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EPISTEMOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE • 2016 • T. XLVII • № 1
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HE SOCIAL INGREDIENTS IN ALL WAYS OF ACQUIRING RELIABLE KNOWLEDGE
Rom Harré —
distinguished research professor, Georgetown University, USA. E-mail:
harre@georgetown.edu
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A distinction should be drawn between natural sciences and cultural studies such as psychology and history. A social philosophy of science must be based on bringing them into a fruitful relationship. What relations are possible? There is the role of natural science concepts and methods in cultural studies and the role of concepts and methods of cultural studies in natural science, determining standards of good work and particularly the choice oif domains of research with respect to human welfare. Cultural studies of natural science as an institution emphasises the importance of standards of excellence and of the role of rights and duties in the life of scientific institutions.
Key words: natural science, cultural studies, social philosophy of science, reliable knowledge.
ОЦИАЛЬНЫЕ ОСНОВАНИЯ ПОЛУЧЕНИЯ НАДЕЖНОГО ЗНАНИЯ
Ром Харре — заслуженный профессор, Джордж-таунский университет, США.
Следует провести различие между естественными науками, а также психологией и историей (дисциплинами cultural studies). Роль социальной философии науки здесь заключается в посредничестве и обеспечении их продуктивного диалога. Какие отношения здесь возможны? Следует отметить роль естественно-научных понятий и методов, используемых в cultural studies, равно как и значимость понятий и методов cultural studies, используемых в естественных науках, которые определяют образцы исследования, в частности выбор приоритетов исследования с учетом соображений о человеческом благе. Cultural studies в естественных науках подчеркивают значимость стандартов качества и роль этических регуляторов в деятельности научных институтов. Ключевые слова: естественные науки, cultural studies, социальная философия науки, достоверное знание.
There are many publications and study projects with 'Science' in the title. Before presenting my own contribution to this literature I want to pause and set out some of the things that the word 'science' encompasses in contemporary English. 'Science' is often used as the name of an institution when we talk about 'the science of an era' or 'Russian science'. It is also widely used to refer to a certain range of practices in phrases like 'medieval science' or 'natural science', and in a related way to the subject matter of such investigations. The members of the institutions of science devote themselves to practicing the accepted range of activities that constitute 'doing science' whatever the domain. The ultimate aim of all this activity is. It is hoped, an increase in the sum of reliable knowledge. This knowledge may include many items that are esoteric, in the sense that only certain people have access to them, whether by reason of the expertise
Epistemology and Cognition 67
required or by reason of various social barriers to that access, such as the character of the institution to which they belong or their place in it. Thinking of science' as an institution we must attend to such social hierarchies as are displayed by the life of the institution and at the same time examine the very strict moral code by which the activities of scientists are controlled. As a society, "science' has rules and rituals, just as it has ways of punishing those who break the moral code. According to Polanyi's wonderful book Personal Knowledge [Polyani, 1962], the members of the institutions of science are recruited through various rites de passage, and is characterised by conviviality and mutual trust. It is not the only institution that displays such a pattern of characteristics. An ary might do so, and so might a religious order.
In order to avoid subtly prejudging the issues to be discussed in what follows let us drop the phrase "social science' and instead use expressions like "social, historical or cultural studies', summed up in the phrase "cultural studies'. These studies are typified by attention to meanings and the use of rules, conventions and customs as the basic concepts of explanatory discourses apropos of human affairs. This is a sketch of a criterion that would enable us to distinguish between Cultural studies and natural sciences. Cultural studies should include economics, theology, history, psychology, studies of the rise and fall of societies and the means by which they held together for longer or shorter times, political processes and so on.
A Social Philosophy of Science?
In effect reflecting on the shape of a social philosophy of science we are effectively asked to consider the possible relations between a society, and two of its own institutions. There are many kinds of societies and so many kinds of cultural studies, for example how far technology shapes fr! social institutions belief patterns and so on. There are few variations of the O core shape of the scientific institutions that research into material nature. JH This means that there may be many social philosophies of science as the B differing features of different societies mesh in different ways with more or O less similar scientific institutions. Does a certain society take the work of ^ its scientists as contributions to national defence or to economic ' development or to some unstable combination oif these directions? Is the W work of scientists able to be conducted independently of the demands of the larger society of which they are also members?
