Perspectivism (German: Perspektivismus; also called perspectivalism) is the epistemological principle that perception of and knowledge of something are always bound to the interpretive perspectives of those observing it. While perspectivism does not regard all perspectives and interpretations as being of equal truth or value, it holds that no one has access to an absolute view of the world cut off from perspective. Instead, all such viewing occurs from some point of view which in turn affects how things are perceived. Rather than attempt to determine truth by correspondence
to things outside any perspective, perspectivism thus generally seeks
to determine truth by comparing and evaluating perspectives among
themselves. Perspectivism may be regarded as an early form of epistemological pluralism, though in some accounts includes treatment of value theory, moral psychology, and realist metaphysics.
Early forms of perspectivism have been identified in the philosophies of Protagoras, Michel de Montaigne, and Gottfried Leibniz. However, its first major statement is considered to be Friedrich Nietzsche's development of the concept in the 19th century, having built off Gustav Teichmüller's use of the term some years prior. For Nietzsche, perspectivism takes the form of a realist antimetaphysics while rejecting both the correspondence theory of truth and the notion that the truth-value of a belief always constitutes its ultimate worth-value. The perspectival conception of objectivity used by Nietzsche sees the deficiencies of each perspective as remediable by an asymptotic study of the differences between them. This stands in contrast to Platonic notions in which objective truth is seen to reside in a wholly non-perspectival domain. Despite this, perspectivism is often misinterpreted as a form of relativism or as a rejection of objectivity entirely.
Though it is often mistaken to imply that no way of seeing the world
can be taken as definitively true, perspectivism can instead be
interpreted as holding certain interpretations (such as that of
perspectivism itself) to be definitively true.
The basic principle that things are perceived differently from
different perspectives (or that perspective determines one's limited and
unprivileged access to knowledge) has sometimes been accounted as a rudimentary, uncontentious form of perspectivism.
The basic practice of comparing contradictory perspectives to one
another may also be considered one such form of perspectivism (See also: Intersubjectivity), as may the entire philosophical problem of how true knowledge is to penetrate one's perspectival limitations.
Precursors and early developments
In Western languages, scholars have found perspectivism in the philosophies of Heraclitus (c. 540 – c. 480 BCE), Protagoras (c. 490 – c. 420 BCE), Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592 CE), and Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716 CE). The origins of perspectivism have also been found to lie also within Renaissance developments in philosophy of art and its artistic notion of perspective. In Asian languages, scholars have found perspectivism in Buddhist, Jain, and Daoist texts. Anthropologists have found a kind of perspectivism in the thinking of some indigenous peoples.
Ancient Greek philosophy
The Western origins of perspectivism can be found in the pre-Socratic philosophies of Heraclitus and Protagoras. In fact, a major cornerstone of Plato's philosophy is his rejection and opposition to perspectivism—this forming a principal element of his aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and theology. The antiperspectivism of Plato made him a central target of critique for later perspectival philosophers such as Nietzsche.
Montaigne
Montaigne's philosophy presents in itself a perspectivism less as a
doctrinaire position than as a core philosophical approach put into
practice. Inasmuch as no one can occupy a God's-eye view, Montaigne holds that no one has access to a view which is totally unbiased, which does not interpret according to its own perspective. It is instead only the underlying psychological biases which view one's own perspective as unbiased. In a passage from his "Of Cannibals", he writes:
Men
of intelligence notice more things and view them more carefully, but
they [interpret] them; and to establish and substantiate their
interpretation, they cannot refrain from altering the facts a little.
They never present things just as they are but twist and disguise them
to conform to the point of view from which they have seen them; and to
gain credence for their opinion and make it attractive, they do not mind
adding something of their own, or extending and amplifying.
