Ideas, Causes, and IR Theory debates

I recently read a post on an excellent IR blog which looked at the validity of drawing an ontological distinction between the material and the ideational. I think it is a very interesting discussion, with broader implications for social scientists – it’s entirely unrelated to the particular scope of international politics – and so I am going to weigh in here.

Specifically, this post centred on the statement by one of IR’s most famous ‘scientific realists’ that

in the end there can only be two possibilities [for types of explanation], materialist and idealist, because there are only two kinds of stuff in the world, material and ideational

- Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics 1999, p. 136

, and the criticism directed against it by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (PTJ), another theorist on philosophy of science in IR. PTJ’s criticisms, which aim to attack Wendt’s particular school of thinking on its own physicalist grounds,  are divisible into two claims:

1. Ideas are material, because reducible  to particular configurations of a cognitive system realised in a physical substrate (ie ideas are brain-states);
2. Because ideas are either caused by neurophysiological states or are actually non-existent, they cannot feature in explanations of cause and effect;

The post’s author rejects both these claims, tentatively, on the grounds that

many physicalists in philosophy of mind argue that mind is not reducible to material objects, but rather shares an identity with certain material processes. Furthermore, even if ideas and beliefs really are just pre-scientific labels we use to refer to particular classes of physical processes, these processes remain as plausible candidates as any others to provide explanations for social phenomena. Commitment to physicalism in the philosophy of mind doesn’t necessarily tell us much anything about what sort of processes are causally efficacious in the social world.

This response is not grounds for rejecting the first of PTJ’s claims , but it is indeed grounds for rejecting the second. PTJ’s first claim is most charitably understood as an argument for token physicalism; basically, according to it, any explanation referring to a particular idea held by a particular person at a particular time is reducible to an explanation involving a brain-state. However, this is not the same as type physicalism, which holds that ideas of a certain type categorically reduce to a certain brain-state. Many token physicalists are not type physicalists, because they believe that multiple brain-states could lead to functionally identical mental-states. To quote wikipedia:

Token identity physicalism argues that mental events are unlikely to have “steady” or categorical biological correlates. These positions make use of the philosophical Type–token distinction (e.g. having the same type of car need not mean that you and your friend share a token, a single vehicle). Type physicalism can now be understood to argue that there is identicalness between types, whereas token identity physicalism says we are only describing a particular, unique, brain event.

Token identity phsyicalism would, as the post’s author claims, mean that we still can use explanations involving ideas or mental states because while we know that our terms are identical to physical processes, we can’t know which processes beyond a set with possibly infinite members. Token physicalism does allow us to view ideas as material, because their physical realisation is in the configuration or sequence of configurations of a material substrate – ie any token idea is causally or ontologically reducible to activity in the brain. However, as token physicalism, unlike type physicalism, does not entail categorical reduction (in the opinion of most philosophers of mind, to my knowledge) we can continue to explain things using ideas, beliefs, mental kinds, etc because we can often go no further than to identify the type of mental state which is causally salient – eg if we’re speaking in categorical terms or if we have insufficient data.

Or, as the post’s author later claims (in a comment):

This means that knowledge regarding mental states provides us with reliable knowledge about the physical states and processes at work within a set of physical systems. Those physical systems (which correspond to the epiphenomena we know as ‘beliefs’, ‘desires’, intentions’) may well be causally efficacious.

Hence while we should not strictly separate between the ideational and the material, we still have good reason to continue to explain things in terms of ideas. Furthermore, while it is possible that eventually social science will be reducible to neuroscience -ie if we believe in type reduction – it is also possible that mental kinds are not simply placeholders for token neurological states but for entire sets of neurological states whose membership can never be fully defined.

Putting ‘qualitative versus quantitative’ in its rightful place

The distinction between ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ data/methods irritates me. It is often presumed that the latter is indicative of – at least in principle – greater scientific or analytical rigour, which is not necessarily wrong in some cases, but is only pertinent to one particular methodology of (social) science, where others can be rigorous as well despite no quantification taking place.

I will now half-assedly defend this position.

By rigour, I mean the extent to which an analysis is coherent, complete, and precise. The highest level of rigour would be that of a deductively valid proof – i.e. formal, incl. mathematical.

1. The Speciousness of Qual vs Quant

Pragmatically speaking, ‘qual’ and ‘quant’ do generally help us differentiate between analyses or data that are represented or studied according to substantially different degrees of formalisation. But a problem arises when we start to think that this distinction is coherent at a deeper philosophical level. It isn’t. There isn’t actually a difference, at least not essentially, between these two supposedly different types of measurements or analyses. Qualitative data speaks to the qualities of some phenomena or property, and qualitative analysis is the study or explication of those qualities. But quantitative data is the same thing, only expressed mathematically. There’s no deep methodological difference between saying something is ‘big’ or ‘small’ or whathaveyou and describing it according to some unit of measurement because units of measurement are themselves simply conventions against which other things can be compared; to employ them is simply to make use of a more refined set of qualitative indicators.

I see fit to mention this because the presence or absence of maths should not be the criterion of demarcation between different types of data or analysis. Sometimes ‘quantify that!’ is a reasonable request for more rigour, but often it isn’t. In many cases the reason why a scholar has not quantified their data and analyses is not because they are maths-phobic or because their observations and concepts are too ill-defined to be amenable to quantification, but rather because they are employing a (social) scientific methodology in which it is not useful or possible to translate their information into a mathematical language; the questions they seek to answer and the ontological/epistemological/metaphysical wagers upon which  their methodology rests limit the usefulness of mathematical formalisation.

This brings me to my next point.

2. The Neopositivist Chauvinism of Qual and Quant

Within one quite popular methodology of science, there is excellent reason to view quantitative analyses as, generally speaking, holding the possibility of more rigour. This is the methodology that has given us the power to predict and alter the natural world in startling and amazing ways: Positivism (and its descendents). Within the Positivist tradition, scientific explanation typically consists of law-like statements which take the following form:

If X, then Y follows.

