On Mon, 1 Nov 1999, James Farmelant wrote:
> Are not man and society a part of nature or do you support the idealist
> thesis that they constitute a separate realm of reality that is
> not susceptible to scientific inquiry? Marx after all thought that
> with his materialist conception of history, he had laid the basis
> for a science of history.
I think Marx was wrong on this point, Jim. There are a couple of crucial differences between the objects of social inquiry and the objects of physics that prevent us from making valid universal statements about social phenomena. And this keeps historical or social science from ever being science in quite the same way that natural science is.
To start with, identity. If you make observations on an isotope of hydrogen, you are safe in assuming it is true for all isotopes of hydrogen. But there is nothing interesting you can say about all men, or all women, or all lesbians or all intellectuals where you can't find some that are dead the opposite. The same is true for large-scale social objects: there is nothing interesting you can say about all societies where you won't find exceptions in a way you won't among isotopes of hydrogen. And from this flows the fact that the "laws" of society change over time. We can assume the laws of gravity were the same for caveman. But the nature of the family was very different in Ancient Greece from what it is in modern day America.
A small amount of hydrogen, properly observed, counts for all the hydrogen that has even been or ever will be. A small number of woman does not. In view of such human diversity, our social observations are always very small. And since the rules of the social game are always changing, our knowledge doesn't accumulate the way scientific knowledge does. Someone that perfectly understood the Renaissance Venetian state can't pass that knowledge on to be built on the way Harvey passed on the knowledge of the circulation of the blood.
The result in social inquiry is that our observations and our knowledge are both very partial. We can't make valid statements that are true For Every X. The best we can do is make statements that are true For Enough X. We still express them in universal form -- we speak of a working class guy or the difficulties faced by single mothers, knowing full well that somewhere is a working man who is nothing like that and a single mother who never faced those difficulties. The best we can hope for is that these exceptions prove the rule -- that they stand out as exceptional.
And there's the rub: we can't avoid the universal form because without it we can't communicate, even with ourselves. Thus in social inquiry, all universals are false universals. That doesn't mean there are no true statements about the social world. It means there are no true universal statements. (Or at least no interesting ones -- none that aren't abstract to the point of tautology.) Consequently, most social argument consists of fighting over the relevant background.
So social truths are different than the truths of chemistry and physics. They are partial. And from this flows the difference between physical science and social science. Valid statements that are true For Every X are independent of our perspective. Partial truths are not. Social assertions always organize the world into the core phenomena that they are good for; the boundary cases that they are half true for; and the rest of the cases that don't count. Thus they incorporate our perspective, and depend on it for both their meaning and their validity.
This is how a how a reasonable man can say that all truths about the social world are partial truths, and that all social perspectives contain some truth and some distortion.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com