THEORY AND METATHEORY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE—OR, WHY THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE IS SO HARD

METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 16, Nos. 2 & 3, April/July 1985 0026-1068 $2.00

THEORY AND METATHEORY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE - OR, WHY THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE IS SO HARD*

BRIAN FAY

I

Many philosophers of social science seem to believe that philosophy in and of itself can set social science straight. They think this can be done by their constructing a sound metatheory to guide the theorizing of social scientists. For them, an a priori metatheory, if an adequate one were to be articulated, would clearly and unequivocally provide the firm foundation on which to build a theoretically solvent account of human life.

Unfortunately, such a belief is deeply mistaken, exhibiting a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between metatheory and theory in pre- sent day social science. As a result it contains an inflated conception of the role philosophy can play in helping us to understand ourselves, a conception which has had the unwitting effect of hiding from philosophers the complexity and difficulty of the philosophy of social science.

But what then is the relation of theory and metatheory in the social sciences today?’ How does a proper understanding of this relationship help us to grasp the nature and role of the philosophy of social science? And how does all of this explain why this philosophical activity is so peculiarly hard? - these are the questions this paper tries to answer.

Today there are two fundamentally important facts which determine the relation between ongoing social science and metatheoretical reflection about it. The first fact is that in its history and current practice social science contains a number of different kinds of theory which embody distinctive, self-consciously adopted metatheories. The second fact is that contemporary metatheoretical dispute is manifestly metaphysical and political in character.

* I wish to thank Austin Clark, Barry Grunenberg, J. Donald Moon, and Meredith Williams for their help with this article.

Metatheorists ask a number of different questions: what is or ought to be the purpose of theory of a certain sort? What is or ought to be the logical structure of this sort of theory? What is the form its explanatory accounts take? What are or ought to be the criteria for their adequacy? What are the semantical relations of the words used in theories of this sort? In this paper I will use ‘metatheory’ to refer to any or all of these questions; however, the principle focus of the paper is on the form explanatory accounts take.

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Both of these facts lead to a radical kind of inconclusiveness in metatheorizing about social science. I wish to examine each fact in turn, and to show how this inconclusiveness arises.

The first fact is that social scientific theories have taken widely different forms partly because they have been constructed in order to self-consciously embody a particular metatheory. The upshot of this feature of theory in social science is that the mere existence of such theories cannot serve as conclusive evidence for what a good social scientific theory really is because they incor- porate within themselves just the metatheoretical positions which are in question. One cannot be justified in claiming that one account of social science is superior to another because it accords better with what social scientists actually do, when the social scientists are doing what they are doing because they are explicitly committed to this account of social science. Such a claim would obviously be question-begging.

Thus, for example, it is not evidence for the essential correctness of the phenomenological account of social science (the foundations of which are laid in Shutz’s Phenomenology of the Social World) to point to Alvin Cicourel’s m e Social Organization of Juvenile Justice or Jack Douglas’ Social Meanings of Suicide, because both of these important works were written with the phenomenological point of view in mind. And similarly, one who isn’t already convinced of a behaviorist philosophy of social science would not accept Skinner’s Verbal Behavior as evidence that social science is essentially a behaviorist undertaking, just because in writing the book Skinner was self-consciously following the methodological rules of theory construction found in his own behaviorist philosophy of science.

This feature of social science is by no means a new one. In fact, one of the recurrent themes throughout the history of social science is the aggressive metatheoretical self-consciousness on the part of many important social theorists. Thus, to start at the very beginning, Saint Simon laid out his theory of social science (most clearly in “Memoire sur la science de l’homme” (1813) before h s substantive theory of society (in L’Industrie, 1816)); and in this his secretary Comte followed him exactly. Or again, Marx’s theory of historical materialism must be viewed as embodying a new metatheory of social science - at least this is what he claimed in his Theses on Feuerbach.2 And it is clear that the theories of Durkheim, J.S. Mill, Weber, and Freud, as well as those of more contemporary theorists like Parsons, Radcliffe-Brown, Piaget, Levi-Strauss, Laing - the list is virtually

The issue here is quite complicated, not only because Marx is not metatheoretically as lucid as he might be, but also because different metatheoretical orientations can lead to radically different accounts of the nature of Marxian theory itself. Thus, from a basically structuralist perspective, see Louis Althusser, 1969 and contrast it with Gajo Petrovic, 1967, in which a Hegelianized metatheory produces a profoundly different reading of Marx’s theory. Indeed, some have argued that, contrary to his intentions, there is a fundamental incompatibility between Marx’s metatheoretical ambitions and his theoretical accomplishment; for this view, see Albrecht Wellmer, 1971, chap. 2.