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Does it make sense to suggest that science, in any of the meanings —' suggested above, has anything to offer those who would either manage
social life or attempt to understand it, or both? Broadly speaking we have three possible relationships between the practice of scientific research and the management of social life:
a. Complete independence — science is a discipline in which scientists confront a natural world which is independent of their activities within the norms of that discipline, in particular the natural world is unaffected by scientific research activities. This is a core doctrine of logical positivism.
b. Complete dependence — science is just one among a great many normative human social activities, and the results of research are comparable to the results of football matches, that is, they are the outcome of rule governed practices.
c. Partial dependence — social factors influence scientific research methods, the character of the minds of scientists and the problems they choose to study, and research is routinely driven by the possibilities of the application of the results in the social world. It might be the use of survey methods to plan a social programme; it might be to make money with an antibiotic; it might be to help manage global warming by mapping ocean currents; it might be to clean up contaminated soil by using supercritical carbon dioxide.
Natural Science Concepts and Methods in Cultural Studies
One useful source of ideas about the use of the concepts and methods of the natural sciences in all kinds of enquiries, including cultural studies, is the one time dominant and still lively program of "Scientism'. This is roughly the idea that the only knowledge worth having, whether of the natural world or of human society, is that provided by the use of the "scientific method', cluster of practices that is supposed to responsible for the success of the natural sciences. This quickly becomes the dogma that all intellectual practices should be modelled on those of the natural sciences. What are the possibilities of a commonality repertoire of knowledge gathering and authenticating methods?
Then there is the ameliorative sociology developed from the Baconian ^ tradition by Sydney and Beatrice Webb, which ties in with the late №
nineteenth century enthusiasms of the socio-biology of Herbert Spencer. ™
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The statistical findings revealed by the Webbs were to be the basis of public policy, and of course the writings of Karl Marx linking social ^ formations to the science driven means of production. A scientific sociology modelled on the natural sciences, as then understood, would be the instrument for the transformation of society for human betterment.
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There is a subtle undercurrent to this style of argument — one can hardly deny that the society of scientists is much the most morally admirable society people have ever invented. It is based on mutual trust and truth telling. Though it does have sanctions for those who break the moral code these sanctions very rarely need to invoked. Perhaps when we hand the design of social institutions and practices over to scientists working with the methods of chemistry, physics and biology, the same strict moral code will now be the basis of all human societies.
Scientism as a Doctrine
Here are three main tenets of "scientism' [Williams & Robinson, 2015]. Local versions differ in the details and the exact manner that these principles are interpreted.
1. Epistemology: All claims to knowledge, whatever their topics, should be judged by the criteria that have evolved in the natural sciences.
2. Semantics: A description of the world as human beings experience it, including their experience ofthemselves, has no essential use for predicates other than those that get their meaning from their use in the discourses of the natural sciences.
3. Methodology: Only those methods of enquiry that have been perfected in the natural sciences should be used to investigate any natural, cultural, historical or religious phenomenon or practice.
There are various versions of these tenets depending on how far the semantics of scientific discourse is designed to meet positivist criteria. And there are varieties depending on how far the shape and contents of explanations are determined by the hypothetico-deductive scheme of the ^ logical empiricists.
O Looking broadly at the many kinds of disciplined knowledge
Sj garnering endeavours people engage in there is a deep question. If the core
?of intellectual excellence is to be found in the three tenets of scientism, .. what is the status of the practices of historical research, ethical debates and theological disputes?
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Problems with Each of the Tenets of Scientism
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^ The epistemological tenet is vulnerable to very simple counter-examples.
The difficulties tie in with the methodology tenet, in particular the role of experiment. The principles of experimentation in the natural sciences requires that as much of the experimental milieu should be maintained in a constant state while the independent and dependent variables change with respect to each other. These requirements ls include the foundational tenet that the
THE SOCIAL INGREDIENTS IN ALL WAYS...
situation of the experiment can be replicated time after time. In the human sciences knowledge is local, idiographic and indexical of the actual then and there siltation in which an observation of some social or psychological process is observed. Each person undergoes continuous and unpredictable changes just by the mere fact of living another day. Furthermore the complexity of the network of human contacts that are relevant to acquiring knowledge of some phenomena cannot be abstracted from in such a way that a simple cause-effect law can be established. In this respect knowledge of the social world in which real people engage in the activities we pick out as psychological which actually consists of local reports and local norms rather than universal laws and timeless experimental results.
