Should the social sciences be like the natural sciences? Wilhelm Dilthey didn't think so. This early 19th and 20th century figure who went on to influence Martin Heidegger, Hans Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur contended that the concept of Verstehen is crucial in our interpretation of human thought and behavior. Verstehen literally means "understanding," and Dilthey believed that whereas we look for explanations of phenomena in the natural sciences, Understanding or Verstehen in Dilthey's technical use as applied to the social sciences means interpreting human behavior in view of generalizations made from descriptions of past or ongoing behavior and whatever judgments or practical rules we can derive from such behavior. Dilthey fundamentally believed that human beings were both historical creatures and creatures with complex agency, and both these assumptions make us track what count as empirical data much differently in the social sciences than in the natural sciences.
Whereas the natural sciences look for laws that govern phenomena, Dilthey did not think that we could be so lucky in understanding human beings. Think of laws in terms of counterfactuals. In Physics, say, if you know a particles' position and velocity, you can determine the particles' behavior. You can even account for changes in the behavior. Not so with humans, beyond whatever general principles it's possible to derive. You can wonder why Sam went to the company picnic and give some reasons why he decided on going instead of staying home but you can't know, apart from taking in a whole host of other countless factors, if he's going to go if he gets a stomachache. Maybe he will, maybe he won't. Part of what we think about whether Sam will go under different conditions has to do with what we think is appropriate or inappropriate in the circumstance, and these conditions of appropriateness range from the most local possible to the most global. As Dilthey explained in his book, Introduction to the Human Sciences, this tells us that our understanding of human behavior, as opposed to other kinds of behavior, is inherently normative, about what people ought to do in such-and-such a circumstance.
Yet we need not conclude from Dilthey's characterization of Understanding that it is something fundamentally anathema to naturalistic explanation, and he himself did not seem to believe as much. Pace the way in which the concept of Understanding may have been taken up post-Dilthey, it is possible to construe his treatise on the social sciences as continuous with the rest of naturalistic inquiry. The biologist-turned-philosopher Massimo Pigliucci, probably unknowingly, is in agreement with Dilthey. He has argued that the way we interpret human behavior is fundamentally irreducible to the way in which we investigate the natural sciences because, in addition to making use of normativity in the social sciences, we more particularly believe that there's such a thing as agency, that is, that people and other animals (and maybe robots too) act from thoughts and values. Pigliucci writes in his book, Nonsense on Stilts, "Suffice to say that free will is a way to label the complex decision-making processes in which the human brain engages, consciously as well as probably subconsciously," and Pigliucci suggests that this is as much a naturalistic way to do rational inquiry as anything else.
Another consideration worth remembering, lest we make too big a deal of the possible discontinuity between explanation and Understanding, is that what makes the social sciences real and reasonable endeavors just like the natural sciences is that people within particular fields generate hypotheses and check them against empirical data, which Pigliucci reminds does not only require experiments, since science "can be done with an intelligent use of observational evidence."
The common thread in all science is the ability to produce and test hypotheses based on systematically collected empirical data (via experiments or observations). How these hypotheses are generated, how exactly scientists go about testing them, and the degree of success we can expect from different sciences varies from science to science and from problem to problem.
Dilthey argues regarding the social sciences in general that the two considerations of paramount importance when thinking of human beings is their historical conditions and also the degree to which human agency confounds our potential understanding. Pigliucci, however, pushes further, arguing that when considering the sciences in general, we can easily see that historical considerations permeate several scientific fields and that the issue of human agency is one instance of the more general problem of complexity. Pigliucci informs us that what count as empirical data have a lot to do with the kinds of problems people are interested in solving within a field and the degree to which a field is both historical and complex.
[O]n the one hand, we have a continuum from completely historical (paleontology, astronomy) to partially historical (evolutionary biology, geology) to essentially ahistorical sciences (physics, chemistry)... On the other hand, we have a second continuum, from sciences that deal with simple, highly tractable systems where one can apply strong inferential methods (physics, chemistry) to sciences dealing with extremely complex objects, where statistical treatment is necessary and where the ability to explain and predict phenomena is much reduced (evolutionary biology, psychology).