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indefinite - were all deeply influenced by explicit metatheories about what form a really scientific theory of social and psychological life would assume. In the history of social science, pace Hegel, the owl of Minerva has been up well before dawn.

This, it seems to me, is no accident. For social science as an endeavor emerged either from a desire to give an account of human life which was in the relevant respects similar to the natural sciences, or from the fear of hu- manists who argued that such an extension of natural science was impossible and the attempt to do so profoundly evil because dehumanizing. This has meant that a great deal of the seminal work in social science has been under- taken with a commitment already made to a philosophy of social science whch saw it as either similar or dissimilar to natural science.

Moreover, social science has been and is self-consciously metatheoretical because of its lack of success relative to the natural sciences. There has been nothing in social science that even approaches the explanatory power of a theory like Newton’s or Darwin’s. True, there are a number of over-arching theories like Marx’s or Freud’s that attempt to provide the synoptic view offered by theories in the natural sciences, but it is a fact that, unlike those theories, neither Freudianism nor Marxism has produced over time a consensus among competent observes. (Indeed, the apparent weaknesses of these theories, combined with their adherents’ tenacity in holding on to them, have so struck some philosophers of science, such as Popper and Lakatos, that they have called these theories “pseudo-scientific.”) And I submit that what is true about these theories is also true about Functionalism, Operant Conditioning Learning Theory, Exchange Theory, and all other such large-scale attempts to offer a comprehensive explanation of wide areas of human life.

Whatever the reason for this situation, just because there is no command- ing theoretical paradigm in the social sciences, it is incumbent upon social scientists to examine the foundations of their enterprise in order to seek direction and guidance as to how they should proceed. Metatheorizing is always strongly in evidence when theory is thought to be floundering; and indeed it is today, as witnessed by the large number of social scientists examining their own disciplines on metatheoretical ground^,^ and by the common current practice of beginning theoretical endeavors with metatheoretical justifications or explanation^.^

The second major fact which bears on the state of metatheory and theory in social science today concerns the nature of social scientific metatheory itself. This is its deeply and explicitly metaphysical and political nature, a fact which has contributed to the radical disagreement among philosophers of social science.

See, for example, Alvin Gouldner, 1970; Dell Hyines (ed.) 1969; M. Hollis and

Such as Erving Goffman, 1959; Harold Garfinkel, 1967; Clifford Geertz, 1973. E. Nell, 1975.


Let’s start with this disagreement. Today, there is no general consensus about the nature of social scientific theory. Of course, there always will exist some disagreement about the correct understanding of any endeavor, but with respect to the social sciences the disagreements are widespread and are over the most basic questions about the structure of social theory. For example, if one takes three contemporary classic works in the philosophy of social science -- Peter Winch‘s The Idea of a Social Science, the relevant chapters from Ernest Nagel’s The Structure of Science, and Jurgen Habermas’ Know- ledge and Human Interests - one finds, amidst all the arguments and counter- arguments about specific issues, a very general disagreement about the very nature of social scientific t h e ~ r y . ~

Thus, according to Winch, social science is meant to provide us with an interpretive understanding of the sense of social actions and practices. For him, understanding social life is like understanding a foreign language: the task of social science is to reveal the intelligible structure of meaning behind apparently arbitrary utterings or movements; it is essentially a task of translation. The point of doing social science is that it provides for the possibility of dialogue between peoples where none existed before. This has come to be called the Interpretive Model of social science.

For Nagel, social science is essentially the same as natural science: it must uncover the basic, systematic causal interconnections between widely diver- gent events and structures. The test of a theory is not whether is helps us understand the meaning of an event, but whether we could have predicted its occurrence if we had been in possession of the theory, and whether we can successfully predict events like it in the future. Given the nomological character of scientific explanations, explanation is the obverse of prediction. The point of doing social science is that it provides for the possibility of technical control over wider areas of social life. T h s has come to be called the Naturalist Model of social science.

