Daniel Little discusses John Stuart Mill's significant contributions to the
creation of a positivist science of society:
John Stuart Mill as a social science founder, by Daniel Little:
John Stuart Mill was Britain's leading thinker when it came to issues having to
do with logic and scientific knowledge in the mid-nineteenth century. His
System of Logic
was first published in 1843 and was reprinted in numerous editions, and it
constituted a comprehensive treatment of scientific knowledge and inference
within the empiricist tradition.
The book devoted an entire section to the logic
of what Mill referred to as the "moral sciences" (Book VI, published separately
as
The Logic of the Moral Sciences). He defined the moral sciences as those
areas of study having to do with human dispositions, character, and action,
extending from psychology to social science. The conception of social science
knowledge that he presents has had a deep impact on subsequent thinking about
"scientific" social analysis and is worth examining again. (Here is a link to
the Gutenberg etext edition of the
System of Logic.)
Mill developed a general vision of science that was derived from the best
current examples of progress in the natural sciences, and he then applied this
vision to the effort to understand human and social phenomena scientifically.
Putting his vision simply, science consists of the discovery of general causal
laws based on systematic empirical observation. It lays the framework for a
positivist conception of social science, and it prepares a charge of "Not
scientific!" to social scientists who deviate from these central positivist
tenets.
The social sciences barely existed in 1843; so it is intriguing to see how Mill
thought about the task of creating a social science. For one thing, he had
virtually no good examples to work with; political economy was just about the
only significant piece of rigorous social analysis that existed. The topics
considered by modern sociology were only beginning to gain rigorous attention,
and political science took the form of analysis of the interests and policies of
specific nation states. Mill was very much interested in the work of Auguste
Comte -- the thinker who introduced both "sociology" and "positivism" into the
philosophical lexicon, and Mill wrote a critical essay about Comte's philosophy
in 1865 (Auguste
Comte & Positivism).
But Comte's writings did not provide good examples of detailed empirical study
of social phenomena. One of Comte's central goals was to discover laws of
development for civilizations -- a far cry from the way we would define the
focus of sociology today. Here is a summary definition of the science of society
that Mill offers:
Next after the science of individual man comes the science of man in society--of
the actions of collective masses of mankind, and the various phenomena which
constitute social life. (Book VI, chap. VI, sect. 1)
In several earlier postings I've referred to the important role that
philosophical ideas played in defining the aims and goals of the social
sciences. Mill's writings certainly fall in the category of foundational,
guiding ideas. So let's see what guiding ideas are expressed in the
System of Logic for the social
sciences.
Prediction. Mill
opens his discussion of the social sciences by quoting a passage from Condorcet
with evident approval on the role of prediction in the sciences and history.
Condorcet draws an explicit parallel between the predictive capacity of some of
the natural sciences (e.g. astronomy) and the development of history; if history
is made by men, then we should be able to learn the laws of behavior and use
them to predict history (Book VI). This captures Mill's conception of social
science: social developments are the result of individual actions and behaviors;
individual actions are subject to laws that can be discovered in psychology and
ethology (the science of human development); and therefore, in principle,
historical outcomes are governed by these laws as well. So the goal of the
social sciences is to discover the laws of behavior that permit us to predict
behavior and social outcomes.
Laws and regularities.
Mill firmly believed that science involves the discovery of laws and
regularities. A body of observations that lacks organizing regularities cannot
be considered to be a science. So for Mill, social science research too must
involve the discovery of laws of social behavior and social dynamics. "Are the
actions of human beings, like all other natural events, subject to invariable
laws? Does that constancy of causation, which is the foundation of every
scientific theory of successive phenomena, really obtain among them?" (Book VI,
chap. I, sect. 2) Mill's answer, ultimately, is affirmative: there are such laws
of individual behavior and choice. In reflecting on the status of weather
phenomena he writes:
Yet no one doubts that the phenomena depend on laws, and that these must be
derivative laws resulting from known ultimate laws, those of heat, electricity,
vaporization, and elastic fluids. (Book VI, chap. III, sect. 1)
He distinguishes between exact sciences (where a few general laws govern
virtually all variation) and inexact sciences (where we need both fundamental
laws and secondary influences in order to explain observed behavior). His
example of an inexact science is tidology.
By combining, however, the exact laws of the greater causes, and of such of the
minor ones as are sufficiently known, with such empirical laws or such
approximate generalizations respecting the miscellaneous variations as can be
obtained by specific observation, we can lay down general propositions which
will be true in the main, and on which, with allowance for the degree of their
probable inaccuracy, we may safely ground our expectations and our conduct.