This point of the Two Continua generalizes beyond fields that are generally accepted as social sciences, fields such as Psychology, Economics, Political Science, and Sociology, and into fields which have sometimes been considered separate from the social sciences and regarded as the Humanities, fields such as Literary Studies or Religious Studies. If what has preceded is true, then the extent to which these fields make use of empirical data and test hypotheses, they are sciences. Once we bear in mind a couple of the common features of the sciences, and how the Two Continua bear on the kind of empirical data the fields can collect, we have less worry to think that the social sciences are radically discontinuous from the natural sciences, and neither for that matter the Humanities. Human beings are both historical and rational creatures, and our empirical data follow from those bedrock assumptions, but then that's not any different from any other science, from which the research programs are built on their respective assumptions and on the basis of which questions constitute interesting problems in particular fields.
a commitment to naturalism isn’t easily reducible to acting/working like a physical scientist (just says that there is nothing at work that isn’t part of physics/existence), but can the “social” sciences be scientific? that’s an open question to date:
https://www.ashgate.com/pdf/SamplePages/There_is_No_Such_Thing_as_a_Social_Science_Intro.pdf
Thank you for the link, dmf.
Would love to hear what you think.
there aren’t the sorts of regularities (that we can detect/calculate) to the “social” (not in individual psychology and certainly not in groups of individuals) that we can use for quality predictions. So we can get an ever better sense of the bodily mechanics of human-be-ings/doings but not predictive powers in terms of what people will do in everyday affairs (let alone what they should do).
hopefully we can take a look here someday at folks like http://www.ianhacking.com/books.html
in statistics/probability/chance
Thank you for your response, dmf. I, too, think that the social sciences can’t be like the natural sciences, but in my view it’s for mostly trivial reasons. Human agency is complex enough that it’s difficult to predict behavior and to conceive of human beings in an ahistorical and controlled context. Even when, say, psych experiments are conducted, they have to, of course, be conducted under highly unnatural circumstances to try to subtract away a number of confounding factors–but even then, it’s unclear how replicable the experiment can be and if we’re really accounting for some real feature of human nature or just someone in a similarly controlled circumstance. That doesn’t detract from Psychology or any other field, though; it just goes to show some of the limitations studying human being run up against. There’s been much fine work in the social sciences, and when conducted in a manner where data and theory jibe, it’s as good science as any.
” it’s unclear how replicable the experiment can be and if we’re really accounting for some real feature of human nature or just someone in a similarly controlled circumstance”
how can this be scientific than?
Nothing spooky here. Same problem plagues other fields, even Physics and Chemistry. The experiments in these fields, too, take place under laboratory conditions because the real world is far too messy–physicists and chemists aren’t just expected to step outside and do science. And the problem of replicability is present here, too. If the experiments are conducted incorrectly, you’ve got a problem of replicability. And finally there’s a larger problem that all the sciences have, which is the problem of induction. But these are just the basic conditions we have to accept that make it really really hard to do science, that is, to be very clear about what we’re going to take as our data and what hypotheses we put forth to try to explain that data.
hard but not impossible for the physical sciences, it’s what makes them scientific if one can’t meet those basic requirements one is merely speculating.
Seems to me the issue here is partly one of translation. In German, the term Wissenschaft has a broader meaning that does science in contemporary English; roughly, it means “systematic inquiry.” What we’re calling the social sciences here would be, for Dilthey, the Geisteswissenschaften, a term which was coined as a translation of J.S. Mill’s “moral sciences,” but has since been borrowed back into English. In the German intellectual world, at least until recently, there wasn’t a strong distinction between the humanities and the social sciences: Geisteswissenschaften encompasses both.
Seems to me that there are two questions here:
(1)To what extent should inquiry into the social resemble or be modeled after inquiry into nature?
(2)How are we going to use the word science?
and it’s important not to confuse them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wissenschaft
Hello, Allan:
Thank you for the response, particularly regarding translation.
Still, I don’t think the problem here comes from confusion; I actually think that Dilthey’s worldview has much to contribute substantively to whether the social sciences should resemble the natural sciences, and for a long time he has been invoked as an advocate of someone who believes that the two can’t resemble. A longer discussion of Dilthey’s contribution is in “The Philosophy of Social Science” by Martin Hollis. The reason he has much to contribute, I believe, is because the question still stands: When we study human behavior, do we have to study it–generate, test, and confirm hypotheses–differently than we do with non-human behavior or non-human phenomena? Dilthey answers in the affirmative. The reason we can’t study human behavior like any other object of inquiry, he believes, is that human beings act from their histories and traditions but they are not–at least they don’t seem to be–determined entirely by their histories, and there are normative considerations that come into play, considerations that we make when interpreting this behavior.