— Michel de Montaigne, "Of Cannibals", Essais (1595), trans. J. M. Cohen
Nietzsche
In his works, Nietzsche makes a number of statements on perspective
which at times contrast each other throughout the development of his
philosophy. Nietzsche's perspectivism begins by challenging the
underlying notions of 'viewing from nowhere', 'viewing from everywhere',
and 'viewing without interpreting' as being absurdities. Instead, all viewing is attached to some perspective, and all viewers are limited in some sense to the perspectives at their command. In The Genealogy of Morals he writes:
Let
us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that
posited a 'pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject'; let us
guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as 'pure
reason', 'absolute spirituality', 'knowledge in itself': these always
demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an
eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and
interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more
eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more
complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity' be.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (1887; III:12), transl. Walter Kaufmann
In this, Nietzsche takes a contextualist approach which rejects any God's-eye view of the world. This has been further linked to his notion of the death of God and the dangers of a resulting relativism. However, Nietzsche's perspectivism itself stands in sharp contrast to any such relativism.
In outlining his perspectivism, Nietzsche rejects those who claim
everything to be subjective, by disassembling the notion of the subject
as itself a mere invention and interpretation.
He further states that, since the two are mutually dependent on each
other, the collapse of the God's-eye view causes also the notion of the thing-in-itself to fall apart with it. Nietzsche views this collapse to reveal, through his genealogical
project, that all that has been considered non-perspectival knowledge,
the entire tradition of Western metaphysics, has itself been only a
perspective.
His perspectivism and genealogical project are further integrated into
each other in addressing the psychological drives that underlie various
philosophical programs and perspectives, as a form of critique. Here, contemporary scholar Ken Gemes views Nietzsche's perspectivism to above all be a principle of moral psychology, rejecting interpretations of it as an epistemological thesis outrightly.
It is through this method of critique that the deficiencies of various
perspectives can be alleviated—through a critical mediation of the
differences between them rather than any appeals to the
non-perspectival. In a posthumously published aphorism from The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes:
"Everything
is subjective," you say; but even this is interpretation. The "subject"
is not something given, it is something added and invented and
projected behind what there is.—Finally, is it necessary to posit an
interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention,
hypothesis.
In so far as the word "knowledge" has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.—"Perspectivism."
It
is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and
Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its
perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept
as a norm.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §481 (1883–1888), transl. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale
While Nietzsche does not plainly reject truth and objectivity, he does reject the notions of absolute truth, external facts, and non-perspectival objectivity.
Truth theory and the value of truth
Despite receiving much attention within contemporary philosophy, there is no academic consensus on Nietzsche's conception of truth.
While his perspectivism presents a number of challenges regarding the
nature of truth, its more controversial element lies in its questioning
of the value of truth. Contemporary scholars Steven D. Hales and Robert C. Welshon write that:
Nietzsche's
writings on truth are among the most elusive and difficult ones in his
corpus. One indication of their obscurity is that on an initial reading
he appears either blatantly inconsistent in his use of the words 'true'
and 'truth', or subject to inexplicable vacillations on the value of
truth.
Ortega's perspectivism, replaced his previous position that "man is completely social". His reversal is prominent in his work Verdad y perspectiva
("Truth and perspective"), where he explained that "each man has a
mission of truth" and that what he sees of reality no other eye sees. He explained:
From
different positions two people see the same surroundings. However, they
do not see the same thing. Their different positions mean that the
surroundings are organized in a different way: what is in the foreground
for one may be in the background for another. Furthermore, as things
are hidden one behind another, each person will see something that the
other may not.
Ortega also maintained that perspective is perfected by the multiplication of its viewpoints.
He noted that war transpires due to the lack of perspective and failure
to see the larger contexts of the actions among nations.
Ortega also cited the importance of phenomenology in perspectivism as
he argued against speculation and the importance of concrete evidence in
understanding truth and reality.
In this discourse, he highlighted the role of "circumstance" in finding
out the truth since it allows us to understand realities beyond
ourselves.
The theory of structuration is a social theory of the creation and reproduction of social systems that is based on the analysis of both structure and agents (see structure and agency), without giving primacy to either. Furthermore, in structuration theory, neither micro- nor macro-focused analysis alone is sufficient. The theory was proposed by sociologistAnthony Giddens, most significantly in The Constitution of Society, which examines phenomenology, hermeneutics,
and social practices at the inseparable intersection of structures and
agents. Its proponents have adopted and expanded this balanced position. Though the theory has received much criticism, it remains a pillar of contemporary sociological theory.
