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The Collectivism of the Scientistic Approach

Closely connected with the objectivism of the scientistic approach is its methodological collectivism, its tendency to treat wholes like society or the economy, capitalism (as a given historical ``phase'') or a particular industry or class or country as definitely given objects about which we can discover laws by observing their behavior as wholes. While the specific subjectivist approach of the social sciences starts, as we have seen, from our knowledge of the inside of these social complexes, the knowledge of the individual attitudes which form the elements of their structure, the objectivism of the natural sciences tries to view them from the outside;6.1it treats social phenomena not as something of which the human mind is a part and the principles of whose organization we can reconstruct from the familiar parts, but as if they were objects directly perceived by us as wholes.

There are several reasons why this tendency should so frequently show itself with natural scientists. They are used to seek first for empirical regularities in the relatively complex phenomena that are immediately given to observation, and only after they have found such regularities to try and explain them as the product of a combination of other, often purely hypothetical, elements (constructs) which are assumed to behave according to simpler and more general rules. They are therefore inclined to seek in the social field, too, first for empirical regularities in the behavior of the complexes before they feel that there is need for a theoretical explanation. This tendency is further strengthened by the experience that there are few regularities in the behavior of individuals which can be established in a strictly objective manner; and they turn therefore to the wholes in the hope that they will show such regularities. Finally, there is the rather vague idea that since ``social phenomena'' are to be the object of study, the obvious procedure is to start from the direct observation of these ``social phenomena,'' where the existence in popular usage of such terms as society or economy is naively taken as evidence that there must be definite ``objects'' corresponding to them. The fact that people all talk about the nation or capitalism leads to the belief that the first step in the study of these phenomena must be to go and see what they are like, just as we should if we heard about a particular stone or a particular animal.6.2

The error involved in this collectivist approach is that it mistakes for facts what are no more than provisional theories, models constructed by the popular mind to explain the connection between some of the individual phenomena which we observe. The paradoxical aspect of it, however, is, as we have seen before,6.3 that those who by the scientistic prejudice are led to approach social phenomena in this manner are induced, by their very anxiety to avoid all merely subjective elements and to confine themselves to ``objective facts,'' to commit the mistake they are most anxious to avoid, namely, that of treating as facts what are no more than vague popular theories. They thus become, when they least suspect it, the victims of the fallacy of ``conceptual realism''' (made familiar by A. N. Whitehead as the ``fallacy of misplaced concreteness'').

The naive realism which uncritically assumes that where there are commonly used concepts there must also be definite ``given'' things which they describe is so deeply embedded in current thought about social phenomena that it requires a deliberate effort of will to free ourselves from it. While most people will readily admit that in this field there may exist special difficulties in recognizing definite wholes because we have never many specimens of a kind before us and therefore cannot readily distinguish their constant from their merely accidental attributes, few are aware that there is a much more fundamental obstacle: that the wholes as such are never given to our observation but are without exception constructions of our mind. They are not ``given facts,'' objective data of a similar kind which we spontaneously recognize as similar by their common physical attributes. They cannot be perceived at all apart from a mental scheme that shows the connection between some of the many individual facts which we can observe. Where we have to deal with such social wholes we cannot (as we do in the natural sciences) start from the observation of a number of instances which we recognize spontaneously by their common sense attributes as instances of ``societies'' or ``economies,'' ``capitalism'' or ``nations,'' ``language'' or ``legal systems,'' and where only after we have collected a sufficient number of instances we begin to seek for common laws which they obey. Social wholes are not given to us as what we may call ``natural units'' which we recognize as similar with our senses, as we do with flowers or butterflies, minerals or light rays, or even forests or ant heaps. They are not given to us as similar things before we even begin to ask whether what looks alike to us also behaves in the same manner. The terms for collectives which we all readily use do not designate definite things in the sense of stable collections of sense attributes which we recognize as alike by inspection; they refer to certain structures of relationships between some of the many things which we can observe within given spatial and temporal limits and which we select because we think that we can discern connections between them--connections which may or may not exist in fact.

