The Verstehen Position
It is often argued that there is a fundamental divide between the Natural
and Human Sciences because, while it is possible to know all about the physical
objects and processes that are studied in the Natural Sciences with complete
precision, this cannot be done with human beings, which are the subject matter
of the Human Sciences, because human beings are more than just a collection of
physical processes. This point of view, often called the Verstehen
Position (from the German, ‘to understand’), claims that in order to really
‘understand’ a human being you have to use introspection and empathy and your
own understanding of yourself and bring that to bear on your subject. The fact
that personal and subjective factors are exactly the sorts of things that we
try to exclude in the Natural Sciences serves to reinforce the idea that there
is a clear difference between these two areas of sciebce.
However, it will be useful to consider in detail twelve specific claims about
the differences between the Natural and Human Sciences to see how different
they really are:
1.
In the natural sciences, a
hypothesis is verified by experiment, but the social sciences cannot experiment.
The ability to experiment is essential to the testing of explanations in the
natural sciences. However, physics need not be taken as the model for the
natural sciences, and neither astronomy nor geology can experiment. Moreover,
if the meaning of “experiment” is somewhat broadened to include an
investigation for which there are controls, then the
social sciences do experiment. Thus, a study in Canada of male hospital attendants
found that those who had been shown a movie of a violent knife fight were more
aggressively punitive toward their patients than a control group of attendants
who were shown a “peaceful” movie. Other inquiries in the social sciences have
investigated whether voters are influenced by a candidate’s religion; and
whether having a television set at home has any effect on how often the
children go to church on Sunday.
2.
The natural sciences can repeat
experiments in order to verify their hypotheses, and can generalize their
results. Any one cubic centimeter of pure water is exactly like any other; if
you find out its weight, then you can predict the weight of every cubic
centimeter of water. The social sciences, however, it is claimed, deal with
situations that are not uniform: no two persons and no two social contexts are
exactly alike. The events of the past have a specific time and place index;
there is a uniqueness (or Einmaligkeit) to
the French Revolution, for example, or to the rise of fascism, which makes it
impossible to include it in any generalization. However, this claim for the Verstehen position cannot be upheld. It is
only by an idealization that two actual cubic centimeters of water may be taken
to be alike: they are never exactly alike, but the differences between
them (in impurities, for example, or temperature) may be irrelevant to a
particular inquiry, just as the differences between two voters or two villages
may be ignored in certain investigations. Certain of the natural sciences (such
as geology) deal with unique past events; and every physical event is (under
certain interpretations) uniquely dated by entropy. The uniqueness of past
historical events does not prevent the discernment of patterns (for example, in
all revolutions) or the pragmatic grouping of individual events into classes in
order to point out functional interrelations (such as between war and
inflation, or between frustration and aggression). Causal laws connect kinds of
events by abstracting from those singularities which are held to be irrelevant
to that inquiry (e.g., whether the hospital attendants in the previously cited
study were blue-eyed or brown-eyed).
3.
The natural scientist, it is
claimed, can isolate what his hypothesis applies to, so that his predictions
are not upset by outside variables. He may close off the solar system as if it were
an aquarium, so to speak; celestial mechanics requires only mass, location, and
velocity for a full description of phenomena. Social phenomena, on the other
hand, are endlessly ramified; there is no way to cut them off clearly. Can
anyone cope with the complexity of the factors relevant to an election? or to the fluctuations of the stock market? When it was
suggested to James that psychology is the study of the knee jerk and related
phenomena, he replied that all phenomena are related phenomena. How many
variables are relevant to intelligence, for example - health? heredity? money? eye
color? brain size? climate?
And in social situations, there may be consequences that are unintended: if I
decide to sell my shares of stock, the price will drop. But the reply to this
claim is to point out that the tacit understanding, other things being
equal, applies in all investigations, physical as well as social. Galileo’s
laws of falling bodies seem to be the essence of simplicity, but that is
because they disregard the friction and resistance of the air - if they did not
do so, they would have to take into account the shape and material of the
falling body and be endlessly complex. Kepler’s law
that a planet travels in a simple elliptical orbit abstracts from the complicated
gravitational attraction exerted on each planet by every other body in the
solar system. In fact I cannot move my finger without disturbing all the stars.
