Contemporary Philosophy and Social Science

An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Michiru Nagatsu, Attilia Ruzzene, Michiru Nagatsu, Attilia Ruzzene

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781474248754
• eBook ISBN: 9781474248761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy

How should we theorize about the social world? How can we integrate theories, models and approaches from seemingly incompatible disciplines? Does theory affect social reality? This state-of-the-art collection addresses contemporary methodological questions and interdisciplinary developments in the philosophy of social science. Facilitating a mutually enriching dialogue, chapters by leading social scientists are followed by critical evaluations from philosophers of social science. This exchange showcases recent major theoretical and methodological breakthroughs and challenges in the social sciences, as well as fruitful ways in which the analytic tools developed in philosophy of science can be applied to understand these advancements. The volume covers a diverse range of principles, methods, innovations and applications, including scientific and methodological pluralism, performativity of theories, causal inferences and applications of social science to policy and business. Taking a practice-orientated and interactive approach, it offers a new philosophy of social science grounded in and relevant to the emerging social science practice.

Part One

The Plurality of Approaches, Disciplines, and Theories

Summary of Chapters

The focus of the first three chapters is how approaches, disciplines, and theories are related to each other in the social sciences. Examining this set of relations raises distinctive philosophical issues about pluralism, interdisciplinarity, and theory choice.

The chapter by Christophe Heintz, Mathieu Charbonneau, and Jay Fogelman discusses the integration of multiple approaches and theories from different social sciences. The authors address crowd dynamics as a target phenomenon common to psychology, rational choice, and network science. They argue that the plurality of causal factors leading to crowd formation and maintenance requires a plurality of explanatory tools from a variety of fields while potentially leading to incompatibility between the different approaches. Heintz et al. advocate integrative pluralism as an epistemic stance oriented not only to reducing emerging incompatibility between approaches but also, more positively, to pursuing three epistemic virtues—consistency, consilience, and complementarity. The authors envisage that integrative pluralism will eventually yield more comprehensive explanations of social phenomena by addressing the multiplicity of causal factors involved. Pluralism of various strands has been advocated in recent philosophy of science, largely concomitant with an increasing interest in the special sciences and their practice. By highlighting key differences in different strands of scientific pluralism, Raffaella Campaner’s commentary provides epistemological tools to better understand the specificity of the approach of Heintz et al.; at the same time, she outlines a framework in which questions about the ultimate desirability and fruitfulness of an integrative stance in the social sciences can be addressed.

The chapter by Tyler DesRoches, Andrew Inkpen, and Tom L. Green focuses on model-building in economics and ecology and calls for fruitful interdisciplinary exchange between these two disciplines. The authors consider the restrictions on the exchange between ecology and economics resulting from the commitment to the ideal of disciplinary purity, that is, the view that each discipline is defined by an appropriate, unique set of objects, methods, theories, and aims. The authors problematize the “artificial-natural distinction” that has underwritten the disciplinary purity of economics and ecology. They argue that this distinction is no longer tenable conceptually and that models linking anthropogenic (i.e., “artificial”) and non-anthropogenic (i.e., “natural”) factors provide epistemic and policy-oriented benefits. Furthermore, they predict that in the current age of the Anthropocene ecology and economics may relinquish global relevance if they don’t make room for adequate interdisciplinary exchange. In his commentary, Michiru Nagatsu provides a context in which this issue can be discussed in the philosophy of social science, such as its relation to performativity; he also critically analyzes the case of DesRoches et al., drawing on his own case study of economics and ecology interactions in renewable natural resource management.

