In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

25 An Overview are abstracted from existing social practices are threatened with a false rigidity or with pious vacuity and that existing criteria are always open to conflicting interpretations and applications and can be weighted in different ways. The effective standards and norms that are operative in scientific inquiry are subject to change and modification in the course of scientific inquiry. We are now aware that it is not only important to understand the role of tradition in science as mediated through research programs or research traditions but that we must understand how such traditions arise, develop, and become progressive and fertile, as well as the ways in which they can degenerate. Other questions about scientific inquiry also come into prominence as a result of this shift of orientation. What is it that constitutes a scientific community? How are norms embodied in the social practices of such communities, and how do such communities reach objective-intersubjective-agreement? We must do justice to the ways in which such communities are committed to the regulative ideal of achieving a rational consensus and discern how this is compatible with individual initiative and forms of dissent that may question a prevailing consensus. When I examine the controversies concerning "incommensurability" (and the meaning of this term) later in this book, we will discover that while some of the apparently extreme claims made about the significance of incommensurability must be rejected, nevertheless an important truth emerges from these controversies that must be preserved in an adequate understanding of scientific inquiry as a rational process. These issues will be explored subsequently, but in this preliminary overview, I want to turn to another area of controversy that shows some remarkable and deep parallels with the issues raised, the positions taken, and the strategies of argumentation used in the postempiricist philosophy and history of the natural sciences. THE IDEA OF A SOCIAL SCIENCE A few years prior to the appearance of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, another monograph appeared, Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958). Like Kuhn's book, it was short, polemical, provocative, and ambiguous; it too touched off a controversy that has continued until the present. Winch was not primarily concerned with giving an analysis of 26 Beyond Ob;ectivism and Relativism the natural sciences but rather with drawing a strong conceptual contrast between the natural and the social disciplines. Ironically (and the significance of this will soon be apparent), in drawing his contrast Winch virtually accepted the empiricist image of science that Kuhn and others (including Polanyi, Feyerabend, and Hanson) were discrediting and deconstructing. Against the mainstream of social scientists, Winch sought to show the conceptual confusion involved in thinking that the object, methods, and aim of the social disciplines are the same as or even analogous to those of the natural sciences. As he put the issue in one of his subsequent clarifications, he was interested in giving an analysis and exhibiting the distinctive, nonreducible "logical grammar" of the"concept of the social."37 One of the many influences on Kuhn was the work of the later Wittgenstein , especially the increasing importance for Wittgenstein of language games and forms of life. In Winch, this aspect of Wittgenstein's investigations is the dominant influence. Winch was one of the first to suggest and try to show that not only the work of Wittgenstein but the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy had significant consequences for understanding social life and for gaining a new insight into what is (or ought to be) distinctive about the social disciplines. Social life is a form of rule-following activity, using the term "rule" in the sense in which Wittgenstein, according to Winch, used it in his Philosophical Investigations. Whatever one's final judgment of the adequacy of Winch's claims, he must be given credit for showing the close relations between concerns that had previously been thought of as independent and unrelated-the type of analysis of language games that we find in Wittgenstein and analytic philosophy, and the concrete understanding of social life that we find in the social disciplines.38 Until the appearance of Winch's monograph, the main issues in analytic philosophy had appeared to be irrelevant to serious concern with questions pertaining to the social disciplines and social life. But this is not the only connection that Winch made. He realized that there were analogies and subterranean connections between the type of...

Share