Habermas argues that social science must attempt to uncover the causes of those mechanisms of false-consciousness and self-deception which underline the basic contradictions and systemic crises of social or personality systems. According to him, a fundamental distinction must be drawn between the latent and manifest content of psychological states, social behavior and in- stitutions; it is the job of social theory to reveal the latent content, to show how it arose, how it is kept latent, and how its being latent causes fundamental problems in the lives of those in possession of it (or, more aptly, who it is in possession of). The point of social theory is to make this latent content manifest, and thereby to provide to people the means by which they can

The examples could be extended to include other general metatheoretical models, such as the structuralist (see Barry Hindess, 1977); the Realist (see R. Keat and J . Urry, 1975); the phenomenological (see Alfred Shutz, 1967); or the Behaviorist (see H. F. Skinner, 1953). However, though these would enrich my argument, they would not substantially alter it.

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emancipate themselves from their own self-defeating behavior. This has come to be called the Critical Model of social science.

These are stark characterizations; it certainly is possible to write about these competing models with their differences played down or even amelior- ated. Despite this, however, at bottom there exists a fundamental difference among them over the question of the job of social theory: is it to reveal structures of meaning? is it to provide causal laws? or is it t o uncover latent content which has socially disruptive power?

How does one go about assessing the answers to this question? An important fact in this matter is that each answer explicitly hinges on some very general beliefs about the world. Winch‘s metatheory clearly presupposes the belief that there are such things as meanings, and that meaningful phenomena can only be understood in terms of their semantic qualities. Nagel’s whole phlosophy rests on the belief that human actions are events which occur as the result of causally antecedent events. And Habermas’ metatheoretical approach is grounded in the presupposition that persons are capable of self- determination on the basis of rational reflection.

Such beliefs have a very distinctive character. For though they are clearly claims about what the world is like, they are very general and abstract ones, and they are remote from direct sensory experience. These are generally thought to be distinguishing features of metaphysical beliefs. If this is so, then the metatheoretical positions outlined above presuppose radically different metaphysical schemes. Actually, this ought not to be surprising, for what one is willing to accept as a good explanation will obviously be affected by the general beliefs one has about the nature of the world.

Thus, all metatheoretical positions are grounded in metaphysical beliefs; what is distinctive about the philosophy of social science today is that these metaphysical beliefs are themselves part of what is in dispute in arguments regarding the worth of a particular metatheory. The literature is filled with examples of this. To take one (to which I will return in Part 111): in discussing the possibility of a psychology constructed along the lines of the Naturalist Model, A.R. Louch claims that, even if a nomological account of human behavior were actually to be produced, this still wouldn’t show that his own essentially Interpretive Model was false. He writes;

The regularities of stimulus response connections in the laboratory cannot then be extrapolated as more accurate measurements of what must hold for the world at large. They are artificially produced, and represent what human and animal nature can be like under such artificial circumstances . . . Psychology’s successes are essentially successes in the mechanism of control, and not in the explanation of normal human action . . . successful methods for controlling particular kinds of behavior are confused with general laws explaining human behavior.6

A. R. Louch, 1966, p. 3 6 .


These remarks echo in a general way the more narrowly focused claim of Hannah Arendt who, in discussing what she saw as the deep passivity of contemporary mass consumer culture, wrote: “the trouble with behaviorism is not that it is false, but that it could come to be true.”’ What both philosophers are saying is that even the existence of a successful social science pat- terned on the Naturalist Model would not be conclusive evidence that the naturalist metatheory is correct, precisely because such a metatheory leaves out what is vital to understanding human beings as they really are, and instead assumes that what is true of them in a particular historical or social siluation is universally true of them. Such a response explicitly invokes a different metaphysical picture of man and society - one that emphasizes free will, rational reflection, the importance of values, and so forth.

Now I do not believe that the metaphysical character of social scientific metatheories means that rational arguments about them are impossible, that one metatheoretical position must be taken to be as good as any other, or that some sort of rationally grounded consensus is unattainable. However, even accepting that metaphysical argument can be a rational affair, I don’t think that one can deny that this sort of discussion and analysis takes place at level relatively removed from the sorts of empirical experience which might yield strong evidence as to the merits of a position, and at such an abstract level that a number of different kinds of theory compatible with a given metaphysical position might be developed which display the scope and explanatory power we require of a theory of man and society. The relation between evidence and theory is never a simple one, but in metaphysical arguments it is all the more tenuous, indirect, and circumspect. The upshot of this is that it is likely that rational persons with the best will in the world will disagree about these fundamental questions.

Thus, just because metatheoretical arguments in the social sciences explicitly invoke the different metaphysical claims they presuppose, it is going to be the case that, even though rational, such arguments will be more tenuous than one might like. A relative inconclusiveness is likely to be the order of the day.

