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Metascience (2012) 21:391394
DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9592-7
ESSAY REVIEW
How should philosophy of social science proceed?

Chrysostomos Mantzavinos (ed.): Philosophy of the social
sciences: Philosophical theory and scientific practice. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009, 344pp, 18.99 PB
Harold Kincaid
Published online: 28 June 2011

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
This volume of 10 new essays by respected contributors to the philosophy of social

science along with commentary from both philosophers and social scientists raises
two fundamental questions: how should philosophy of social science proceed and
what are we to make of much social science that offers qualitative evidence and
piecemeal explanations? The chapters give rather different answers to the first
question and mostly raise rather than try to answer the second.
There are two poles in philosophy of social science, with the literature falling on
a continuum between. One end might be called naturalist in the sense of naturalized
epistemology and naturalized philosophy of science. On this view, philosophy of
social science and social science itself are continuous, philosophy has no special
knowledge or tools that only it can provide, philosophy of social science has to be
intimately connected with real social research, philosophy of science can and should
try to be of use to social scientists themselves, and social phenomena are susceptible
to the broad methods of science in general. On the other end is the view that there
are deep, eternal philosophical questions raised by the social sciences that can be
and sometime can only be answered by philosophical reflection independent of and
prior to the details of social research practices. Of course, since naturalism can be
interpreted weakly or strongly and since a great many philosophers would prefer not
to be thought of as anti-naturalists, it is common to find contributors who would
claim to be naturalists but at the same time provide arguments and analyses that are
much closer to the anti-naturalist pole.
The chapters included in this volume are representative in these regards. The
chapters by Searle, Pettit, Bratman, and Papineau fall pretty strongly on the anti-
naturalist end. Searle is the most obviously so. He is quite explicit: social ontology
is prior to methodology and theory (9). Likewise, by conceptual analysis, he
H. Kincaid (&)
Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham,
900 13th Street South, Birmingham, AL 35294-1260, USA
e-mail: hkincaid@me.com
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claims to show that in understanding society, we have to introduce the notion of

