Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences

Ernest Gellner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415302968
• eBook ISBN: 9781134413386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: History & Theory of Philosophy

This volume focuses on key conceptual issues in the social sciences, such as Winch's idea of a social science, structuralism, Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard, and the concept of kinship. In particular it deals with such problems as the relationship of nature and culture, the relevance of concepts drawn from within a given society to its understanding, and the relation of theory to time.

Chapter I Explanation in history*

The problem of explanation in history is also the problem of the nature of sociology. The views adopted in this field are held to have profound moral and political implications. We have recently often been reminded of this. The simplest argument connecting a premiss about the nature of historical explanation with political or ethical consequences runs as follows: if rigid, unchangeable, and wide-rang-ing generalizations are attainable with regard to historical processes, then an outlook which presupposes individual responsibility is basically misguided. Having pointed out this implication, philosophers hostile to the conclusion then devote themselves to undermining the premiss. They may do so either by pointing out that the required historical laws have not been found, or by arguing that they could not be.

I shall not directly concern myself with this matter of the existence or possibility of historical laws, but attempt to isolate the issues which arise here that can be stated without at any rate explicit reference to the law-like nature of history. I shall concern myself with the kind of concept or term characteristically employed when we talk of history or of societies. Notoriously the grammatical subject of sentences written or uttered by social scientists is often not a man, or enumerated or characterized men, but groups, institutions, ‘cultures,’ etc. The proper study of mankind is human groups and institutions.

Thus the alleged argument leading to the elimination of individual autonomy and responsibility may be stated without at least explicit and obvious presupposition of the attainment of causal generalizations in history. Those concerned with defending humanity against historicist or other mythologies—I shall call these defenders ‘Individualists’—notice this fact. This gives rise to an attempt to ‘eliminate’ so-called ‘holistic’ concepts, or rather to show that these are in principle eliminable. That such an elimination should be possible seems strongly suggested by the fact that, after all, groups consist of people, and institutions are what people do, etc. A state cannot exist without citizens, nor a legal system without judges, litigants, etc. The worst obstacle such elimination could encounter, it seems, would be complexity.¹

The matter, however, is not so simple. Arguments have been put forward to the effect that the elimination is in principle impossible.² Moreover, it is a weighty fact that at least some explanations in social sciences would in practice not be stated or be at all easily statable in Individualist terms.³

To each side in this dispute, its own position appears very nearly self-evident, and the opponents' position something that can be said, but not seriously practised. To the Individualist, his own position appears so true that it barely needs the confirmation of actually carried out eliminations, whilst he gleefully points out that in practice the holist can and does only approach his institutions, etc., through what concrete people do, which seems to the Individualist a practical demonstration and implicit confession of the absurdity of holism. By contrast (and with neat symmetry) the holist sees in the fact that the individualist continues to talk in holistic terms a practical demonstration of the unworkability of individualism, and he certainly does not consider the fact that he can only approach groups and institutions through the doings of individuals to be something which he had implicitly denied and which could count against him. Both sides find comfort in the actual practice of the opponent.

One should add here that the possibility of political implications cuts both ways. Individualists who attempt to save us, in the name of logic and liberty, from misconstruing our situation, are not wholly free at all times from the suspicion that a little propaganda for laissez faire is being hitched on to those very general issues.⁴

What is at issue is the ontological status of the entities referred to by the holistic terms. As the notion of ontological status is not as clear as it might be, I shall at some stages shift provisionally to something which is as important to the reductionist and which to him is an index of existence—namely, causation. He does not wish to allow that the Whole could ever be a cause, and to insist that explanations which make it appear that it is can be translated into others. That which is a mere construct cannot causally affect that which ‘really exists’; this is, I suspect, the feeling of the Individualist, the reductionist. This, in conjunction with the truism that a whole is made up of its parts, that nothing can happen to a whole without something happening to either some at least of its parts or to their mutual relations,—leads him to the misleading conclusion that explanation in history and in social studies must ultimately be in terms of individual dispositions. The holistic counter-argument works in reverse; if something (a) is a causal factor and (b) cannot be reduced, then in some sense it ‘really and independently exists.’