Moreover, there is another factor besides their metaphysical character which makes metatheoretical disputes about the social sciences explosive; this is their political dimension. That this is an important factor in such disputes can easily be seen in the case of someone like Skinner; indeed, one of the reasons we have to be grateful to him (or Marx, or Comte, or Laing for that matter) is for his clear perception of the connection between social scientific metatheories and political ideologies in general, and behaviorism and social engineering in particular. Another example which highlights this feature is the Adorno-Popper dispute which touched off the decade-long methodenstreit which was a dominant feature of German intellectual life of the sixties. Throughout this debate over the nature of social science the participants kept the political dimension of the argument quite explicit - indeed, perhaps

13. Arendt, 1958, p. 322

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too much so, as metatheoretical positions were often defended or attacked solely for their implicit political implications. As Popper himself in retro- spect summarized:

The main issue of the book has been Adorno’s and Habermas’ accusa- tion that a “positivist” like Popper is bound by his methodology to defend the political status quo.8

That there are political dimensions to metatheoretical debates in the social sciences seems an indisputable fact; however, it is still the received opinion that such a dimension ought to be eliminated from these debates if they are to be conducted on rational lines. This received opinion seems to me to be a deep mistake, however.’ For each of the metatheories I have outlined contains a vision of how the knowledge gained from social science can be useful to us, and this vision feeds into a much larger picture of the nature of political life. Moreover, this vision is directly related to each model’s characterization of the appropriate form of explanatory accounts in social science, and so there is a conceptual connection between each metatheoretical model and a view of politics. Thus, it is part of the naturalist metatheory that predication (and thus possible technical control) is the obverse of causal explanation, and hence it is no accident that its account of the usefulness of scientific theory is one of social engineering. Or again, the notion of translation in the portrayal of explanatory accounts of social life found in the Interpretive Model is directly related to the possibility of increased communication, and so it is one which stresses understanding and alien ways of others (and even ourselves!), resolving conflict through opening paths of communication, and so forth. An lastly, the critical metatheoretic approach explicitly rests on the idea of leading the oppressed, through a process of self-reflection, to become conscious of their needs and motives and to learn thereby how to alter those structures of social life which are frustrating them. This is a view of theory and practice which sees knowledge as a force capable of liberating people from the self-destructive patterns of thought and action in which they unwitt- ingly engage; such a view consequently contains a revolutionary message.

If this analysis is correct, then there is every reason to expect that arguments among metatheoreticians of social science will continue to invoke political considerations either explicitly or just below their surface. Arguments in the philosophy of social science have, for better or worse, inherent moral and political implications; such arguments will continue to be all that more complex and intense as a result.

Thus, there are good reasons why metatheoretical disputes about the

* Karl Popper, “Reason or Revolution” in Theodor Adorno, et. al., 1976, p. 291. This book contains most of the important articles which comprised this debate.

I tried to show this in detail in my Social Theory and Political Practice, 1975.


social sciences are so explosive and intractible: they involve different answers to the most basic question of the subject, namely, what is the nature of social science; they involve at their center metaphysical principles of a very h g h order of abstraction; and they raise ideological considerations of very great intensity. Moreover, social science is itself comprised of a variety of different sorts of theory, all of which embody a different metatheory more or less self- consciously; thls means that metatheoreticians cannot simply look at what social scientists do in order to defend their analyses, for such a procedure would beg the very question at issue. Furthermore, though the existence of a quite successful (according to some standard of success) theory of human behavior would not by itself rationally compel someone to opt for the metatheory it embodied, nevertheless the lack of any such compelling theory adds to the difficulty of metatheoretical reflection by making it more open-ended and unfocused.

To make these points in a less abstract way I now wish to examine a particular case, namely, the explanation of schizophrenia.

111

One of the most interesting and acute metatheoretical analyses in recent years is to be found in Part I1 of Aron Esterson’s The Leaves 0fSpring.I’ In Part I of the book, Esterson (a co-worker of R.D. Laing, and co-author with him of the now classic Sanity, Madness and the Family) portrays in great detail the life of Sarah Danzig, a girl diagnosed as a schizophrenic and committed for treatment. Using the framework of Double-Bind Theory, Esterson describes Sarah’s family situation, demonstrating how her odd behavior can be seen as a meaningful response (though an inadequate one) to this family situation.