For example, in my field one candidate law might be ‘if two countries are democratic, they will not go to war against one another’. In another field, it might be something like ‘the introduction of chemical X at time T1 will lead to a reaction R at time T2′.

These laws are tested by hypothetico-deduction, usually: the consequences that would obtain if the law were true are predicted in the form of a hypothesis, then tested by way of observation and experimentation. Sometimes the law itself is not discussed; a scientist may feel that it suffices to show that R did indeed occur, and allow the scientific community to infer what it will from this result. But explanation and causality within this methodology nevertheless reduces to laws of nature.*

This methodology pressures one into using increasingly larger samples, increasingly precise measurement (in order to test how much an increase in X leads to an increase in Y), and increasingly complex methods of analysis to test whether, across a wide range of cases, Y indeed does follow X when all other factors are controlled. Since the type of reasoning is inductive, an increase in the number of cases in which the temporal (read: causal) relationship between X and Y holds will lead to an increase of confidence in the truth of the law. It is easy to see how this will lead to the scientist wanting to use statistical techniques and formal analyses to determine with maximum confidence that it is not some intervening third factor or ‘fluke’ that is responsible for the apparent ‘X then Y’ relation (ie significance tests), and therefore that greater rigour is made possible through ‘quantification’, whereby the qualities of the data are made amenable to mathematical analysis.

In the social sciences, for various reasons of terminological clarity, this methodology has been well-referred to as ‘Neopositivism’.

However, Neopositivism – that is, social science enquiry via the Positivist tradition – is not very good for answering a whole host of interesting and important empirical questions, nor is it without strong competition in enabling a coherent conception of causality in complex systems.

When we study social behaviour, we are often interested not so much in finding predictive laws – ‘if we see X, we know Johnny will do Y’ – but rather to specify the motives that led someone to act as they did – ‘because of his perception X, Johnny feel it appropriate to do Y’. This is the core of explanation in ‘interpretive social science’: the scientist explains social outcomes by clarifying and explicating the Reasons why an actor took a certain action or set of actions. While it might be possible to test competing explanations across cases via Neopositivist methods, it is the near-consensus of Interpretivist social scientists that a far better, more rigorous method involves ‘thick description’ or other ways of developing a rich and nuanced picture of the cultural conventions and personal narratives that serve as the context that make action meaningful; that make action something other than a reflexive twitch.

Meanwhile, when we study complex systems, we often find that prediction is impossible, and we’re thus moved to seek an account of causality that doesn’t require us to reduce phenomena to laws of nature. Social scientists, as students of complex systems, often make use of single-case analyses in which one particular configuration of factors, entities, or processes is examined for how it caused a given outcome. Causation cannot be reduced to any particular factor or set of actors; rather, all factors ‘came together’ exactly in such a way as to produce the effect. This kind of analysis enables the scientist to determine what is possible and how that possibility can be realised. The social scientist may attempt to specify certain ‘causal mechanisms’ that constitute cross-case regularities of causation, but these mechanisms are not laws; rather than are types of patterns or processes that connect cause and effect via their instantiation, independent of the observable phenomena they produce. In this methodology, quantification and mathematical analysis is less useful than methods such as ‘process tracing’, because apparent regularities in conjuctions/correlations of initial conditions and outcomes indicate nothing about the causal sequences that lead to those outcomes.*

The Punchline

As I have tried to show, there are other methodologies for engaging in social enquiry that can and are conducted rigorously and which do provide interesting scientific conclusions. They are not well-aided by quantification and yet they still feature explanations that are formally coherent, deductively valid, and meticulously grounded in empirical analyses.

*This highly simplistic summary  should not be considered adequate by anyone.

Culture and ‘science’

A couple people have requested of me that I make a blog post about this topic. I am not sure I am going to contribute anything novel to the discussion, but I’ll try to at least bring in some of the literature and philosophy of science that I think is relevant and which many people ignore or don’t know. I am probably not going to link every name or concept, though I’ll try to link to more info on some of the less clear references. One could also skip to the end if they were in a huge hurry, but I don’t recommend it…

The ‘topic’ is whether science is a culturally contingent construct; whether it is reasonable to talk about ‘science’ as something ‘Western’, and no more warranted than ‘other ways of knowing’, perhaps from the ‘East’ or wherever.

The prompt for discussing this topic is an essay by Natalie Reed, whom I hold in general esteem for a great many reasons, but who has to a large degree missed something important with this particular contribution.

The premise of her essay is that it is wrong for people to dismiss science as no more reliable or epistemologically sound than other ways of enquiring, other ways of interrogating nature for its secrets, other ways of investigating reality. The people who dismiss science in this way typically come from positions of political and social subordination, and they view ‘science’ as a kind of hegemonic and oppressive construct that serves to delegitimate the philosophies of other cultures. Yet, according to Natalie, this is both foolish and clueless:

The differences between the “West” and other cultures aren’t so fundamental as to speak to how we think, how we feel, how we know, how we process knowledge….Even if it were true that science as we understand it is simply a “Western” construct being inexactly applied to a more universal kind of thought, does that say anything about science being wrong? Dangerous? Harmful? Does it’s relative “Westerness” have anything whatsoever to do with the applicability of science, or it’s beneficial nature relative to human bias?

Let me first praise Natalie for some things that I think she has done better than I probably could. She has, with empathy, sympathy, and authenticity, captured why it is that so many people are inclined to view ‘science’ and the accompanying narrative of progress as coercive. She also hammers on what one friend of mine has called ‘noble savage worship’:

To say that science is “Western” is intensely condescending, dismissive and Euro-centric. It takes the same old colonial narrative of the “advanced”, civilized peoples of Europe, and the savage mystical primitives of Everywhere-Else, and repackages it in such a way as to be enjoyed within the halls of contemporary academia without any post-imperial guilt.

Bravo! I am genuinely refreshed and delighted to see this sentiment expressed by someone who is otherwise enormously sensitive to the position of marginalised people in our society. I am filled with respect for Natalie’s condemnation of this sort of hypocrisy, and also for her steadfast belief that principles of scepticism, self-criticism, and methodological rigour will do more for the cause of the oppressed than mysticism ever will.