What we group together as instances of the same collective or whole are different complexes of individual events, by themselves perhaps quite dissimilar, but believed by us to be related to each other in a similar manner; they are selections of certain elements of a complex picture on the basis of a theory about their coherence. They do not stand for definite things or classes of things (if we understand the term thing in any material or concrete sense) but for a pattern or order in which different things may be related to each other-- an order which is not a spatial or temporal order but can be defined only in terms of relations which are intelligible human attitudes. This order or pattern is as little perceptible as a physical fact as these relations themselves; and it can be studied only by following up the implications of the particular combination of relationships. In other words, the wholes about which we speak exist only if, and to the extent to which, the theory is correct which we have formed about the connection of the parts which they imply, and which we can explicitly state only in the form of a model built from those relationships.6.4

The social sciences, thus, do not deal with ``given'' wholes but their task is to constitute these wholes by constructing models from the familiar elements-- models which reproduce the structure of relationships between some of the many phenomena which we always simultaneously observe in real life. This is no less true of the popular concepts of social wholes which are represented by the terms current in ordinary language; they too refer to mental models, but instead of a precise description they convey merely vague and indistinct suggestions of the way in which certain phenomena are connected. Sometimes the wholes constituted by the theoretical social sciences will roughly correspond with the wholes to which the popular concepts refer, because popular usage has succeeded in approximately separating the significant from the accidental; sometimes the wholes constituted by theory may refer to entirely new structural connections of which we did not know before systematic study commenced and for which ordinary language has not even a name. If we take current concepts like those of ``market'' or of ``capital,'' the popular meaning of these words corresponds at least in some measure to the similar concepts which we have to form for theoretical purposes, although even in these instances the popular meaning is far too vague to allow the use of these terms without first giving them a more precise meaning. If they can be retrained in theoretical work at all it is, however, because in these instances even the popular concepts have long ceased to describe particular concrete things, definable in physical terms, and have come to cover a great variety of different things which are classed together solely because of a recognized similarity in the structure of the relationships between men and things. A ``market,'' for example, has long ceased to mean only the periodical meeting of men at a fixed place to which they bring their products to sell them from temporary wooden stalls. It now covers any arrangements for regular contacts between potential buyers and sellers of any thing that can be sold, whether by personal contact, by telephone or telegraph, by advertising, etc., etc.6.5

When, however, we speak of the behavior of, for example, the price system as a whole and discuss the complex of connected changes which will correspond in certain conditions to a fall in the rate of interest, we are not concerned with a whole that obtrudes itself on popular notice or that is ever definitely given; we can only reconstruct it by following up the reactions of many individuals to the initial change and its immediate effects. That in this case certain changes ``belong together''--that among the large number of other changes which in any concrete situation will always occur simultaneously with them and which will often swamp those which form part of the complex in which we are interested, a few form a more closely interrelated complex--we do not know from observing that these particular changes regularly occur together. That would indeed be impossible because what in different circumstances would have to be regarded as the same set of changes could not be determined by any of the physical attributes of the things but only by singling out certain relevant aspects in the attitudes of men toward the things; and this can be done only by the help of the models we have formed.

The mistake of treating as definite objects wholes that are no more than constructions, and that can have no properties except those which follow from the way in which we have constructed them from the elements, has probably appeared most frequently in the form of the various theories about a ``social'' or ``collective'' mind6.6and has in this connection raised all sorts of pseudoproblems. The same idea is frequently but imperfectly concealed under the attributes of personality or individuality which are ascribed to society. Whatever the name, these terms always mean that, instead of reconstructing the wholes from the relations between individual minds which we directly know, a vaguely apprehended whole is treated as something akin to the individual mind. It is in this form that in the social sciences an illegitimate use of anthropomorphic concepts has had as harmful an effect as the use of such concepts in the natural sciences. The remarkable thing here is, again, that it should so frequently be the empiricism of the positivists, the archenemies of any anthropomorphic concepts even where they are in place, which leads them to postulate such metaphysical entities and to treat humanity, as for instance Comte does, as one ``social being,'' a kind of superperson. But as there is no other possibility than either to compose the whole from the individual minds or to postulate a supermind in the image of the individual mind, and as positivists reject the first of these alternatives, they are necessarily driven to the second. We have here the root of that curious alliance between nineteenth-century positivism and Hegelianism which will occupy us in a later study.

