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Next: The Objectivism of the Up: Part One Scientism and Previous: The Subjective Character of   Contents

The Individualist and ``Compositive'' Method of the Social Sciences

At this point it becomes necessary briefly to interrupt the main argument in order to safeguard ourselves against a misconception which might arise from what has just been said. The stress which we have laid on the fact that in the social sciences our data or ``facts'' are themselves ideas or concepts must, of course, not be understood to mean that all the concepts with which we have to deal in the social sciences are of this character. There would be no room for any scientific work if this were so; and the social sciences no less than the natural sciences aim at revising the popular concepts which men have formed about the objects of their study, and at replacing them by more appropriate ones. The special difficulties of the social sciences, and much confusion about their character, derive precisely from the fact that in them ideas appear in two capacities, as it were, as part of their object and as ideas about that object. While in the natural sciences the contrast between the object of our study and our explanation of it coincides with the distinction between ideas and objective facts, in the social sciences it is necessary to draw a distinction between those ideas which are constitutive of the phenomena we want to explain and the ideas which either we ourselves or the very people whose actions we have to explain may have formed about these phenomena and which are not the cause of, but theories about, the social structures.

This special difficulty of the social sciences is a result, not merely of the fact that we have to distinguish between the views held by the people which are the object of our study and our views about them, but also of the fact that the people who are our object themselves not only are motivated by ideas but also form ideas about the undesigned results of their actions-- popular theories about the various social structures or formations which we share with them and which our study has to revise and improve. The danger of substituting ``concepts'' (or ``theories'') for the ``facts'' is by no means absent in the social sciences and failure to avoid it has exercised as detrimental an effect here as in the natural sciences;4.1but it appears on a different plane and is very inadequately expressed by the contrast between ideas and facts. The real contrast is between ideas which by being held by the people become the causes of a social phenomenon and the ideas which people form about that phenomenon. That these two classes of ideas are distinct (although in different contexts the distinction may have to be drawn differently)4.2 can easily be shown. The changes in the opinions which people hold about a particular commodity and which we recognize as the cause of a change in the price of that commodity stand clearly in a different class from the ideas which the same people may have formed about the causes of the change in price or about the ``nature of value'' in general. Similarly, the beliefs and opinions which lead a number of people regularly to repeat certain acts, for example, to produce, sell, or buy certain quantities of commodities, are entirely different from the ideas they may have formed about the whole of the ``society,'' or the ``economic system,'' to which they belong and which the aggregate of all their actions constitutes. The first kind of opinions and beliefs is a condition of the existence of the ``wholes'' which would not exist without them; they are, as we have said, ``constitutive,'' essential for the existence of the phenomenon which the people refer to as ``society'' or the ``economic system,'' but which will exist irrespectively of the concepts which the people have formed about these wholes.

It is very important that we should carefully distinguish between the motivating or constitutive opinions on the one hand and the speculative or explanatory views which people have formed about the wholes; confusion between the two is a source of constant danger. Is it the ideas which the popular mind has formed about such collectives as society or the economic system, capitalism or imperialism, and other such collective entities, which the social scientist must regard as no more than provisional theories, popular abstractions, and which he must not mistake for facts? That he consistently refrains from treating these pseudo-entities as facts, and that he systematically starts from the concepts which guide individuals in their actions and not from the results of their theorizing about their actions, is the characteristic feature of that methodological individualism which is closely connected with the subjectivism of the social sciences. The scientistic approach, on the other hand, because it is afraid of starting from the subjective concepts determining individual actions, is, as we shall presently see, regularly led into the very mistake it attempts to avoid, namely of treating as facts those collectives which are no more than popular generalizations. Trying to avoid using as data the concepts held by individuals where they are clearly recognizable and explicitly introduced as what they are, people brought up in scientistic views frequently and naively accept the speculative concepts of popular usage as definite facts of the kind they are familiar with.

We shall have to discuss the nature of this collectivist prejudice inherent in the scientistic approach more fully in a later section.

