> According to these folks, we haven't produced the sort of Covering Law
> or hypotehtico-deductive theory that is supposed to dominate the nat.
> sciences: to explain something is to provide a justifiable account of
> necessary causes and essential determinants based on universal laws
> that operate under specific conditions. (that's where probability
> comes into play; see end of post)
This implicitly assumes that social relations are not internal relations. Where interdependence is "dialectical" in this sense there will be no "universal laws."
In social theory internal relations mean that “man himself is in a great measure a creature of circumstances and changes with them." (Alfred Marshall, as quoted by Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. X, p. 196. According to Keynes, it is this - largely ignored - aspect of Marshall that is basis of Marshall’s distinction "between the objects and methods of the mathematical sciences and those of the social sciences" (p. 197) and that expresses "the profundity of his [Marshall's] insight into the true character of his subject in its highest and most useful developments" (p. 188).)
Whitehead defines a “society” in terms of the idea:
“The point of a ‘society,’ as the term is here used, is that it is self-sustaining; in other words, that it is its own reason. Thus a society is more than a set of entities to which the same class-name applies: that is to say, it involves more that a merely mathematical conception of ‘order.’ To constitute a society, the class-name has got to apply to each member, by reason of genetic derivation from other members of that same society. The members of the society are alike because, by reason of their common character, they impose on other members of the society the conditions which lead to that likeness.” (A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, [Corrected ed.], p. 89)
An ontology of internal relations has many ramifications. For instance, it underpins Keynes’s claim that social phenomena are “essentially vague” so that it is a mistake, the mistake that - following Frank Ramsey - Keynes calls “scholasticism”, to treat the subject-matter of economics “as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category.” (Ramsey, as quoted by Keynes vol. X, p. 343.) For the reasons elaborated by Whitehead, this limits the applicability not only of mathematical but of any kind of formal reasoning. (Whitehead, Modes of Thought, pp. 105-7). It rules out representing all change algebraically - for instance, as changes in parameter values or as non-linear relations. For the same reason, it limits the applicability of statistical methods for estimating the parameters of algebraic relations (such methods cannot, by the way, prove or disprove a theory - Keynes vol. XIV, pp. 307-8). It also limits the applicability of quantitative methods.
Though internal relations are consistent with order and regularity in observed behaviour (in fact, as Whitehead points out in the passage below, they provide an answer to Hume’s problem of induction), this order and regularity will alter over space and time. It will not be invariant. As Marshall puts it, “if the subject-matter of a science passes through different stages of development, the laws which apply to one stage will seldom apply without modification to others; the laws of the science must have a development corresponding to that of the things of which they treat.” (Marshall, Principles [Variorum ed.], vol. 1, p. 763)
Whitehead calls this “the doctrine of Law as immanent”:
“By the doctrine of Law as immanent it is meant that the order of nature expresses the characters of the real things which jointly compose the existences to be found in nature. When we understand the essences of these things, we thereby know their mutual relations to each other. Thus, according as there are common elements in their various characters, there will necessarily be corresponding identities in their mutual relations. In other words, some partial identity of pattern in the various characters of natural things issues in some partial identity of pattern in the mutual relations of those things. These identifies of pattern in the mutual relations are the Laws of Nature. Conversely, a Law is explanatory of some community in character pervading the things which constitute Nature. It is evident that the doctrine involves the negation of ‘absolute being’. It presupposes the essential interdependence of things. “… since the laws of nature depend on the individual characters of the things constituting nature, as the things change, then correspondingly the laws will change. Thus the modern evolutionary view of the physical universe should conceive of the laws of nature as evolving concurrently with the things constituting the environment. Thus the conception of the Universe as evolving subject to fixed, eternal laws regulating all behaviour should be abandoned. “… a reason can now be produced why we should put some limited trust in induction. For if we assume an environment largely composed of a sort of existences whose natures we partly understand, then we have some knowledge of the laws of nature dominating that environment. But apart from that premise and apart from the doctrine of Immanent Law, we can have no knowledge of the future. We should then acknowledge blank ignorance, and not make pretences about probability. “,,, the doctrine of Immanent Law is untenable unless we can construct a plausible metaphysical doctrine according to which the characters of the relevant things in nature are the outcome of their interconnections, and their interconnections are the outcome of their characters. This involves some doctrine of Internal Relations.” (Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, [Free Press Paperback Ed., 1967] pp. 111-3)
Where relations are internal, “to convert a model into a quantitative formula is to destroy its usefulness as an instrument of thought.” As Keynes indicates at the end of this passage, however, "statistical fetishism" is very hard to overcome.
“My point against Tinbergen is a different one. In chemistry and physics and other natural sciences the object of experiment is to fill in the actual values of the various quantities and factors appearing in an equation or a formula; and the work when done is once and for all. In economics that is not the case, and to convert a model into a quantitative formula is to destroy its usefulness as an instrument of thought. Tinbergen endeavours to work out the variable quantities in a particular case, or perhaps in the average of several particular cases, and he then suggests that the quantitative formula so obtained has general validity. Yet in fact, by filling in the figures, which one can be quite sure will not apply next time, so far from increasing the value of his instrument, he has destroyed it. All the statisticians tend that way. Colin [Clark], for example, has recently persuaded himself that the propensity to consume is constant at all phases of the credit cycle. He works out a figure for it and proposes to predict by using the result, regardless of the fact that his own investigations clearly show that it is not constant, in addition to the strong a priori reasons for regarding it as most unlikely that it can be so.” (vol. XIV, pp. 299-300)
Ted