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Behavioralism, Post-Beliavioralism, and the Philosophy of Science: Two Houses. One Plague

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Michael E. Kirn
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Extract

In the past decade American political science has experienced considerable internal conflict and turmoil. To an extent, these disturbances were unexpected for in the early 1960's the “epitaph” for a “successful” behavioral movement had been written and the “credo” of behavioralism presented. Nevertheless, by the middle of the 1960's a “new revolution in political science” was under way, a revolution “directed against a developing behavioral orthodoxy.” Behavioral political science was challenged on many grounds, but of central importance were these

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , January 1977 , pp. 82 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1977

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References

1 Dahl, Robert A., “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest,” American Political Science Review (APSR), 60 (12, 1961), 763–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the “credo” see Easton, David, A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), p. 7Google Scholar.

2 Easton, David, “The New Revolution in Political Science” APSR, 63 (12, 1969), 1051CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Green, Philip and Levinson, Sanford, eds., Power and Community: Dissenting Essays in Political Science (New York, 1970), p. viiGoogle Scholar.

4 A major factor contributing to the emergence of the revolution so soon after the behavioral “protest” was the failure of American political science either to account for, or to be much concerned with the political upheavals of the last half of the 1960's. The emergence of new disciplinary outlooks in response to changed and changing political conditions may well be a general characteristic of political science, but is a matter beyond the scope of this article. For a general discussion of this point see: Wolin, Sheldon S., “Paradigms and Political Theories” in Politics and Experience: Essays Presented to Professor Michael Oakeshott, eds. King, Preston and Parekh, B. C. (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 125–152Google Scholar. Also see: Beardsley, Philip L., “Political Science: The Case of the Missing Paradigm,” Political Theory, 2 (02, 1974), 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Easton, , “The New Revolution in Political Science,” p. 1051Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., p. 1052.

7 For a statement emphasizing the central importance of policy analysis for post-behavioral inquiry see: Dolbeare, Kenneth M., “Public Policy Analysis and the Coming Struggle for the Soul of the Postbehavioral Revolution” in Green, and Sanford, , Power and Community, pp. 85–111Google Scholar.

8 For example, the Caucus for a New Political Science Conference on “Socialist Perspectives on Social Change in the United States,” held November 7–9, 1975, at Brown University.

9 Representative selections from the various post-behavioral viewpoints can be found in the following work: McCoy, Charles A. and Playford, John, eds., Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behavioralism (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Green, and Levinson, , Power and Community; Surkin, Marvin and Wolfe, Alan, eds., An End to Political Science (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; and Graham, George J. Jr, and Carey, George W., eds., The Post-Behavioral Era (New York, 1972)Google Scholar.

10 Easton, , “The New Revolution in Political Science,” p. 1051Google Scholar. Also, see: Susser, Bernard, “The Behavioral Ideology: A Review and a Prospect,” Political Studies, 22 (09, 1974), 288CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For a discussion and analysis of these debates see: Miller, Eugene F., “Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry,” APSR, 66 (09, 1972), 796–817CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Although many philosophers of science have written on the social sciences, the concept of science articulated and advocated by most of them represents the results of their studies of one or more of the natural sciences. This is true regardless of the specific concept of science a writer may have developed.

13 For a good selection of the work of the philosophical movements of logical positivism and logical empiricism see: Ayer, A. J., ed., Logical Positivism (New York, 1959)Google Scholar. Useful works dealing with these movements include: Achinstein, Peter and Barker, Stephen F., eds., The Legacy of Logical Positivism (Baltimore, 1969)Google Scholar; and Urmson, J. O., Philosophical Analysis (Oxford, 1967)Google Scholar. For Hempel's views see his Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York, 1965)Google Scholar. For examples of Popper's influential work see: The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York, 1956)Google Scholar; The Open Society and Its Enemies Volume Two (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; The Poverty of Historicism (New York and Evanston, 1964)Google Scholar; and Conjectures and Refutations (New York, 1962)Google Scholar.

14 For this general point see: Gunnell, John G., “Deduction, Explanation, and Social Scientific Inquiry,” APSR, 63 (12, 1969), 1233–1246Google Scholar. Gunnell elaborates on this problem in “Political Science and the Philosophy of Science: An Overview and Argument” (Paper presented at the 1971 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois). That political scientists should have sought a model of inquiry in certain accounts of the successful natural sciences is, of course, not surprising.