A few more remarks must be added about the specific theoretical method which corresponds to the systematic subjectivism and individualism of the social sciences. From the fact that it is the concepts and views held by individuals which are directly known to us and which form the elements from which we must build up, as it were, the more complex phenomena, follows another important difference between the method of the social disciplines and the natural sciences. While in the former it is the attitudes of individuals which are the familiar elements and by the combination of which we try to reproduce the complex phenomena, the results of individual actions, which are much less known--a procedure which often leads to the discovery of principles of structural coherence of the complex phenomena which had not been (and perhaps could not be) established by direct observation--the physical sciences necessarily begin with the complex phenomena of nature and work backward to infer the elements from which they are composed. The place where the human individual stands in the order of things brings it about that in one direction what he perceives are the comparatively complex phenomena which he analyzes, while in the other direction what are given to him are elements from which those more complex phenomena are composed that he cannot observe as wholes.4.3While the method of the natural sciences is in this sense, analytic, the method of the social sciences is better described as Compositive4.4 or synthetic. It is the so-called wholes, the groups of elements which are structurally connected, which we learn to single out from the totality of observed phenomena only as a result to our systematic fitting together of the elements with familiar properties, and which we build up or reconstruct from the known properties of the elements.

It is important to observe that in all this the various types of individual beliefs or attitudes are not themselves the object of our explanation, but merely the elements from which we build up the structure of possible relationships between individuals. Insofar as we analyze individual thought in the social sciences the purpose is not to explain that thought but merely to distinguish the possible types of elements with which we shall have to reckon in the construction of different patterns of social relationships. It is a mistake, to which careless expressions by social scientists often give countenance, to believe that their aim is to explain conscious action. This, if it can be done at all, is a different task, the task of psychology. For the social sciences the types of conscious action are data4.5and all they have to do with regard to these data is to arrange them in such orderly fashion that they can be effectively used for their task.4.6 The problems which they try to answer arise only insofar as the conscious action of many men produce undesigned results, insofar as regularities are observed which are not the result of anybody's design. If social phenomena showed no order except insofar as they were consciously designed, there would indeed be no room for theoretical sciences of society and there would be, as is often argued, only problems of psychology. It is only insofar as some sort of order arises as a result of individual action but without being designed by any individual that a problem is raised which demands a theoretical explanation. But although people dominated by the scientistic prejudice are often inclined to deny the existence of any such order (and thereby the existence of an object for theoretical sciences of society), few if any would be prepared to do so consistently: that at least language shows a definite order which is not the result of any conscious design can scarcely be questioned.

The reason for the difficulty which the natural scientist experiences in admitting the existence of such an order in social phenomena is that these orders cannot be stated in physical terms, that if we define the elements in physical terms no such order is visible, and that the units which show an orderly arrangement do not (or at least need not) have any physical properties in common (except that men react to them in the ``same'' way--although the ``sameness'' of different people's reaction will again, as a rule, not be definable in physical terms). It is an order in which things behave in the same way because they mean the same thing to man. If, instead of regarding as alike and unlike what appears so to the acting man, we were to take for our units only what Science shows to be alike or unlike, we should probably find no recognizable order whatever in social phenomena--at least not till the natural sciences had completed their task of analyzing all natural phenomena into their ultimate constituents and psychology had also fully achieved the reverse task of explaining in all detail how the ultimate units of physical science come to appear to man just as they do, that is, how that apparatus of classification operates which our senses constitute.

It is only in the very simplest instances that it can be shown briefly and without any technical apparatus how the independent actions of individuals will produce an order which is no part of their intentions; and in those instances the explanation is usually so obvious that we never stop to examine the type of argument which leads us to it. The way in which footpaths are formed in a wild broken country is such an instance. At first everyone will seek for himself what seems to him the best path. But the fact that such a path has been used once is likely to make it easier to traverse and therefore more likely to be used again; and thus gradually more and more clearly defined tracks arise and come to be used to the exclusion of other possible ways. Human movements through the region come to conform to a definite pattern which, although the result of deliberate decisions of many people, has yet not been consciously designed by anyone. This explanation of how this happens is an elementary ``theory'' applicable to hundreds of particular historical instances; and it is not the observation of the actual growth of any particular track, and still less of many, from which this explanation derives its cogency, but from our general knowledge of how we and other people behave in the kind of situation in which the successive people find themselves who have to seek their way and who by the cumulative effect of their action create the path. It is the elements of the complex of events which are familiar to us from everyday experience, but it is only by a deliberate effort of directed thought that we come to see the necessary effects of the combination of such actions by many people. We ``understand'' the way in which the result we observe can be produced, although we may never be in a position to watch the whole process or to predict its precise course and result.