When we face a problem of ‘reduction’ in philosophy we are often confronted with a dilemma; on the one hand forceful formal arguments tend to show that a reduction must be possible, on the other hand all attempted reductions fail or are incomplete, and features can be found which suggest or prove that they cannot succeed or be complete. For instance, phenomenalism is supported not by the plausibility or success of actual reductions but by the force of the arguments to the effect that there must be a reduction, whilst at the same time the interesting arguments against it as cogently indicate that phenomenalist translation can never be completed.

The situation is similar with regard to the present problem. I consider, for instance, one particular, rather ambitious [and interesting] attempt to demonstrate that a reduction must be possible.

‘All social phenomena are, directly or indirectly, human creations. A lump of matter may exist which no one has perceived but not a price which no one has charged, or a disciplinary code to which no one refers, or a tool which no one would dream of using. From this truism I infer the methodological principle … that the social scientist can continue searching for explanations of a social phenomenon until he has reduced it to psychological terms.’ (italics mine)

The conclusion reached in the end is:

‘Individualistic ideal types of explanatory power are constructed by first discerning the form of typical… dispositions, and then by demonstration how these lead to certain principles of social behavior.’ ⁵

As the argument also maintains that ‘individualistic ideal types’ are alone possible, what the conclusion amounts to is something like this: to explain a social or historical situation is to deduce it from what the individuals involved in it are disposed to do.

This contention can be broken up into two claims; that an explanation specifies individual dispositions, and that it specifies individual dispositions. In other words: (1) Statements about things other than individuals are excluded from a final explanation; (2) Statements which are not about dispositions are similarly excluded. By ‘disposition’ here is meant something ‘intelligible,’ a conceivable reaction of human beings to circumstances; not necessarily one we share, still less necessarily one we can ‘introspect’; but still something opposed to what we would call ‘dead’ physical causation where ‘anything could cause anything.’

Having broken up the requirements of reduction into two parts, we get four possibilities, of which three are excluded. Let us consider these excluded ones in turn.

(1) Holistic subject plus intelligible disposition. This is equivalent to a ‘group mind’ theory. I take it no one is advocating this seriously.

(2) Holistic subject without intelligible dispositions—i.e. attributions of regularity or pattern to wholes, without any suggestion that these patterns express conscious or purposive reactions.

(3) Individualistic subjects without intelligible dispositions. Let it be said that events explicable along the lines of alternative (3) can be excluded from history or sociology only by an inconvenient and arbitrary fiat. The destruction of Pompeii or the Black Death are historical events. It is true that the reaction of survivors to these ‘blindly casual’ events calls for explanation not in terms of ‘dead’ causation but possibly in terms of aims, dispositions, expectations, convictions. So be it; but the very fact that semi-deliberate and blindly causal events are so often and intimately fused in life brings out the inconvenience of excluding one kind.

Consider now exclusion of kind (2). When an historian speaks of the maintenance or growth of an institution, or a linguist about phonetic change, or an anthropologist about the maintenance of a system of kinship structure, they do not in fact always or often mention individual dispositions. The question is, could they?

The first step towards such a translation is easy. ‘The monarchy is strong’ can be translated into a disposition of subjects to have a certain set of attitudes to the monarch. Note: not necessarily all subjects or all the time, but a sufficient number of them sufficiently often, and above all at crucial times. Neither ‘sufficient number’ nor ‘sufficiently often’ nor ‘crucial times’ can be defined with precision, nor ultimately without referring back to the holist term ‘monarchy.’ The same applies to the ‘set of attitudes.’

By and large, institutions and social structures and climates of opinion are not the results of what people want and believe, but of what they take for granted. Let us allow the reductionist to class tacit acceptance amongst dispositions, though I suspect we shall find the same circularity here as occurs above. Such translations would, however, be clumsy, nebulous, long and vague, where the original statement about an institution or feature of the social scene was clear, brief and intelligible.