15 Examples of such “derivative” works include: Gibson, Quentin, The Logic of Social Enquiry (London, 1960)Google Scholar; Mayer, Lawrence G., Comparative Political Inquiry: A Methodological Survey (Homewood, Illinois, 1972)Google Scholar; Meehan, Eugene J., The Theory and Method of Political Analysis (Homewood, Illinois, 1965)Google Scholar; Rudner, Richard S., Philosophy of Social Science (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1966)Google Scholar; and Dyke, Vernon Van, Political Science: A Philosophical Analysis (Standford, 1960)Google Scholar.

16 The impact of Hempelian and Popperian perspectives on political science has not been confined only to the realm of disciplinary images but has also reached the level of disciplinary practice. This can be seen clearly in the widespread acceptance by behavioralists of Hempel's “covering law theory” of explanation, and in the consequent extensive efforts to “build” general explanatory theories of politics, or at least to formulate conceptual frameworks as a first step to the construction of a systematic theory of politics. For the specific features of Hempel's theory of scientific explanation see the work cited above in note. Also, see Mayer, Comparative Political Inquiry.

17 In particular, various works of Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, Michael Polanyi, Michael Scriven, and Stephen Toulmin have been used by the postbehavioral critics.

18 In order to prevent misunderstanding, a caveat must be entered. It is not the intention of this study to deny the relevance of the philosophy and history of the natural sciences for the understanding of the social sciences. Rather, it is to point to and illustrate some pitfalls which stem from a near total dependence on them. The utility of these disciplines for political science is not in doubt, and should be apparent. Above all, the work of historians and philosophers of natural science provides a clear model of the type of investigations needed in the social sciences. In addition, the extent to which there is unity among the empirical sciences cannot be determined without considering the studies of the natural sciences.

19 Cf. Gunnell, “Political Science and the Philosophy of Science: An Overview and Argument”; Ihara, Randall H., “The Coming Crisis of American Political Science: An Overview,” Review of Social Theory, 1 (09, 1972), 53–74Google Scholar. Also see note 15 above.

20 The accusation often voiced by various post-behavioralists that behavioral political science is biased toward conservatism will not be discussed here. There may well be linkages between the critique of behavioralism as conservative and critique of the philosophical foundations of behavioralism, but this question is not the subject of the present investigation.

21 Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1962, 1970)Google Scholar. The distinctiveness of Kuhn's outlook is apparent in Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This volume is devoted to a discussion of Kuhn's and Popper's views on the nature of science. Also see the critical discussion of Kuhn by Scheffler, Israel, Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis, 1967)Google Scholar.

22 Max Weber, “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences” in Weber, Max, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans, and ed. Shils, Edward A. and Finch, Henry A. (New York, 1949), p. 116Google Scholar.

23 Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of Nature (Oxford, 1960), p. 2Google Scholar. Of course, neither Collingwood nor the present author suggests that the philosophy of science should dictate the practice and methods of the empirical sciences. While there are philosophical and social foundations of these sciences, it is obviously not the case that these foundations were clearly elucidated prior to substantive developments within these sciences, though systematic elucidation may subsequently influence the development of the sciences. As Max Weber pointed out, “purely epistemological and methodological reflections have never played the crucial role” in the development of science and scientific methods (Weber, , “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences,” p. 116Google Scholar).

24 It may seem contentious to suggest that recent discussions have been sterile, but the outpouring of literature concerned with the discipline of political science has failed to clarify the issues, at alone provide solutions to any of our problems. In particular, the vigorous assault on behavioralism emphasizing supposed conservative biases has yet to lead to a set of detailed studies of the structural features of the discipline. Nor has this attack, with a few exceptions, raised fundamental questions about the status of political knowledge.

25 On the need to maintain a close relationship between the concepts and methodological norms of science and the ongoing practice of scientific inquiry, see Kaplan, Abraham, The Conduct of Inquiry (San Francisco, 1964)Google Scholar, chap, one. Also see the fascinating study by Mitroff, Ian I., The Subjective Side of Science: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Psychology of the Apollo Moon Scientists (Amsterdam, 1974)Google Scholar, especially chaps, one and seven.

26 Cf. Popper, , The Open Society and Its Enemies vol. 2, chap. 23Google Scholar, and the essays by Watkins and Popper in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge.