The chapter by Andre Hofmeyr and Don Ross narrows down the focus to inter-theoretical relations within economics, specifically between different game-theoretic explanations of pro-social behavior. The authors consider the motivations leading individuals to participate in multiple levels of economic agency. One of these levels is characterized in terms of utility to social groups with which people identify. Hofmeyr and Ross review and assess two theoretical approaches to pro-social behavior, namely Bacharach’s account of “team reasoning” (2006) and Stirling’s account of “conditional games” (2012). While they regard Bacharach’s conceptualization as useful, they argue that its application is limited to processes supported by deliberation. Since this is, however, only one of the causal mechanisms underlying pro-social behavior, they regard a more general account as desirable, and argue that Stirling’s (2012) achieves the desired generalization. Paternotte’s commentary critically analyses the assumed notion of generality of theories in terms of explanatory power, explanatory potential, and assumptions about agents. Paternotte argues that, if one takes these dimensions into account, neither conditional game theory nor team reasoning is more general than the other. Correspondence in this chapter shows that philosophy of science, while unable to give the final verdict, can elucidate relevant methodological and epistemic considerations underlying scientific disagreements over theory choice.

1

Integration and the Disunity of the Social Sciences

Christophe Heintz, Mathieu Charbonneau, and Jay Fogelman

1.1 Introduction

There is a plurality of theoretical approaches, methodological tools, and explanatory strategies in the social sciences. Different fields rely on different methods and explanatory tools even when they study the very same phenomena. We illustrate this plurality of the social sciences with the studies of crowds. We show how three different takes on crowd phenomena—psychology, rational choice theory, and network theory—can complement one another. We conclude that social scientists are better described as researchers endowed with explanatory toolkits than specialists of some specific social domain. Social scientists’ toolkits are adapted for identifying and specifying the role of specific causal factors among the multiple factors that produce social phenomena. These factors can be, in a nonexclusive way, economic incentives, psychological processes, the ecology, or aspects of the social and cultural environment.

The plurality of methods and theories in the social sciences flies in the face of the project to unify the sciences associated with the positivists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, the compatibility and consilience of theories and practices still have epistemic value: they enable the development of more powerful and robust theories and they allow the advent of interdisciplinary studies. We present the integrative stance as the will to improve compatibility and consilience across fields, yet recognize that the plurality of causes of social phenomena invite a diversity of methodological and theoretical tools. We conclude by characterizing naturalism as an integrative stance applied to fields that belong to the social sciences and to the natural sciences.

1.2 The Unity of the Social Sciences: A Failed Project

The strong unity model associated to positivists such as Carl Hempel and Ernst Nagel holds that social facts reduce to facts about individuals, which in turn can be reduced to biological, chemical, and ultimately physical facts. Disciplinary boundaries do not necessarily correspond to the organization of nature; they are arbitrarily drawn by scientists. Furthermore, the methods and aims of the social sciences should be modeled on those of the natural sciences, as ultimately everything could be explained in physical terms. Although this view has generally fallen into disrepute, its specific answers to the ontological, disciplinary, and methodological objectives remain hotly debated. For instance, some social scientists would advocate methodological individualism in the social sciences, arguing that social phenomena should be explained in terms of individual behaviors and their aggregation. But some other social scientists recommend methodological holism—social facts can appear in scientific explanations (Zahle 2016).

In spite of these attempts to single out the specificity of the social sciences, explanations of social phenomena remain very diverse. For instance, an explanation in economics relies on modeling an economic agent as a rational individual maximizing her own expected utility. Such assumption is at odds with standard explanations in sociology, which appeal to the social milieu as a determinant of individuals’ behaviors. It is hard to find a methodological principle and/or a theoretical claim that would characterize or unify all explanations in the social sciences. What is in fact striking is the diversity of methods and theories in the social sciences compared to the relative unity of other scientific disciplines. Given the lack of consensus, the social sciences have de facto followed a generally pluralistic philosophy: Different social sciences develop their own methods for studying the social world, yet often with their disciplinary boundaries overlapping in such a way that the very same social phenomena are investigated and explained in radically different ways.

Contrary to this stance of “defau...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One The Plurality of Approaches, Disciplines, and Theories
• Part Two From Methodological Choice to Methodological Mix
• Part Three Explanation, Theorizing, Performativity
• Index
• Copyright Page