Bergmann - Epistemology and Social Science

Epistemology And Social Science

Frithjof Bergmann

Copyright by Frithjof Bergmann 1973

EDITION 2013 by Frithjof Bergmann and NewWork NewCulture.Networks

Published in 2013 by FLOWZONE |

Research. Facilitation. Publikation

(www.flow-zone.info)

Edited by Thomas Staehelin, Katrin Steglich and Klaus Kampmann

ISBN: 978-3943385-373

E-Book Distribution: XinXii
http://www.xinxii.com

The year is 1973, February. Its cold. A man sits in his kitchen, writing. His little boy lies sleeping in the adjoining room. He is working on the last corrections of his text; its the almost final version of his essay. Is it complete and correct? Maybe so, possibly. Yes, absolutely ready for publishing. Outside it is raining. It ought to snow. He decides to hand in his text tomorrow. Changing rooms he cautiously finds a place to sit and watch his sleeping baby. How will things develop?

August 2013. The screen displays Frithjof Bergmanns essay: Epistemology and Social Science. At last! Some texts seem to take their own time. Or has it been waiting for the perfect point in time? The text is to be published, as a book as well as an e-book The past 40 years have changed the world of publishing. One advantage of the long wait. Also, some of the worldviews have changed within the past decades. Today, neuroscience and behavioral economics support Frithjof Bergmanns arguments. Thus his text appears very contemporary although it was forgotten for such a long time. How did this come about? Why was it in hiding? Which plans and coincidences dragged it into the limelight? This is another story to be told in a different place.

Thomas Staehelin

Katrin Steglich

Klaus Kampmann

February 1973

Is a physics of social phenomena possible? Some say yes, but not yet, not now, only in remote future. Others say no, and list various impeding factors: too many variables, no controlled experiments, human freedom, the phenomenon of self-verification, uniqueness, the absence of laws, and so forth. Both answers are inadequate, almost comic: tics on the skin of the problem.

Consider, as a preliminary exercise, a surface difference between explanation in physical science and explanation in sociology and psychology. Take the standard positivist example of a glass of water that cracks when the water in it freezes to ice. Compare the uneducated, common sense account of this event with the full explanation science enables us to give. The difference is very large. The scientific explanation introduces general laws concerning the expansion of volumes, the related pressures, the stress-limits of various materials and eventually draws on the main body of molecular theory. On the positivistic interpretation of science the laws together with the antecedent circumstances yield ideally a rigorous prediction. Here the sheer added quantity of information is enormous, the advance beyond the level of someone who had never heard of science is very impressive. The picture that psychology presents is radically different. For our purposes it will be important that the starting point is here much higher. Any normal person can offer a very complex and very informative explanation of his own or other peoples actions. (Motives, intentions, reasons, emotions, etc.)

This is not at all like with the broken glass. Imagine a question like: Why did Creon condemn Antigone to death? The limits of what could here be said are mostly drawn by patience and by convenience. If we had full knowledge of Creons life (if he were not a character in a play) we could mention indefinitely many relevant antecedent facts and the enumeration of motives and reason would take us from reasons of state and political philosophy to the sources of his personal stubbornness and pride. The uneducated explanation is here far more powerful (on a much higher level) than when we deal with nature. In some sense, especially when we deal with simple cases like: Why did you move your rook? Because the pawn would have taken it, the explanation seems even complete.

The contrast to the generalizations of social science is startling. Take the thesis that all behavior moves in the direction of reduced tension. To say this about Creon that he was trying to relax seems far less informative than what we can say without science. And we can dispense with caricature. The Frustration-Aggression thesis presents an analogous picture. Why did he attack? To relieve frustration. Again it seems that we can do much better than this without scientific psychology. And sociology shows a similar pattern. Compare any good historical account of the outbreak of World War I with the notion that wars result from an imbalance of power. The sociological generalization does not amplify our understanding of the individual case. It represents a decline, a lowering of the level of information. No conclusions should be drawn from this. We only want to raise several questions: Why is our ordinary knowledge in the domain of the social sciences address so much more powerful than the unscientific knowledge we have of the material world? What are the implications of this for the conduct of the social sciences? How can we create a social science that is not less but more informative than common sense knowledge?

The ultimate foundation of our inherited conception of science and of its tasks is a certain view of mind, of consciousness and a certain manner of conceptualizing the relationship that mind has to matter and to the external world. This model of mind can be explained most conveniently if we start from the problem of perception. How did this question arise? This is to begin with an object out there. It sends a message consisting of light-waves or of other waves, and we receive this message with a sense organ, say with our eyes. In the eye a series of complicated events occur that are fairly well understood. Then the message is sent from the eyes through the optic nerve into the brain. There it is transmitted to a specific place, and by now we know an amazing amount about the events that occur in this spot. That is, we know what chemical and electric changes take place. But another side of what happens in this location in the brain is thought to be very mysterious, and even very up-to-date discussions of brain physiology admit to utter bafflement when it comes to that other side. For it is assumed that the chemical and electric processes in the brain through a kind of metamorphosis, or transformation through something that indeed is completely mysterious and not at all understood give rise to consciousness, to the image that we perceive. And indeed the problem is baffling: we can isolate the minute motion of an electrical charge, or the change from one acid into another and this innocuous process is supposed to produce my image of this chair. And the situation is thought to be the same in the case of our thoughts, and our dreams, and also of our memories, and of course the more complex the mental phenomenon the more puzzling the matter becomes. If I look into a forest in all its detail and glory then, on this model, I should believe that a message is sent to my eyes, that this message eventually becomes a tiny alteration in the brain, and that this small alteration gives rise to the panoramic view of the flamboyant forest which I behold. In a sense this picture is still incomplete since this account almost requires the postulation of some kind of Self, Ego or Subject who views this image which the brain creates. A Subject is therefore usually part of this picture. A schematic diagram might help.