27 Kuhn, , “Logic of Discovery of Psychology or Research?” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, p. 10Google Scholar and Structure, pp. 3–4, 77.

28 The ambiguities of Kuhn's discussion are brought out most forcefully by Shapere, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” and Margaret Masterman, “The Nature of a Paradigm” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge.

29 Kuhn, , Structure, pp. 175Google Scholar. Kuhn further refines the notion of a paradigm and suggests that a better term for it is “disciplinary matrix”: “‘disciplinary’ because it refers to t he common possessions of the practitioners of a particular discipline: ‘matrix’ because it is composed of ordered elements of various sorts, each requiring further specification” (p. 182). Four elements of a disciplinary matrix are identified by Kuhn: (1) “symbolic generalizations” being “those expressions, deployed without question or dissent by group members”; (2) shared commitments to “particular models,” which “help to determine what will be accepted as an explanation and as a puzzle-solution”; (3) widely shared values about the nature of the scientific enterprise; and (4) “exemplars” or “the concrete problem solutions” (pp. 182–187). See, also, “Second Thoughts on Paradigms” in The Structure of Scientific Theories, ed. Suppe, Frederick (Urbana, Illinois, 1974), pp. 459–82Google Scholar.

30 Kuhn, , Structure, p. 43Google Scholar.

31 Ibid., p. 44.

32 Ibid., pp. 46–47.

33 Ibid., p. 150. See Kuhn's defense of his position against the charge of “irrationalism” in “Reflections on My Critics” in Criticism and Growth of Knowledge, pp. 259–266. Also see note 45 below.

34 Kuhn, , Structure, p. 179Google Scholar.

35 Ibid., p. 56.

36 In this regard, see Beardsley, Philip L., “Political Science: The Case of the Missing Paradigm,” Political Theory, 2 (02, 1974), pp. 46–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Cf. the essays by J. Peter Euben, “Political Science and Political Silence” and Sanford Levinson, “On ‘Teaching’ Political ‘Science’” in Green and Levinson, Power and Community. Also, see these stimulating essays by Wolin, Sheldon S.: “Paradigms and Political Theories” in Politics and Experience, eds. King, Preston and Prekh, B. C. (Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar, and “Political Theory as a Vocation,” APSR, 63 (12, 1969), 1062–1082CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It must again be noted, though, that Kuhn insists that his position does not entail relativism, but rather only undermines Popper's account of objectivity, not objectivity itself.

38 Landau, Martin, Political Theory and Political Science: Studies in the Methodology of Political Inquiry (New York, 1972), pp. 43–77Google Scholar. Among the many virtues of this essay is the clear and important distinction that Landau draws between “neutrality” and “objectivity,” and the emphasis placed upon the use and misuse of Kuhn by many political scientists, behavioral and postbehavioral. Indeed, one of the difficulties of much post-behavioral literature would appear to be the failure to maintain the distinction between the problems of objectivity and neutrality. See also, Landau's, “Comment: On Objectivity,” APSR, 66 (09, 1972), 846–856CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which is a reply to Miller, Eugene F., “Positivism, Historicism and Political Inquiry,” same issue of the APSR, pp. 796–817Google Scholar.

39 Of course, part of the difficulties here center on the precise meaning of “relativism.” This idea is employed in a number of different ways, and it is not always clear in the various post-behavioral and behavioral discussions in which sense it is being employed.

40 In addition to the works cited in note 21, see: Shapere, Dudley, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” Philosophical Review, 73 (1964), 383–394CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shapere, , “Meaning and Scientific Change,” in Mind and Cosmos: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy ed. Colodny, Robert G. (Pittsburgh, 1966), pp. 41–85Google Scholar; Shapere, , “The Paradigm Concept,” Science, 172 (05, 1971), 706–709Google Scholar; Suppe, Frederick, “Exemplars, Theories and Disciplinary Matrixes” in Structure of Scientific Theories, pp. 483–499Google Scholar; and Toulmin, Stephen, “Conceptual Revolutions in Science” in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. 3, ed. Cohen, Robert S. and Wartofsky, Marx W. (Dordrecht-Holland, 1967), 331–355Google Scholar.