Premises and origins
Sociologist Anthony Giddens adopted a post-empiricist frame for his theory, as he was concerned with the abstract characteristics of social relations. This leaves each level more accessible to analysis via the ontologies which constitute the human social experience: space and time ("and thus, in one sense, 'history'.")
His aim was to build a broad social theory which viewed "[t]he basic
domain of study of the social sciences... [as] neither the experience of
the individual actor, nor the existence of any form of societal
totality, but social practices ordered across space and time." His focus on abstract ontology accompanied a general and purposeful neglect of epistemology or detailed research methodology.
Giddens used concepts from objectivist and subjectivist
social theories, discarding objectivism's focus on detached structures,
which lacked regard for humanist elements and subjectivism's exclusive
attention to individual or group agency without consideration for
socio-structural context. He critically engaged classical nineteenth and
early twentieth century social theorists such as Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Alfred Schutz, Robert K. Merton, Erving Goffman, and Jürgen Habermas. Thus, in many ways, structuration was "an exercise in clarification of logical issues." Structuration drew on other fields, as well: "He also wanted to bring
in from other disciplines novel aspects of ontology that he felt had
been neglected by social theorists working in the domains that most
interested him. Thus, for example, he enlisted the aid of geographers,
historians and philosophers in bringing notions of time and space into
the central heartlands of social theory."
Giddens hoped that a subject-wide "coming together" might occur which
would involve greater cross-disciplinary dialogue and cooperation,
especially between anthropologists,
social scientists and sociologists of all types, historians,
geographers, and even novelists. Believing that "literary style
matters", he held that social scientists are communicators who share
frames of meaning across cultural contexts through their work by
utilising "the same sources of description (mutual knowledge) as
novelists or others who write fictional accounts of social life."
Structuration differs from its historical sources. Unlike
structuralism it sees the reproduction of social systems not "as a
mechanical outcome, [but] rather ... as an active constituting process,
accomplished by, and consisting in, the doings of active subjects." Unlike Althusser's concept of agents as "bearers" of structures, structuration theory sees them as active participants. Unlike the philosophy of action and other forms of interpretative sociology, structuration focuses on structure rather than production exclusively. Unlike Saussure's
production of an utterance, structuration sees language as a tool from
which to view society, not as the constitution of society—parting with structural linguists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and generative grammar theorists such as Noam Chomsky. Unlike post-structuralist theory, which put similar focus on the effects of time and space, structuration does not recognise only movement, change and transition. Unlike functionalism,
in which structures and their virtual synonyms, "systems", comprise
organisations, structuration sees structures and systems as separate
concepts. Unlike Marxism,
structuration avoids an overly restrictive concept of "society" and
Marxism's reliance on a universal "motor of history" (i.e. class conflict),
its theories of societal "adaptation", and its insistence on the
working class as universal class and socialism as the ultimate form of
modern society. Finally, "structuration theory cannot be expected to
furnish the moral guarantees that critical theorists sometimes purport to offer."
Main ideas
Duality of structure
Giddens observed that in social analysis, the term structure
referred generally to "rules and resources" and more specifically to
"the structuring properties allowing the 'binding' of time-space in
social systems". These properties make it possible for similar social
practices to exist across time and space and that lend them "systemic"
form. Agents—groups or individuals—draw upon these structures to perform social actions through embedded memory, called memory traces.
Memory traces are thus the vehicle through which social actions are
carried out. Structure is also, however, the result of these social
practices. Thus, Giddens conceives of the duality of structure as being:
...the essential recursiveness of
social life, as constituted in social practices: structure is both
medium and outcome of reproduction of practices. Structure enters
simultaneously into the constitution of the agent and social practices,
and 'exists' in the generating moments of this constitution.
Giddens uses "the duality of structure" (i.e. material/ideational,
micro/macro) to emphasize structure's nature as both medium and outcome.
Structures exist both internally within agents as memory traces that
are the product of phenomenological and hermeneutic inheritance
and externally as the manifestation of social actions. Similarly,
social structures contain agents and/or are the product of past actions
of agents. Giddens holds this duality, alongside "structure" and
"system," in addition to the concept of recursiveness, as the core of
structuration theory. His theory has been adopted by those with structuralist inclinations, but who wish to situate such structures in human practice rather than to reify them as an ideal type or material property. (This is different, for example, from actor–network theory which appears to grant a certain autonomy to technical artifacts.)