In both the natural and social sciences, we always assume that we may disregard
certain elements as irrelevant or trivial. Some areas of physics, such as cloud
formation and hydrodynamic turbulence, seem to be as complex as any phenomena
the social sciences study.
4.
The astronomer may confidently
predict the next solar eclipse, so that his hypotheses may be unequivocally
verified; whereas, it is claimed by the Verstehen
position, no social scientist can predict with any assurance. This charge
is true, but it is a matter of degree. No physicist would dare to predict where
a flying leaf will be ten minutes hence. No sociologist would hesitate to
predict that no woman will be elected Pope in 2010.
5.
The hypotheses of the natural
scientist, it is claimed, can be stated with precision and universality because
he operates with certain constants that hold true throughout the universe.
Among these are the speed of light (c), Planck’s constant of energy
levels (h), the electric charge of the electron (e), the mass of
the electron (m), and the gravitational constant (G). The social scientist has
nothing to compare with these unchanging aspects of the physical world.
However, it would be an exaggeration to claim that there are no constants in
human actions; for instance, human mortality, perhaps sexual desire, and the
law of diminishing returns.
6.
The physical scientist, it is
claimed, can verify his hypotheses by observation; he can see the eclipse and
the falling apple; but the social scientist can see only the smallest part of
“social reality.” He relies on introspection and empathy to uncover the motives
of human behavior, which are unobservable and inaccessible. If the
anthropologist observes a primitive society, he has no way of finding out that
it is their belief in witchcraft which motivates their behavior. He may be as
mystified by their ritual as they would be if they saw him drop a letter into a
mailbox after licking a stamp. If the social scientist is limited to what he
can observe, what will he report when, for example, he sees that you don’t vote
(is it because of laziness? or disgust? or rebelliousness? or a bribe?) or when
you stand still on Armistice Day? When the physicist postulates unobservable
entities, such as electrons, to explain phenomena, he introduces precise rules
that coordinate those unobservable electrons with something that can be observed,
namely, tracks in a Wilson
cloud chamber; but he need not empathize with his electrons. The social
scientist does not know what motive to coordinate with your not voting; he must
refer to his own motives in order to formulate the conditions under which such
events occur. Now, this may well be the source of explanatory hypotheses in the
social sciences; introspection and empathy may be useful, perhaps even
necessary; but what counts in science is not where the hypothesis comes from,
but whether and how it is verified. The historian Guglielmo
Ferrero writes: I am not one of those historians who
must submerge themselves in masses of documents to form an opinion. As soon as
I know the facts, I enter into the psychology of the men who were important to
the events. I read their works; I study their actions; then, interpreting from
experience, I try to form an opinion, and finally I work out an
hypothesis which I verify by research. But empathy may actually mislead you.
When you bomb your enemy in wartime, do you predict his submission because you
empathize with the terror, or do you predict his resistance because you
empathize with the challenge? Can you by Verstehen
empathize with Lee Harvey Oswald? or with Hitler? or with believers in witchcraft? “Intuition prevents some
people from imagining that anyone could possibly dislike chocolate,” says Karl
Popper. The poet, too, uses empathy; in the “pathetic fallacy” he imputes human
feelings to inanimate objects—the “angry” storm, the “brave” early crocus, nature’s
“lavish ingenuity.” Prediction of human actions may but need not speculate
on motives or other unobservable factors. If the social scientist correctly
predicts voting behavior, that is, if his hypothesis is verified by what
happens, then his empathy with presumed laziness or disgust or rebelliousness
or whatever, is beside the point.
7.