The semantic tenet runs into a fatal difficulty, the first mereological fallacy. This arises when the failure to maintain the meaning of a word as it used firstly for a whole entity and then for one of that entities parts is ignored. For example, the famous discussion by Bennett and Hacker (2003) is based on highlighting the change of meaning that occurs when a word used for a whole person function or phenomenon is used to describe a part of that person. The fallacy is actually quite subtle and complex. There are many aspects of a person, such as height or weight or temperature that are projectable from the while person to one or more of that persons parts. Nurses remark on how heavy a leg is when amputated. A dietician might remark on how heavy a self-indulgent patient has become. However, if the word is used to ascribe some cognitive or moral quality to the whole person, such as deciding or suffering or gloating, it is a fallacy to declare that the frontal lobes are deciding, that the amygdala is suffering or that the hippocampus is gloating. One matter that distinguishes legitimate transitions of words from a whole to its parts maintaining meanings is that these predicates have no moral content. Those for which the transition from whole to part is fallacious have moral content — we remember that only a whole person can be praised or blamed. " It was not me but my hand that struck the fatal blow' gets one nowhere in court. However, in some situations, an exculpating transfer of responsibility from jg whole person to person part does seem to be acceptable is one in which the S cause of a morally significant feature of a person or that person's actions, is q plausibly assigned to a body part. ^
The methodological tenet depends on identifying what are the basic ^ methods of the natural sciences, physics chemistry and biology. Observation (B of phenomena depending on the use of an evolving conceptual system is one source of factual knowledge while deliberate experimentation manipulating q variables in a stable environment is another. Observation is a key method in ^ cultural studies while experimentation is almost always impossible with respect some particular research project. Statistical methods are appropriate in both physics and biology, though not important in chemistry. But in the cultural studies statistical reports can only be of local and immediate validity. In psychology statistical analyses of the dependent/independent varia-
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ble patterns displayed by a sample of human beings are inherently fallacious. A statistical analysis eliminates the individual's behaviour pattern but it is individuals who think, feel, and decide and so on.
These critical analyses suggest that a distinction between natural sciences and cultural studies is essential, not only in the domain of phenomena to be studied but in the methods by which such study is carried on. Where and when are experiments useful and what sort of experiments might they be? Should they involve manipulation of variables, analysis of substances and situations, the activation of models and so on?
The Concepts and Methods of the Cultural Studies
What do we need to understand in order to describe and explain cultural phenomenal, such as belief systems, patterns of social life, games, family practices, religious dogma, and so on?
The idea that the methods of the natural sciences, particularly chemistry, physics and biology, can be readily adapted to the study of social phenomena, the content and structure of belief systems, the history of institutions, the behaviour of people in daily life, has been largely discredited, though for various reasons such methods continue to be practiced. A disinterested look at social and psychological phenomena shows us that these domains consist of patterns of meanings shaped by acknowledged and unacknowledged rules, conventions and customs. A social philosophy of social and psychological studies brings people as agents engaged in symbolic interactions and exchanges to the fore. Psychologists, sociologists, historians, linguists, political theorists and theologians are engaged in reflexive tasks working on systems and ^ situations of which they themselves are part. O
■g Are there any Concepts that Can be Usefully g1 Borrowed by Cultural Studies from the Natural u Sciences?
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We now quite familiar with borrowing from Darwinian evolutionary
Q biology for making sense of social change. But Jakob von Uexkull (1934), ® introduced an even more valuable way of looking at all life, concept in his § distinction between Umgebung, the environment at large, and Umwelt, the ambient world, or milieu, proper to a given species, as it exists for that species. It is useful to introduced a distinction between Mesology, the study of
"|fgl 1 I owe this elaboration of von Ueksull's proposals to Jean Pierre Llored and S. Sarade, -1 (2016).
THE SOCIAL INGREDIENTS IN ALL WAYS...
the Umwelt, and Ecology, the study of the Umgebung. The general idea is that a species and its milieu are a mutual elaboration, in which the animal is not like a machine reacting to a situation with an automatic response, but rather like a bicyclist reacting to a signal with an appropriate action, stopping at a red light, for example. The signal has a meaning in that context and may have a different meaning in a different setting. The reality ofa milieu (Umwelt) lies below the dichotomy between subject and object, which are not in a an oppositional relation. Uexkull was also a forerunner of bio-semiotics, that is a study of signification in the world of animals and plants. His mesology entails the necessity of studying how the facts of the environment become, or do not become, signifying traits of the concerned animal's milieu. In other words, how the information contained in the environment becomes the system of significations of a milieu [Berque, 2013].