It makes no difference for our present purpose whether the process extends over a long period of time, as it does in such cases as the evolution of money or the formation of language, or whether it is a process which is constantly repeated anew, as in the case of the formation of prices or the direction of production under competition. The former instances raise theoretical (that is, generic) problems (as distinguished from the specifically historical problems in the precise sense which we shall have to define later) which are fundamentally similar to the problems raised by such recurring phenomena as the determination of prices. Although in the study of any particular instance of the evolution of an ``institution'' like money or the language the theoretical problem will frequently be so overlaid by the consideration of the particular circumstances involved (the properly historical task), this does not alter the fact that any explanation of a historical process involves assumptions about the kind of circumstances that can produce certain kinds of effects--assumptions which, where we have to deal with results which were not directly willed by somebody, can only be stated in the form of a generic scheme, in other words a theory.

The physicist who wishes to understand the problems of the social sciences with the help of an analogy from his own field would have to imagine a world in which he knew by direct observation the inside of the atoms and had neither the possibility of making experiments with lumps of matter nor the opportunity to observe more than the interactions of a comparatively few atoms during a limited period. From his knowledge of the different kinds of atoms he could build up models of all the various ways in which they could combine into larger units and make these models more and more closely reproduce all the features of the few instances in which he was able to observe more complex phenomena. But the laws of the macrocosm which he could derive from his knowledge of the microcosm would always remain ``deductive''; they would, because of his limited knowledge of the data of the complex situation, scarcely ever enable him to predict the precise outcome of a particular situation; and he could never confirm them by controlled experiment--although they might be disproved by the observation of events which according to his theory are impossible.

In a sense some problems of theoretical astronomy are more similar to those of the social sciences than those of any of the experimental sciences. Yet there remain important differences. While the astronomer aims at knowing all the elements of which his universe is composed, the student of social phenomena cannot hope to know more than the types of elements from which his universe is made up. He will scarcely ever know even all of the elements of which it consists and he will certainly never know all the relevant properties of each of them. The inevitable imperfection of the human mind becomes here not only a basic datum about the object of explanation but, since it applies no less to the observer, also a limitation on what he can hope to accomplish in his attempt to explain the observed facts. The number of separate variables which in any particular social phenomenon will determine the result of a given change will as a rule be far too large for any human mind to master and manipulate them effectively.4.7 In consequence our knowledge of the principle by which these phenomena are produced will rarely if ever enable us to predict the precise result of any concrete situation. While we can explain the principle on which certain phenomena are produced and can from this knowledge exclude the possibility of certain results, for example, of certain events occurring together, our knowledge will in a sense be only negative; that is, it will merely enable us to preclude certain results but not enable us to narrow the range of possibilities sufficiently so that only one remains.

The distinction between an explanation merely of the principle on which a phenomenon is produced and an explanation which enables us to predict the precise result is of great importance for the understanding of the theoretical methods of the social sciences. It arises, I believe, also elsewhere, for example, in biology and certainly in psychology. It is, however, somewhat unfamiliar and I know no place where it is adequately explained. The best illustration in the field of the social sciences is probably the general theory of prices as represented, for example, by the Walrus or Partisan systems of equations. These systems show merely the principle of coherence between the prices of the various types of commodities of which the system is composed; but without knowledge of the numerical values of all the constants which occur in it and which we never do know, this does not enable us to predict the precise results which any particular change will have.4.8 Apart from this particular case, a set of equations which shows merely the form of a system of relationships but does not give the values of the constants contained in it, is perhaps the best general illustration of an explanation merely of the principle on which any phenomenon is produced.

This must suffice as a positive description of the characteristic problems of the social sciences. It will become clearer as we contrast in the following sections the specific procedure of the social sciences with the most characteristic aspects of the attempts to treat their object after the fashion of the natural sciences.


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Next: The Objectivism of the Up: Part One Scientism and Previous: The Subjective Character of   Contents