Abstract
In a somewhat oblique but economical way, a review of Thomas Kuhn’s influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,1 helps to identify the current state of the methodology of the social and human sciences. Kuhn himself, of course, is very much interested in applying his theory to these sciences, though he has yet to pursue the matter in a sustained way. He has attracted a good deal of sanguine interest among the practitioners of the human sciences, of course. But the point, frankly, of beginning with Kuhn (and of pursuing at some length the promise of his well-known theory) is to show that the effectiveness with which he breached the canonical picture of the physical sciences does not really depend on his own favored notions of paradigm shifts and incommensurability (which are in any case not at all strongly defended or fully defensible) but on certain subterranean themes, somewhat displaced by his own notions, that do force a review of the methodological features of the physical sciences — either to justify a functional division between them and the human sciences or to confirm the dependence of the first on the second in a respect the canon has traditionally resisted or ignored (at least since it assumed its characteristically modem form).
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Notes
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. enl. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1970).
bid., pp. 111–112.
See Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1978), Chs. 1, 7, particularly pp. 2, 110.
See Joseph Margolis, `Relativism, History, and Objectivity in the Human Studies,’ Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior XIV (1984), ‘Scientific Realism as a Transcendental Issue,’ Manuscrito VII (1984).
See for example ‘Postscript — 1969’ to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; T. S. Kuhn, ’Reflections on My Critics,’ in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), and T. S. Kuhn, ’Second Thoughts on Paradigms,’ in Frederick Suppe (ed.), The Structure of Scientific Theories (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970).
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, ‘Postscript — 1969,’ p. 206.
bid.
See Imre Lakatos, ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,’ Philosophical Papers,Vol. 1, eds. John Worrall and Gregory Currie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); originally published in Lakatos and Musgrave, loc. cit.
Karl R. Popper, ‘Normal Science and Its Dangers,’ Lakatos and Musgrave, loc. cit. 1° ’Postscript — 1969,’ p. 179. Kuhn is surely influenced here by the work of such friendly commentators as Margaret Masterman, ’The Nature of a Paradigm,’ in Lakatos and Musgrave, loc. cit.
Ibid., pp. 54–55.
’Postscript —1969,’ pp. 207–208.
`Postscript — 1969,’ p. 178f. See also, Gary Gutting (ed.) Paradigms and Revolutions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980).
Not meant here in Stephen Toulmin’s technical sense; cf. ‘Does the Distinction between Normal and Revolutionary Science Hold Water?’ Lakatos and Musgrave, loc. cit.
See, for instance, Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 102–103; Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: NLB, 1975), Ch. 17. See also, Dudley Shapere, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,’ Philosophical Review LXXIII (1964); ’Meaning and Scientific Change,’ in R. G. Colodny (ed.), Mind and Cosmos: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966).
’Reflections on My Critics,’ p. 268.
Ibid., p. 266.
This bears directly on the papers by J. W. N. Watkins, Stephen Toulmin, and Popper particularly, in Lakatos and Musgrave, loc. cit.; also, those by Shapere, cited above.
Kuhn himself worries about the issue, for example in ‘Postscript — 1969,’ pp. 205–210. See also, Popper, loc. cit. For a sample of the pernicious consequences of this linkage, see most of the papers in Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (ed.), Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982). On the issue of relativism, See Joseph Margolis, ’The Nature and Strategies of Relativism,’ Mind XCII (1983). 2° See Joseph Margolis, ‘Pragmatism without Foundations,’ American Philosophical Quarterly XXI (1984).
This undoubtedly helps to explain the unusual interest in the recent work of Richard Rorty: see for instance Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); and Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
Rudolf Carnap, ‘Psychology in Physical Language,’ trans. George Schick, in A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959), pp. 166–167. See also, Joseph Margolis, ’Schlick and Carnap on the Problem of Psychology,’ in Eugene T. Gadol (ed.), Rationality and Science (Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 1982).
See Carl G. Hempel, ‘Logical Positivism and the Social Sciences,’ in Peter Achinstein and Stephen F. Barker (eds.), The Legacy of Logical Positivism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969).
Paul Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam, ‘Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis,’ in Herbert Feigl et al. (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. II (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958). See also, Robert L. Causey, Unity of Science (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1977), Ch. 6.
Oppenheim and Putnam, loc. cit.; Causey, loc. cit. See also, Mario Bunge, ‘Emergence and the Mind,’ Neuroscience XI (1977); and ’Levels and Reduction,’ American Journal of Physiology CIII (1977).