(Book VI, chap. III, sect. 1)
And this model seems to capture his entire conception of scientific
understanding: we understand a phenomenon when we have identified the primary
causes that bring it about (and the laws that correspond to these); and the
secondary influences that disturb or modify the workings of the primary causes
(with their laws as well).
The science of human nature is of this description. It falls far short of the
standard of exactness now realized in Astronomy; but there is no reason that it
should not be as much a science as Tidology is, or as Astronomy was when its
calculations had only mastered the main phenomena, but not the perturbations....
(Book VI, chap. III, sect. 2)
The subject, then, of Psychology is the uniformities of succession, the laws,
whether ultimate or derivative, according to which one mental state succeeds
another, is caused by, or at least, is caused to follow, another. (Book VI,
chap. IV, sect. 3)
So Mill believes that a science of behavior is possible, issuing in a set of
regularities of behavior. And he believes that we can also arrive at a science
of development, which he refers to as "ethology"; this is a description of the
ways in which circumstances influence individual character. Ethology too issues
in laws and regularities, according to Mill.
A science is thus formed, to which I would propose to give the name of Ethology,
or the Science of Character, from
ἦθος, a word more
nearly corresponding to the term "character" as I here use it, than any other
word in the same language. (Book VI, chap. V, sect. 4)
This leads to a general conception of how social change works:
All phenomena of society are phenomena of human nature, generated by the action
of outward circumstances upon masses of human beings; and if, therefore, the
phenomena of human thought, feeling, and action are subject to fixed laws, the
phenomena of society can not but conform to fixed laws. (Book VI, chap. VI,
sect. 2)
Methodological
individualism. So laws govern individual actions. What about social
phenomena? Mill sees social phenomena as the combination of multiple individual
actions. And he believes that it is self-evident that the laws of the compound
derive from the workings of the laws of the parts.
The laws of the phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing but the laws of
the actions and passions of human beings united together in the social state.
Men, however, in a state of society are still men; their actions and passions
are obedient to the laws of individual human nature. Men are not, when brought
together, converted into another kind of substance. (Book VI, chap. VII, sect.
1)
So social laws and regularities ought to be explained on the basis of
individual-level laws and regularities. This is a pretty clear statement
of the principle of methodological individualism.
Parallel to the assumption of methodological individualism is a strong
inclination on Mill's part towards the idea of inter-theoretic reduction: the
laws of the compound should be reducible to the action of the laws of the
composing entities. So social laws should be reducible to laws of psychology,
combined with factual descriptions of the particular circumstances that surround
given societies.
Methods of agreement and
difference. Quite a bit of attention has been directed to Mill's methods
of agreement and difference within the field of comparative historical
sociology. It is startling, therefore, to realize that Mill himself felt that
these families of methods were not relevant or applicable to social phenomena.
Appeal to these methods in the social sciences, Mill maintains, is to succumb to
the fallacy of the "chemical or experimental method" in the social sciences
(Book VI, chap. VII, sect. 1). The problem is that the conditions for the
application of these methods are impossibly stringent when we come to
consideration of the causes of complex social events like revolutions or civil
wars. There are always innumerable differences between the cases; so the methods
of difference and similarity cannot direct us to the unique differentiating
causes.
The Method of Difference in either of its forms being thus completely out of the
question, there remains the Method of Agreement. But we are already aware of how
little value this method is, in cases admitting Plurality of Causes; and social
phenomena are those in which the plurality prevails in the utmost possible
extent. (Book VI, chap. VII, sect. 4)
Mill offers an alternative preferred method, the deductive method. "However
complex the phenomena, all their sequences and co-existences result from the
laws of the separate elements" (Book VI, chap. IX, sect. 1). The deductive
method involves identifying these separate elements; discovering their
fundamental properties and regularities; and deducing the interactions that
occur among them to produce the complex outcome.
The Social Science, therefore (which, by a convenient barbarism, has been termed
Sociology), is a deductive science; not, indeed, after the model of geometry,
but after that of the more complex physical sciences. It infers the law of each
effect from the laws of causation on which that effect depends; not, however,
from the law merely of one cause, as in the geometrical method but by
considering all the causes which conjunctly influence the effect, and
compounding their laws with one another. (Book VI, chap. IX, sect. 1)
The plurality of causes that is explicit in the deductive method leads Mill to
qualify the scope of prediction that is possible in the social sciences. Because
it is not possible to precisely determine the joint effect of multiple causes,
predictions are generally approximate rather than exact.