Social systems have patterns of social relation that change over
time; the changing nature of space and time determines the interaction
of social relations and therefore structure. Hitherto, social structures
or models were either taken to be beyond the realm of human control—the
positivistic approach—or posit that action creates them—the interpretivist
approach. The duality of structure emphasizes that they are different
sides to the same central question of how social order is created.
Gregor McLennan suggested renaming this process "the duality of structure and agency", since both aspects are involved in using and producing social actions.
Cycle of structuration
The duality of structure is essentially a feedback–feedforward process whereby agents and structures mutually enact social systems, and social systems in turn become part of that duality. Structuration thus recognizes a social cycle. In examining social systems, structuration theory examines structure, modality, and interaction. The "modality" (discussed below) of a structural system is the means by which structures are translated into actions.
Interaction
Interaction
is the agent's activity within the social system, space and time. "It
can be understood as the fitful yet routinized occurrence of encounters,
fading away in time and space, yet constantly reconstituted within
different areas of time-space."Rules can affect interaction, as originally suggested by Goffman.
"Frames" are "clusters of rules which help to constitute and regulate
activities, defining them as activities of a certain sort and as subject
to a given range of sanctions."
Frames are necessary for agents to feel "ontological security, the
trust that everyday actions have some degree of predictability. Whenever
individuals interact in a specific context they address—without any
difficulty and in many cases without conscious acknowledgement—the
question: "What is going on here?" Framing is the practice by which
agents make sense of what they are doing.
Routinization
Structuration theory is centrally concerned with order as "the transcending of time and space in human social relationships". Institutionalized action and routinization
are foundational in the establishment of social order and the
reproduction of social systems. Routine persists in society, even during
social and political revolutions, where daily life is greatly deformed,
"as Bettelheim demonstrates so well, routines, including those of an
obnoxious sort, are re-established."
Routine interactions become institutionalized features of social
systems via tradition, custom and/or habit, but this is no easy societal
task and it "is a major error to suppose that these phenomena need no
explanation. On the contrary, as Goffman (together with ethnomethodology)
has helped to demonstrate, the routinized character of most social
activity is something that has to be 'worked at' continually by those
who sustain it in their day-to-day conduct." Therefore, routinized social practices do not stem from coincidence, "but the skilled accomplishments of knowledgeable agents."
Trust and tact are essential for the existence of a "basic security system, the sustaining (in praxis)
of a sense of ontological security, and [thus] the routine nature of
social reproduction which agents skilfully organize. The monitoring of
the body, the control and use of face in 'face work'—these are fundamental to social integration in time and space."
Explanation
When
I utter a sentence I draw upon various syntactical rules (sedimented in
my practical consciousness of the language) in order to do so. These
structural features of the language are the medium whereby I generate
the utterance. But in producing a syntactically correct utterance I
simultaneously contribute to the reproduction of the language as a
whole. ...The relation between moment and totality for social theory...
[involves] a dialectic of presence and absence which ties the most minor
or trivial forms of social action to structural properties of the
overall society, and to the coalescence of institutions over long
stretches of historical time.
Thus, even the smallest social actions contribute to the alteration
or reproduction of social systems. Social stability and order is not
permanent; agents always possess a dialectic of control
(discussed below) which allows them to break away from normative
actions. Depending on the social factors present, agents may cause
shifts in social structure.
The cycle of structuration is not a defined sequence; it is
rarely a direct succession of causal events. Structures and agents are
both internal and external to each other, mingling, interrupting, and
continually changing each other as feedbacks and feedforwards occur.
Giddens stated, "The degree of "systemness"
is very variable. ...I take it to be one of the main features of
structuration theory that the extension and 'closure' of societies
across space and time is regarded as problematic."
The use of "patriot" in political speech reflects this mingling,
borrowing from and contributing to nationalistic norms and supports
structures such as a police state, from which it in turn gains impact.