41 Landau, , “Objectivity, Neutrality, and Kuhn's Paradigm,” p. 76Google Scholar.

42 Ibid., p. 55. It must be noted that Landau's summary of Kuhn's views at times borders on caricature.

43 Ibid., pp. 63–65. It should be noted that Toulmin, Shapere and Feyerabend, while critics of Kuhn, are also critical of the Popperian and logical empiricist philosophies of science. For Kuhn's recent reformulations and defense of his views see: Kuhn, Thomas S., “Reflections on My Critics” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, pp. 231–278Google Scholar. Also see Kuhn's, “Postscript-1969” to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970)Google Scholar, and his “Second Thoughts on Paradigms,” pp. 459–482.

44 Ibid., pp. 65–67.

45 See ibid., pp. 76–77 for quotations for Kuhn. These quotations from Kuhn are culled from his response to the charge of “irrationalism” in his “Reflections on My Critics.” The substance of Kuhn's position is this:

In the debate over choice of theory, neither party has access to an argument which resembles a proof in logic or formal mathematics … Nothing about this … thesis should suggest that scientists do not use logic (and mathematics) in their arguments, including those which aim to persuade a colleague to renounce a favored theory and embrace another … To name persuasion as the scientist's recourse is not to suggest that there are not many good reasons for choosing one theory rather than another. It is emphatically not my view that “adoption of a new scientific theory is an intuitive or mystical affair, a matter for psychological description rather than logical or methodological codification” … What I am denying … is neither the existence of good reasons nor that these reasons are of the sort usually described. I am, however, insisting that such reasons constitute values to be used in making choices rather than rules of choice. Scientists who share them may nevertheless make different choices in the same concrete situation (pp. 260–63).

For a similar argument see: Ziman, John, Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 31–32Google Scholar.

46 Another fine example of “external analysis” in the course of a debate on the nature of political science is the “Symposium on Scientific Explanation in Political Science” participated in by John G. Gunnell, Arthur S. Goldberg, and A. James Gregor. See, APSR, 63 (12, 1969), 1233–1262Google Scholar. Of course, behavioral political scientists have been very attuned to the latest developments in research techniques in the other social sciences. Also, in the development of “frameworks for political analysis” political scientists have borrowed heavily from other social sciences, and the natural sciences.

47 With respect to philosophical presuppositions, what is needed are studies in critical metaphysics, i.e., studies to clarify the logical foundations of the various empirical sciences, to elucidate what each science presupposes. For this general approach to the study of the sciences, see: Collingwood, R. G., An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford, 1940), and Toulmin, “Conceptual Revolutions in Science.”Google Scholar

48 Kaplan, , Conduct of Inquiry, p. 31Google Scholar. A number of different meanings have been attached to the notion of the unity of the empirical sciences. For example, an early logical positivist position (rejected by Popper at the time, and by contemporary logical empiricists) held that the unity of the sciences meant that all sciences should, in theory, be reducible to the principles and methods of physics. On the other hand, the methodological the, at a minimum, involves the conviction (especially with reference to the social sciences) “that human behavior is amendable … to the orthodox procedures of observation, hypothesis, and empirical test” (Runciman, W. G., Sociology in Its Place and Other Essays [Cambridge, 1970], p. 6Google Scholar). More specifically, the empirical sciences employ the hypothetico-deductive method, described by Kaplan in these terms:

The scientist, by a combination of careful observation, shrewd guess, and scientific intuition, arrives at a set of postulates governing the phenomena in which he is interested: from these he deduces observable consequences; he then tests these consequences by experiment, and so confirms or disconfirms the postulates, replacing them where necessary, by others, and so continuing (The Conduct of Inquiry, pp. 9–10).

A more controversial element to this doctrine is the argument that “to proffer any explanation of human behavior at all is implicitly to appeal to lawlike generalizations under which the behavior in question could be subsumed, whether or not these are explicitly stated or even precisely known” (Runciman, , Sociology in Its Place, p. 6)Google Scholar.

49 Easton, David, A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), p. 8Google Scholar.

50 This phrase is taken from Rudner, Richard S., “Comment: On Evolving Standard Views in Philosophy of Science” APSR, 66 (09, 1972), 827–845CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This essay is one of the critiques of Miller's “Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry.”