Except now there are some philosophical problems I want to discuss. The above paragraph hints at how Natalie understands science, and she makes this understanding more clear later in her essay (and pardon the long quote):

Science is by definition non-cultural. It is not a part of a struggle between different cultural worldviews. In so far as a cultural worldview falls into a scientist’s interpretation of her data, she’s screwing up. She’s making the kind of human error science is structured to minimize as much as possible.

Science is not a “way of knowing”. It is a process. A process designed to minimize all of the different little biases, cognitive distortions, logical fallacies and errors of perception that define a cultural perspective, or subjective vantage point, or “way of knowing”. It’s streamlining a bunch of different principles that have been practiced by all human beings in all cultures for millenia to help us tell what’s really going on from what simply seems to be going on, to tell what is probably true from what we want to be true, to tell the important variables from the coincidences, to tell the actual causal relationships from things that just happen to come after other things.

And it wants to be wrong. It wants to make sure it can be shown to be wrong. It questions itself, it’s open to criticism, it values self-questioning, skepticism… the things I fear our progressive movements don’t value nearly enough. It’s wrong over and over and over again, and it KNOWS it will be wrong again. It acknowledges its margin of error.

Let me deconstruct this a bit.

Oh wait, before I do, let me just point out that Natalie reifies ‘science’ in a way that seems problematic here. I caution against ascribing any desires or values to Science. ‘Science’ is not a mind, and it has no will. As Natalie herself points out, it is something involving processes. Those processes are employed and acted out by people – scientists – and we should avoid discussing science in a way that may lead us to forget that science is something that scientists do, whether or not we believe that there is a single, universal method that all scientists should follow. And despite her protests to the contrary, science as Natalie conceives of it is precisely a way of knowing. It is very evident that Natalie believes science to be a process of generating knowledge about an ‘objective’ reality, and that process involves ways of minimising such things as ‘observer bias’ or ‘inaccuracy’.

There are certain assumptions to Natalie’s position. Let  me spell out the ones I think are salient:

1. We live in an ‘objective reality’ independent of our experience of it; there would be things like mountains and trees whether or not we were around to believe in them;
2. We can observe that ‘mind-independent’ reality;
3. Our observations are warped and flawed due to our cognitive biases, but those biases can be minimised to produce knowledge of reality that is more accurate or approximately true;
4. There is a sort of common-sense aspect to science, such that many of its core principles have been practiced by all people in all cultures;
5. Scepticism and self-criticism is an essential component of science

These assumptions seem pretty intuitive, and I think that to a large degree they follow from the ‘naive realism’ – to quote a term from one of my favourite philosophers and cognitive scientists – with which we view our world. But these assumptions are to varying degrees highly contentious, and they have been the subject of much debate amongst philosophers of language, science, mind, metaphysics, and so on.

1 and 2. The notion that we all live in the same ‘objective reality’ can be attacked in a number of ways.

The most powerful attack, in my opinion, comes from Wittgenstein. That attack claims that many, if not all, of the objects we observe to populate reality are only ‘objects’ because we have made them into objects through social practices, which he calls ‘language games’.  Language games aren’t necessarily about words, but rather are about the development of conventions or rules through context-specific practices (‘forms of life’). We learn to divide our world according to have we interact with it, and how we interact with it is learned and patterned. Other variants of the linguistic attack include Foucault’s ‘power-knowledge’, and certain awful post-structuralists whose names I shall not mention. While the strongest empirical formulation of this challenge, the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis, seems largely false, the underlying philosophical implications of the linguistic attack upon realism  – the epistemological and ontological aspects of it – make it difficult to imagine that any statement we could make, any proposition or predicate, could ever describe something ‘mind-independent’.

Another powerful attack comes from the instrumentalist tradition. This attack rests upon the notion that our observations are phenomenal: they are constructions of sense-data created by our brains, and as such, they represent reality but never grant us reliable or unmediated access to it. This tradition is very venerable, and rests upon Cartesian and Humean foundations. According to instrumentalists, all we do is divide up our sensations into useful and consistent patterns in order to effectively manipulate the world and solve our problems. While advances in cognitive science have shown that our brains appear to naturally divide sense data in certain ways, this doesn’t actually tell us anything about what is True, only what we can be reasonable confident will persist as phenomena.

There are, of course, excellent and interesting defences to theses attacks, but we should not be blithely assume that they succeed.

3.  The notion that we can develop approximately true knowledge of reality by minimising our biases or by following certain methods has many powerful challenges. Ever since the Duhem-Quine thesis – that we never falsify single theories but rather sets of theories – received broad (though not universal) acceptance in the 1950s, and Kuhn’s historical discussion of the many ways in which scientists are most definitely not sceptical, most definitely do not test all their assumptions, and most definitely do not progress in knowledge in any kind of linear way, scientific realism has been under attack.

Recently, realist philosophers of science have roughly divided into two general camps. The first, in the Lakatosian tradition, believes that while we don’t have the ability to ‘falsify’ individual theories in any kind of non-contextual way, we do have the ability to falisfy methodologies – substantive sets of assumptions about what the world is and how it can be studied – by seeing whether they allow us to accurately predict new things. The second believes that we can make true statements about cause and effect, and that we can possibly also divide reality accurately into entities based on their emergent properties, using a kind of principle of ‘inference to the best explanation’, or ‘abductive reasoning’.

However, anti-realist and instrumentalist philosophers have hit back hard. Larry Laudan, in ‘A Confutation of Convergent Realism’, has pointed out that the history of science is filled with theories that enabled highly accurate and new predictions, but whose central terms are now believed to be total fictions. Examples include phlogistons or aethers. Other philosophers have criticised the reliance upon emergence as being logically contradictory, and thus attacked the suggested that we could ‘abduce’ real entities out of our observations of cause and effect.

As in the previous case, all of these points are the subject of fierce and, in many cases, unresolved debate amongst our bright lights of ‘analytic’ philosophy.

