[Interpretationandmethods] Explanation and Ethical Evaluation

[wjkellpro at aol.com]

Hi All!

Congratulations to Patrick for such a splendid statement of his case against my examples of Polanyian social science (PSS).  I will try to explain my position in relation to what I see as his most salient points. These are: 1) the relationship of explanation and ethical evaluation.  2)  My two illustrative sketches for social science studies.  3)  Interpreting the meanings and mental states in the minds of other people.  In the hope of avoiding confusion, I will send these as three different posts.



Before one can explain human behavior, one must make numerous personal judgments. 

Out of all of what William James calls the "blooming, buzzing confusion" in the world, one must first focus on that behavior which one regards as human.  Out of all the human behavior going on, one must focus on a particular event, or instance of behavior.  Already, one is deeply involved in discriminating between the relevant and the irrelevant.  But how is this discrimination done?  One must have a conception in mind by which to sort the "wheat" from the "chaff."  That is how a person knows one from the other.  No one can prepare a research proposal without first making all these, and other, personal judgments.  It is done everyday in social science.


One of the problems Polanyi calls attention to is that social scientists are making all these judgments either without being aware of it, or actually denying that they are doing so.  Hence, they are either intellectually dishonest, or they fail to fulfill their responsibility as scientists to be as fully rational as they can be.   Part of being rational, in Polanyi’s sense, is to be aware of what you are doing.  In Personal Knowledge he criticized natural scientists, in large part, both for their lack of self-awareness and for their false self-understandings.  That approach also applies to social scientists.


Suppose that the primary aim of social science is to explain "how and why" human behavior, or human events, happened the way it did.  This already presupposes a conception of what is human.  But social scientists rarely, if ever, justify that presupposition.  But skipping, or dodging, or denying the necessity of this justification has huge consequences.   The most distinctive dimension of human behavior, indeed, that which makes it human, is treated as if it does not exist.  Talk about ignoring the elephant in the room!  So, in effect Polanyi is challenging social scientists to acknowledge what they are actually doing, and to do it in a fully rational manner.


Because the dimension of rationality is not examined, one effect is that human behavior is equated with all the activities of people – no matter how rational or irrational these may be.  Simply by questioning this established practice, Polanyi threatens a revolutionary change in social science.  


As I have said in prior postings, Polanyi has no problem with Aristotle’s time-honored maxim, in my words, “persons are rational animals.”  But Polanyi broadens the conception of rational far beyond the logical, to include the whole of human intelligence.  Thus, besides our language skills and the capacity for logical consistency, human rationality includes a resourceful problem solving ability, and a gift for astute means-ends practical thinking.  These qualities are all emergent properties of evolution, with their roots in animal intelligence.  While we excel in these, our most distinctive quality is our capacity to recognize the intrinsic value of other humans.  In short, to be rational is to be respectful of others.   Polanyi defends this thesis in many ways (see my paper, Respect and Empathy as Method…, at 

 

 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?form_name=journalBrowse&journal_id=998969 .)


While distinctively human behavior is rational, not all human behavior is equally rational.  This is true for logical reasoning, practical thinking, and for the gradients of respect the behavior manifests.  Because distinctively human behavior is rational, it can be explained by reference to the reasons the actors acted upon.  These reasons can be criticized for their degree of rationality under the circumstances.  Some behavior, like Hitler’s, has pathological causes.  Hence, it is not within the realm of the rational, and its reasons have no ranking in rationality.


Ancient Greek democracy was based on a slave economy.  If slavery shows a lack of respect for human dignity, then those Greeks acted in a less than fully rational manner.  But their behavior was not so irrational as to manifest pathological causes.

This judgment of the Ancient Greeks gauges the degree of rationality in their behavior.  Thus, the existence of Greek democracy can be explained, in part, by their insensitivity to the dignity and intrinsic worth of those people they forced into slavery.  In this, they failed to fulfill their full potential for human rationality.  A society of fully rational folks would not reduce their fellows to chattels. 


This is a judgment.  But it is not the sort of judgment that a priest makes when he condemns lovers for having sex out of wedlock.  Nor is it like the judgment of an abolitionist when he condemns all slavery as an abomination.  It is far more like the judgment a doctor makes about the state of a patient’s health after a thorough examination.  All judgments of this sort are normative, or norm-based, but not all judgments are moral/ethical judgments.  A judgment of the degree of rationality in human behavior is like the judgment of an Olympic diver’s performance; it is an appraisal of an achievement.


In short, one reality of human behavior is that it manifests varying grades of rationality.  Therefore, an explanation of human behavior cannot be complete without accounting for its gradient of rationality.  Indeed, to ignore this range of rationality is itself a less than rational act.  For social scientists to ignore it, as if all rationality was equal, is professionally irresponsible.


More later.


Bill Kelleher


PS

Half of The Study of Man is meant to show why thinking in natural science is not separated by a logical gap from the thinking that would go on in a Polanyian social science.  Polanyi specifically distances himself from Weber’s theory of value neutral explanation, at SM 101.  

 

 

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://listserv.cddc.vt.edu/pipermail/interpretationandmethods/attachments/20080708/923cd656/attachment-0001.html