I included the philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci because he serves as an interesting foil for Dilthey. Pigliucci is in complete agreement but he argues that all fields of inquiry have peculiar characteristics we have to take into account when we study the behavior or phenomena that make them up, characteristics that fundamentally limit and direct the way we’re going to investigate what we study, including what we think would make for good hypotheses and what would even count as empirical data. In that respect, studying human behavior is continuous with studying any other kind of behavior, in that it’s still all about hypotheses and data and two continua: the degree to which a field is historical or ahistorical and the degree to which the objects of study are simple and complex.
One more note: If it’s true, as Dilthey believed, that human beings exhibit behavior that has to appeal to decision-making and it’s true that our judgments of such behavior involve different degrees of normativity, then it follows that particular fields which claim to be normatively neutral aren’t. Those fields, too, are making normative assumptions, even if not stating them explicitly. Economics comes to mind, and I take it listeners of PEL will recall the discussion that the PEL guys did with Michael Sandel, the latter a firm advocate for thinking about Economics as an extension of the moral sciences. At any rate, you almost never hear these assumptions either publicly debated or challenged although if they were I’m sure the issue would raise people’s suspicions regarding value-neutrality in the social sciences.
The Austrians’ insistence on a distinction between social science and natural science is the most pronounced disagreement between the Austrian and the Neoclassical Schools of economics. (Cf. Sousa, in Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen, http://goo.gl/f1IBfI)
On methodological debates in Economics, Mises’ Theory and History is a great read: http://goo.gl/F702av .
Jahouse:
Could you explain the circumstances of the debate a little bit?
Best wishes,
BP
Sure, though not as thoroughly as others have: http://www.amazon.com/Austrian-Economics-Re-examined-Ignorance-Foundations/dp/1138023000
The Austrian school of economics originally arose as a response to the German historical school, and at around the same time as classical economics (Smith, Ricardo, Mill). Crudely distinguished, the Austrian school insisted that economics must focus on the choices of the individual, and the marginal costs and benefits to him, instead of beginning from a class-based analysis. Classes and groups are only aggregates of individual choices, and history is merely the past results of individual choice. The Austrians believed that neither the existence of an aggregate, nor its past actions, could be used to predict or theorize about the future.
The Austrians were largely successful, with extreme Marxism becoming the only historical-school descendant remaining through the 20th century. And the Anglo-American classical economists even adopted the Austrians’ theory of marginal utility.
However, once the neoclassical synthesis became the dominant school, the Austrians once again saw reason to depart: The focus on marginal utility and equilibrium, both concepts accepted by Austrians in theory, caused mainstream economics to become overly mechanical. In, some would say, an attempt to add natural scientific rigor to economics, economists began to focus on the predictive ability of equilibrium theory. Basically, supply and demand curves, once quantified, could show the “efficient” (read: optimal, in their minds) price of a good and how such a price was being “distorted”. The extreme version of this scientistic trend is Econometrics.
The Austrians’ focus on the individual once again forced them to depart from the mainstream of economics. How could anyone measure demand? An individual’s desires are subjective. And what’s more, they change over time. As for equilibrium theory as a whole, it is useful as a concept but it does not accurately portray the real world. Even if human actions cause prices to tend toward equilibrium, it does not do so immediately–time passes and small bumps occur along the way. Many of these complaints were echoed by new institutionalists and post-Keynesians as well, but the mainstream of economics has not changed its trend toward mathematization of everything.
The radical subjectivism of the Austrian school resulted in Austrian scholarship, probably to its detriment, shunning almost any kind of empirical-historical studies. Instead the Austrians focus on methodology, history, and disequilibrium economics. For this reason they have the reputation of being less rigorous, or as Paul Krugman once said, very “wordy.” There is also the fact that the Austrian school is very closely associated with American libertarianism, perhaps because of the methodological focus on the individual. But Max Weber was a kind of methological individualist and he is not known as a libertarian. And early Austrian school economists were not libertarian either. Regardless, many attach the same fringe, third-party impression to the Austrian school that they do to American libertarianism.