In Part 11, Esterson develops his account of the principles of explanation which he claims must characterize an adequate science of man. He calls his metatheory “dialectical science” (in the terminology of this paper, dialectical science is a form of the Critical Model), and he contrasts it to the “analytical science” he thinks appropriate for the study of natural events and objects. Broadly, dialectical science is the “study of the reciprocities of persons and groups in contrast to the study of natural events” (213-4). Persons are beings which exist in relation to their environment in a particular way, namely, “they experience themselves relating, they experience the possibility of relating, and they experience the possibility of knowing the form and style of the relations they make” (214); furthermore, “in being aware of oneself as relating to an event . . . one experiences and constitutes oneself separate from the event” (214). Indeed, the nature of one’s personal relations is so crucial that “one’s identity is established in and through the way one relates to the persons and non-persons comprising one’s world” (2 15).

l o Aron Esterson, 1972. All quotations are from this edition.

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These (metaphysical) facts about personhood have fundamental implications for the sciences of man:

Since persons are always in relation, one cannot study persons without studying the relations they make with others and with non-personal entities, particularly the others and entities of their usual social context. (217)

Esterson argues that this sort of study requires that the theorist be directly involved with the persons he is trying to understand - indeed, that he become so interpersonally related that he himself is “open to being affected in his way of experiencing and being with the other” (217). His argument for this is that:

The setting in which an observer can best study a person’s mode of relating is an interpersonal relationship, one in which he is reciprocally open to being affected in his way of experiencing and being with the other. For only if he is personally open, i.e. open in his way of being a person, will he be able to experience reflectively how the other defines himself, others and the relations between. (217)

T h s requires a form of “dialectical rationality,” and it is for this reason that a science of persons must be dialectical:

To understand a person, the observer must relate to him fully reciprocally, while simultaneously observing their joint relationshp . . . since the field he studies is comprised of himself and the other(s) by himself and the other(s), he must be able to reflect upon, and reason about, a reciprocity that includes himself as one of the reciprocating terms. He must study from a position within the situation he is reasoning about. This requires a rationality that is dialectical in form. (218)

Upon this foundation Esterson proceeds to develop an extensive and care- ful account of the methodology through which this understanding can take place; to lay out criteria on the basis of which the truth value of a dialectical theory can be tested; to analyze the role which impersonal observation and generalization have in such a science; to elaborate on the relation between dialectical theory and therapeutic practice; and to outline further a meta- physics of consciousness which underlies this whole viewpoint.

Thus, according to ‘dialectical science’ the study of schizophrenia must assume a distinctly humanist form: it must treat schizophrenic behavior as an expression of the perceptions and intentions of those who engage in it; it must try to grasp the meaning of these expressions, and consequently must try to understand the world as the schizophrenic sees it; it must thus take seriously the content of the schizophrenic’s experience and behavior; it must study in great detail the structure of the schizophrenic’s social rela-


tions; it must actually engage the schizophrenic in dialogue; and its therapy must center on the attempt to persuade the schizophrenic to see himself and his situation differently, and to act differently as a result. In no way must the psychologist see the schizophrenic as a merely natural object whch has had something happen to it as the result of the movements of other natural objects; schizophrenia is not a disease, and it must not be studied or explained or treated in the same way as heart attacks, insulin shocks, or epileptic seizures.

Not surprisingly, Esterson’s particular theory of schizophrenia embodies the general remarks on personhood and the metatheoretical model of science he proposes with these general remarks in mind. As I have said, according to Esterson the nature of a person’s relations, and particularly the way he comes to view himself in light of these relations - a process of learning largely accomplished in the family ~ will determine what sort of person he is. Now a crucially important point is that a person may be treated as if he were a non- person, either in particular instances or in a systematic way; in the latter case, the person is regarded as a being incapable of personal relations at all - he is “invalidated”. Of course, such invalidation is a self-contradictory state of affairs, “since to disconfirm him like this he must be related to implicitly as a person” (217). Now according to Esterson, it is precisely the systematic invalidation of a person, and the gradual building into ongoing social practices of the contradiction involved in this invalidation, that is characteristic of the families of schizophrenics. Indeed, schizophrenic behavior must be understood as the way an invalidated person tries to respond to the implicit contradiction of his or her social life. It is this contradiction which puts the invalidated into a “double bind” situation, and his or her schizophrenic behavior is precisely a response to this two pronged situation.

