Wittgenstein and the Social Sciences. Robert Vinten

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In his book The Idea of a Social Science Peter Winch developed Wittgenstein’s ideas about action, behaviour, language, and rules into a critique of the idea that the disciplines known as the social sciences are scientific in the manner of the natural sciences. Action appears in The Idea of a Social Science as a way of distinguishing natural sciences, which feature causal explanations prominently, from social sciences, which focus upon human actions and feature explanations in terms of reasons and motives more conspicuously. Winch distinguishes actions from habitual behaviour and distinguishes actions in terms of motives from causal explanations. Wittgenstein was notoriously opposed to scientism, that is, the attempt to bring the methods of science to bear in areas where they are not appropriate, especially in philosophy.¹⁰ Winch, following Wittgenstein, detailed ways in which social investigations differ from investigations in the natural sciences.

Phil Hutchinson, Rupert Read, and Wes Sharrock have recently defended Winch’s account of differences between natural sciences and social disciplines. In their book There is No Such Thing as a Social Science they come to the conclusion that calling social disciplines ‘sciences’ is likely to lead to confusion.¹¹ However, not all philosophers who have been influenced by Wittgenstein and Winch agree that there is no such thing as a social science. At the British Wittgenstein Society conference in 2015 (on Wittgenstein and the social sciences) John Dupré defended the idea that social studies can be scientific.¹²

In discussing whether the disciplines that are known as social sciences¹³ are in fact scientific there are a number of different ways in which the question might be approached. (1) One way of arguing that social sciences are scientific is to claim that social sciences are reducible to natural sciences. The positivists of the Vienna Circle and philosophers influenced by them (as well as many scientists) have made the claim that social sciences are reducible to natural sciences, that is, that behaviour at the level of social groups can ultimately be explained in terms of objects at another level – cells, or molecules, atoms, physical things, or even sense data. Reductionists often accompany this claim with the claim that laws at one level can be derived from laws at a lower level (e.g. that the laws of chemistry can be derived from the laws of physics). (2) One might not accept reductionism but nonetheless claim that the kind of explanations used in the social sciences are of the same sort as those used in the natural sciences. The debate about whether explanations in terms of reasons are causal explanations is relevant to this. Donald Davidson in the later part of the twentieth century famously argued that reasons are causes. (3) Another relevant issue in deciding whether the social sciences are scientific is methodology. Some have defended the claim that social sciences are scientific on the basis that they employ the same methodology as natural sciences.¹⁴ (4) A problem that arises in comparing natural sciences to social sciences is that there does not seem to be the same kind of progress in the social sciences as in the natural ones. In the natural sciences we see widespread agreement over a wide range of issues as well as advances in technology and in the sophistication and usefulness of theories. However, in the social sciences disagreement is the rule and doubts are raised about whether any progress has been made (in philosophy in particular). There is certainly no clear agreement among philosophers about, for example, the relationship between mind and body, and philosophers are still puzzled about the question of whether human beings have free will despite centuries of having discussed the question.¹⁵

      It is worth noting that John Dupré and Hutchinson, Read, and Sharrock would largely agree in how they would think about the issues of reductionism, the varieties of explanation, methodology, and progress. However, they come to different conclusions about whether social studies should be called scientific. In this chapter I will come down on the side of Dupré and conclude that ultimately the question of whether the social sciences are scientific does not rest on whether they are reducible to natural sciences or whether they employ the same methodologies. I will argue that social sciences are not reducible to natural sciences and that social and natural sciences do not employ the same methodologies across the board (and nor should they) but that, nonetheless, disciplines like psychology, sociology, and economics can make some claim to be scientific.

Before going on to discuss reductionism it is first worthwhile mentioning the related, infamous, dispute in the late 1950s and early 1960s between C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis about whether there were two cultures, literary and scientific, which were mutually uncomprehending of one another. Snow suggested that there were and that in order to correct the situation there should be greater efforts to educate the young in the natural sciences and to introduce more scientific literacy into politics. He thought that this would lead to improvements in society, especially in poorer parts of the world. Snow was accused of scientism for his efforts to promote the role of science in society.¹⁶ Leavis, on the other hand, argued that there was just one culture¹⁷ (and was accused of ‘literarism’¹⁸). Leavis’s concerns about Snow’s scientism are not of the same sort as Wittgenstein’s worries about scientism mentioned above. Whereas Leavis was primarily concerned with the way in which Snow emphasized science education and technological progress at the expense of literature and social science education, which involved a kind of lacuna in terms of what makes for good, meaningful, happy lives (literature has an important role to play, according to Leavis), Wittgenstein’s worries about scientism were primarily about the confusion caused by trying to import scientific methods and concepts into the humanities and the social sciences (particularly philosophy but also psychology and other social/humanistic disciplines) and about attempts to reduce social sciences to natural ones. However, that is not to say that there is no overlap at all. Wittgenstein expressed somewhat similar worries to Leavis about progress¹⁹ and Leavis had relevant things to say about the status of social and humanistic disciplines that I will come back to in the conclusion to this chapter.²⁰

1.2Reductionism

      1.2.1What Is Reductionism?

Reductionism has been defined as ‘a commitment to the complete explanation of the nature and behaviour of entities of a given type in terms of the nature and behaviour of their constituents’.²¹ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on reductionism²² makes the point that ‘saying that x reduces to y typically implies that x is nothing more than y or nothing over and above y’ and so the scientist Francis Crick’s claim that ‘“you” […] are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells’²³ is an expression of a reductionist view. Crick goes on to argue that a nerve cell in turn can be expected to be understood in terms of its parts, ‘the ions and molecules of which it is composed’.²⁴ So, one might think that social groups are made up of collections of multicellular organisms, and multicellular organisms are made up of cells, which are made up of molecules made up of atoms composed out of subatomic particles, and that we can explain entities at one level in terms of the lower levels, with the subatomic particles studied by physics at the lowest level of explanation.²⁵

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