The collectivist approach to social phenomena has not often been so emphatically proclaimed as when the founder of sociology, Auguste Comte, asserted with respect to them that, as in biology, ``the whole of the object is here certainly much better known and more immediately accessible''6.7 than the constituent parts. This view has exercised a lasting influence on that scientistic study of society which he attempted to create. Yet the particular similarity between the objects of biology and those of sociology, which fitted so well in Comte's hierarchy of the sciences, does not in fact exist. In biology we do indeed first recognize as things of one kind natural units, stable combinations of sense properties, of which we find many instances which we spontaneously recognize as alike. We can, therefore, begin by asking why these definite sets of attributes regularly occur together. But where we have to deal with social wholes or structures it is not the observation of the regular coexistence of certain physical facts which teaches us that they belong together or form a whole. We do not first observe that the parts always occur together and afterward ask what holds them together; but it is only because we know the ties that hold them together that we can select a few elements from the immensely complicated world around us as parts of a connected whole.

We shall presently see that Comte and many others regard social phenomena as given wholes in yet another, different, sense, contending that concrete social phenomena can be understood only by considering the totality of everything that can be found within certain spatio-temporal boundaries, and that any attempt to select parts or aspects as systematically connected is bound to fail. In this form the argument amounts to a denial of the possibility of a theory of social phenomena as developed, for example, by economics, and leads directly to what has been misnamed the ``historical method'' with which, indeed, methodological collectivism is closely connected. We shall have to discuss this view below under the heading of historicism.

The endeavor to grasp social phenomena as wholes finds its most characteristic expression in the desire to gain a distant and comprehensive view in the hope that thus regularities will reveal themselves which remain obscure at closer range. Whether it is the conception of an observer from a distant planet, which has always been a favorite with positivists from Condorcet to Mach,6.8 or whether it is the survey of long stretches of time through which it is hoped that constant configurations or regularities will reveal themselves, it is always the same endeavor to get away from our inside knowledge of human affairs and to gain a view of the kind which, it is supposed, would be commanded by somebody who was not himself a man but stood to men in the same relation as that in which we stand to the external world.

This distant and comprehensive view of human events at which the scientistic approach aims is now often described as the ``macroscopic view.'' It would probably be better called the telescopic view (meaning simply the distant view--unless it be the view through the inverted telescope) since its aim is deliberately to ignore what we can see only from the inside. In the ``macrocosm'' which this approach attempts to see, and in the ``macrodynamic'' theories which it endeavors to produce, the elements would not be individual human beings but collectives, constant configurations which, it is presumed, could be defined and described in strictly objective terms.

In most instances this belief that the total view will enable us to distinguish wholes by objective criteria, however, proves to be just an illusion. This becomes evident as soon as we seriously try to imagine of what the macrocosm would consist if we were really to dispense with our knowledge of what things mean to the acting men, and if we merely observed the actions of men as we observe an ant heap or a beehive. In the picture such a study could produce there could not appear such things as means or tools, commodities or money, crimes or punishments, or words or sentences; it could contain only physical objects defined either in terms of the sense attributes they present to the observer or even in purely relational terms. And since the human behavior toward the physical objects would show practically no regularities discernible to such an observer, since men would in a great many instances not appear to react alike to things which would to the observer seem to be the same, nor differently to what appeared to him to be different, he could not hope to achieve an explanation of their actions unless he had first succeeded in reconstructing in full detail the way in which men's senses and men' s minds pictured the external world to them. The famous observer from Mars, in other words, before he could understand even as much of human affairs as the ordinary man does, would have to reconstruct from our behavior those immediate data of our mind which to us form the starting point of any interpretation of human action.

If we are not more aware of the difficulties which would be encountered by an observer not possessed of a human mind, this is so because we never seriously imagine the possibility that any being with which we are familiar might command sense perceptions or knowledge denied to us. Rightly or wrongly we tend to assume that the other minds which we encounter can differ from ours only by being inferior, so that everything which they perceive or know can also be perceived or be known to us. The only way in which we can form an approximate idea of what our position would be if we had to deal with an organism as complicated as ours but organized on a different principle, so that we should not be able to reproduce its working on the analogy of our own mind, is to conceive that we had to study the behavior of people with a knowledge vastly superior to our own. If, for example, we had developed our modern scientific technique while still confined to a part of our planet, and then had made contact with other parts inhabited by a race which had advanced knowledge much further, we clearly could not hope to understand many of their actions by merely observing what they did and without directly learning from them their knowledge. It would not be from observing them in action that we should acquire their knowledge, but it would be through being taught their knowledge that we should learn to understand their actions.

