Logical Positivism II

This week we read Hempel and Ragin. To get the conversation rolling, I will post a few questions and/or comments.

Hempel distinguishes between scientific and pseudo-scientific explanations. Scientific explanations are deduced from universal laws, while pseudo-scientific explanations are based on metaphors. Is it not the case that by appealing to universal 'laws' Hempel is engaged in pseudo-science? Is he, in effect, using metaphors to explain causation?

If events can be deduced from universal laws, then why are you in graduate school? What universal law caused you to be here? Did you have any choice in the matter? Was it inevitable? Or by chance? Or does this seem bogus?

Throughout the book, Ragin warns against unspoken presumptions that then become embedded in empirical generalizations. For instance, he warns against the problem of presuming unit homogeneity, which then becomes embedded in generalizations about the empirical world. It seems to me that Ragin's analysis suffers from unspoken presumptions. For instance, he seems to presume that language has no epistemological status or role in social science. He seems to presume that langauge is transparent; that language purely and unproblematically conveys information from one person to another. Does he make this presumption? Should the presumption be made explicit? Can language be causal? Is language opaque? Problematic?

Are any events inevitable or necessary? Might they not be historically contingent upon a number of forces converging together at a particular time and place?

Three Tractarian Quandries

Since everyone (wisely? foolishly?) chose to avoid presenting this week on Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, it falls to me -- yet again -- to post the weekly blog entry that everyone can respond to. Let me simply post three questions dealing with specific passages of this complex and seminal work, in the hopes that they will stimulate some interesting reflections.

1) in 6.44, Wittgenstein writes: "Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Statements about the world as a whole do not seem to fall into the universe of propositions, since propositions have to be about objects in the world, and the world is not an object in the world. Hence statements about the world existing would fall outside of the boundaries of logic, and thus outside of the boundaries of the sayable. But if this is the case, why isn't it equally mystical to make claims about the existence or nonexistence of things in the world? Why is any statement not mystical?

2) in 3.1432, Wittgenstein writes: "We must not say, 'The complex sign "aRb" says "a stands in relation R to b"'; but we must say, 'That "a" stands in a certain relation to "b" says that aRb'." If the arrangement of objects already says this, what use is the propositional expression of that relationship? is there in fact any meaningful difference between the proposition "aRb" and the state of affairs such that a stands in relationship R to b?

3) in 6.3631, Wittgenstein writes: "It is clear that there are no grounds for believing that the simplest course of events will really happen." This is part of his criticisms of induction, causal reasoning, and the like. Given his position, does this work have anything to offer to social scientists -- for whom induction and causation are among the more commonly-deployed tools of the trade?

[Posted with ecto]

Constructing the Hacking test

[This entry serves two functions. First, it sets the stage for the discussion of Hacking on Thursday, so all students enrolled in the class will have to post a reply to it before class begins. Second, it provides a concrete example of the kinds of postings that I expect from the weekly presenters.]

Hacking offers a rather neat solution to one of the more complex problems bedeviling constructionist analyses: how can one simultaneously maintain that something is socially constructed and that it is in some sense real? We might call this the inverted-commas solution, inasmuch as it involves placing scare-quotes around the specific thing that we want to think of as socially constructed and then arguing that social construction applies to the concept (surrounded by inverted commas) and not to the object. We thus transform child abuse into 'child abuse', and can then without fear of contradiction claim both that child abuse is real and that 'child abuse' is a social construct. Ditto for 'multiple-personality disorder', 'dolomite', and so on.

It's an ingenious solution, one that simultaneously preserves two of our current intuitions about social life:

• things in the social world -- things that all of us as social theorists and social scientists are interested in -- are in some sense dependent on contingent human activity to produce and sustain them; and
• things in the social world are not simply a product of wishful thinking or flights of fancy, but seem to point beyond themselves -- 'child abuse' the concept, like 'genocide' the concept, is not simply a figment of our (collective) imaginations, since it refers to something.

But I wonder if it isn't too neat. In particular, I wonder if it glosses over a tension implicit in the claim that something is socially constructed: is that claim itself "real" or "socially constructed"? (Both?) Can there be a truth-value to a statement like "the notion of 'child abuse' (or the notion of 'social construction') is socially constructed"?

Take a concrete example: the "Hacking test," proposed by the author as a way of seeing where you fall on the three important dimensions of social construction: nominalism, contingency, and externality sources of stability in knowledge. What exactly does this test "test"? If it is an attempt to rank readers on a scale, is it constructing those readers' proclivities, or merely revealing them? Apply Hacking's own analysis: the notion of being a 'social constructionist' is clearly a social construction, but this doesn't necessarily mean that social constructionists are. So could you be essentially and intrinsically a social constructionist? Could you be so consistently? (Should this matter?)

Compare the Hacking test with, say, this personality-typing system based on the enneagram. Does that change the issue in any way?

Do claims about social construction occupy some kind of middle ground between a thing and the inverted-comma concept of that thing?

[Posted with ecto]