Abstract
This chapter explores the different features of the critical method as an epistemological and methodological underpinning for the critical social sciences and for critical theory more generally, and furthermore calls into question the prevailing methodological assumptions and theses that underpin the mainstream contemporary social sciences. It argues that critique as a method of knowledge production breaks with the most basic and deeply entrenched methodological assumptions and logics of the mainstream social sciences. The author explores the basic pillars of the critical method: the nature of reality as dynamic and processual rather than discrete and static, the nature of the unification of “factual” knowledge claims and “normative” or “evaluative” knowledge claims, and the relation between essence and appearance in the comprehension of social facts and social reality more generally. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the nature of critical judgment as an essential aim of critical theory or critical social sciences.
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Habermas maintains that this split between the empirical and practical dimensions of philosophy occurred much earlier: “Prior to positivism, critical knowledge referred to a scientific orientation in action … However, after the empirical sciences of the new type, so successful since the time of Galileo, had attained a consciousness of themselves in positivism, and after analytic philosophy, inspired by the Vienna circle as well as by Peirce and Dewey, had explicated this self-understanding in terms of the philosophy of science, especially in the work of Carnap, Popper, and Morris, the two cognitive functions were distinctly separated – and both deprived of their power of orientation for action” (Habermas 1973: 263). Although Habermas is correct to point to this as a decisive feature of the development of modern forms of science and its separation from practical rationality, it is clear that thinkers such as Hegel and Marx were attempting to formulate a modern form of philosophical science that would once again unite the cognitive and practical features of a fuller form of human rationality.
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Marx’s theory of scientific knowledge makes a similar claim in that the object itself dictates the kinds of reasoning needed for its comprehension, hence the materialist understanding of matter preceding consciousness. As Patrick Murray has explained: “This entails necessity in that the relation between the ‘facts’ and the logic that is to draw them together into the shape of a science sheds its arbitrariness. The object under study determines the science now in second intension; it determines the logic of the ‘facts.’ Marx’s critique of empiricism is immanent in calling empiricism to submit the question of the relation of ‘facts’ and their logical reconstruction itself to empirical scrutiny. This critical approach to concepts and their logical interconnections is one of the features that sets Marx’s theory of scientific knowledge apart from positivist understandings of science” (Murray 1988: 41). Also see McCarthy (1988: 135ff.).
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Westphal correctly notes on this point: “Because the essential interrelation between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ would determine the characteristics of each of them, a thorough investigation of appearances would lead one to comprehend ‘reality’ as well” (Westphal 1989: 145).
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Norman Geras says on this point that “the content explains the form, and the essence the appearances. But this must not be regarded as a journey from illusion to reality. It is rather a process of elucidating one reality by disclosing its foundation and determination by another” (Geras 1971: 77).
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Howard Williams correctly suggests, for Marx: “Empirical reality exists just as much as does scientific reality. The one can be observed by the senses and the other can be discovered by the intellect. Marx subscribes to two distinct concepts of appearance, therefore, because appearance possesses these two aspects” (Williams 1989: 144).
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In the Preface to the Phänomenologie, Hegel writes: “Among the many consequences that follow from what has been said, it is important to emphasize this: that knowledge is only real and is only fully put forth in the form of science, in the form of a system” (Hegel 1970b: 27). Also see the discussion by Westphal (1989: 140ff.).
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This was also the position worked out by Lukács (1971) when he argued that part of the effect of reification was the impression of economic logics onto the categories of social science and social philosophy itself constituting what he calls “antinomies of bourgeois thought.”
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Adorno therefore writes that, when studying the psychological structure of the individual, that the “[p]ersonality is not … to be hypostatized as an ultimate determinant. Far from being something which is given in the beginning, which remains fixed and acts upon the surrounding world, personality evolves under the impact of the social environment and can never be isolated from the social totality within which is occurs” (Adorno et al. 1950: 5). Cf. Fromm (1971).
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Thompson, M.J. (2017). Critique as the Epistemic Framework of the Critical Social Sciences. In: Thompson, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55801-5_11
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