4 and 5. We can’t even agree on what the principles of science should be in our culture. And to my knowledge, no other culture has produced such a vibrant debate over what they should be. However, it is true that basic principles of logic – non-contradiction, exclusion, and identification – appear to guide philosophical and ‘scientific’ debates in many other cultures than ours. As for scepticism…well, Wittgenstein has quite a bit to say about that too (language game!), as does Laudan (that it’s a context specific attempt to solve problems), not to mention many others. They’re all worth reading.

I’m going to suggest an alternative understanding of science, since it should be quite obvious by now that Natalie’s understanding of it is entirely culturally and philosophically contingent upon specific traditions. My alternative should allow us to still view science as a special process of enquiry  worthy of our esteem, and also give us grounds to criticise mysticism or fortune-telling as bankrupt. Here goes:

Science is a process of enquiring about the world that occurs within a community of people who a) engage in constant self and mutual criticism of the methods, assumptions, and conclusions of their enquiries and who b) produce ‘knowledge’ that is publicly accessible and c) in principle designed to clarify and disclose the world irrespective of any particular moral stance.

By this definition, we can criticise mystical claims about the world for being unwarranted on the grounds of their own methodological insufficiency (ie they are not reasonable even from within the system that produced them), and privilege science on the grounds that it is by definition something that is – or should be! – a public and politically neutral domain of enquiry, there to resolve disputes about how the world is regardless of how we think it should be. And crucially, we can criticise people for dismissing scientific knowledge when we have good reason to believe that it was produced according to methods that have a lot of potential for making our lives better – as Natalie has argued so pointedly.

My take on freedom.

I’m going to briefly share my take on ‘free will’ as both a metaphysical and meta-ethical concept. I may update this post as my views develop, but this is still more or less my robust perspective.

I believe that the experience of agency is very important for human wellbeing. Feeling free is something we crave, inescapably. Because of that, freedom is an important concept and an important phenomenon in any moral system. We must think about it. But that doesn’t make it coherent as a metaphysical concept. The experience of agency is something that emerges out of the complexity of our minds. It doesn’t mean that we have the ability to choose our actions in the sense that in another identical world, we could have done differently. Our actions are determined, entirely, by their antecedent causal conditions. Some of this determinism we can feel as we struggle against structures that exert forces in society, like the economy, but we still can’t shake the feeling that we have choices. This is only and entirely why ‘choices’ and ‘freedom’ matter: because we will always feel as though they are Real, even when we realise their impossibility at the metaphysical level.

As a result, I see no reason to assign moral responsibility in any way other than that which is most instrumentally useful while simultaneously being something we can accept without feeling violated, and if we have a case where an assignation appears useful but also bothers us, we should see nothing particularly special about our attitudes such that we shouldn’t try to change them instead of assigning responsibility differently.

Why study the philosophy of science?

‘The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.’ – Richard Feynman

So why should you study the philosophy of science, then? In particular, if you’re a scientist  then what is to gain from all this metatheory? How does it impact upon your day to day practice of research and theorising and so-forth?

Well, I can’t speak for you but I can speak a little bit about why I have found it helpful. Mind-altering, even.

So normally, most people think of science as trying to make valid causal inferences: the search for cause and effect. This is thought to occur via something called The Scientific Method whereby the scientist proposes a hypothesis and runs an experiment to see if the hypothesis ‘comes true’. If it doesn’t come true, the hypothesis is falsified and discarded. If the hypothesis seems really robust, we can start to call it a theory or even a law of nature. Even if one’s attitude isn’t quite so narrow as to what constitutes ‘science’, most still view prediction by induction to be the raison d’etre of scientific enquiry, where the subject of that enquiry are a reality that we can approximate in our theories and which exists in more or less the same form regardless of our ideas about it (eg when the tree falls in the forest and nobody is around, it sill makes a sound).

I am a social scientist. This means that I study what people do as part of society, and what sort of things characterise and constitute that society. It follows from the above definition of science that I should be looking for the causes and effects of social activity, and for general patterns of the type ‘whenever A happens, B follows‘. But people are really, really complex, and the methodologies available for studying them – those rules of analysis and problems or questions of interest that together define a research agenda – vary widely between fields and within them. Should I be trying to falsify hypotheses? Should I be using economic models? Should I be, I don’t know, just asking people to tell me why they do the things they do?

Let me give you an example of one of the puzzles that social scientists face; something that gives us cause to wonder if many of our common explanations involve some deeply paradoxical or counterintuitive assumptions. Consider the notion of social structures: if social structures affect our actions, but social structures only exist because of the actions of individual people, then doesn’t that mean that we’re both cause and effect? And if structures are more than the sum of their parts – us – how is that metaphysically possible? Isn’t that like saying 1+1=3? And if structures are nothing more than us, and can’t influence us, then what do they do? I’m not actually going to try to answer these puzzles – though I do have some ideas about them – but I do think they give you just a small glimpse into some of the conceptual difficulties that social scientists must face.

There is a critical immediacy to discussions on how to conceptualise notions like truth, causality, observation, explanation, and scientific progress when it comes to social science that don’t seem as pressing in the so-called ‘natural’ or ‘experimental’ sciences. That doesn’t mean they don’t matter deep down, but there doesn’t seem to be as much choice between radically different methods and assumptions for studying the same general thing. Some philosophers of science have suggested that the mark of a ‘mature’ science is this sort of methodological uniformity, but if that were true, then it would be grim news for social scientists, because I have the distinct sense that we’ll never get there. Or at least, we’ll get there only by radically changing the way we talk about people, in potentially impractical ways.

I think that a basic understanding of the philosophy of science – which I’ve already said is particularly important in social science – should consist of an understanding of the various debates on the following (interconnected!) issues:

• What are facts and what is a true statement?
• How do we find facts or determine whether a statement is true?
• What is the link between observation, theory, evidence, and truth? What gives us warrant to assert a claim?
• What is an explanation?
• How do we develop more ‘knowledge’ or make progress on our understanding and explaining?
• What does it mean to ‘do science’?