The Japanese philosopher, Watsuji Tetsuro extended von Uxkull's distinction to the human situation. He distinguished between kankyo, the environment, as abstractly objectified by natural science, and fudo, the milieu, as concretely experienced by the members of a certain society. Von Uexkull deals with the ontological level of living organisms in general, whereas Watsuji deals with that of the human in particular. Uexkull did not have a concept for the coupling of an animal with its milieu. Watsuji introduced the concept offudosei, for the process by which environment and mileu are dynamically combined into a "moment" one which is individual, the hito, and one of which is collective. We could call this linkage between people and things, a "mediance', by which a milieu (fudo) is created.
The human being is medial, with a level of mediance higher than that of any other living being, because people have added a multitude of technical and symbolic systems to the animal body. There cannot be a private system of significations, so the ancillary constituents of the human being are necessarily collective, but at the same time they are constitutive of the very existence of people as individuals. It has not been easy to accept the idea that the reality which surrounds us is not an objective environment ^ (Umgebung), of objects confronted by an individual subject, but a milieu, constituted with things which participate in our very being because of our ^ mediance [Berque, 2014]. U
Watsuji stressed that fudogaku implies a hermeneutical method in or- ^ der to grasp the meaning of its milieu for a certain human society, or a certain culture. The notions of subjecthood, and that of interpretation rather than information, are crucial for mesology. Starting from Watsuji's conception offudo, Berque defines the 'ecumene' as the total sum of human milieux, and thus as the relationship of humankind with theEarth.The ecu- g mene emerged from the biosphere by dint of the development of technical and symbolic systems, making possible the emergence of the human species as persons. The ecumene must be distinguished ontologically from the ® biosphere. It is at once ecological, technological and symbolic. '—
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Are there any Methods that can be Usefully Borrowed from Natura Sciences for Cultural Studies?
Presuming that by science' we mean the natural sciences taken as a whole, how could the practices and discoveries of the natural sciences find a place, if they do, in cultural studies? Though we must reject the hegemonic ambitions of scientism, it would be foolish to reject more modest borrowings from the natural sciences, in particular model making and testing. This is the technique by which the content of theories is developed beyond the bounds of observation. Model making occurs in both natural sciences and in human studies. In making and using models or analogues of the systems under study we are drawing on the knowledge we already have of some system or process or state of affairs that, as an analogue, will lead us to a new view of some phenomenon we do not see clearly or which we do not then and there understand how it has come to be. Models stand in for hidden mechanisms of the production of phenomena [Rothbart D., 2002]. The use of the dramaturgical model, that is seeing social life as if it were a performance in the theatre, has been influential in the social sciences, for example in the works of Erving Goffman (1964), and its use parallels more or less closely the use of models in the natural sciences, such as the kinetic theory of gases, Niels Bohr's atom and Darwin's model of breeding stock on the farm as the source of ideas for understanding change in natural species.
Statistics is of very restricted value in cultural studies, and in the case of psychology actually a barrier to productive understandings. What about the Webbs? They and many others believed that finding the proportions of people with certain attributes in the population at large was a fundamental O"1 prerequisite of enlightened or even effective social policy. This could apply equally to cleaning up the cities and to planning an army. No inferences can be drawn about the attributes any given person from such O data, so the cognitive and emotional processes that lie behind human behaviour can play no role in this kind of sociology and even less in psychology. Yet, statistical finding are of crucial importance in analysing a (B field trial of a new drug, the spread of epidemics, the best way to fertilise crops and so on.
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§ in the Natural Sciences %
JJi We must look at the natural sciences as the work that is done by the
—' members of the natural scientific community. As such we need to pay
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attention to social factors that impact the work of the members of this community [Llored & Sarrade, 2016].
Choice of Domain to Investigate and Limitations on Methods of Inquiry: the Case of Green Chemistry
This shows how cultural factors play an essential role in the practice of natural sciences. J.P. Llored has pointed out how socio-political factors have begun to infiltrate chemistry — in particular concerns about the effect of the release of new and old substances, the products of research by chemists, into the environment.