See Carl G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: Free Press, 1965), Ch. 4; Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood Cliffs, 1966), Ch. 5.
Causey, loc. cit.
Otto Neurath, ‘Protocol Sentences,’ trans. George Schick, in Ayer, loc. cit.
See Joseph Margolis, ‘Pragmatism without Foundations’; ’Skepticism, Foundationalism, and Pragmatism,’ American Philosophical Quarterly XIV (1977).
Karl R. Popper, ‘The Aim of Science,’ Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Cf. also, Rorty, loc. cit.
See Joseph Margolis, Persons and Minds (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980; Culture and Cultural Entities (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984; Philosophy of Psychology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984).
Cf. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation, pp. 376–425; Wesley C. Salmon, ‘Statistical Explanation,’ in Wesley C. Salmon et al., Statistical Explanation and Statistical Relevance (Pittsburgh; University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971); Hans Reichenbach, Laws, Modalities, and Counterfactuals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). On biological laws, see Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), Ch. 2; on the prospect of laws in the linguistic and cultural domains, see Margolis, Culture and Cultural Entities.
W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960); Donald Davidson, ‘In Defense of Convention T,’ in Hugues Leblanc (ed.), Truth, Syntax and Modality (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1973); Donald Davidson, `Mental Events,’ in L. Foster and J. Swanson (eds.), Experience and Theory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970). See also, Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Gareth Evans and John McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
Margolis, Culture and Cultural Entities.
See for example Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Nelson Goodman, loc. cit.; Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Joseph Margolis, ‘Scientific Realism as a Transcendental Issue.’
Karl B. Popper, Realism and the Aim of Science (Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery, Vol. I), ed. W. W. Bartley, Ill (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983), Ch. 1, 2, 4.
See Karl R. Popper Conjectures and Refutations, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), Ch. 10 and addenda.
See Margolis, ‘Pragmatism without Foundations.’
See Reichenbach, loc. cit.
See Feyerabend, loc. cit.
Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 6. Cf. Jerry A. Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983).
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 16. Cf. the rest of Ch. 1; and Donald Hockney, ‘The Bifurcation of Scientific Theories and Indeterminacy of Translation,’ Philosophy of Science XLH (1975).
See Margolis, Culture and Cultural Entities, Chs. 6–7.
Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility, trans. John Viertel (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), pp. 152–153.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, in trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 247.
Ibid., pp. 248, 249, 252. See also, Joseph Margolis, ‘The Savage Mind Totalizes,’ Man and World XVII (1984).
Jean Piaget, `Piaget’s Theory,’ in Bärbel Inhelder et al. (eds.), Piaget and His School (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1976), pp. 11–12; this is a modified version of an earlier article by Piaget, originally published in P. H. Mussen (ed.), Carmichael’s Manual of Child Psychology, 3rd ed. Vol. 1 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1970). See also, Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. Chaninah Maschler (New York: Basic Books, 1970); Biology and Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
Ibid., p. 22.
L. S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962).
See Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (ed.), Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).
See Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), originally published as The Language of the Self; and Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
See Joseph Margolis, ‘Reconciling Freud’s Scientific Project and Psychoanalysis,’ in Daniel Callahan and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. (eds.), Morals,Science and Sociality (Vol. III, The Foundations of Ethics and Its Relationship to Science (Hastings-on-Hudson: The Hastings Center, 1978); `Goethe and Psychoanalysis,’ in Francis J. Zucker, Frederick Amrine, and Harvey Wheeler (eds.), Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986).
See for instance Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey; Philosopher of the Human Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Michael Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, `The Heritage of Hegel,’ Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), p. 61.
Jürgen Habermas, `What Is Universal Pragmatics?’ Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979). See Thomas McCarthy, `Rationality and Relativism: Habermas’s `Overcoming’ of Hermeneutics,’ in John B. Thompson and David Held (eds.), Habermas: Critical Debates (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982); and Joseph Margolis, `Historicism, Universalism, and the Threat of Relativism,’ unpublished.
Regardless of one’s final assessment of Gouldner’s thesis. See Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms (New York: Seabury Press, 1980).
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. G. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (in translation) (New York: Random House, 1970); Paul Ricoeur, Ilermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Feyerabend, loc. cit.
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Margolis, J. (1989). Monistic and Dualistic Canons for the Natural and Human Sciences. In: Glassner, B., Moreno, J.D. (eds) The Qualitative-Quantitative Distinction in the Social Sciences. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 112. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3444-8_9
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