The raw material of the natural
sciences can be measured with precision, but concepts in the social sciences (e.g.,
“army morale,” “equality of opportunity,” “free enterprise,” “national
character”) are inherently vague and qualitative (or intensive). You can
measure a woman’s height, but not her patriotism. You can put two people on a
scale together to get a heavier weight, but you cannot add their I.Q.’s to get a genius. However, (a) some natural
sciences (e.g., meteorology) are quite imprecise; and “it is never possible to
predict a physical occurrence with unlimited precision,” as Planck said. (b)
The social sciences are increasingly relying on mathematics. Consider, for
instance, anthropometry, cybernetics, theory of games and economic behavior,
sampling and poll- taking, elaborate statistical analysis by computers, “cliometrics,” the newest branch of history. In economics,
the raw data of experience are already in numerical form. Some surprising facts
have emerged from the use of mathematics in the social sciences: there is an
isomorphism between the spread of rumors and the spread of disease (just as
sounds have the same form as water waves) ; in sufficiently large aggregations
there is a relation between the rank and the frequency of certain elements (Zipf’s “law of least effort”— the second letter in order of
frequency, t, appears half as often as the first, e; if the cities of a
nation are ranked in order of population, then the largest city has twice the
population of the next largest). (c) Although intensive qualities cannot
be measured, they often can be scaled, or placed within some rank or order. The
hardness of minerals, for example, is not measured, but expressed in terms of a
scale from 1 (talc) to 10 (diamond); a new mineral might be described as being
between 7 (quartz) and 8 (topaz). The pecking order of a group of barnyard fowl
is also a scale. By careful analysis, it has been found possible to scale such
intensive qualities as patriotism and race prejudice. (d) The “mystique
of quality” is misguided; “the difference between the qualitative and the
quantitative is not difference in nature but a difference in our conceptual
system - in our language,” says Carnap. When you say
that it is hot, and when you say that the temperature is 86°F, you are not
denoting different things, but using different sets of symbols. To call a sound
high-pitched and to identify its wavelength is to refer to the same “piece of
the world” in different ways. Quality and quantity are not antithetical; any
quantity is a quantity of a quality.
8.
In the natural sciences,
phenomena may be studied without regard to their past (an inclined plane is
just what it is), whereas human beings and societies are only what they have
come to be. This is a problem for the social sciences, which may find their
predictions falsified because of unobservable and unverifiable past histories.
Not everyone who dips a madeleine in tea will react
as did Marcel Proust. Only the burnt child dreads the fire. Living creatures
have memories, dispositions, and expectations. Behavior is altered by habits
and conditioning. Thus, a person’s past history influences his present
reactions (Russell’s “mnemic phenomena”); rocks do
not remember. But this constraint does not preclude the search for
generalizations about behavioral phenomena (for example, one might investigate
whether all burnt children dread fire equally) and in physics the influence of
the past is not always irrelevant (hysteresis is the lagging or retardation
effect in viscosity and internal friction). Everything is what it has come to
be. If you were to take someone’s place in the middle of a chess game, you
could determine your best move just by examining the position on the chess
board at that time, but you could not similarly replace the bridge player in
the middle of a hand without knowing the previous bids and cards played. Thus,
the physicist can often make predictions on the basis of general laws and
present conditions, whereas the sociologist may require, in addition, a
temporal or historical perspective: knowledge of how things got to be the way
they are. Sartre misses• the point when he remarks that American
“hyper-empiricism - which on principle neglects connections with the past -
could arise only in a country whose History is relatively short.” But that a
social situation (or a man, or a bridge game) is what it has come to be does
not prevent scientific inquiry - why should it? - any
more than it does in historical geology. In evolutionary biology, every living
species is what it is as the result of a long history of natural selection; but
only the history which is incorporated into its present structure is of any
scientific significance.
9.
In the social sciences,
explanatory hypotheses may become confused because there is an unavoidable
interaction between the scientist and what he studies, between his statements
and the people to whom he makes them. The astronomer’s prediction of an eclipse
has no effect on the eclipse; but the sociologist’s predictions, when
publicized, may be self-fulfilling (“there will be a run on the bank”; “prices
on the stock market will go up”; “ghetto children are likely to become
delinquents”; remember what happened to Macbeth when the witches predicted he
would become king). The sociologist’s predictions may also be self-defeating
(“the commodity you manufacture will be overproduced”; “you’ll have an accident
if you drive home in this weather”; “Jones is the underdog in this election and
can’t possibly win”). This is the Cassandra paradox: a prediction to you
about you may motivate you to defy the prediction. Moreover, as opinion
researchers will confirm, a question may often be asked in such a way as to
evoke a certain response. The poll-taker may unconsciously interfere with the
situation being investigated; this criticism was made of the Kinsey report. The
announcement of a new disease or syndrome, genuine or imaginary, will elicit
some responses of “That’s just what I have!” Thus, the physician (like other
investigators) may induce by his manner or remarks an otherwise nonexistent
pathological condition (“iatrogenic causation”). Different physicians using the
same drugs on the same patients may get different results. Interactions between
social investigators and what is being investigated do occur, and they do
present a problem for social science. But this complication is again a matter
of degree. In physics, too, the insertion of a thermometer into a liquid alters
its temperature; and in all intra-atomic measurements, the observing device
interacts with what is being observed. However, there is no reason why all
these interactions cannot be examined. The impact of self-fulfilling or self
defeating prophecies can be evaluated. There is no insurmountable difficulty in
generalizing these behavior patterns. Adolph Lowe has argued in On Economic
Knowledge that economic theory does not unravel a tangle from outside, but
is the means whereby a participant within the process consciously alters it: ‘That knowledge should be inseparable from
action, because that which is known may first have to be created in the image
of a rationally conceived design, is probably the one characteristic that - . .