Jahouse:
Thank you very much for your detailed explication. Curious, though, about the distinction between Austrian and Neoclassical economists’ conception of social science and its discontinuity or continuity with the natural sciences. Focusing on systems or classes as opposed to individuals, say, doesn’t seem to commit a person to a discontinuity between natural and social sciences. In fact, it seems like another way to do science–like, if you were interested in studying the wealthiest 10% of a country’s potential influence on public policy vis-a-vis the majority of a population. I wonder what the connection is, exactly, between the natural science-social science divide. Could be my failure, but I couldn’t catch if the Austrian economists or the Neoclassical economists were supposed to be the guys breaking with the natural sciences and why.
Best wishes,
BP
I’m sorry for the confusion, but the class/individual divide was the debate with histrocists, not neoclassicals.
My point of that introduction was to show the Austrians’ focus on the individual. The split with neoclassicals is related because the Austrians do not think that the neoclassicals take the individual and his subjectivity seriously. In other words, Austrians feel that neoclassicals talk as if they are methodolgically individualist, but really aren’t because they try to quantify the individual.
To Austrians, the neoclassical focus on quantification and mathematics is a form of physics-envy, an attempt to make economics into a natural science. The Austrians insist that economics is a social science because social science takes into account the subjectivity and unpredictability of human desires, whereas natural sciences focus on objective, measurable observations.
I think I see the difference now although it is a little unclear to me how the differences play out, not having much of an idea how each school’s assumptions affect their economics in practice. Perhaps I’ll do some further reading on the topic, given the links you provided.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2015/03/15/is-science-broken-lets-ask-karl-popper/
This article made a mistake. In Physics, according to the Heisenberg Principle, you cannot simultaneously know a particle’s position and velocity. Hence, probability plays a huge role, just as it does in determining human behavior.
Hello, Gene:
Yeah, I wanted to steer away from the puzzling cases of quantum indeterminacy, which is why I wrote, “*If* you know a particle’s position and velocity…” Certainly outside of the quantum realm, it’s business as usual for applying non-probabilistic laws to medium-sized objects.
I have heard parallels drawn with probability applications between both quantum mechanics and human behavior but make no claim to have investigated it much. Would love to hear what you have in mind.
Best wishes,
BP
Great to have a post on Dilthey.
There has always been a tension between the humanist side and the scientifically minded theorists in anthropology. Dilthey is certainly a big influence along with German counter-Enlightenment, Neo-Kantianism, and Historicism, particularly on American cultural anthropology. A lot of these issues are tied to the topic of cultural variability and the notion of anthropology as a comparative discipline.
19th century evolutionists attempted to explain human cultural diversity by postulating a unilineal evolution of all cultures from simple to more complex and superior forms. They constructed abstract evolutionary typologies by trying correlate socio-political and technological characteristics of societies into coherent stages. A famous example of this is Lewis Henry Morgan’s scheme which outlines three major stages of cultural development: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Supposedly since external environments in which cultures existed differed, some fostering evolution some hindering, cultures developed at different rates. Anthropology, by utilizing the comparative method, would thus allow advanced civilizations to glimpse their own archaic past in the so called primitive cultures of the world. As James Frazer put it “As savage races are not all on the same plane, but some have stopped or tarried at different points of the upward path, we can to a certain extent, by comparing them with each other, construct a scale of social progression and mark out roughly some of the stages on the long road that leads from savagery to civilization.” Unilineal evolution could also explain certain supposedly incongruous features of civilized cultures as relics (“survivals”) that had carried on from a more archaic stage of development. Anthropology has obviously moved on from these premises, but various neo-evolutionist formulations persist in the more materialistically oriented schools of anthropological thought.
In opposition to this we have the German distinction between nomothetic natural sciences in search of laws and explanations and idiographic social sciences / humanities in search of meaning and understanding. The tradition emphasizing the latter (von Humboldt, Herder, Dilthey et. al.) insisted on the irreducible historical particularity of national characters or cultures. This particularity could not be mechanically explained by reductionist appeals to natural laws, but could be understood (verstehen) which involved empathy and a degree of subjectivity (the self-reflexive culturally embedded position of the scholar was a factor). Anti-positivist Dilthey was an influence of Franz Boas who is widely considered the father of modern American anthropology and who was an important critic of evolutionist pseudo-history and scientific racism. It is arguably through Boas that culture, “folk psychology,” the native’s point of view, and cultural relativism became to hold such prominence in American anthropology. Interestingly Boas had his roots in physics and the hard sciences, and the Boasian empirical project can be seen as a mix of geistes- and naturwissenschaftliche viewpoints. Boasian anthropology is furthermore linked to the notion of holism according to which cultural phenomena cannot be understood on their own, but as part of cultural wholes. Holism is implicated in the idea that pre-modern societies were not functionally differentiated, and politics, economy, kinship and so on did not constitute discrete domains. Thus you could not reduce cultures to separate component parts or elements.
