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PPE Notes The Philosophy of Science and Social Science Notes

Peter Winch The Idea Of A Social Science Notes

Updated Peter Winch The Idea Of A Social Science Notes

The Philosophy of Science and Social Science Notes

The Philosophy of Science and Social Science

Approximately 88 pages

Notes on various texts and debates in the philosophy of science and philosophy of social science, including explanation, relativism, interpretation, and individual/holism....

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our The Philosophy of Science and Social Science Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Peter Winch - The Idea of a Social Science

Chapter Two - The Nature of Meaningful Behaviour

Philosophy and Sociology

  • there is a distinction between peripheral branches of philosophy and epistemology

    • philosophy of science, art, history etc is concerned with the particular nature of those forms of life

    • epistemology is concerned with what is involved in the notion of a form of life as such

      • Wittgenstein’s concept of following a rule and its corollary form of interpersonal agreement are contributions to this debate

      • this debate is played out in the social sciences: should sociology synthesise all social studies, or be one among many?

  • The central problem of sociology - giving an account of social phenomena - belongs to epistemology, though it has been misconstrued as a scientific problem

  • Often the crucial ingredient of sociology - language - is barely touched upon

    • the notion of having a language, and things such as meaning are often taken for granted

    • in fact categories of meaning are logically dependent for their sense on social interaction between men

      • ‘it is only by virtue of their possession of concepts that they are able to make generalizations at all’

Meaningful Behaviour

  • Forms of interactions that have meaning or symbolic character all depend on following a rule, as in language

  • People usually perform actions for reasons, whether explicit or implicit

    • a necessary condition of a reason constituting a reason for an action (i.e. forming part of an explanation) is that the concepts involved in the reason make sense to the agent

  • Sometimes people behave without having reasons for doing so

    • e.g. habit - a person may understand what they are doing, and hence is actually casting a vote, but does not have a reason: he simply does it because his father did

  • An act that looks like exchange is only economic if it has a sense, if the agents ‘carry with them..a regulation of their future behaviour’

    • placing a slip of paper between pages is only using a bookmark if it is done with the idea of using the slip to determine where to start reading later

    • we can only be committed in the future if our acts are the application of a rule

  • So it only makes sense to say that N votes if:

    • the political institutions of his society allow for voting

    • N is familiar with those institutions, and the symbolic act of voting

      • thus N applies a rule in a context in which application is possible

Activities and Precepts

  • Even an anarchist follow rules insofar as he has a way of life that involves meaningful choices

  • Reason doesn’t come from without: means employed and ends sought do not generate forms of social activity, but rather depend for their very being on those forms

    • a scientist with a certain end in mind can only be understood by someone with familiar knowledge

    • human activity can never be summed up in a set of explicit precepts

      • e.g. Carroll ‘What the Tortoise said to Achilles’

      • in order to explain a human activity, we always need to go beyond explicit precepts in understanding the context in which the activity makes sense

Rules and Habits

  • Oakeshott distinguishes between habitual actions and rule governed actions

    • the dividing line he draws in where rules are consciously applied

  • Rather, we should say that the dividing line is where a criterion is being applied, whether or not the agent can formulate the criterion

    • after learning the natural numbers we do not consciously apply rules to our use of them, but our use goes beyond the recital of habit: we must be able to realise (perhaps implicitly) the ways of applying the rule(s)

    • e.g. dogs may be able to learn sequences or actions, but they do not use criterion; they are simply demonstrating conditioning

  • Before a human being can be said to have acquired a rule, he has to understand what is meant by ‘doing the same thing of the same kind of occasion’

  • It is only because human actions exemplify rules that we can speak of past experience influencing the present - otherwise, if it were a question of habits, we would merely do the same thing over and over again, as if we were conditioned - the dog is conditioned to respond in a certain way; we know the right way to go on on the basis on what we have been taught

Reflectiveness

  • ‘The notion of a principle of conduct and the notion of meaningful action are interwoven

  • Matters of reflection are bound to arise for anyone who experiences foreign situations, and this is human existence

    • changing circumstances compel us to use rules that contain within themselves the means of assessing the significance of the behaviour they prescribe

    • human history is not just an account of changing habits - it is an account of trying to carry over what is regarded as important in behaviour

The Social Studies as Science

Mill

  • Mill claims that the state of our moral sciences is embarrassing

  • He views science as existing where Humean causation - constant conjunction - is the case

  • Mill believes that there are general laws of psychology, which may be reducible in principle to laws of physiology

Differences in Degree and Differences in Kind

  • Mill claims all explanations have the same logical structure, so there can be no difference in form between how we explain natural and social events

    • the entails that the methodological issues of the moral sciences are empirical

  • But this is not true, the issue is conceptual; of what it makes...

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