H. P. Grice, the Oxford philosopher, once said:
"We must be ever watchful against the Devil of scientism, who would lead us
into myopic overconcentration on the nature and importance of knowledge, and of
scientific knowledge in particular; the Devil who is even so audacious as to
tempt us to call in question the very system of ideas require to make
intelligible the idea of calling in question anything at all; and who would
even prompt us, in effect, to suggest that since we do not really think but
only think that we think, we had better change our minds without undue delay."
I think I fell in love with that noun, as pronounced by Grice -- in his Oxonian
acquired accent (he was from Brum, as Brum dwellers call "Brum" or Birmingham)
-- 'scientism'.
And then there's Comte, the inventer [sic] of 'sociology', which I here refer
to as 'social scientism'.
McEvoy quotes from Phatic in "Sciences and freedom".
The quoted passage reads:
"Social scientists entered the labs -- the very monestaries of modern science
-- to tease out the constructed character of physics, biology and what have
you."
McEvoy comments:
"Did they really? I.e. enter the labs? How often? How many times did "social
scientists" sit in the labs - presumably observing - and watch as the true
philosophical character of the activities of natural scientists became apparent
to them? Where are the records of this?"
The life and times of Comte?
Durkheim followed suit and he entered the labs to study 'suicide,' understood
as the social scientist he (Durkheim) thought he was, a 'social phenomenon'.
Grice sees it (i.e. suicide) as a "puzzle of philosophical psychology along the
rational lines instituted by Kantotle." (But cfr. Aristotle's discussion and
conceptual analysis of Ayax's suicide).
McEvoy goes on:
In "Intellectual Impostures" Sokal and Bricont take a gentle sledgehammer to
philosophical claims about the character of science made by certain people -
many of whom might fairly be deemed kinds of 'constructivist' [or
post-modernist]. My (vague) impression is that these people, who may be fairly
deemed 'scientifically illiterate' in the way someone who cannot make accurate
sense of written French might be deemed not literate in French, _did not enter
labs_ and their views were not based on research by social scientists who
entered labs."
I like that. It's granting that SOME social scientists did enter the labs. I
was wondering if they left them, too! (Cfr. "The social construction of
reality," now a Penguin paperback -- not a paperback Penguin).
McEvoy:
"Their views were of the sort that would more easily appeal to people who never
entered labs than people who did [e.g. like Sokal and Bricont did]"
I think Bricol entered the labs more times than Sokal. Geary keeps count. ("In
any case," as Geary notes, "the point is otiose; since it can be algebraically
proved that, as many times as Bricont and Sokal did enter their labs, they left
them, too.").
McEvoy:
"and were based on dogmas developed by people who (more or less) _never entered
labs_."
The implicature is of course to the Pope -- Pope Francis --. Whenever the word
'dogma' is used, the implicature is "the Pope.". Admittedly, there are no labs
in the Vatican.
At one point this became Oxonian. When Quine was in Oxford, he wrote, "Two
dogmas of empiricism," and his implicatures were not Popish in kind. Grice
responded, "In defense of a dogma", with the implicature that popes don't NEED
to defend a dogma. (He's also implicating that there is a divergence in the way
Noah Webster spells 'defense' and Grice's preferred 'defence' -- but this is
complicated). Later in his career, Grice expressed that he could be "trusted to
rally to the defense of the underdogma." Here the implicature is not Popish,
but Dickensian (See "Underdogs, Overdogs -- and Dogs").
McEvoy concludes:
"I could of course be wrong in all this idle speculation - which I have
concluded from an armchair and not by entering labs over the years to check for
the presence, or absence, of 'social scientists' [in some post-modernism, their
'absence' might even be claimed to be 'the highest form of presence', but we
all know this kind of claim would be just evasive bollix]."
Well, 'lab,' Grice said, should not be used. Even though one of his maxims of
conversation is "be brief," he preferred 'laboratory'. "A nice Ancient Roman
word," he would add.