These are hard questions. Very hard questions. Of course, we will need to take up certain substantive positions on them if we are going to support our particular choice of methodologies, and of course I have my own opinions on them, but the only way to take a reasonable position is to know the basics of the various options, and to have some idea of where those options take you.

I won’t go into many specifics of who to read and why – at least not extensively – but  some excellent starting choices are Alexander Rosenberg‘s concise and cogent introductions to science and social science, Larry Laudan’s pragmatic theory of scientific progress, Laudan’s ‘Confutation of Convergent Realism‘ (for the slightly more advanced), and Peter Winch‘s short but powerful  ‘The Idea of a Social Science‘ (note: link is to an ebook and its only 160 pages!). I would highly recommend to anyone else in International Relations and political science to at the very least read Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s book on how philosophy of science pertains to the field, though Jackson’s book would be a good start even for sociologists, anthropologists, critical theorists, etc simply for its breadth. Or just go through the readings in an introductory syllabus and see where they take you.

If you’re looking for some key insights right away, let me share a few with you:

• There are more ways to do science than to make hypotheses and test them by seeing if their predictions come true. While experiments of this nature can give us powerful ways of controlling the world, they may not give us the right kind of answer to other sorts of questions. For example, instead of determining which independent variables are stronger ’causes’ than others for ‘dependent variable’ effects, an event or outcome may be best understood as occurring when a whole set of factors come together in just the right way as to produce an effect. In other words, rather than a set of possible causes to find the real ones, the scientist studies one situation that they know was the real cause, and looks to see how it created the effect – in short, a search for causal mechanisms.
• The above alternative to the hypothetico-deductive method – ie experiments and hypothesis testing – is particularly pertinent to looking at very complex things, such as society or certain kinds of biology. That is because there are many causal factors, and it is very hard to know just precisely how they came together. Some of them might only need to be present, but others might do different things depending on their quantities and ratios. In a sense, some causal structures simply make something possible while others are part of a sequence in the process that leads to it happening in the way that it did.
• In the social sciences, quite often the sort of ‘explanation’ we are looking for is an answer to ‘why did X find it reasonable or appropriate to do what they did?’ This kind of explanation requires us to try to understand X’s situation in the same way X did, and look for the rules of behaviour or thinking that influenced X’s judgement. Often we can only really get an answer by deep, narrative study of X and X’s relation to their environment.
• There are powerful challenges to the notion that we could ever describe a kind of objective reality, not just in terms of cognitive biases but in principle. These challenges come from the nature of language (ebook), of consciousness, and of causality and metaphysics itself. They are worth studying in detail, because deciding how to deal with them is necessary to produce a coherent methodology. One way out is to be entirely instrumentalist, but this escape comes at great cost.

Even though my main area of study is International Relations and political sociology, I have found that studying the philosophy of (social) science has helped me think about how to view things like ‘states’ or ‘politics’ or ‘rhetoric’ or ‘power’ in hugely relevant ways, and to figure out what I can contribute in studying them.

On Denying the Religious Identity of Others

I’ve encountered an argument, from a few people at this point, that goes something to the effect of the following:

If someone says that they are a [Christian/Muslim/Jew/etc] but doesn’t think that [Christ was divine/gay sex is wrong and awful/all laws of Leviticus should be obeyed/etc] then they aren’t actually of the religion that they claim, even if they genuinely believe themselves to be.

Some of you are probably wondering why I appear to be attacking a strawman. Others may note that there is a difference between suggesting that a necessary condition for being a Christian is believing in ‘the teachings of Christ’ and believing that all Christians must abhor sodomy, where the former makes a little more sense based on conventional use of the term. It may be fair to note, ‘hey, it says here in the bible that gay sex is bad!’ and hope that someone who treats the bible as a sacred text will have an explanation as to why they don’t think it says that, but even the word ‘Christianity’ itself has the name ‘Christ’ in it, so certain positions on Christ’s divinity and wisdom seen essential.

But I think that all arguments of this form are uniformly wrong-headed. I’m going to explain why I think this, and I’m mostly going to talk about Christianity as an example, but what I say should extend to any religion and even any ideology like ‘Marxism’ or ‘Liberalism’ in general. though I think it’s particularly and more practically pertinent to religions.

Also, let me just get this out of the way: I’m not saying something like ‘we shouldn’t put people into boxes, dude!’ because we absolutely must be able to sort people/things into categories if we’re going to talk about them, and those categories must have content.

So, yeah: Christianity. There is a very diverse array of beliefs and sets of beliefs that are supposedly ‘Christian’. They run the range from looking almost like the sort of thing you’d expect from the Taliban to something resembling the most liberal of Humanisms. How can all these things be ‘Christianity’? Well, they can be Christianity because Christianity is what Christians make of it.

Theology and hermeneutics are the ‘sciences’ of developing religious doctrines and of interpreting what sacred texts – like the bible – are ‘really’ saying. For example, many Christians will read a passage and think ‘ah, this is a metaphor or an allegory’ and they will try to build their principles around what they think that metaphor or allegory is for rather than the most obvious reading that comes to mind. Two Christians from different communities could read the same passage but come to radically different conclusions as to what that passage says.

One instinctive response for many secular people, upon seeing this process, is to accuse one or both parties of dishonesty or glibness. We can point to a passage and say ‘look here, it clearly says that X is a sin, and over here it talks about magic’ and so on, and we think that rather than admit that the bible is both evil and crazy/superstitious, Christians are deluding themselves in order to continue to believe what they want. This response is understandable, because most of what secular people read when it comes to philosophy is quite clear. It’s written by people trying very hard to be very explicit as to what they mean, and it was written recently enough that we don’t have trouble translating or contextualising what the author is saying. But this is a more unreasonable position when it comes to religious identity. It degrades our ability to figure out what’s going on with religious people and their religious beliefs in their religious communities and their religious conversations precisely because they really and truly believe all that glibness. And understanding people’s beliefs is what we’re trying to do in the first place.