The Social Conditions and Cultural Presuppositions of Natural Science Research
We have already noted the importance of the fact that the scientific community, or perhaps we should say 'communities', is a human society with many of the attributes of the kinds if human societies we find already existing in such institutions as the military forces, religious groups such as monks , nuns, dervishes, Buddhists, and many others. The most obvious but perhaps the least important feature of these societies is the way that each of them acknowledges norms of correct behaviour and has various kinds of punishments for deviants and rewards for the faithful. The worst offence of all is to reject and abandon the society. Apostasy is the cardinal sin. But in the everyday working of a society the most important feature of the local moral order and one that shapes almost everyone's pattern of actions is the distribution of rights and duties to act and even to think in certain ways. A member has duty to perform such and such tasks and in advanced societies the right to comply or refuse. In the perfect society duties and rights enjoin the very same patterns of action. The study of how ^ rights and duties are distributed among the members of a society, at u whatever level, is Positioning Theory [Van Langenhove & Harre, 1992]. ^ Publishing results in the natural sciences, and increasingly in the human sciences, is disciplined by the right an investigator has to claim a discovery >i or a part in a discovery. Disputes about priority are often savage, including archaeology — who first opened such and such an Egyptian tomb? Who ^ really first proved Fermat's Last Theorem? Who discovered oxygen? The g names at the head of a scientific article are a clue to the hierarchy within which rights and duties are distributed. The team leader has the greatest rights in making claims and the technician who did all the work may have no rights at all to be recognised as a contributor.
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ROM HARRE
Conclusions
What will be the leading concepts that will appear as we develop a social philosophy of science? We must choose concepts which permeate the whole of sciences, social, psychological, cultural and natural. Here are two suggestions for the moral foundations of a philosophy of science, that links the natural sciences withy cultural studies in a principled way.
Excellence
By that I mean concepts which point to Eudaimonia, Aristotle's word for excellence in life. Different societies at different geographical and historical locations are likely to have their own versions of what is to count as Eudaimonia. In any analysis of a scientific program the fact that whatever it is must inevitably impact the Umwelt means that simple environmental studies fall short of what a social philosophy of science could demand. In a social philosophy of science we must track the various ways that "medience' ties human thought and action to those aspects of the orld that those very ways make available or in extreme cases actually create. The ecumeme both gains content as new Umwelten are created but also loses content as one or more Umwelten become obsolete or discredited as fantasies. At every stage the working criterion must be a versions of "excellence' or as Aristotle had it, Eudaimonia.
Rights and Duties: Positioning
How scientific research is undertaken and now the results of such research are interpreted and perhaps implemented in projects in the everyday world, will depend on how rights and duties are distributed and allocated not only in the scientific community but in the society at large. When do rights or perhaps duties to conceal the results of scientific research become salient and how are they determined? When is it legitimate to suppress the right of a person or community of scientists to make the results of their research public? How is credit for a discovery determined and by whom?
When as philosophers we attend to the activities of scientific communities with these questions in mind then we are undertaking the construction of a social philosophy of science. But above all we must turn to attend reflexively to build a social philosophy of science of the social philosophy of science. This opens a regress which terminates only when the value of these exercises diminishes towards zero.
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References
Bennet, M. & Hacker, P. M. S. Philosophical Foundations of Cognitive Science. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Berque, A. Mesology in the light of Yamauchi Tokuryü's Logos and lemma. Philosophizing in Asia, APF Series 1, UTCP (The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy), Uehiro Booklet 3, 9-25, 2013.
Berque, A. Ecoumene. Introduction a l'etude des milieux humains, Paris: Be-lin, 2009.
Goffman, E. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1964.
Llored, J.P. & Sarrade, S. Connecting philosophy of chemsitry and moral philosophy: sustainable chemistry, consequentialism and the ethics of care. Foundations of Chemistry SpeciaL Issue, 2016.
Polanyi, M. Personal Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.
Rothbart, D. Models and Modeling. New York: Springer, 2002.
Uexküll, J. Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen. Bedeutungslehre (Raids in the ambient worlds of animals and humans. Study ofsignification), Hamburg: Rowohlt, (1956 (1934)).
Van Langenhove, L. & Harre, R. Positioning Theory, 1999.
Watsuji, T. Fudo. Le milieu humain, translated by Berque A., Paris: CNRS, 2011, or. 1935.
Williams, R.N. & Robsinon, D.N. Scientism : The New Orthodoxy. London: Bloomsbury, 1915.
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