If, however, we grant that ‘in principle’ this translation is possible, it in no way follows that these tacit and irregularly diffused dispositions are in turn explicable in terms of familiar, intelligible human responses. The existence of a diffused monarchical disposition was inferred logically from the truth of ‘The monarchy is strong’; the dependence of the latter statement on the former, if it obtains at all, does so in virtue of logic or the truism that an institution is what people do. But the dependence of the perhaps validly inferred monarchical disposition in turn on a piece of intuitively obvious psychology would be a causal matter, and there are no reasons in logic or fact for supposing it to hold. On the contrary, in as far as such a procedure seems to assume the possibility of isolating more elementary dispositions ‘as they are prior to their manifestations in a social context,’ formal doubts may be raised concerning the realizability of such a program. [Need all our numerous tacit dispositions, each to one of the many facets of our social environment, be—all of them and necessarily—by-products or modifications of some avowable aim or attitude? I doubt whether as much could be claimed for mine, unless at any rate some of them are brought under the residual and negative classifications of ‘passivity,’ ‘inertia,’ ‘imitativeness’ and even ‘randomness’; and these dubious dispositions will fail to explain the specific modifications of my attitudes, being essentially only indications that really good explanations in terms of aim and information are not to be had.]

There are two specific points, possibly inconclusive by themselves but worth noting, which influence the holist at this stage.

First, very small differences in individual conduct distributed irregularly over a large population, may have important consequences for the society at large without being detectable individually. The argument in favour of ‘social facts’ is historically connected with the presence of statistical regularities where none can be found at the molecular, individual level. The statistical regularity can be explained in terms of features of the social situation as a whole, but in practice it is seldom possible to trace the nexus in individual cases. To insist that it is always ‘in principle’ possible is to prejudge the issue under discussion. Moreover, something like an uncertainty principle may very well operate here, for the amount of disturbance involved in observing the individual case may very often be much larger than the small difference which accounts for the statistical result and may, so to speak, ‘drown it.’

Secondly, individuals do have holistic concepts and often act in terms of them. For instance, a number of reviewers of the recently published Memoirs of General de Gaulle have commented on the fact that de Gaulle's actions were inspired by his idea of France— which may perhaps have had little relation to actual Frenchmen. When the holistic ideas of many individuals are co-ordinated and reinforced by public behavior and physical objects—by ceremonials, rituals, symbols, public buildings, etc.—it is difficult for the social scientist, though he observes the scene from the outside, not to use the holistic concept. It is quite true that the fact that X acts and thinks in terms of an holistic idea—e.g. he treats the totem as if it were his tribe, and the tribe as if it were more than the tribesmen—is itself a fact about an individual. On the other hand, though the holistic term as used by the observer may be eliminable, as used by the participant it is not. Are we to say that a logically impeccable explanation of a social situation is committed to crediting its subjects with nonsensical thought? Perhaps we are. On the other hand, the fact that holistic terms are ineliminable from the thought of participants may well be a clue to their ineliminability from that of observers. [For, in one sense, social environments are the Gestalten projected by individuals onto reality, provided they act in terms of them and provided reality is compatible with them and contains some devices for reinforcing them, such as rituals or other symbols, e.g. public buildings, totems, etc. (It is of course open to the Individualists to maintain that I have here given a schematic individualist account of the holistic illusion. Perhaps.)]

It is perhaps unnecessary at this stage to insist on the fact that very little is gained by having individual dispositions as the bedrock of a historical or social explanation. Their ‘intelligibility’ is either familiarity, or, equally often, springs from the fact that dispositional terms come in clusters each of which is a more or less exhaustive crude taxonomy: such as, perhaps, for instance: ‘Knowing—believing—considering—tacitly accepting—disregarding,’ or ‘wanting— being indifferent to—not wanting.’ If with the help of such terms we characterize someone's conduct, on the analogy of the parallelogram of forces, do we thereby really approach the actual causal sequences?

It is true th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• SELECTED PHILOSOPHICAL THEMES, VOLUMES I—III
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Explanation in history
• 2 Concepts and society
• 3 Winch’s idea of a social science
• 4 The new idealism—cause and meaning in the social sciences
• 5 The entry of the philosophers
• 6 Time and theory in social anthropology
• 7 Sociology and social anthropology
• 8 On Malinowski
• 9 On Evans-Pritchard
• 10 On structuralism
• 11 Ideal language and kinship structure
• 12 The concept of kinship
• 13 Nature and society in social anthropology
• 14 The alchemists of sociology
• 15 The sociology of faith
• Sources
• Index of names
• Index of subjects