One of my favourite books on social identities describes them as having both a ‘nominal’ and a ”virtual’ component. Basically: the name we give to our identities is a very important part of what those identities are, even as the experience of living out those identities, or fleshing them out with ideas about the world and ourselves, is also very important. Again, I think that for many secular people, this seems a bit strange, because we imagine that the name of something simply serves as shorthand for the content of that something. ‘Liberalism’ is nothing more than a convenient way to refer to a set of ideas about justice or individual rights, according to this understanding. And again, I think that makes practical sense when discussing modern ideologies. It even makes sense, practically speaking, to treat ‘Christianity’ as, at the very least, shorthand for certain beliefs about Christ’s divinity, etc.

But ‘practical’ doesn’t always mean ‘rigorous’, nor does it give us a tool for every problem or every situation.

When we look at a community of religious believers, we see that the beliefs that they think are required of someone who calls themselves a Believer – the things that a Good Christian must consider true, for example – we see two notable traits: first, that those beliefs often change over time, and second, that they are constantly being debated or contended. Some beliefs seem more stable or ‘sacred’ than others, and they seem to change less, but there is a constant process of negotiation and discourse over what the Book really says, and how to live according to it. If you took a snapshot in time of one particular religious community’s beliefs, you’d have a fairly stable ideology, but I don’t think that such a snapshot would be very useful in understanding religious communities and religious people. That process of trying to figure out the authentic Truth is an important part of what they do.

My suggestion is to define Christianity as ‘the community of people who call themselves “Christian” and search for religious truths in “Christian” texts and scriptures’. I recognise that this is very broad – anyone who takes the name ‘Christian’ could potentially qualify – but, well, Christianity is very broad. And I’m not sure we want to become theologians ourselves by going to the bible and saying ‘here is the correct reading that you have to follow if you are actually a Christian’. This is what religious fundamentalists do. And yes, it certainly violates the dictionary definition of Christianity if someone says ‘I’m a Christian but I think that Christ was just a man’ or whatever, but the dictionary isn’t a source of Truth. It’s a description of linguistic conventions, designed to make communication easier.

And what about communication? We still need words to describe particular sets of beliefs, and if we don’t actually think that ‘Christianity’ entails any such thing, then how do we talk about those beliefs?

The way out of this is to compromise. Even if in principle we should make no further assumptions about ‘Baptists’ or ‘Lutherans’ or ‘Catholics’ than we should about ‘Christians’ in general, we can still treat certain doctrines as institutionalised within those communities. We can do this by focusing more narrowly on specific groups. However, even among Catholics there can be quite a wide variety of ideas as to what being a Good Catholic involves, for example. So we can also try to talk about the beliefs themselves rather than the groups of people that putatively hold them, if possible. And we can be flexible about our terms, and be willing to change them to suit the discussion, since our goal is to talk about things, and not dictate or mandate certain True things. Unless we’re actually members of the religion in question, of course. Then finding the Truth is what we’ve set out to do in the first place.

Nihilism and Privilege

It has been observed, in a discussion amongst my friends, that most moral nihilists appear to be very privileged, socially. They tend to be men, white, middle-class or higher, very well educated, and otherwise at – if not the zenith – a fairly substantial level of comfort and security.

This is an interesting observation, because it seems consistent with much of the social science scholarship I’ve read on sacred principles, morality, group identity, and political struggle.

There are two reasons why privilege might be, generally, a precondition for nihilism. One is the conditions of life and whether they allow for the time to be philosophical and abstract. If you’re working all day with your hands, and the availability of food, rest, and safety from violence is an ever-present concern, asking ‘what does it all mean?’ is just too self-indulgent. And the other is the pressing urgency of morality – understood as a community feature and process, rather than a sphere of enquiry – to political struggle. If your life is a struggle, you don’t have the ability to question your principles or closely-held beliefs. But we’ll also see this in non-liberal societies. In kinship-based societies or ones held by powerful nationalisms, people can’t question the principles that tie together the community and warrant in-group chauvinism. So we not only need economic privilege of a certain degree, but a liberal mode of subjectivity where the individual is the centre of personhood and moral activity.

What are the implications of this? Well, I can think of a few. First of all, nihilism is not sustainable. If we collectively hold that nothing matters, we will fall apart as a community. Yes, we might still pursue mechanisms of personal security and interest aggregation, but the sorts of cultural commonplaces that give us meaning in our lives will eventually dry up. Anomie will consume us. Luckily, I don’t think this is even possible simply because I think that people are, usually, unable to actually be true nihilists. But we should be willing to think utopian for a moment, to imagine certain ideal states of affairs that follow from our moral reasoning. In following that reasoning, we come to the conclusion that nihilism is not desirable except perhaps to provide a critical voice by a few tragic philosophers. Second, we can see that many of our liberal principles have the potential to lead to nihilism once they are generalised and once the aspirations they entail are achieved throughout society. We want liberal subjectivity, liberal personhood, enormous socio-economic freedom, and a political system that represents our will as people, while avoiding a tyranny of the majority. But how can we achieve this sustainably?

This inexorably returns me to the idea of deliberative democracy. Only with ongoing public discussion over meaning can we maintain our cultural commonplaces while still achieving our liberal values. We must accept the importance of Principles, of sacred values, in keeping our community safe and free. That doesn’t mean we should abandon critical discussion over them, but it does mean that we need to keep some ideas special: not immutable but nevertheless central and univeralisable.

Your face obtains.

Just a bit of frivolity. Will expand as necessary.

External Realist: Your face obtains. Because it is a thing.
Convergent realist: We are getting closer to describing your face. In fact, ‘your face’ now approximately refers.
Positivist: Your face is a coincidence. An awfully face-like coincidence.
Critical Realist: Your face obtains because of strong emergence. Poof! Viva la Revelucion!
Anti-Realist: Your face is a language game. If I tweak your nose, it activates a gestalt switch.
Relativist: Your face obtains for you. But after la Revelucion…
Instrumentalist: Your face is very useful. I can’t say anything more.

and

Surrealist: C’est ne pas ton visage.

