Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Decline of Naturalism by Jason Blakely (review)

Blakely tells the story of an intellectual revolution in the social sciences that occurred over fifty years ago. But it was a quiet revolution; few people paid attention. Blakely's aim is to reconstruct and "recover" its claims so that scholars will realize what they already should have known: one cannot go about business as usual in the social sciences after the uprising of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Their aim was to dismantle the assumptions governing the "naturalistic" social science that, by the 1970s, had reigned for nearly a century. One virtue of Blakely's book is his contextualization of the political and intellectual conditions and moods out of which their arguments developed: both were associated with the New Left, which worried about the "dynamic between naturalist forms of social science and anti-humanistic politics." Another virtue is Blakely's careful tracing of the stages and tools of their arguments, from analytic demonstrations of logical incoherence (for example, the behaviorist concept of "stimulus") to the full formulation of rival ontologies and philosophical anthropologies, aided by work in phenomenology and hermeneutics. Both Taylor and MacIntyre insisted on the irreducibility of interpretation, evaluation, normativity, and meaning in any investigation of social activity, both in terms of the human subjects being studied and the "explanations" proposed by the observer. Yet—and this is one of the subtleties of Blakely's exposition—MacIntyre and Taylor also rejected the relativistic view of social science as mere "description" of the social actors' self-understandings (as in the work of Peter Winch), since descriptions no less than explanations always involve "evaluations." As Blakely puts it, "a theory about how to explain human agency necessarily entails judgments about the reasonableness of rival conceptualizations."

Although this study does not treat the entire philosophical output of these two major thinkers, one cannot read it without sensing that their projects were founded on and motivated by their comprehensive criticisms of naturalist social science. Blakely believes that these criticisms are devastating—I am inclined to agree—yet he also suggests that most social science as currently practiced has not internalized them. Blakely further believes that the abandonment of "naturalism" does not require the abandonment of empirical method. And so, the reader is left wondering what a "reunification of empirical and normative concerns" looks like in practice.