"Laboratory" was first used in England c. 1600, for a "room or building set
apart for scientific experiments". It was straight from Medieval Latin
"laboratorium,", "a place for labour or work," from Latin laboratus, past
participle of laborare "to work" (see labour (v.))."
Laboratoria, such being the plural, were rare in Ancient Rome. In fact, the
Ancient Roman word for 'business' (nec-otium) comes from the 'negation'
("nec-") of 'otiosity' ("otium"). And we know it's usually 'otium' that
provokes the greatest paradigm shifts in scientific revolutions (witness Newton
relaxing under the apple tree).
The figurative use of 'laboratory' was common already by 1660s.
McEvoy notes:
"But if I am wrong, there will surely be an evidential record as to who entered
labs and for what purposes and what they established by this. So what is this
evidential record as to the entering of labs? Or is this 'entering the labs'
just another constructivist myth? That is, more 'intellectual imposture'."
Well, this is a point for conceptual analysis. To enter a lab requires some
necessary and sufficient conditions. As "to leave a lab". As Geary says, "it's
what a social scientist does IN a lab, once he's entered it, that matters."
For the record, this Comteian idea of a special science—not the humanities, not
metaphysics—for the social was prominent in the 19th century and not unique to
Comte. It has recently been discovered that the term "sociology" – a term
considered coined by Comte – had already been introduced in 1780, albeit with a
different meaning, by the French essayist Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836).
Le Suicide is an essay written by French sociologist Émile Durkheim. It was the
first methodological study of a social fact in the context of society. It is
ostensibly a case study of suicide, a publication unique for its time that
provided an example of what the sociological monograph should look like. Some
argue that it is not a case study, which makes it unique among other scholarly
work on the same subject.
Durkheim explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics,
arguing that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide
rates. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration
while Protestant society has low levels. There are at least two problems with
this interpretation. First, Durkheim took most of his data from earlier
researchers, notably Adolph Wagner and Henry Morselli, who were much more
careful in generalizing from their own data. Second, later researchers found
that the Protestant-Catholic differences in suicide seemed to be limited to
German-speaking Europe and thus may always have been the spurious reflection of
other factors. Despite its limitations, Durkheim's work on suicide has
influenced proponents of control theory, and is often mentioned[as a classic
sociological study.
Durkheim concluded that:
Suicide rates are higher in men than women (although married women who remained
childless for a number of years ended up with a high suicide rate).
Suicide rates are higher for those who are single than those who are in a
sexual relationship.
Suicide rates are higher for people without children than people with children.
Suicide rates are higher among Protestants than Catholics and Jews.
Suicide rates are higher among soldiers than civilians.
Suicide rates are higher in times of peace than in times of war (the suicide
rate in France fell after the coup d'état of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, for
example. War also reduced the suicide rate: after war broke out in 1866 between
Austria and Italy, the suicide rate fell by 14% in both countries.)
Suicide rates are higher in Scandinavian countries.
The higher the education level, the more likely it was that an individual would
choose suicide. However, Durkheim established that there is more correlation
between an individual's religion and suicide rate than an individual's
education level. Jewish people were generally highly educated but had a low
suicide rate.
Durkheim, predating Grice, provides a conceptual analysis of 'suicide' as
follows:
...the term suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or
indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he
knows will produce this result.
— Durkheim, 1897
Durkheim, alla Grice, goes on to distinguish between four subtypes of suicide
-- for each of which he provides a conceptual analysis:
Egoistic suicide reflects a prolonged sense of not belonging, of not being
integrated in a community, an experience, of not having a tether: an absence
that can give rise to meaninglessness, apathy, melancholy, and depression. It
is the result of a weakening of the bonds that normally integrate individuals
into the collectivity: in other words a breakdown or decrease of social
integration. Durkheim refers to this type of suicide as the result of
"excessive individuation", meaning that the individual becomes increasingly
detached from other members of his community. Those individuals who were not
sufficiently bound to social groups (and therefore well-defined values,
traditions, norms, and goals) were left with little social support or guidance,
and therefore tended to commit suicide on an increased basis. An example
Durkheim discovered was that of unmarried people, particularly males, who, with
less to bind and connect them to stable social norms and goals, committed
suicide at higher rates than married people.
