Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: problems of structure and action
- 2 Discovering truth: the rationalist way
- 3 Positive science: the empiricist way
- 4 Ants, spiders and bees: a third way?
- 5 Systems and functions
- 6 Games with rational agents
- 7 Understanding social action
- 8 Self and roles
- 9 Explaining and understanding
- 10 A value-neutral social science?
- 11 Rationality and relativism
- 12 Conclusion: two stories to tell
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Ants, spiders and bees: a third way?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2012
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: problems of structure and action
- 2 Discovering truth: the rationalist way
- 3 Positive science: the empiricist way
- 4 Ants, spiders and bees: a third way?
- 5 Systems and functions
- 6 Games with rational agents
- 7 Understanding social action
- 8 Self and roles
- 9 Explaining and understanding
- 10 A value-neutral social science?
- 11 Rationality and relativism
- 12 Conclusion: two stories to tell
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Later in the First Book of Aphorisms Bacon tempers his claim that a gradual and unbroken ascent from the senses and particulars is 'the true way':
Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use: the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy: for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.
These graphic similes highlight our previous two chapters. Formal systems and abstract theories are too like cobwebs to serve rationalist hopes that they correspond to the real, necessary order of the world. Pure empiricists who merely collect and use cannot do justice to the role of theory in guiding our steps. Admittedly this last point might not matter, if the process of discovery can be cleanly separated from the process of validation. But we shall be raising doubts about that in a moment. Meanwhile Bacon suggests that 'a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational will do what is needed.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Philosophy of Social ScienceAn Introduction, pp. 66 - 93Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994