In Esterson’s book one has all the elements that are involved in proposing and defending a particular metatheory of social science: certain metaphysical beliefs about the nature of persons and their behavior; certain political views about the way persons ought to be related to and treated; a model of explanation; and an empirical theory of great subtlety and power embodying all these elements. Moreover, these elements fit together to form an extremely cogent and compelling account of how we are to explain persons rather than things. Nevertheless, there are a number of reasons why one might reasonably remain unconvinced by Esterson’s approach. By examining these reasons, one can appreciate in a more vivid way the points I made in Part 111, and thus see why philosophical argument intended to inform us what social science must “really” be like is so hard and ultimately so inconclusive.

In the first place, that a family of theories exists among practicing psycho- logists which assume an essentially dialectical form does not of itself demonstrate that the Critical Model of social science is correct. The reason for this is that such theories have often been constructed in the way they have precisely because of a prior commitment to a critical metatheoretic approach. This is just the case with Esterson, who explicitly bases his theory

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on the conceptions of psychology propounded by Sartre. In this case inter- preting the relationship of theory to metatheory as one of evidence to hypothesis is a question-begging move.

And this is all the easier to do when the theory itself is subject to as much criticism as Esterson’s is: too much of its supporting data are from clinical observation in which control groups are lacking; it doesn’t provide a convincing way to disentangle the contributions of heredity and physical environment from those of the family situation (in fact, the most common criticism of L i n g and Esterson’s work is the claim that the odd behavior in the families of schizophrenics is a response on the part of the family to a person with a cognitive/perceptual disorder which is organically caused); there are some important data which the theory of Double-Bind cannot at least prima facie explain (for example, the high incidence of schzophrenia among twins raised in quite different environments”); and so forth. Moreover, there exist a number of competing theories for which there is strong if not overwhelming supporting evidence, and whch assume a radically different logical form from that of Esterson’s (for example, the whole group of genetic-neural theories,12 as well as those which are essentially beha~iorist’~).

Another line of attack brings out the fact that there are important metaphysical dimensions to t h s view of science, and shows how metaphyscial arguments figure in the philosophy of social science. The basic assertions of Esterson are that schizophrenics are persons and that all human behavior which has content (such as schizophrenic behavior) is an expression of the intentions of the person engaging in it; schizophrenia is a form of “praxis”. But neither of these assertions is obviously true. In the first place, are there really such creatures called persons? Of course, to deny that there are is to go against the deepest assumptions of the framework we employ in everyday life, but then this framework has been violated before with an apparently significant increase in truth value. Thus, to suggest t o many primitive tribes that natural phenomena aren’t a kind of praxis would sound perfectly crazy to them, but in fact this is just what Esterson claims. However, his under- mining of the everyday framework stops with human beings, and his ontology is aggressively dualist: for him there are things and there are persons. But why should this be so? Even Esterson would admit that humans are at least in part things; perhaps they seem only partially and not completely so because of our ignorance as to how to explain in a thing-like way the behavior of these creatures - an ignorance that would be made permanent if we adopted Esterson’s metatheory. In any case, it is just in this context that arguments in the philosophy of mind are relevant: to make his case, Esterson must meet

l 1 See James Shields, “Summary of the Genetic Evidence” in Rosenthal and Kety (eds.), 1968, pp. 95-129.

I* See Paul Meehl, “Schizotaxia, Schizotypy, Schizophrenia” in A. & E. Buss (eds.), 1969.

l 3 See Mednick, “A Learning Theory Approach to Research in Schizophrenia” in Buss and Buss, op. cit.


the sorts of powerful analysis to be found among the Eliminative Materialists and Behaviorists, for these thinkers are united in thinking that there are no such things as persons as Esterson conceives them. (Of course, one should not think these ultimately metaphysical arguments are indubitable either!)

Moreover, Esterson’s second basic assertion - that the behavior of persons w l c h has content is a form of praxis - is even less convincing. For it’s not at all clear that the class of ostensibly meaningful behavior is the class of “praxis phenomena”. Thus, the movements of an epileptic during a seizure were at one time in human history thought to be a form of praxis, and were explained in this way. But today we have quite good evidence to show that despite appearance, epileptic seizures are not intentional phenomena and that they can be explained in a quite mechanical way (by the level of enkephalins in the blood, for example). Or again - more controversially - it has seemed from time immemorial that dreams have a meaning and that to explain them one has to uncover this meaning and understand what the dreamer is trying to say; this assumption was raised to the level of science by Freud. However, recent work in the theory of dreaming questions this very assumption, accounting for dreams in an essentially biological way.14 The point here, of course, is not that epilepsy, dreams, or schizophrenia must be explained by an “analytic science” such as neurophysiology; it is, rather, that it is irrational to rule out on a pn‘ori grounds the belief that one or all of these is something that just happens to a person, the result, say, of a purely physio- logical change in his body chemistry. There are far too many instances in human history in which apparently intentional phenomena have been explained without reference to intentions - from the rising of the sun to the origins of species to the dances of bees to the seizures of epileptics - for anyone to feel comfortable with any sort of philosophical dogmatism about the matter.