51 For commentaries on this phenomenon of presidential uses of Kuhn see: Gunnell, , “Political Science and the Philosophy of Science: An Overview and Argument,” p. 10Google Scholar;Landau, , “Objectivity, Neutrality, and Kuhn's Paradigm,” pp. 57–60Google Scholar; and Beardsley, , “Political Science: The Case of the Missing Paradigm,” pp. 46–58Google Scholar. Beardsley's detailed discussion of the misuse of Kuhn's idea of a paradigm by David Truman and Gabriel Almond in their Presidential Addresses is especially enlightening. For recent presidential uses of Kuhn see: Truman, David, “Disillusion and Regeneration: The Quest for a Discipline,” APSR, 59 (09, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Almond, Gabriel, “Political Theory and Political Science,” APSR, 60 (12, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Easton, David, “The New Revolution in Political Science,” APSR, 63 (12, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Deutsch, Karl, “On Political Theory and Political Action,” APSR, 65 (03, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Landau, , “Objectivity, Neutrality, and Kuhn's Paradigm,” pp. 58–59Google Scholar. The crucial problem with all of the suggested “paradigms” is that none operates as a “concrete puzzle-solution.”

53 Ibid., pp. 59–60. Also, see note 38 above.

54 Meehan, Eugene J., Explanation in Social Science: A System Paradigm (Homewood, Illinois, 1968)Google Scholar. For his earlier defense of the deductive paradigm of explanation see the work cited in note 15 above. It should be stressed that the success or failure of Meehah's effort to identify a truly alternative paradigm of scientific explanation is not at issue here.

55 Gunnell, , “Deduction, Explanation, and Social Scientific Inquiry,” p. 1233Google Scholar.

56 Of course, there may well be political as opposed to intellectual reasons for this phenomenon, but such considerations go beyond the scope of this article. Indeed, constant invocations of authority and scripture do suggest that other than purely intellectual reasons may account for the prolonged and bitter disputations concerning the nature of political science.

57 John Gunnell's work as a whole has emphasized this theme, and consequently has been very useful insofar as it has brought these new perspectives in the philosophy of science to the attention of a wide audience of political scientists, and encouraged political scientists to look elsewhere than the natural sciences for a model of inquiry. Unfortunately, his analyses seem to veer in the direction of an uncritical acceptance of the works of Kuhn and others and their supposed implications for the social sciences.

58 Roberts, Marc J., “On the Nation and Condition of Social Science,” Daedalus, 103 (Summer, 1974), 47Google Scholar.

59 Gunnell, “Political Science and the Philosophy of Science: An Overview and Argument,” and Randall H. Ihara, “The Coming Crisis of American Political Science: An Overview,” have also analyzed the need for such investigations. The remainder of this article draws upon sections of a paper, “Professionalism in American Political Science: Exorcising the Ghost in the Disciplinary Machine,” which the author, in conjunction with Gilbert Abcarian, has recently completed and in which the idea of a scientific profession is employed in an effort to enrich understanding of the discipline of political science and to set an agenda for future inquiries into the structure and processes of the discipline.

60 Roberts, , “On the Nature and Condition of Social Science,” p. 47Google Scholar.

61 In addition, the serious reexamination of the methodological works of some of the great social science theorists, such as Weber and Durkheim, would be most interesting and might well be quite valuable. See for example: Runciman, W. G., A Critique of Max Weber's Philosophy of Social Sciences (Cambridge, 1972)Google Scholar.

62 In addition to the works cited in notes 36, 37, 38, and 51, see: Spragens, Thomas A. Jr, “The Politics of Inertia and Gravitation: The Functions of Exemplar Paradigms in Social Thought,” Polity 5 (Spring, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nelson, John S., “Once More on Kuhn,” Political Methodology, 1 (Spring, 1974)Google Scholar.

63 While the literature is hardly of one mind on the subject of the paradigm-status of the discipline, there does seem to be a rough consensus that political science is, at least when viewed in strict comparison with the advanced natural sciences, in a pre-paradigmatic state. Of course, the differences of opinion among political scientists on this matter are the result in part of the ambiguities of Kuhn's initial formulation of the concept of a paradigm.

64 See especially the articles by Wolin and Beardsley cited above in notes 36 and 37.

65 Excellent examples of such investigations of aspects of the community structures and processes of the natural sciences are: Hagstrom, Warren O., The Scientific Community (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; and Mitroff, The Subjective Side of Science. The author would like to thank Gilbert Abcarian and Robert Booth Fowler for their many helpful criticisms and suggestions.