Critic of Philosophy of Social Science Chapter 9

Critic of Philosophy of Social Science

Chapter 9 Holism and Antireductionism in Sociology and Psychology

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Thursday, June 9, 2016

Abstract

This chapter deal with the holism of social science. At first, Rosenberg talked about the definitions of holism and functionalism. Then, he talks about the theory of Durkheim and why it can connect to the core of holism. Rosenberg then compare the holism with rather different reductionism, and discusses the differences. And he uses the concept of supervinience to support the holism. 

The Social Facts and the Holism

The social science deals not only psychological personal actions but also some distinctive social facts. These facts are is objective and not belong to a singular person. They can be observed as the behavior of a group of people. In this case, the idea of the existence of special differences of social facts when we counts large amount of people are called holism. Some people will argue that if there really exists group behaviors that cannot be described by personal causes and actions. Of course, the very complex collective behavior cannot easy be constructed by the units they consist of. Sometime it is just like a ‘’collective conscious’’ making decisions.

Holism relates to another feature of social science—functionalism, which is the method of understand features of society by their ‘’functions’’. On the other side, the methodological individualists claim that all social facts can be explained by generalizing individual behavior and the idiom [L] mentioned in the previous chapters. Traditional aspects from methodological individualists thinks that all the results should only be translated to observations. The failure of this point of view is that it abandons too much of explanatory ability, and the holists do not do so. They imply that the descriptions of social facts should apply the best explanatory functions.

One of the important view that holists holds is that the whole is more than just a group of people. In other words, they may be two kind of social facts, one about the group, and one about the single person. For them, the social facts should supply evidences to the beliefs and ideas. However, this argument do not explain how the small parts influence the whole. To make the viewpoint more convincing, they need a more powerful argument to stand for their idea.

Autonomy of Society

Some sociologists have studied social facts by applying the holism. One example is Durkheim’s research. He analyzed suicide cases, and found out that the suicide cases rises up at some period of time. It is not easy to explain by personal psychology factors. He summed up three different causes of suicide, which are altruistic suicide (too much of social integration), egoistic suicide (too little social integration), and anomic suicide (caused by great and rapid changes of society). He thinks the suicide cases are mainly caused by the structure of the entire society in the meantime. It seems that Durkheim take the view that the society is a whole, integrated, organic unity (which can be describe by the ‘autonomy of society’ or ‘the group mind’). By Durkheim, the so-called the mental states of a person is also a manifestation of the entire society.

Reductionism

If the psychological laws are helpful, they could link the social integrations in to personal psychology, i.e. the sociology is reducible to psychology. This is the opposite of holism because the holists claims that there are always something that cannot be reduced. One of the methods to still apply holism is to view psychology and the mental changes as appendix phenomena. It not caused suicide but is a by-product from a causing-suicide society. Also, the problem with reductionism is that many phenomenon are just too difficult to reduce in to simple laws. We can only describe nearly right general laws in a much more huge scale—the macroscopic scale.

Even in natural science, there are always subjects that cannot reduce to a more fundamental subject in the near future. Rosenberg claims that maybe we can never view social facts as psychological facts even if all the psychological theory is very complete.  That is to say, the social facts can though as a more fundamental and metaphysical laws not just by methodological meaning.

Supervenience

Rosenberg also mentions the philosophical concept of supervenience and multiple realizablity. This means any being can be observed must obey:

(a) This object will have certain kind of composition.

(b) If another subject have exactly the same composition, it will have the same function--supervenience.

(c) There are always multiple ways to form an object that is concluded in some kind of concept (e.g. chair, desk, pencil, person, etc.) – the multiple realizablity.

It is hard to find a term in social science that is not defined by its functions. If the function was defined, we will see the supervenience and multiple realizations it bring. The compositions it supervenes could be actions and behaviors. Rosenberg strongly suggests that the social facts are not easy reducible because the object is not just the sum of all its compositions, and this part stands for the point of view of holists.

Personal Opinions

After reading all the articles, I think it is an interesting to discuss about if it is really impossible to prove all social facts by psychological laws. I think it is not very realistic. There are three reasons:

(1) The psychological laws are not absolute; they are not so precise like physics laws.

(2) The social facts are much more complex than a single person’s thinking. There will be a lot of factors produced by the environment, and it will also be influenced by the composition of the society.

(3) It is very hard to set experiments to prove the relationship between personal laws and the social laws.

However, we can still try to guess what will happen in the future by the laws we have known. 

Reference

Rosenberg, Alexander (2016). Philosophy of Social Science (fifth edition), Westview press, ISBN 978-0813345925