ON-01: Knowing and the Known: Facts and Explanations in the Social Sciences

What is this course about? In the social sciences generally, we have well-established vocabularies for expressing substantive claims about the world, and for talking about the various tools and techniques that we use in evaluating those claims. What we do not have in the same level of detail are vocabularies for discussing methodology, understood here as the logic of any particular inquiry: why we might want to use particular techniques for answering particular questions, what kind of questions we might ask about particular research topics, and in general the epistemic status of our knowledge-claims. This course aims to construct a more adequate lexicon for discussing these methodological issues, surveying debates in the philosophy of social science and then diving into the critical role of explanation in social-scientific work. Who is this course for? All practicing social scientists are, so to speak, practical philosophers of science, in that our accounts of how scientific knowledge ought to be produced shape how we do our work whether or not we are explicit about our philosophical commitments. So this course will be useful to everyone.

For various historical reasons, the social sciences—especially in the English-speaking world—have been dominated by neopositivism for decades. Indeed, neopositivism, with its commitment to the elucidation of nomothetic generalizations through a procedure of hypothesis-testing across multiple cases, is all too often mistaken for “the scientific method,” crowding out other approaches to knowledge-production. The epistemic interests of neopositivist research are then mistaken for the goals of science per se, despite the fact that neopositivism doesn’t capture the actual practice of physical sciences like physics terribly well.

The result of this methodological monoculture is that we do not really understand what neopositivism is, let alone what alternatives to neopositivism might look like. In this course we will begin by excavating the roots of neopositivism in the European Enlightenment, and in the Vienna Circle of logical positivists whose work provides the proximate point of departure for most contemporary discussions of these issues. We will then turn to a consideration of three prominent alternatives to neopositivism (realism, pragmatic analyticism, and critical reflexivity) and how they cash out the problem of knowledge differently. Throughout, the emphasis will be on the practical implications of the philosophical commitments that constitute different approaches, and how they inform different kinds of empirical work.

The methodological pluralism explored in the first part of the course will then be turned to a more specific set of issues involving facts and explanations, and the role of theory of different sorts in both of those endeavors. While neopositivist approaches tend to regard explanation as a form of description of aggregate patterns, other approaches adopt different stances on the relationship between description and explanation. This shapes the operative notion of theory that a researcher works with, and manifests in very different kinds of research products. Simple binaries like nomothetic/ideographic are insufficient to capture the rich diversity of styles of description and explanation in the social sciences, so in this course we will aim to do better.

For each of the five class days, the instructor will prepare a lecture that sets the stage for the day’s readings. That lecture will be available for asynchronous viewing before the scheduled class session. Each class day will feature a synchronous discussion session, in which the day’s readings will be interactively pondered and engaged with. Finally, for each day, each member of the class will be required to post a post-discussion reflective entry in the class discussion board, ruminating on the day’s discussion and connecting it to the student’s own work.

Day-to-day outline:

Day 1

The history of neopositivism. Readings to include A. J. Ayer, Karl Popper, and Carl Hempel.

Day 2

Dualism(s). Readings to include Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, John Searle, and Roy Bhaskar.

Day 3

Monism(s). Readings to include Max Weber, Sandra Harding, and John Dewey. Maybe a little Wittgenstein.

Day 4

Description. Readings to include Jackson (2024)

Day 5

Explanation. Readings to include Jackson (2024), Nancy Cartwright, and Anna Tsing.

This description is subject to change at the discretion of the Instructor

2 Credits

For completion of all work before and during the course, as outlined by the Instructor, and 90% participation and attendance of the course.