There is yet another argument which we must briefly consider which supports the tendency to look at social phenomena ``from the outside,'' and which is easily confused with the methodological collectivism of which we have spoken though it is really distinct from it. Are not social phenomena, it may be asked, from their definition mass phenomena, and is it not obvious, therefore, that we can hope to discover regularities in them only if we investigate them by the method developed for the study of mass phenomena, that is, statistics? Now this is certainly true of the study of certain phenomena, such as those which form the object of vital statistics and which, as has been mentioned before, are sometimes also described as social phenomena, although they are essentially distinct from those with which we are here concerned.

Nothing is more instructive than to compare the nature of these statistical wholes, to which the same word collective is sometimes also applied, with that of the wholes or collectives with which we have to deal in the theoretical social sciences. The statistical study is concerned with the attributes of individuals, though not with attributes of particular individuals, but with attributes of which we know only that they are possessed by a certain quantitatively determined proportion of all the individuals in our ``collective'' or ``population.'' In order that any collection of individuals should form a true statistical collective it is even necessary that the attributes of the individuals whose frequency distribution we study should not be systematically connected or, at least, that in our selection of the individuals which form the ``collective'' we are not guided by any knowledge of such a connection. The collectives of statistics, on which we study the regularities produced by the ``law of large numbers,'' are thus emphatically not wholes in the sense in which we describe social structures as wholes. This is best seen from the fact that the properties of the collectives with statistics studies must remain unaffected if from the total of elements we select at random a certain part. Far from dealing with structures of relationships, statistics deliberately and systematically disregards the relationships between the individual elements. It is, to repeat, concerned with the properties of the elements of the collective, though not with the properties of particular elements, but with the frequency with which elements with certain properties occur among the total. And, what is more, it assumes that these properties are not systematically connected with the different ways in which the elements are related to each other.

The consequence of this is that in the statistical study of social phenomena the structures with which the theoretical social sciences are concerned actually disappear. Statistics may supply us with very interesting and important information about what is the raw material from which we have to reproduce these structures, but it can tell us nothing about these structures themselves. In some field this is immediately obvious as soon as it is stated. That the statistics of words can tell us nothing about the structure of a language will hardly be denied. But although the contrary is sometimes suggested, the same holds no less true of other systematically connected wholes such as, for example, the price system. No statistical information about the elements can explain to us the properties of the connected wholes. Statistics could produce knowledge of the properties of the wholes only if they informed us about statistical collectives the elements of which were wholes, that is, if we had statistical information about the properties of many languages, many price systems, etc. But, quite apart from the practical limitations imposed on us by the limited number of instances which are known to us, there is an even more serious obstacle to the statistical study of these wholes: the fact, which we have already discussed, that these wholes and their properties are not given to our observation but can only be formed or composed by us from their parts.

What we have said applies, however, by no means to all that goes by the name of statistics in the social sciences. Much that is thus described is not statistics in the strict modern sense of the term; it does not deal with mass phenomena at all, but is called statistics only in the older, wider sense of the word in which it is used for any descriptive information about the state or society. Though the term will today be used only where the descriptive data are of a quantitative nature, this should not lead us to confuse it with the science of statistics in the narrower sense. Most of the economic statistics which we ordinarily meet, such as trade statistics, figures about price changes, and most ``time series,'' or statistics of the ``national income,'' are not data to which the technique appropriate to the investigation of mass phenomena can be applied. They are just ``measurements'' and frequently measurements of the type already discussed at the end of Chapter Five above. If they refer to significant phenomena they may be very interesting as information about the conditions existing at a particular moment. But unlike statistics proper, which may indeed help us to discover important regularities in the social world (though regularities of an entirely different order from those with which the theoretical sciences of society deal), there is no reason to expect that these measurements will ever reveal anything to us which is of significance beyond the particular place and time at which they have been made. That they cannot produce generalizations does, of course, not mean that they may not be useful, even very useful; they will often provide us with the data to which our theoretical generalizations must be applied to be of any practical use. They are an instance of the historical information about a particular situation the significance of which we must further consider in the next chapters.


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