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From: carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.EDU (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Modern man (knowledge and the social sciences)
Message-ID: <680@gargoyle.UChicago.EDU>
Date: Tue, 23-Jun-87 14:35:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.680
Posted: Tue Jun 23 14:35:13 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 25-Jun-87 04:21:16 EDT
References: <3587e521.44e6@apollo.uucp>
Reply-To: carnes@gargoyle.uchicago.edu.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Organization: U. of Chicago, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 68
Xref: mnetor talk.religion.misc:2913 sci.philosophy.tech:201

nelson_p@apollo.uucp:
>This shows, as I noted a month ago here, that most of the disputes in
>this group are essentially epistemological in nature.  In my original
>posting [I] defined 'knowledge' as being of the scientific definition
>i.e., generally agreed-upon, testable, predictive, repeatable results
>etc.   You may, of course, adopt a definition that includes things
>like personal experience if you wish but I find such a definition is
>too broad, i.e., almost anything qualifies as knowledge that way,
>even a great many things that directly contradict each other.  

There is no such animal as `the scientific definition of knowledge'
or `the scientific epistemology'.  Your view of knowledge is, in
broad terms, an empiricist one, which is orthodoxy in the hard
sciences because it explains them well.  But the philosophical
question you and others are begging is whether an empiricist
epistemology is adequate for the kind of understanding we can have of
the specifically human world studied by the social sciences.  The
following quote from Charles Taylor's essay on `Interpretation and
the Sciences of Man' [*The Review of Metaphysics* 25 (1971), pp.
3-51] will give one a taste of an different conception of knowledge:

  "The progress of natural science has lent great credibility to this
  epistemology, since it can be plausibly reconstructed on this model,
  as for instance has been done by the logical empiricists.  And, of
  course, the temptation has been overwhelming to reconstruct the
  sciences of man on the same model; or rather to launch them in lines
  of enquiry that fit this paradigm, since they are constantly said to
  be in their `infancy'.  Psychology, where an earlier vogue of
  behaviourism is being replaced by a boom of computer-based models, is
  far from the only case.
  
  "The form this epistemological bias -- one might say obsession --
  takes is different for different sciences.... But in general, the
  empiricist orientation must be hostile to a conduct of enquiry which
  is based on interpretation, and which encounters the hermeneutical
  circle as this was characterized above.  This cannot meet the
  requirements of intersubjective, non-arbitrary verification which it
  considers essential to science.  And along with the epistemological
  stance goes the ontological belief that reality must be susceptible
  to understanding and explanation by science so understood.  From this
  follows a certain set of notions of what the sciences of man must be.
  
  "On the other hand, many, including myself, would like to argue that
  these notions about the sciences of man are sterile, that we cannot
  come to understand important dimensions of human life within the
  bounds set by this epistemological orientation....
  
  "Common meanings, as well as inter-subjective ones, fall through the
  net of mainstream social science.  They can find no place in its
  categories.  For they are not simply a converging set of subjective
  reactions, but part of the common world.  What the ontology of
  mainstream social science lacks is the notion of meaning as not
  simply for an individual subject; of a subject who can be a `we' as
  well as an `I'.  The exclusion of this possibility, of the communal,
  comes once again from the baleful influence of the epistemological
  tradition for which all knowledge has to be reconstructed from the
  impressions imprinted on the individual subject.  But if we free
  ourselves from the hold of these prejudices, this seems a wildly
  implausible view about the development of human consciousness; we are
  aware of the world through a `we' before we are through an `I'.
  Hence we need the distinction between what is just shared in the
  sense that each of us has it in our individual worlds, and that which
  is in the common world.  But the very idea of something which is in
  the common world in contradistinction to what is in all the
  individual worlds is totally opaque to empiricist epistemology.
  Hence it finds no place in mainstream social science...."

Richard Carnes