Altruistic suicide is characterized by a sense of being overwhelmed by a
group's goals and beliefs. It occurs in societies with high integration, where
individual needs are seen as less important than the society's needs as a
whole. They thus occur on the opposite integration scale as egoistic suicide.
As individual interest would not be considered important, Durkheim stated that
in an altruistic society there would be little reason for people to commit
suicide. He stated one exception, namely when the individual is expected to
kill themselves on behalf of society – a primary example being the soldier in
military service.
Anomic suicide reflects an individual's moral confusion and lack of social
direction, which is related to dramatic social and economic upheaval. It is the
product of moral deregulation and a lack of definition of legitimate
aspirations through a restraining social ethic, which could impose meaning and
order on the individual conscience. This is symptomatic of a failure of
economic development and division of labour to produce Durkheim's organic
solidarity. People do not know where they fit in within their societies.
Durkheim explains that this is a state of moral disorder where man does not
know the limits on his desires, and is constantly in a state of disappointment.
This can occur when man goes through extreme changes in wealth; while this
includes economic ruin, it can also include windfall gains – in both cases,
previous expectations from life are brushed aside and new expectations are
needed before he can judge his new situation in relation to the new limits.
Fatalistic suicide occurs when a person is excessively regulated, when their
futures are pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive
discipline. It is the opposite of Anomic suicide, and appears in overly
oppressive societies, causing people to prefer to die than to carry on living
within their society. A good example would be within a prison; some people
might prefer to die than live in a prison with constant abuse and excessive
regulation that prohibits them from pursuing their desires.
These four types of suicide are based on the degrees of imbalance of two social
forces: social integration and moral regulation. Durkheim noted the effects of
various crises on social aggregates – war, for example, leading to an increase
in altruism, economic boom or disaster contributing to anomie.
Durkheim's study of suicide has been criticized as an example of the logical
error termed the ecological fallacy. Indeed, Durkheim's conclusions about
individual behaviour (e.g. suicide) are based on aggregate statistics (the
suicide rate among Protestants and Catholics). This type of inference,
explaining micro events in terms of macro properties, is often misleading, as
is shown by examples of Simpson's paradox.
However, diverging views have contested whether Durkheim's work really
contained an ecological fallacy. Van Poppel and Day have advanced that
differences in suicide rates between Catholics and Protestants were explicable
entirely in terms of how deaths were categorized between the two social groups.
For instance, while "sudden deaths" or "deaths from ill-defined or unspecified
cause" would often be recorded as suicides among Protestants, this would not be
the case for Catholics. Hence Durkheim would have committed an empirical rather
than logical error. Some, such as Inkeles (1959), Johnson (1965) and Gibbs
(1968), have claimed that Durkheim's only intent was to explain suicide
sociologically within a holistic perspective, emphasizing that "he intended his
theory to explain variation among social environments in the incidence of
suicide, not the suicides of particular individuals."
More recent authors such as Berk (2006) have also questioned the micro-macro
relations underlying criticisms of Durkheim's work. For instance, Berk notices
that Durkheim speaks of a "collective current" that reflects the collective
inclination flowing down the channels of social organization. The intensity of
the current determines the volume of suicides (...) Introducing psychological
[i.e. individual] variables such as depression, [which could be seen as] an
independent [non-social] cause of suicide, overlooks Durkheim's conception that
these variables are the ones most likely to be effected by the larger social
forces and without these forces suicide may not occur within such individuals.
And so on.
Cheers,
Speranza