But - to turn the tables on Esterson’s opponents for a moment -- one should not think that the existence of an analytic type theory explaining schizophrenic behavior analogous to the theory of enkephalins for epilepsy would show once and for all that schizophrenia is not a form of praxis and need not be studied dialectically. For such an assertion would also rest on metaphysical assumptions which are open to serious question. To see that this is so, let us examine what Esterson might reply to a hard-nosed biologist who actually produced a theory in which he was able to show the linkages between certain neuro-chemical changes (say, the amount of dopamine in the nervous system, as is being touted recently as the “key” to schiz~phrenia’~) and certain malfunctions of the brain.

To such a situation Esterson might well reply that treating schizophrenia as an organic condition related to the level of dopamine in the nervous system would be analogous to explaining the stereotypic behavior of caged animals solely in terms of the chemistry of their endocrine system and its effect on

l4 See A. J. Hobson and Robert McCarley, 1977. l 5 See 1.. Stein and C. D. Wise, 1971 and 1974.

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neurological functioning. What is wrong in both cases is that the explanation fails to point out that it is a certain social situation apprehended as such by the organisms involved that is the cause of the changes in body chemistry in the first place. Moreover, this failure must occur given the metatheoretical commitments of an analytic science, just because introducing the family situation of the schizophrenics or the zoo environment for the caged animals as causal factors requires that one talk of the organisms’ perceptions of their situation, their beliefs about it, their desires with respect to it - in short, the meaning of the situation for those involved. But reference to these requires an intentionalist vocabulary, the very thing an analytic science eschews.

Of course, this response would represent something of a retreat from the aggressively humanist approach that Esterson takes in The Leaves of Spring, because he would now be allowing an important role for a purely physio- logical theory in his overall account of schizophrenia. Nevertheless, he could still rightly claim that the basic thrust of his account was humanist, and that his approach would be no more invalidated than would a humanist-type theory of voting behavior which included in it an account of the muscle systems through which voting levers were pulled.

Furthermore, Esterson might take up an argument which resembles that of Louch and Arendt I mentioned earlier; in so doing, he would be making an essentially political point against the understanding of schizophrenia along analytic lines. For he might claim16 that such an approach is really based on concealed ideological grounds, namely, that the contemporary con- ventional world of the sane is the rational or healthy one. This view is implicit in the analytic-type hypothesis that the neural chemistry of schizophrenics is deviant, for such a judgment presupposes that the chemistry of the rest of the population is “healthy” or “properly functioning”. Moreover, the analytic approach clearly assumes that, as mere natural organisms, persons are not capable of what Kant calls “autonomy”, and that in order to change their behavior some sort of (presumably biochemical) manipulation is required. In both these cases, what is presumed to be the norm is the current political world in which we live in which some are in power, define what is permitted, and manipulate others through a variety of non-rational means to insure that they act in this manner. This is the world of the zookeeper and his animals, and to theorize about this world as if it represented the true situation of the human condition, as if the parameters set by it were universal or necessary, and as if the form of knowledge appropriate to understanding such a world were the form relevant to understanding human life, is already to have accepted a certain political position as both a given and an ideal. And this, Esterson might claim, is a deeply suspect position, to be criticized on political as well as on methodological grounds.

So where does all this leave one with respect to Esterson’s call for a dia- l6 Esterson does make arguments similar to the one I make in this paragraph; see

op. cit., p. 264-6. In so doing he seems to be echoing the criticism his co-worker R. D. Laing made in his 1967.


lectical approach in social science? It seems to me that the situation is a fluid and ambiguous one, that is, we are neither in a position to simply reject nor to embrace his call. And we are not just because of the position which metatheory has today vis-a-vis social scientific theory: given the absence of strongly compelling theories (no matter what the criteria of compellingness), the existence of theories constructed so as to already embody a particular metatheory, the presence of a number of competing metatheoretical frameworks, and the crucial role metaphysical and political argument play in the construction and defense of a metatheory, metatheoretical argument is bound to be wide- ranging, complex, and ultimately inconclusive.