collective intentionality (12). His analyses show that one can imagine a society
with no institutional facts beyond language, (18), because social institutions
logically presuppose language but there is no equivalent conceptual dependence of
language on social institutions. No social science research is mentioned in his
chapter. To my mind, these claims are entirely dubious, but if that does not seem
apparent on its face, try translating these ideas into claims about physics or biology.
You get Kant legislating on what physics can and cannot do or Naturphilosphie-like
speculations on the essence of life that claim to show that it could never be
understood by chemistry. It is certainly likewise hard to imagine social scientists
finding much of interest in Searles baroque conceptual constructions that he claims
are the glue of society.
Bratman, Pettit, and Papineau are not so explicit, but there is no doubt they lie to
the anti-naturalist end. Like Searle, Bratman wants to provide a conceptual analysis
that explains sociality, though he restricts himself to small groups of adults with no
asymmetric power relations (some social scientists would think he is restricting
himself to the null set). Sociality emerges (his word) out of shared intentions as
he analyzes them. These are the building blocks that help ensure modes of
norm-assessable functioning that are characteristic of shared intention. These modes
of functioning will include intention-like responsiveness of each to the end of the
shared action, aspects of treating each other as intentional co-participants, the
pursuit of coherent and effective interweaving of sub-plans, and dispositions to help
(44). Perhaps, there are clear empirical claims lurking in here somewhere, but it is
not obvious. The notion of a norm is fundamental, for example, yet it is left
unexplicated or related to the many different things social scientists have identified
under this rubric. Again, no relevant social science is cited.
Pettits chapter is on the possibility of groups being agents. Many groups do not
have agency he believes, but there may be some that do. Behavior manifests agency
if it exhibits a purposive-representational pattern. He grants that others would
require more, such as a psychological conscious realization of purposive-represen-
tation behavior or the ability to reflect on the pattern of behavior. Pettit finds these
further requirements unconvincing, however. So he argues that some social groups
meet the weaker version. Purposive representational behavior does not exhibit
random noise (or not much), holds up across contexts, is variably realized, and is
non-contradictory. Straw vote assemblies, he believes, have these characteristics.
Straw vote assembles not only vote on resolutions but also vote on competing
previous resolutions that are logically inconsistent with them. This gives them the
kind of lack of contradiction essential to agency that groups based on majoritarian
sequential rule do not.
Straw vote assemblies may be interesting as possible political institution, but
Pettit gives no empirical examples of them (and a quick literature search did not
reveal much). I am not sure exactly what turns on whether we would call them
group agents. Perhaps there are implications for political philosophy, but I do not
see that anything follows relevant to the social scientists. Social scientists do think
about agency. However, they frequently think of it in a much more pragmatic and
empirical ways. For example, at any given level of aggregation is that group agent
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Metascience (2012) 21:391394 393
enough like that we can assign a utility function to it (thus getting Pettits
consistency)? Can nation-states be usefully modeled this way for certain purposes?
Can they, as economists say, be treated as representative agents? Are individual
human being always best modeled as agents or as collections of sub-personal
agents? These judgements depend on the purposes of modeling, on how we pick out
and describe their component members, and are a matter of degree. Pettit cites
Dennetts (1991) notion of real patterns in support of his account of agency, but as I
read Dennett, I would see him endorsing real patterns as matters of degree (they can
compress more or less information) and overlapping in various ways (Rosss (2000)
rainforest realism) that is quite at odds with the project of deciding on
philosophical grounds what an agent is and then deciding what gets the title.
Papineau grapples with the question of whether there are laws in the social
sciences and takes it that a proper physicalism makes that unlikely. That makes it
different from the other sciences. Only if the social sciences invoke selectional
mechanisms or can find uniform physical mechanisms will they make the grade.
The anti-naturalism comes in ignoring what the other sciences are really like
(philosophers of biology generally doubt there is much in the way of laws in real
biology) and from using a philosophical doctrine with a specific twist to try to
decide what the social sciences cannot do. There are other variants of physicalism
with less reductive implications. Not surprisingly, no real social science is
discussed. The two respected social scientists that comment on the chapter rightfully
on my view find the chapter unhelpful philosophical reductionism.
The other chapters in the book by Mitchell on complexity, biology and social
science, Little on recent developments in social science that are as much philosophy
of the social sciences, Cartwright on the limits of Randomized Clinical Trials
(RTCs), Mantzavinos on naturalizing hermeneutics, and Woodward on the social
science of human cooperation are to my mind much more interesting than the above
chapters because they tie into real issues in the social sciences. So Woodward assess
the variety of sources of human cooperation and the evidence for and against them,
to me a much more interesting project than Bratmans conceptual analysis of what it
means to paint the house together. Cartwright carefully lays out the general
obstacles to inferring from clinical trials to whether the treatment will work in other
settings. RCTs are increasing popular in the social sciences, especially development
economics, so these are certainly issues relevant to social research.
At points, this second set of essays is still not quite as naturalist as I would like to
see. Little defends what he calls localism (but generally called supervenience in the
general literature): social phenomena possess their characteristics by virtue of
individuals. He concludes that social explanations must have individualist micro-
foundations. However, micro-foundations can mean all kinds of different things,
and there is no easy route from supervenience to a need for micro-foundations (cf.
Kincaid 1996, 2012a, b; Hoover 2001). He also says that social entities such as
states have no essence and thus there is little or no place for generalizations in social
research, just description of mechanisms found by methods like comparative
analysis. I fear these are philosophically motivated pronouncements about how
social science must work that do not confront the real problems of social research.
Knight, a distinguished political scientist, objects in his commentary that social
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scientists are indeed interested in mechanisms that allow for generalizations across
cases.
This brings me to the second important question running though many of these
essays: how and when can the social sciences take the kinds of evidence it has to
provide compelling explanations, assuming that we do not demand the strict laws
that are perhaps characteristic of physics and allow a variety of qualitative
evidence? Little points to recent developments such as causal process tracing and
comparative analysis as furthering the goals of social research, but it is a big, open
question what the standards are for such methods and the extent to which they
succeed (cf. Waldner 2012; Goertz 2012). Little, as we saw, thought they did not
warrant generalizations; an unhappy conclusion, given the fact that social scientists
seem to have produced a number of generalizations, albeit restricted ones (cf.
Goertz 2012). Cartwright thinks it exceedingly rare that we have the knowledge
needed to argue that the results of a social experiment can be generalized outside the
experimental setting. This may be true, but she provides no concrete evidence for
the claim, and what is really needed is an analysis of the strategies that might be
used to argue for external validity. Social and behavioral scientists have
increasingly sophisticated to deal with the fundamental problem of causal
confounding and causal complexity (cf. Ragin 1989; Winship and Morgan and
Winship 2007). How these methods work and how well they work are interesting
open question for the naturalist tradition in the philosophy of social science.
References
Dennett, D. 1991. Real patterns. Journal of Philosophy 88: 2751.

Goertz, G. 2012. Descriptivecausal generalizations: empirical laws in the social sciences? In Kincaid
(2012a).
Hoover, K. 2001. Causality in macroeconomics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kincaid, H. 1996. Philosophical foundations of the social sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Kincaid, H. 2012a. The Oxford handbook of the philosophy of the social sciences. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Kincaid, H. 2012b. Mechanisms, causal modeling, and the limitations of traditional multiple regression.
In Kincaid (2012a).
Morgan, S., and C. Winship. 2007. Counterfactuals and causal inference. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ragin, C. 1989. The comparative method: Moving beyond qualitative and quantitative strategies. Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Ross, D. 2000. Rainforest realism: A Dennettian theory of existence. In Dennetts philosophy: A
comprehensive assessment, ed. D. Ross, A. Brook, and D. Thompson, 147168. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Waldner, D. 2012. Process tracing and causal mechanisms. In Kincaid (2012a).
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Metascience (2012) 21:391394

How should philosophy of social science proceed?

Published online: 28 June 2011

This volume of 10 new essays by respected contributors to the philosophy of social

claims to show that in understanding society, we have to introduce the notion of

Dennett, D. 1991. Real patterns. Journal of Philosophy 88: 2751.

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