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The Role and Limitations of Rationalizing Explanation in the Social Sciences*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David K. Henderson
David K. Henderson*
Affiliation:
Memphis State University, Memphis, TN38152, U.S.A.
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Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 1989 , pp. 267 - 287
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1989

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank H. Hamner Hill, I. C. Jarvie, Deborah Soles, and this journal’s two anonymous readers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

References

1 Donald Davidson, ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes,’ in Davidson, ed., Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1980) 3-19; Alvin Goldman, A Theory of Human Action (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1970); I. C. Jarvie, The Revolution in Anthropology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1964); Stephen Turner, Sociological Explanation as Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980); ‘Translating Ritual Beliefs,’ Philosophy of Social Science 9 (1979) 401-23; Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1978), 34-45; Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality, revised edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984).

2 This example is suggested by Sidney Verba and Norman Nie’s classic Participation in America: Political Democracy and Political Equality (New York: Harper and Row 1972). These authors show that the pattern of political activities is a good deal more intricate than had previously been recognized. Outside a group of those who are politically highly active, those who seek to influence governmental activities tailor their involvement in ways that are understandable as rational, given their own ends and the different characteristics of types of political activity. For example, some activities run a higher risk of conflict than others, and some people find conflict more distasteful than others. Some activities are to influence governmental decisions on matters of narrow, individual interests, while others are to influence decisions on matters of wide social interest. Thus, we find here an application of rationalizing explanation at the level of social aggregates (explaining a pattern found among overlapping but distinct groups). Now, one sort of political activity that requires a good amount of initiative, individual contacting of officials on particularlized problems, is not strongly correlated with the general level of political activity of the agents. In this respect, such activity is unique among types of political activities. My example is one possible version of such activity.

3 Davidson, 16; also ‘Towards a Unified Theory of Meaning and Action,’ Grazer Philosophische Studien 11 (1980) 1-12; Dagfinn Føllesdal, ‘Understanding and Rationality,’ in Herman Perret and Jacques Bouveresse, eds., Meaning and Understanding (Berlin: de Guyter 1981), 154-68; Goldman, 74, 86-8.

4 For example, there is a tendency on the part of philosophers who recognize that translation is a part of a larger explanatory endeavor to conceive of explanation as basically a matter of showing the rationality of what is thought and done. This result is to be expected to the extent that the writer finds little to social scientific explanation other than translation or interpretation. In such a case ‘meanings’ or ‘implications’ come to carry the explanatory weight, and the result is a more or less implicit reliance on rationalizing explanation. It is only as one finds a substantial role for psychological or sociological theory that one can avoid unwittingly falling into making an exclusivity claim for rationalizing explanation. Thus, translation centered accounts such as Turner’s and Putnam’s provide accounts of social scientific understanding that makes it almost exclusively a matter of rationalization.

Turner, in particular, provides an excellent discussion of several concrete cases of explanation that exhibits the usefulness of rationalizing explanation. (Turner, Sociological Explanation as Translation, chapter 4.)

5 220; cf. 21-2, 36-7, 198, 220-4

6 72; 78-9; 95-6; 117-23; 135-7

7 Interestingly, Jarvie himself seems to admit some reservations, at least in one sort of case. Values, including ethical positions, are clearly important subjects of investigation for social scientists. They are among the things that social scientists seek to explain and to use in explanations. Yet Jarvie admits that they are not subject to rationalizing explanation (Ibid., 113). Unfortunately, Jarvie’s difficulties with the explanation of values in particular seem to stem from his particular understanding of the standards of rationality that drive rationalizing explanation. I, on the other hand, do not find the rationalizing explanation of values particularly problematic. Rather, I foresee the same problems here that plague the exclusive reliance on rationalizing explanation elsewhere: people are systematically irrational in particular respects as well as systematically rational in other respects.

8 Cf. Elster, 72, 78-9, 117-23, 135-7.

9 Robert Cummins, The Nature of Psychological Explanation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1985). John Haugland, ‘The Nature and Plausibility of Cognitivism,’ The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2 (1978) 215-60 provides a closely related and supporting position.

10 Cummins’ analysis of what more is needed to characterize cognitive dispositions is somewhat less convincing and less precise than the points on which I rely (75-117; cf. Joseph Levine, ’The Nature of Psychological Explanation by Robert Cummins; A Critical Notice,’ The Philosophical Review 96 (1987) 249-74).

11 Ibid., 36; see also 53.

12 It should not be thought that there is one program that is the program assumed by attributions of cognitive capacities and states. Rather, such would generally seem appropriate and interesting when the program carries a good deal of explanatory weight. As Cummins points out, this is a matter of the complexity of the program and its ability to analyze complex dispositions of the system into simple ones. There are, in principle, a rather large family of programs that could do this, given the right system. I presume that many of these lack corresponding systems. (See, for example, Cherniak’s discussion of the propriety of attributing beliefs to systems with radically different orderings of the feasibility of inferences [Christopher Cherniak, Minimal Rationality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1986), 34-9].) However, the set of systems presumed in the attribution of cognitive capacities and dispositions to humans is rather narrower. I believe that this is because we insist upon finding a certain homogeniety in human cognitive capacities. In effect, the sort of information I appeal to in this paper (for example, concerning the structure of human memory, and learning theory) is as an ancillary theory necessary to provide analyses of human reasoning.

13 More accurately, if such rules are either a common part of all members of the family of programs that may used in the analysis of persons, or a typical part of those members, then this result follows.

14 This alone should show that it is a mistake to insist that some notion of ideal rationality be employed in the analyses presupposed by cognitive characterizations. This is Dennett’s error, for which he has been aptly criticized by Stich. (Stephen Stich, ‘Dennett on Intentional Systems,’ Philosophical Topics 12 (1981) 39-62. See also, Stich, ‘Could Man be an Irrational Animal?’ Synthese 64 (1985) 115-35; Daniel Dennett, ‘Making Sense of Ourselves,’ Philosophical Topics 12 (1981) 63-81.)

15 Davidson, ‘Psychology as Philosophy,’ in Davidson, ed., Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1980), 232. Cf. Goldman, 57-63.

16 Strictly speaking, this does not make the use of such heuristics irrational. Rather, in part due to limitations in human cognitive capacities, it seems a part of ideal human rationality to make a limited use of such heuristics. (Cf. Cherniak, chapter 4, also Nisbett and Ross.) Irrationality arises from their overuse, from their use where they systematically produce incorrect results, and where it is feasible to apply valid rules. The cases I discuss are of this sort.

17 J. S. Mill, A System of Logic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974 [1843]), 756. Taking a cue from this talk of ‘prejudice,’ one might attempt to turn the program error of such judgmental heuristics into simple erroneous beliefs, dispensing with the irrationality they seem to represent. However, this is not promising. Many people would be disinclined to assent to any statement (or formalization) of the strategy, while nevertheless being inclined to it as a matter of practice.

18 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Withcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1937), 487. See Nisbett and Ross, 115-6.

19 There is a tendency to mistakenly identify psychological information about irrationality with abnormal psychology. Some of the aversion on the part of philosophers and social scientists to social scientific attributions of irrationality may be understood as the result of conflating these things. Jarvie provides one example, as he moves quickly from objecting to psychopathological explanation of religious beliefs to objecting to psychological explanations of such beliefs (Jarvie, 97, 97n.). I agree that abnormal psychology has little to contribute to the social sciences. It should, however, be clear that the psychological results I rely on here are not results in psychopathology.