It is evident, in the first place, that Sociology, considered as a system of
deductions a priori, can not be a science of positive predictions, but only of
tendencies. We may be able to conclude, from the laws of human nature applied to
the circumstances of a given state of society, that a particular cause will
operate in a certain manner unless counteracted; but we can never be assured to
what extent or amount it will so operate, or affirm with certainty that it will
not be counteracted. (Book VI, chap. IX, sect. 2)
(Daniel Hausman gives a good exposition of this method of explanation in "The
Deductive Method" (Essays
on Philosophy and Economic Methodology).)
The aim of sociology.
Mill believes that the most fundamental aim of sociology is to derive a set of
governing laws for the whole of society from the laws of individual action and
ethology, and to permit the scientist to explain the particular features of the
total state of society. He describes the "state of society" in these terms:
In order to conceive correctly the scope of this general science, and
distinguish it from the subordinate departments of sociological speculation, it
is necessary to fix the ideas attached to the phrase, "A State of Society." What
is called a state of society, is the simultaneous state of all the greater
social facts or phenomena. Such are: the degree of knowledge, and of
intellectual and moral culture, existing in the community, and in every class of
it; the state of industry, of wealth and its distribution; the habitual
occupations of the community; their division into classes, and the relations of
those classes to one another; the common beliefs which they entertain on all the
subjects most important to mankind, and the degree of assurance with which those
beliefs are held; their tastes, and the character and degree of their aesthetic
development; their form of government, and the more important of their laws and
customs. (Book VI, chap. X, sect. 2)
This sounds pretty much like what we might call "macro-sociology" -- an effort
to describe and explain the large-scale features of a given society. So the goal
of sociology is to discover laws of behavior at the individual level that permit
deduction of the features of society in which these individuals live, given the
current circumstances. Sociology should provide a theory providing an
understanding of the broad sweep of history, the totality of human individual
and social actions.
The doctrine which the preceding chapters were intended to enforce and
elucidate--that the collective series of social phenomena, in other words the
course of history, is subject to general laws, which philosophy may possibly
detect--has been familiar for generations to the scientific thinkers of the
Continent, and has for the last quarter of a century passed out of their
peculiar domain, into that of newspaers and ordinary political discussion. (Book
VI, chap. XI, sect. 1)
A sociological imagination?
In spite of Mill's evident interest in the foundations of a science of society,
he shows little evidence of possessing a lively sociological imagination. He
does not seem to have paid much attention to the actual social processes and
changes underway in Britain in the beginning of the nineteenth century. There is
almost no description or comment concerning the social circumstances of
nineteenth-century Britain -- subjects that were of great interest to Mill as a
reformer. It is striking to compare his writings with those of Tocqueville, who
observes and conceptualizes a wide range of concrete social activity and
behavior. Mill remains on a highly abstract plane: are there social laws? How do
social laws relate to individual laws? How does evidence support or undermine
various social hypotheses? (See an earlier
posting on Tocqueville.)
So here we find almost all the elements that came to define the framework of
positivist social science: the doctrine of the
unity of science,
the insistence on the primacy of the discovery of
laws and regularities,
the doctrines of
methodological individualism and
reductionism, and
the assumption that the natural sciences provide a regulative guide to the
social sciences (naturalism).
Mill's writings about the social sciences set the stage for the development of a
positivist paradigm that impaired the disciplines from adopting the fluidity and
pluralistic viewpoints that they would need.
The shortcomings of Mill's philosophy of social science derive from his most
basic assumptions. He treats the creation of a science of society as primarily a
methodological and epistemic problem; he takes it for granted that the
"phenomena" of the social world are entirely analogous to the phenomena of the
natural world. But this is an error of social ontology. Social phenomena are not
relevantly analogous to natural phenomena. "States" are not like "metals", and
social processes like contention are not like physical processes of mixing and
heating. And if Mill had devoted more of his analytical intelligence to the
problem of discovering, analyzing, and explaining the actual social phenomena of
contemporary Britain, he might well have been drawn to a less positivist
construction of sociology.*****
(Here are several earlier postings that are
relevant to this topic:
- philosophical frameworks of the social
sciences
link- how does philosophy help guide the social
sciences?
link- why a philosophy of social science?
link- proto-social inquiry
link- components of positivism
link- a non-naturalistic approach
link
The unifying thread to these posts is the
question, to what extent did philosophical presuppositions influence the
development of the social sciences?)
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