The debate over the extent to which the social sciences should model themselves on the natural sciences seems never ending. Reopening a debate that some would say defined modern political science after World War II and that then attracted increasing philosophical attention and raged into the 1970s, Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely take aim at the persistent “physics envy” in some of the social sciences, setting out a case for radically rejecting the “naturalist” model of social and political inquiry. Their broad line of argument is familiar: the subject matter of the social sciences is fundamentally different from that of the natural sciences in that the former’s objective is to understand human beliefs and actions. In contrast to natural objects, human behavior is meaningful and must be grasped through a hermeneutical process in which the observer comes to understand its meaning. Natural scientists study phenomena from the outside and develop concepts to describe and explain what they observe, but these concepts and whatever questions of interpretation to which they give rise are rooted in the communities and practices of the natural scientists. By contrast, the first task of the social scientists is to grasp the concepts and self-understandings of social actors, which requires attention to the meanings of these ideas in the lifeworlds of the actors being studied. Where natural scientists explain what they observe by providing causal explanations that (at least ideally) subsume observed phenomena under universal laws, “the study of human beliefs and actions is historical, cultural, and narrative in form.” It “requires the interpretation of meanings— relating beliefs, actions, and practices to further webs of meaning” (p. 1).
If the broad outlines of Bevir and Blakely’s argument are familiar, many features of it are new and engaging. One is their philosophical and methodological pluralism. They acknowledge that there are a number of philosophical positions that lead to the interpretive turn; although they critically assess some of these positions (e.g., Schutz’s phenomenology and Foucault’s anti-humanism), they do not argue for a definitive approach and instead present anti-naturalism not so much as a distinct philosophical position but as a framework that can accommodate a variety of positions while providing a fully adequate account of social and political inquiry. In a similar vein they acknowledge the variety of methodologies used in political research today and explicitly reject the frequent association of the interpretive turn with qualitative as opposed to quantitative research. The range of their concerns is comprehensive, including such issues as concept formation; large-scale studies, both diachronic and synchronic; and the relationship of social inquiry to ethics and public policy. Although they draw on different disciplines in developing their argument, their work is also distinctive in its focus on political science and use of research drawing on different subfields of the discipline. Its concrete rooting in political and social science research makes it impossible to dismiss their work as irrelevant or out of touch with what political and other social scientists actually do.
As the subtitle makes clear, the principal objective of the book is to present a critique of what Bevir and Blakely call “naturalism” in the social sciences; as with any critique, it raises the question of whether or to what extent its explication of its object, naturalist social science, adequately represents the views of those who identify with this position or whether it is a straw figure. Some might respond to their critique of naturalism by pointing out that the naturalism they describe is heavily weighted toward logical positivist thinkers such as Carl Hempel (see, for example, pp. 35–36 and notes), whose voices are no longer authoritative in the philosophy of science. More importantly, their characterization of the aim of the social sciences might be disputed. In their account, the social sciences seek “to understand human behavior,” which they gloss as “understand[ing] and explain[ing] human agency” or, even more specifically, “human beliefs and actions” (p. 1). One might agree with their view that human beliefs and actions are inherently meaningful and that their meanings must be grasped hermeneutically in terms of the concepts, systems of belief, and, more generally, the self-understandings of social actors. But much of what happens in social life, although in large part a result of human behavior, is not a form of human behavior, and thus is not in itself a human belief or action. The collapse of world financial markets in 2008 and the onset of population decline in Japan in 2004 are, no doubt, consequences of human actions, but they are not intended consequences. To be sure, unraveling their causes and explaining their subsequent effects may require that we grasp the self-understandings of social actors. We may need to probe the reasoning of bankers, monetary authorities, and members of regulatory bodies to understand why, for example, Lehman Brothers was allowed to go under; similarly, we may need to learn whether changing meanings of family and children may have played a role in the decline of the birth rate in Japan. But understanding the decisions and actions of particular individuals does not by itself tell us how these decisions and actions interacted in ways to produce the social outcomes in question. Even if we grant that naturalism, with its focus on discovering causal regularities and predicting outcomes, does not give us the tools for explaining beliefs and actions, it does not follow that naturalism must be rejected entirely in social and political research.
Even in the field of beliefs and actions it is hard to see how we can entirely dispense with causal processes and prediction. In discussing changes in belief, Bevir and Blakely argue that because beliefs are held for particular reasons, and because those reasons are embedded in webs of beliefs, concepts, and so on, our “beliefs are vulnerable to change whenever the supporting webs ... are challenged.” New experiences, for example, can lead to new beliefs that may be in tension with our existing beliefs, causing us to revise our existing web of beliefs in ways that are not entirely predictable. An interpretive approach is necessary for us to trace, let alone to understand, this process. But the authors also recognize that there can be “pathologic” changes in belief resulting from “disease, self-deception, irrationality, and other forms of distortion” (p. 25). Interpretation may be necessary to understand the new beliefs induced by pathological factors, but to the extent that changes are due to such factors, interpretation does not explain the take-up of the new beliefs, and we must view them “from the outside,” not only from within the self-understandings of social actors and not only in terms of meanings.
Although the scholarship represented in this work is impressive for the range of sources, thinkers, and schools of thought the authors engage, they do not draw on the work of Jürgen Habermas. Like them, Habermas recognizes the interpretive or hermeneutic dimension of social inquiry, but he also insists that it is insufficient, at least in our social world(s), because much of what occurs is a result of forces we do not control or even recognize. He calls for a critical social science that, by unearthing those causal processes, would increase the scope of human freedom. But to move in that direction would require a more accommodating view of the role of what we might call a quasi-naturalist social or political science.
In raising these critical questions I do not mean to discount the value of Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely’s contribution, but to continue the dialogue about the philosophy of the social and political sciences that they reopened. Their thoughtful and well-researched book provides the occasion for us to grapple with fundamental questions regarding the nature of social and political inquiry.