separates the science of Society from the science of
Nature.’ But, as I argue throughout this book, neither in physics nor in
human affairs is there a determinate, ordered “reality” which can be known by
the passive reception of discrete sense impressions.
10.
The natural scientist is
indifferent to his subject matter, but the student of human affairs can
scarcely be detached in investigating birth control, socialism, sexual freedom,
crime, drugs, pornography, and so on, The social sciences, unlike the physical,
are permeated with values. It was the hope of Auguste
Comte that his newly founded “science of society” would eliminate values by
distinguishing, for example, the question of whether to land a man on the moon
from the question of how to do so; or whether to solve India’s population
problem by putting a sterilizing chemical into the water supply from how to do
so. (These examples, of course, are not from Comte.) The involvement of the
social sciences with ethical or moral issues has various aspects. (a) As in the
examples cited, the issues themselves may pose ethical considerations. But,
obviously, issues in the natural sciences do so as well. Whether to develop new
pesticides, or a new nerve gas; what kinds of experiments to perform on
animals, fetuses, and prisoners, all involve moral questions. (b) The
judgment of the social scientist may be affected by his interests: think of
conservative and liberal analysts of unemployment and inflation, of Mao and
Khrushchev on the inevitability of war, of labor and capitalist determinations
as to whether wages or profits rose faster. But such bias occurs in the natural
sciences as well: think of the Soviet advocacy of Lysenkoism,
of Nazi opposition to relativity physics, of Oppenheimer versus Teller on the
hydrogen bomb, of arguments about evolution and the age of the earth.
Scientists may be biased; but this applies to the natural sciences and the
social sciences equally. Theoretically, bias may be made explicit and
compensated for; scientific procedures are self-corrective. (c) Some of
the applications of social theories have been suspect: functionalism in
anthropology has been denounced as a device for the imperialist management of
primitive societies; but physical theories have of course also been used for
ulterior purposes. (d) The social scientist may select his problems
because he believes the results of his research will be socially valuable
(e.g., to raise real wages); but so does the physicist. Both are human beings. (e)
It is claimed that fact and value are in principle impossible to separate
in the social sciences: can you describe a concentration camp factually without
using the word “cruel”? But, as Ernest Nagel has shown, there is a sharp
difference between characterizing and appraising, that is,
between defining or clarifying a condition, and approving or condemning it. You
might say that absinthe is the best way to drink yourself to death. An atheist
is no less competent than a devout believer in distinguishing a truly religious
person from one who is only going through the motions. A pro- or anti- attitude
need not obfuscate a statement of the relation of means to ends. (f) Since
no hypothesis is ever completely proven, there is often in the physical as well
in the social sciences some problem that requires rational decision; for
example, how high should we build a dam to prevent floods? what
safety factor should we use for a bridge? when is a
certain new drug safe to market? what percentage of
toxic side effects may we ignore? when ought a new
discovery be published? These decisions involve values; they must be made in
both the natural and the social sciences.
11.
In the natural sciences, it is
claimed that the facts dealt with can be unambiguously isolated; whereas the
social sciences face problems in establishing their hypotheses not only because
the concepts used are qualitative and vague (which is claim #7) but also
because social facts are contextual and holistic. They involve human
actions, which are never without a setting. Thus, a “voter in the primary” is
more than just a “person moving a lever”; a “banker certifying a check” is more
than just a “person pushing a pen”; a piece of green paper is money only if the
people handling it believe it to be so; a man wearing a uniform is an army
officer only if he is so regarded. Social data are never “brute facts.” They
require interpretation by concepts. These concepts, it is claimed, are
unavoidably normative and can be properly understood only by the participants
themselves “from the inside.” No outsider can break into this interlocking set
of meanings and values (the “hermeneutic circle”). But this argument for the Verstehen position transforms a practical
difficulty into a theoretical impasse, and confuses experience with knowledge.