In early 20th century the method that gave anthropology its particularity became fieldwork (long-time bodily presence and immersion in a foreign culture) and anthropologists have tended to emphasize qualitative data over quantitative.
In the first half of twentieth century English and French anthropological traditions were somewhat different from the Boasian school. The influence of Emil Durkheim was more prominent and the Brits tended to see society or the social as more fundamental than culture (the social structure was determining and cultural meanings were by and large the shine on the apple or the froth on the wave). In African political Systems Evans-Pritchard claimed that “The task of social anthropology, as a natural science of human society, is the systematic investigation of the nature of social institutions. The method of natural science rests always on the comparison of observed phenomena, and the aim of such comparison is by a careful examination of diversities to discover underlying uniformities. Applied to human societies the comparative method used as an instrument for inductive inference will enable us to discover the universal, essential, characters which belong to all human societies, past, present, and future.” Similarly in Structure and Function in Primitive Society Radcliffe-Brown asserted that “Comparative sociology, of which social anthropology is a branch, is here conceived as a theoretical or nomothetic study of which the aim is to provide acceptable generalisations. The theoretical understanding of a particular institution is its interpretation in the light of such generalisations.” The Brits put a lot of effort into formal analysis of kinship systems in order to formulate comparative typologies, but by the sixties this hopeless task of classifying social systems came under heavy critique (Edmund Leach famously dismissed it as “butterfly collecting”). In France Claude Levi-Strauss approached hard sciences in another manner and based his structuralist anthropology on hypothetical universal cognitive structures of the human brain. Despite its universalizing premises Levi-Strauss’ structuralism has remained more relevant to symbolic anthropology.
In contrast to the British structural functionalists, American cultural anthropologists, particularly after the interpretative turn in the sixties and seventies, were less interested in such generalizations. As Geertz put it in Interpretation of Culture “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical.”
Since the eighties postmodernism, post-colonial theory, and feminism have contributed to a prevailing mood of epistemological scepticism, in the light of which the cultural relativism of the interpretative turn seem too like a continuation of an outmoded modernist project. Geertz for example argued for holistic “thick description,” the deep contextualization of cultural phenomena, but the concept of culture itself became under attack as bounded, essentializing, reifying, totalizing, etc. Meanwhile the notion of interpretation and culture as text ignored power. Subsequent theoretical critiques have been levelled at the anthropocentrism of the culturalist Neo-Kantian project.
One way in which comparison has been conceptualized in anthropology is the opposition of emic and etic viewpoints. The terms, derived from linguistics (phonemics and phonetics), refer to the indigenous viewpoint and an outside (objective or culturally neutral) scientist’s viewpoint respectively. One prevalent trend in the last thirty years is that anthropology should only concentrate on emic perspective since anything else is distorting symbolic violence, possibly colonialist and racist. This has made cultural comparison seem like an old-fashioned idea. On the other hand Marshall Sahlins, in many ways an old school Boasian, has argued that “No good ethnography is self-contained. Implicitly or explicitly ethnography is an act of comparison. By virtue of comparison ethnographic description becomes objective. Not in the naive positivist sense of an unmediated perception—just the opposite: it becomes a universal understanding to the extent it brings to bear on the perception of any society the conceptions of all the others.”
A culturalist tradition in anthropology that could be linked to Dilthey is in some ways stuck between a rock and a hard place: on one hand deemed airy-fairy idealism by materialist reductionist accounts (if not techno-environmental determinism perhaps cognitive individualism) and on the other under attack from postmodernism which has deconstructed culture as an object with any kind of meaningful coherence. Perhaps it could be even argued that the two sides have recently found common ground.
That was a long ramble, but hopefully provided some context for anthropology regarding your topic. Incidentally I did undergraduate studies in anthropology at a University with separate social and cultural anthropology departments, the first in social sciences and the second in humanities, though in actuality the content of teaching was the same.
Then there was the kerfuffle in 2012 when American Anthropological Association dropped the word science from its revised long-range plan…
Thank you for your detailed response, HS.
