In : Rationality, Relativism, and the Human Sciences (Margolis, Krausz,
Burian)
p.4 I will argue that, although one cannot prove that the
human sciences which try to emulate the physical sciences can never be closed and predictive and thus not normal
sciences like the physical sciences, one can give arguments which lead one to expect them to fall short of the ideal
of natural science in just the way they do.
p.4 The human sciences... have never been stable or cumulative...
These "dubious disciplines," to use Foucault's pejorative phrase, do not progress through revolutions like physical science,
but merely go through episodes in which certain fads tend to dominate research until some competing fad lures most
researchers onto its bandwagon. One style of research gives way to another... because researchers have become bored
and discouraged with the old approach. The new style allows everyone to forget the old questions
p.6 There must be something about human beings, on the one hand, and the
nature of theoretical explanation, on the other, which do not fit together. This alone would explain why the human sciences
have never become normal.
p.6-7 What explains the difficulty of the 'human sciences,' their
precariousness, their uncertainty as sciences, their dangerous familiarity with philosophy, their ill-defined reliance upon
other domains of knowledge, their perpetually secondary and derived character, and also their claim to universality is
not, as is often stated, the extreme density of their object, it is not the metaphysical status or the inerasable transcendence
of this man they speak of, but rather the complexity of the epistemological configuration in which they find themselves
placed, their constant relation to the three dimensions that give them space. [JLJ - full quote from Foucault]
[from the greenstone.org version of this document]
Garfinkel has recently discovered that not only sociologists but also physicists,
astronomers, etc., have elaborate shared skills which enable them to produce objective data. Garfinkel thinks that these background
practices should be a part of physics just as the sociologists' background practices are a part of sociology. Unfortunately,
natural scientists turn out to have what Garfinkel considers a reprehensible "amnesia'' concerning their background skills
when they write up their results in publishable articles. I think that Garfinkel misunderstands this so-called amnesia. What
he has discovered is that scientists in a normal science have a double skill. They have a first order skill for producing
decontextualized data by using instruments which select only context-independent features such as color, weight, rate of diffusion,
etc., for only such decontextualized facts can fill in the variables over which scientific laws range. But, normal scientists
also have learned a further skill by which they eliminate all reference to taken-for-granted, shared first order skills from
their final reports. Thus a description of the practices by which everyday objects get worked over into bare physical
facts is external to normal natural science. Descriptions of such skills appear and should appear in the journals of the ethnomethodologists,
not in The Physical Review.
the practices of social scientists are an essential part of human activity
and so cannot be omitted from human science. Thus the question inevitably arises: Can the human sciences provide a
scientific theory of their own background practices? At this point, the interpretive social scientists claim, objective
social science breaks down. If background skills could be captured in strict rules then we could have objective social
science, e.g. "cognitive'' sociology, but skills cannot be objectified. They must be taught by apprenticeship...
It follows from the above considerations that the right vocabulary
for what were once called the human sciences would have to be a vocabulary which picked out entirely different
features than those abstracted from our everyday activity -- features or attributes which would remain invariant
in different pragmatic situations and across cultural revolutions. Just what such features would be, no one can say...
Conclusion
To clarify this complex debate I will separate the issues into three distinct
questions:
(1) Can there be a science of man? Here Foucault is right. There can
be no stable science of an entity which as meaning giver is the condition of its own objectification. No science
can objectify the skills which make it possible. But this only shows we should abandon the Kantian definition of man.
(2) Can there be a science of human activities? Here Taylor,
as modified by me, is right. No, if one tries to follow the model of natural science. That is if one seeks
a theory of human capacities by abstracting context-free features from everyday contexts and then trying to predict everyday
human activities using rules or laws relating these features.
(3) Can there be a science of human capacities using other features
than those used in everyday practice? Here Rorty is right. In principle such a theory is possible.
But, one must add that since we have no precedent for such a theory, no reason to believe the abstract features it would require
exist, and no way to find them if they did, this abstract philosophical point casts no light on the past, present or future
difficulties facing the social sciences.
Epilogue
...One could, of course, postulate some sort of highly complex features of
prototypes abstracted by the mind in ways unknown to the human beings doing the abstracting.