PTJ’s Conduct of Inquiry: a belated few words

About five months ago I read Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s excellent book The Conduct of Inquiry, which is a discussion of the ‘philosophy of science’ as it pertains to the discipline of International Relations. I have no real criticisms of PTJ’s work – none worthy of or ready for articulation, anyway – and it was a major contributing factor in the nevertheless probably overdetermined journey I’ve since made into the philosophy of science and social science. I’ll probably reread his book before starting my PhD programme, too, as I’ll likely get more out of it now that I’m more conversant with the subject matter.

However, I have since formed one…not quite a criticism, but an alternative perspective on PTJ’s subject matter and the 2×2 matrix – the hallmark of social science! – he used to sort enquiry in my discipline into explicitly ideal-typical categories.

Basically, this was his model:

The Neopositivists blithely H-D their way to ever more robust conjunctions – oh the Hume-anity! – perhaps while singing this.

The Critical Realists figure out what must be the case through a sort of NeoKantian ‘transcendental argumentation’, in which they use abductive reasoning - which contrary to what you might expect, does not mean that they will kidnap your mind -  to determine the shape of really real ontological entities. Basically: ‘given what the data show, [entity] must exist, and possess [causal dispositions], because otherwise our theories, to use Searle’s favourite word, would just be absurd’.

The Analyticists build ideal-typical models and doesn’t afraid of anything because they’re badass pragmatists who realise that while there’s more to science than prediction, Critical Realism is…(you guessed it) absurd. Analyticists try to capture certain salient aspects of their subject matter in order to make it intelligible. A model might have predictive power, but its main function is as a cognitive guide. Like a map, it is not meant to be fully isomorphic to really real reality, but rather to help the thinker navigate.

The Reflexivists handwave. Ok, ignore that. The Reflexivists try to discover how occupying a certain position – usually social – grants privileged access to certain kinds of knowledge, is necessary for the possession of certain kinds of conceptual categories, or indeed entails its own truths that might even contradict other truths. They are the only bunch likely to utter the words ‘true for whom?’ in a non-ironic way.

Now, I really like this model. I think that it captures the main methodological paradigms in my discipline, and highlights the deeper ontological and (in some cases) epistemological wagers in which they are grounded (often unselfconsciously). But I don’t think these paradigms are necessarily incommensurable if they’re taken solely on their methodological merits. I wouldn’t dream of claiming to have anywhere near PTJ’s familiarity with the sort of claims that people in my field make, nor of the value in systematically highlighting their deeper ontological and epistemological underpinnings. So what follows is merely the product of my thinking about what wagers or positions on this issue are possible, and how they might look.

Consider this alternative two-level model.

At the first level we divide people into epistemological* Realists and Pragmatists.

Level One: R or P

[R] Realists believe that there exists some kind of method[ology] which will give us access to the really real entities that comprise reality, and reveal their powers.

[P] Pragmatists believe that no method[ology] will give us access to really real reality, and thus our theories are merely cognitive tools.

Level Two: Types of R or P

[Rp] Some Realists are methodolgical positivists, and believe that when an extremely robust conjunction of A and B obtains, there really is something real going on wherein A is causally linked to B, even if they can go no further.

[Re] Some Realists are entity realists. They rely on ‘inference to the best explanation’ to develop a really real ontology. A conjuction is, for them, a good clue, but not firm evidence as there could be undetected additional entities whose potential goes unrealised due to various countervailing influences.

[Rs] Some Realists are standpoint theorists. They are engaged in largely critical enterprise of bringing in additional perspectives on really real reality because those additional perspectives lead to a more complete scientific/theoretical ontology.

[Rnowayjose] Probably, ideal-typification is not really compatible with Realism.

[Pp] Some Pragmatists are methodological positivists. They think that, for the most part, testing hypotheses via the H-D method is a good way to keep science moving along. They probably care mainly about predictions. And shiny things.

[Pm] Some Pragmatists are ideal-typical modelers. They care about more than prediction, and think that models can be normatively useful, or help spot interesting areas for further study when they find substantial discrepancies between the predictions of a supposedly verisimilitudenous (is that even a word?) model and empirical reality.

[Ps] Some Pragmatists are standpoint theorists. They think that a diversity of perspectives allows for a more robust critical discourse. Arendt you convinced already?

[Pe] Some pragmatists could specify a diverse ontology of entities, though I wonder if this wouldn’t be subsumed within [Pm]

Another way to put it is that standpoint theorists and entity realists describe entities themselves, while positivists and modelers focus on making sense of phenomena. So the 2×2 matrix, which I haven’t bothered to make, would have ‘pragmatist’ and ‘realist’ as one distinction, and ‘phenomalism’ and ‘entity…ism’ as the other.

Thus, this alternative of mine works at two levels: the first level is that of epistemological wager, and the second is that of preferred methodology, or perhaps of one’s opinion as to the limits of methodology. Basically, the above model shows that one can employ similar method[ologie]s but treat the results of one’s enquiries as indicating different things. Generally speaking, Realists are trying to learn facts and access really real reality, while Pragmatists are engaged in a whole host of tasks from prediction to normative evaluation to sandbox exploration (something possible with computational simulations). Given the undeniable success of the H-D method in many aspects of science, for example, both a Realist and a Pragmatist could conceivably find a great deal of value in it.

And yes, there is an obvious asymmetry between the Realists and Pragmatists, in that the Realist must specify in rigorous terms why their preferred method[ology] allows for true statements or the specification of real causal relations, or entities, etc, while the Pragmatist just needs to defend their choice as an appropriate means to their ends. Of course, the Pragmatist purchases their easy ride at great cost.

The benefit of a model such as the one that I’ve provided is that it allows for methodolgical alliances between scholars holding competing epistemological positions. For example, I generally consider myself to be a Pragmatist. Overarchingly, I think that any theory is really just an ideal-typical model. But I need not alienate myself from [Rp]s if our research interests overlap. We can both collaborate on the same project, and find value in running the same analyses of the same data. Until I got very bored, and started run a ‘regression’ to a childlike state in which I play with my food and make animal noises to stay amused.

Anyway, this was my two cents. I’m sure this made sense to very few readers, and not necessarily because of ‘obscure’ subject material.