Dilthey is definitely a non-reductivist concerning the explanation of human behavior, and I believe that’s the most charitable way to read him. Having read portions of “Introduction to the Human Sciences,” human beings are fundamentally historical and act from their histories as well as make individual choices, and there’s no way that we can think about the totality of human behavior mechanistically.
I didn’t write about problems with the mechanistic view in the article above, but I have written about it elsewhere recently: http://bpritchett.blogspot.com/2015/03/misreading-history-of-science.html. If you want the short version of the article in that link, it’s that some people who either do science or do philosophy of science still talk and write as though a mechanistic worldview is the going paradigm. But I think this is a misreading of the history of science that hasn’t been active in practice (at least for the most part) since the 17th century, when Descartes proposed that mind had to be something more than push-and-pull mechanics and when Newton posited the ‘occult force’ of Gravity to explain why planets orbit and apples fall, ‘spooky action at a distance’ if anything is. Nothing mechanistic about this view.
I think this misreading of the history of science is of a piece with people who argue too zealously for a thoroughgoing reductionism or reductivism. It’s assumed, for instance, that unless you reduce human agency to things that push and pull, you haven’t done real science, like saying that choosing to wave is just a matter of certain neural firings and the release of acetylcholine that ‘tells’ the arm to move. But say, if you’re doing Anthropology, the appeal to brain matter isn’t going to do much to talk about greetings–in fact, that description will be pretty much irrelevant to the discussion of greetings.
But, you know, I do want to say that there are some readings of Dilthey and views like his which go too far in the other direction. There’s a sense in which we all are just very intricate and creative animals. So it would be odd if certain aspects of human behavior weren’t amenable to collecting empirical data and formulating hypotheses, just like with any other creature. There might be some fundamental limitations but try as we might we ought to proceed like with the other sciences.
You mentioned that Dilthey might not be well-beloved by reductionist and postmodernists alike. And that well may be true. I understand what the reductionist criticism is–or so I think. But regarding postmodern criticisms, aside from admitting that not only human behavior but the entire world is full of seeming paradoxes, problems of induction and serious limitations that exist with possibilities for rational inquiry, I fail to see what the problem is with proceeding with business as usual for inquiry. Those are the starting points, the basic facts we have to admit, that Nature is mysterious and complex and science is hard to do. The starting points, not the finish line.
I agree with you about the supposedly mechanistic nature of scientific worldview (as if such singular thing existed), and of course Boas’ or the neo-Kantian’s 19th century notion of natural laws would differ from a contemporary account. A lot of this hinges on methodology and how the topic of inquiry is conceptualized. Interestingly Boas moved from physics to anthropology through geography, and his doctoral thesis was on light penetrating water. As he later wrote “I had used photometric methods to compare intensities of light. This led me to consider the quantitative values of sensations. In the course of my investigation I learned to recognize that there are domains of our experience in which the concept of quantity, of measures that can be added or subtracted like those with which I was accustomed to operate, are not applicable.” This awakening to qualitative aspect of his analysis corresponds to the more poetic or subjective verstehen concept of the German school, though Boas was not adverse to statistical analysis either, and as I said presented a synthesis of geistes- and naturwissenschaftliche viewpoints. (Though I don’t think Boas could have foreseen the methodological nightmare of “big data.”)
Still it’s clear that there are more and less reductionist or mechanistic ways to analyse cultural phenomena. There are plenty of people who would like to reduce them to neural activity or who posit that a hypothetical human nature or individual cognitive capacities are more fundamental or determining than cultural variability. Or who say that a cultural superstructure is determined by an economic base, or who attempt to explain transformations of socio-political systems through environmental adaptation and population dynamics. Indeed you can find all these reductionist tendencies within different schools of anthropology, and there is arguably a long-standing rift between more trenchant culturalist and certain materialistically oriented approaches, though attempts are occasionally made to cross the divide. Yet I do not agree with recent criticisms that culturalism, often accused of idealism, has ignored the material world, or has consistently attempted to purge nature from culture.
https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/ICEA/ICEA_publication_pdfs/Debated_Mind_-_Conclusion.pdf
http://somatosphere.net/2013/10/philippe-descolas-beyond-nature-and-culture.html
As for empirical data, you can be a dyed in the wool cultural relativist and a theoretical instrumentalist, but as an anthropologist you are still (hopefully) going to respect the empirical data and agree that some accounts are better than others. I’d claim that where anthropology resembles philosophy more than natural sciences is that it’s big theoretical preoccupations are not so much accumulatively solved as they cycle in and out of fashion and are reformulated.
