historical and philosophical context is certainly related to Harré’s belief that the disciplinary organization of the social sciences, together with the peer review system that favours existing paradigms, is detrimental to innovative thinking. As Harré and Secord wrote on the occasion of the second decade of the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour:

As scientific disciplines mature, a kind of inertia develops that reduces the chances of innovation. This occurs because the control over research funds, educational facilities, appearances on conference programmes, and publication in the more widely-read journals in large part falls into the hands of senior scientists who have a vested interest in the paradigms that characterize the science. In the case of sciences that are making substantial advances, such inertia may not be especially damaging. But given the immaturity of the human sciences, inertial dynamics that keep each discipline on a main path and that discourage new directions can seriously impede scientific progress.

(1990: 293)

Today we can say that Harré’s work on social sciences in the late 1960s and early 1970s was both prophetic and insightful and paved the way for a shift of thinking towards a constructionist approach to social sciences and for a social narrative-attuned approach to cognitive sciences (Hodgkin 1992).

Perhaps the most central theme in his work is his attempt to develop a systematic programme for psychology. The basic elements of that programme are: (i) the demonstration that psychology is to be considered as a hybrid science that has to rely both on biological neuropsychological insights as well as on hermeneutic understandings of discourse, (ii) the development of the discursive side of the science of psychology that not only puts language and conversation in a central position, but also stresses that the basic so-called psychological phenomena have to be located not inside individual persons but in the conversational space between persons in interpersonal symbolic interactions, (iii) the placing of persons and not psychological faculties nor neurophysiological processes at the heart of psychology.

For Harré, the word ‘psychology’ covers a diverse cluster of practices engaged in by a goodly number of people for a great many different reasons. His own reading of what psychology is about is that it is the study of thinking, feeling (emotions), perceiving and acting (Harré 2002a: 1). Hence he sees the task of psychology to

produce a discourse about human thinking, feeling and acting that has certain attributes, those of the kinds of discourses we are accustomed to call ‘the sciences’. The problems that have beset psychology in the last 100 years can be put down, in large part, to setting about this admirable task with a false picture of the established sciences.

(Harré 2002a: 153)

Harré sees psychology as becoming polarized around two seemingly irreconcilable schools of thought: the discursive approach and the neuro-biological approach. But for him, both approaches need to be developed simultaneously as psychology is to be regarded as a hybrid science. Harré’s quest for developing a scientific psychology has thus also led him to criticize in a systematic way the mainstream methodologies of today’s social sciences in general and to develop and advocate alternative methods of research. Three main issues have been part of this: (a) the introduction of an appropriate ontology for studying mental and social phenomena; (b) the development of a conceptual apparatus (e.g. concepts such as icons, model, grammars, meanings and so on) that can be used to study social phenomena without reification; (c) the formulation of a systematic critique against the influence of covert positivistic assumptions which need not lead to the extremes of relativistic post-modern approaches. He has developed a form of scientific realism as the most adequate philosophy of science for the social sciences, social reality comprising an ever flowing stream of symbolic interactions. As such his work can be considered as an attempt to re-design the social sciences.

Rom Harré – being a prolific writer – has developed the above programme in countless books and articles and in doing so he gradually expanded his work from psychology in particular to social sciences in general. Over the years Harré has of course changed opinions (for instance regarding the role of rules in driving human behaviour), but all in all there is a remarkable unity and consistency in his work. This makes it difficult sometimes to fully grasp the consequences of some of his propositions as the reader is assumed to be familiar with his previous work. This is why in the present volume I have chosen to complement the capita selecta with short introductions that present and explain the basic Harréan concepts. Readers looking for more are referred to the list of references in the back of this volume, where the major works of Rom Harré are brought together under the heading ‘primary sources’. That list, however, is by no means an exhaustive bibliography. Further secondary reading to explore the Harréan conceptual universe includes Bhaskar (1990), Rothbart (2004) and Van Langenhove (2007).

The overall theme to this book is the exploration of the human umwelt. The latter concept being typical Harréan. In order to emphasize the human aspects of the social realm, Harré (1990c) borrowed the concept ‘umwelt’ from biology where it refers to those aspects of the environment that are available to a certain species, given its perceptual and motor resources. Bats for instance can hear sounds that mice cannot hear, so the acoustic environment in which they operate is largely different. By referring to the human umwelt, Harré has emphasized the human aspect of the social realm. It refers to the social reality that surrounds us as well as to what at the same time is also somehow ‘inside’ us. Exploring the social umwelt can in principle be done by everyone everywhere. The academic practices that fall under the heading of ‘social sciences’ are just one possible context for such explorations.

Part I
Epistemological and ontological foundations for the social sciences

2
Studying the social realm in a scientific way

Introduction to Part I

Luk Van Langenhove

Harré’s work in the social sciences has been both epistemological and ontological. Part I of this book brings together the basic elements of how Harré looks at the social universe (his ontological claims) and how he looks at the issue of ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in Sociology
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Rom Harré and the exploration of the human umwelt
• Part I Epistemological and ontological foundations for the social sciences
• Part II Conversations as the primary social reality
• Part III Persons as discursive realizations
• Part IV
• Bibliography
• Index