*I’m deliberately assuming that we beginning from, at minimum, a kind of External Realism. ER is, according to Searle, the belief that there is a world independent of our representations of it. That is, a state of affairs comprising some set of primitive ontological entities exists whether or not we try to talk about it. Searle thinks that this position is a presupposition of language itself – using NeoKantian transcendental argumentation, incidentally – and I’m inclined to agree with him. So we’re all Realists in a trivial way, and thus we can all talk about epistemology: how, if its even possible, can we learn about those really real things?

Nihilism and Humanism: Happy Hypocrisy

One of the problems I’ve personally encountered in trying to justify my humanist moral principles is that it is impossible to justify humanist moral principles. This was a pretty big problem for me, actually, but I’ve found that hypocrisy has allowed me to move past it. I’ve got good friends who are still struggling with it, though, and I think they  – and anyone else facing a similar struggle – would benefit from my perspective.

The Problem.

Here’s the problem: I’m a cosmopolitan, liberal person who wants everyone to have great freedom of choice, opportunity, and thought. Wanting something isn’t, of course, a moral position on its own. But my feelings go beyond that. When I see a person’s freedom curtailed – when I see people lose autonomy over their body in the most comprehensive and painful of ways, for example – I feel moved to condemn that curtailment. It isn’t just that I would prefer things to be otherwise. It’s Wrong. I feel bad in a very certain way when I am confronted with such Wrong things, and that feeling seems different from the feelings I get when my own particular interests are not realised (unless my failure seems unjust, but let’s save that for a moment).

I can talk about it being Wrong very easily. I can use language that treats right and wrong as though it were similar to truth and falsity. I can apply the principles of reason to determine whether an act or an outcome is good or bad, once I’ve been able to figure out how ‘good’ and ‘bad’ should be defined. And of course, I have figured that out, very generally, because I’m the sort of person who thinks about such things.

So I’ve got this ethical system. It happens to be a kind of ‘rule utilitarianism’, in case you haven’t noticed from all of my little essays on the subject. It works pretty well for me. It helps me navigate difficult moral dilemmas, and it has so far proven quite robust. I mean, I have my self-serving biases and I certainly could see that other ethical systems have their merits, but I’m usually able to reconcile these things with my working understandings of how people behave and how we all should act.

But it’s all false. Well, actually, it’s not even true or false. It’s absurd. I’m treating a proposition – ‘an outcome is good directly proportional to the extent to which it facilitates human wellbeing/happiness – as though it were true when there is no possible way that it could ever be so. I’m sure most people reading this are familiar with the fact-value distinction or the is-ought distinction. There is no way to derive what we should be doing from any understanding of what is the case. There is no way for our particular desires to hold some kind of metaphysical status as universal, or otherwise to be ‘real’ except contingent upon us happening to hold them. All moral principles are equally impossible because there is no part of reality in which they could exist as anything more than our own thoughts and feelings even if we treat them as though they are propositions with truth value.

Now, since we’re good rational thinkers, we cannot abide by the thought of investing our confidence in, and shaping our behaviour based upon, absurd and clearly untrue beliefs. We hold others to high standards of epistemology, and we’d be hypocrites if we exempted ourselves from the same standards. In fact, it’s those very standards that have freed us from our own ignorance and foolishness!

Fuck.

Nihilism.

Sigh.

The Solution.

Most people who see The Problem in these terms, myself included, are able to give a plausible account of why they are humanists. They explain that they were genetically and environmentally conditioned to feel empathy, and that a society full of humanistic people is likely to be peaceful, prosperous, and pleasant. So of course being humanist is the most rational, as well as the most predictable, moral position for them to hold. This account allows one to justify humanistic ethics in self-interest and affect, and therefore dispense with the impossible metaphysical commitments of moral realism.

And yet there’s that pedantic voice in the back of our head going ‘hypocrite!’ It’s saying ‘you know that this is still no justification’. If you’re not a psychopath, anyway. And it bothers you. You would really like to satisfy your inner pedant.

You can’t. You never will. We are ineluctably driven to morality and cannot by force of will or argument abrogate that.

You  have evolved to reason deontically about social behaviour and to feel a whole host of emotions related to the forms of it which you encounter in others and in yourself. You necessarily must have some standard of fairness, compassion, of in-group and out-group. You will always feel that transgressions upon these standards are Wrong in the sense that the violate some kind of universal and universalisable principle. No matter how much you ruminate on the absurdity of it all, you will still have these things.

So just embrace it. Realise that you can be part of a vibrant moral discourse even without some kind of epistemic warrant for those claims you and others defend so passionately. Apply all the Reason you can muster to debate and articulate the particulars of righteousness. Start with what ‘feels’ right to you – you are, after all, already a humanist, more or less – and let your intuitive and trained commitment to coherence guide you to constantly critique and resolve the discrepancies between what you claim to value and what you actually see and do.  Make morality intersubjectively real, and you won’t have this crushing feeling of nihilism.

Simply engaging in the process of moral discourse will satisfy you. Try it. Try really hard to start not at the level of questioning what warrant you have for your moral beliefs and instead just start at the level of discourse, of intersubjectivity.

I’m not saying that you should just be an ethical anarchist and assert whatever moral claim pleases you. Well actually, I am saying that, but I’m assuming that you find it painful to assert contradictions or rely too much on tautologies (in the non-trivial sense) when at all possible. Keep being reasonable.

But of course, in the end you will have to have at least one tautology, one axiom on which to base your calculations of right and wrong. I will suggest that you try to find a small set of very flexible, broadly consequentialist principles such as I have done, if starting from intuition in every discussion seems sloppy or difficult for you. The simpler and more general the principle, the easier it will be for you to assimilate and apply it without feeling the pointlessness of it all. But this is, of course, simply a bit of advice on how to turn morality into a good habit, more than anything.

Yes, it’s absurd. Yes, it’s hypocritical. But it doesn’t matter. Because nothing matters, and this will make you happy.  It will let you focus on navigating the dilemmas of social life. So make an exception just this once.