One correction: I didn’t say that “material reductionists” and “postmodernists” have a problem with Dilthey but with the anthropological culture paradigm that has a connection to Dilthey’s philosophy. The postmodern critique has to do with the deconstruction of the culture concept (particularly cultures in plural).
Oh, and concerning economic theories discussed by jahouse there is the whole formalist vs substantivist debate started by Karl Polanyi, with the latter view lining with anthropological particularist ideas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_formalist_vs_substantivist_debate
Interesting post. If anyone is interested, allow me to contribute an aside from the perspective of an academic economist.
You say that Dilthey believes that potentially “human agency confounds our potential understanding.” While this is certainly the case, human agency also makes additional types of the scientific study of human behavior possible. To me, agency means being able to take decisions that are in line with your desires — that is, to engage in goal oriented behavior (if someone compelled into actions they didn’t want to take, we would say that they don’t have agency). But, the study of economics (setting aside behavioral economics) is precisely the study of goal oriented (sometimes called ‘rational’) behavior and its consequences.
Once you know something about what a goal oriented actor wants, and the rules of the game she thinks she is playing, you can begin to make testable predictions about her behavior.
Hear, hear.
Yeah, I wrote that Dilthey is partially interested in “the degree to which human agency confounds our potential understanding.” And thank you for the economic perspective. Trying to establish a decision tree for a firm or an individual or what have you is that you have to operate under the assumptions that people (or corporations, et al.) have a well-ordered set of preferences and that they’ll work to maximize those preferences. No problem with that assumption, and deviations from those norms are instructive–perhaps revealing that the agent was irrational or that he or she actually preferred B to A rather than vice versa–a difference between actual preferences as opposed to stated preferences, maybe.
What I am interested in knowing is how well the models work. Has anybody done any longitudinal studies on rational choice theory’s predictive power? I imagine that if it were easy to plug in the variables for the models, it would be the go-to explanation for predicting human behavior. I confess ignorance on this point because I haven’t looked at how effective they are. Of course they’re thought to be effective, but I would like to know if anybody has put the models to the test, and not just for retrodiction but for actual prediction. Has this been done?
Best wishes,
BP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_formalist_vs_substantivist_debate#Course_of_the_debate
Billie,
Sorry for the delayed response. As you might expect, assuming that people and other agents behave as rational optimizers is much more successful at predicting behavior than in other areas.
For example, consider finance, an area of strength for the assumption. One basic implication of optimizing behavior is ‘no gains from arbitrage’ also known as ‘the law of one price’. That is, if there are a group of people who want to buy the same thing and there are no transaction costs, then the price of that thing should be the same everywhere, and it should not be possible to buy the good from one person and sell it for a profit to another. It is easy to see why the only way profitable arbitrage would be possible is if some people were buying goods for prices higher than they needed too — irrational behavior in almost any context.
In financial markets, this has very powerful consequences that almost always seem to hold. Suppose there are three financial assets, where the third asset pays off in precisely the same way as the combination of the first two assets. If people were completely irrational, and the market priced financial assets willy-nilly, then there is no reason for the price of these three things to have anything to do with each other. However, markets being made up of at least ‘enough’ rational people, you will almost universally see that third asset being priced identically to the sum of the first two assets (because the third asset -is- the combination of the first two assets, just with a different name). Because almost any financial asset in the economy can be conceived of as a combination of other assets, this makes powerful (and mostly correct) predictions about the relationships between different prices in financial markets.
There are two types of exceptions to this rule. First, there are several well known riddles in finance that are still open questions in the literature. One is the fact that people tend to invest more money domestically than models predict (i.e. they should hedge against the risk of a domestic recession by investing most of their money abroad). This may be for subtle rational reasons that basic models don’t capture or due to some kind of irrationality, and research is ongoing.
The second type of exception is stuff that is clearly irrational. For example, successful pyramid schemes clearly violate no-arbitrage (as well as other principles of rationality). You shouldn’t be able to go around selling an ‘investment’ with negative expected returns at a positive price. Clearly the people buying these are, at least on average, deluded in some way.
While it would be very difficult to say ‘in general’ how correct the assumption of some kind of rationality is, it is a very powerful assumption that can and does make correct predictions about the world.