No special intuition or empathetic understanding is required to predict and
describe what people do. If social facts are indeed contextual, and
institutions are constituted by systems of rules, or “forms of life,” they can
be investigated just like any other phenomena, even if they are networks which
are more than the individuals involved. An army, or a football team, or a
square dance, or a revival meeting, or a philosophy class consists of persons
who have mutual interactions and expectations. “One chimpanzee is no
chimpanzee,” said Yerkes, perceptively. The thesis of holism takes the
beehive as the model for human society: laws stating the properties of wholes
or collectives are required in order to explain and predict social events;
personality variables are irrelevant; individuals are the actors who just
happen to play roles in a social scene. Tolstoy wondered in War and Peace how
the army could want war when each soldier wanted peace; but, whether in a lynch
mob, or a political convention, or a social club, or a Dutch tulip craze,
persons will do in groups what they will not do acting alone. Every culture
assumes some notion of order or hierarchy without which no description of
social facts is complete. Marxist holism claims that what each of us thinks and
how each of us acts are to be explained by how our class is related to the
modes of production. Three considerations, however, may be adduced to modulate
the view that social science is distinctively holistic. (a) Natural science
must also often take account of context (e.g., the critical level necessary for
an atomic reaction; or in magnetism or ecology). (b) The astronomer can
study the stars in the Big Dipper as a single constellation; the sociologist
can study the behavior of a mob as a unity. Thus, microeconomics studies the
observable actions of single individuals; macroeconomics deals with such
abstractions as “balance of trade” and “Gross National Product.” The
“aggregation problem” in economics of inferring the total demand for consumer
goods from the number of shirts that Bert buys presents no greater theoretical
difficulties than the physicist faces in dealing with temperature as the
property of a thermodynamic system rather than of a single molecule. (c) Most
important, the thesis of methodological individualism, which is opposed
to holism, argues that all social or collective terms can be analyzed
exhaustively into the behavior and dispositions of individual persons.
Accordingly, Adam Smith and Mill base social theories on individual propensities;
Pareto claims that “psychology is at the base of all the social sciences”; and
Erich Fromm uses the categories of psychoanalysis to explain politics and
economics. John Maynard Keynes built his General Theory of economic
activity on three psychological factors: a propensity to consume, an attitude
to liquidity, and an expectation of future yield from capital assets. Lewis Namier contributed to historiography by his study of the
eighteenth-century British political parties, in which he maintained that party
decisions were motivated by the self-interest of individual party members. This
sort of reduction of the social sciences to depth psychology, I believe, often
teeters on the edge of the reductive fallacy. I doubt that the jury system in England can be
accounted for by some Anglo-Saxon psychological trait or that it was the
“authoritarian personality” that produced Nazism. I am not persuaded by
Geoffrey Gorer’s contention that the success of
Bolshevism may be attributed to the Russian addiction to swaddling clothes.
However, there are sufficient grounds to dispute the claim of holism that
contextual social facts must be theoretically distinguished from physical
facts.
12.
Max Weber contends that no
objective analysis of “social reality” can be made because “life, with its
irrational reality and its store of possible meanings, is inexhaustible.” We
must select, then, he says, what we consider to be the essential features of an
event, and use meaningful categories to construct an “ideal type” which we then
impute to the event. “Capitalist” is an example of such an accented construct;
no living person actually spends all his time maximizing his profit. However, all
the concepts of science (not only those of “social reality”) are idealized;
all descriptions are selective. The concept of “capitalism” is useful;
so are the concepts of “friction-less engine” and “ideal gas,” which are
likewise arrived at by giving certain variables extreme values.
These twelve diverse and overlapping arguments for the Verstehen view do not impair the naturalist
ideal of the unity of science. In different areas of inquiry, there are
differences in subject matter, technique, and complexity, but any claim to
knowledge must be validated, verified by evidence, and justified by reasons.
There is no basis for excluding the investigation of human actions from the
maximal organization of knowledge. Empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient
for scientific explanation.
Adapted from Reuben Abel’s ‘Man is the Measure’ (Chapter 11)