IV

Given that I have accurately characterized the relation between metatheory and theory in the social sciences, what lessons can be drawn regarding the philosophy of social science? I think at least the following two major conclusions.

In the first place, no metatheoretical arguments can be finally settled simply by analyzing the logic of the concepts employed in social scientific inquiry. The reason why this is so is the fact that what is and what isn’t genuinely “social scientific” is itself the question at issue, as well as the fact that particular social scientific works take the form they do because of a prior commitment to a certain metatheory. Moreover, once one recognizes these facts one is inevitably struck by the further fact that questions about what a genuine account of human life would look like are enmeshed in metaphysical and further metatheoretical argument - just the sorts of thing of which conceptual analysis was supposed to relieve us.

Thus, take perhaps the most classic example, the concept of “action”. Even if it were the case that the “logic” of this concept, because it requires explaining the events it designates in terms of psychological states and social conventions, is such that a science using it must employ a “scheme of concepts fundamentally different from that found in the natural sciences” (to use Winch’s words), it still would not follow that social science is fundamentally different from natural science and that the Naturalist Model is wrong. Such a conclusion would follow only if there are such events as actions, and there may not be - as the behaviorists and eliminative materialists have been quick to argue. Moreover, it is not a simple empirical or conceptual matter to decide this question. For the most obvious way to settle the issue is to see if either of the two competing perspectives is able to generate a successful theory explaining the range of events referred to by those who use the term “action”. However, the criterion of empirical success cannot of itself be decisive, for it is always possible for one to argue that, because one perspective hasn’t yet provided an adequate theory, it doesn’t follow that it never will or that it can’t. Moreover, and more importantly, it is also the case that what

164 BRIAN FAY

constitutes a success is partially determined by the nature of the questions we ask and by our level of expectations, and these are themselves partly a function of our metaphysical commitments, i.e., a function of just the issue at hand.

The result is that the analysis of concepts found in social science, far from settling the question of the worth of the various models of social science, inexorable forces us into a tangle of argument involving metaphysical questions about the nature of man and metatheoretical assessments of the coherence and success of social scientific theories. And this means that the long-standing assumption (and dream) of the philosophy of social science as found in the analytic tradition - that the analysis of concepts is the way to settle the questions of what understanding human life really involves - must be aban- doned.”

The second major lesson to be drawn from my account of the relationship between theory and metatheory in social science is that the phlosophy of social science must be an essentially revisionary enterprise. In a situation in which there is widespread dissatisfaction with the state of social science, both in terms of the quality of its theories and in terms of the soundness of its metatheoretical foundations, the metatheorist cannot be content to articulate the structure of rules, beliefs, and values which comprise the enterprise he is trying to understand, Le., he cannot do the kind of “descriptive philosophy” one finds in mainstream phlosophy of natural science. He cannot be content with this for the simple reason that there is no relatively self-consistent structure whose underlying principles he can uncover and elucidate; instead, there is a welter of conflicting and incommensurable presuppositions embedded in a whole variety of works which comprise “social science” (think of the differences to be found in theories inspired by behaviorism, ethnomethodology, socio-biology, artificial intelligence theory, Marxism, ethology, and Chomskian linguistics!). Moreover, he cannot be content with mere descriptions of what social scientists do because what we need to know today is what we ought to do; philosophy must try to give direction and guidance, not just self-conscious reflection. The purpose of the philosophy of social science is not simply to understand the social sciences; rather, it is to change them.

But, one will be quick to retort, this revolutionary aim of philosophical inquiry does not sit well with the inconclusiveness and complexity which I have claimed are inherent in metatheorizing about the social sciences today. Ths , it seems to me, is quite true. What is required is both an attitude of aggressive willingness to propose new models as guides for social inquiry, and an attitude of humble willingness to allow that others may well be right and that one’s own radical program is wrong. These requirements pull in opposite directions. My only response is that, as Popper has so brilliantly shown, this is in part precisely what the rational attitude is, and it is thus one that philosophers must sustain. But it is the sustaining of this disjunctive

l’ An exception to this long-standing assumption within the analytic tradition is to be found in Charles Taylor’s 1965, sections 2.4 and 5.1. In fact, much of my first conclusion follows Taylor’s line on this.


attitude which is the most important reason why the philosophy of social science is so hard.

Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 0645 7 USA

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