Structure and society
Structures
are the "rules and resources" embedded in agents' memory traces. Agents
call upon their memory traces of which they are "knowledgeable" to
perform social actions. "Knowledgeability" refers to "what agents know
about what they do, and why they do it." Giddens divides memory traces (structures-within-knowledgeability) into three types:
Domination (power): Giddens also uses "resources" to refer to
this type. "Authoritative resources" allow agents to control persons,
whereas "allocative resources" allow agents to control material objects.
Signification (meaning): Giddens suggests that meaning is inferred
through structures. Agents use existing experience to infer meaning. For
example, the meaning of living with mental illness comes from
contextualized experiences.
Legitimation (norms): Giddens sometimes uses "rules" to refer to either signification or legitimation. An agent draws upon these stocks of knowledge via memory to inform him or herself about the external context, conditions, and potential results of an action.
When an agent uses these structures for social interactions, they are called modalities
and present themselves in the forms of facility (domination),
interpretive scheme/communication (signification) and norms/sanctions
(legitimation).
Thus, he distinguishes between overall
"structures-within-knowledgeability" and the more limited and
task-specific "modalities" on which these agents subsequently draw when
they interact.
The duality of structures means that structures enter
"simultaneously into the constitution of the agent and social practices,
and 'exists' in the generating moments of this constitution."
"Structures exist paradigmatically, as an absent set of differences,
temporally "present" only in their instantiation, in the constituting
moments of social systems." Giddens draws upon structuralism and post-structuralism in theorizing that structures and their meaning are understood by their differences.
Agents and society
Giddens' agents follow previous psychoanalysis work done by Sigmund Freud and others.
Agency, as Giddens calls it, is human action. To be human is to be an
agent (not all agents are human). Agency is critical to both the
reproduction and the transformation of society. Another way to explain
this concept is by what Giddens calls the "reflexive monitoring of
actions."
"Reflexive monitoring" refers to agents' ability to monitor their
actions and those actions' settings and contexts. Monitoring is an
essential characteristic of agency. Agents subsequently "rationalize,"
or evaluate, the success of those efforts. All humans engage in this
process, and expect the same from others. Through action, agents produce
structures; through reflexive monitoring and rationalization, they
transform them. To act, agents must be motivated, must be knowledgeable
must be able to rationalize the action; and must reflexively monitor the
action.
Agents, while bounded in structure, draw upon their knowledge of
that structural context when they act. However, actions are constrained
by agents' inherent capabilities and their understandings of available
actions and external limitations. Practical consciousness and discursive consciousness
inform these abilities. Practical consciousness is the knowledgeability
that an agent brings to the tasks required by everyday life, which is
so integrated as to be hardly noticed. Reflexive monitoring occurs at
the level of practical consciousness.
Discursive consciousness is the ability to verbally express knowledge.
Alongside practical and discursive consciousness, Giddens recognizes
actors as having reflexive, contextual knowledge, and that habitual,
widespread use of knowledgeability makes structures become
institutionalized.
Agents rationalize, and in doing so, link the agent and the
agent's knowledgeability. Agents must coordinate ongoing projects,
goals, and contexts while performing actions. This coordination is
called reflexive monitoring and is connected to ethnomethodology's
emphasis on agents' intrinsic sense of accountability.
The factors that can enable or constrain an agent, as well as how an agent uses structures, are known as capability constraints
include age, cognitive/physical limits on performing multiple tasks at
once and the physical impossibility of being in multiple places at once,
available time and the relationship between movement in space and
movement in time.
Location offers are a particular type of capability constraint. Examples include:
Locale
Regionalization: political or geographical zones, or rooms in a building
Presence: Do other actors participate in the action? (see co-presence); and more specifically
Physical presence: Are other actors physically nearby?
Agents are always able to engage in a dialectic of control,
able to "intervene in the world or to refrain from such intervention,
with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs." In essence, agents experience inherent and contrasting amounts of autonomy and dependence; agents can always either act or not.
Methodology
Structuration
theory is relevant to research, but does not prescribe a methodology
and its use in research has been problematic. Giddens intended his
theory to be abstract and theoretical, informing the hermeneutic aspects
of research rather than guiding practice. Giddens wrote that
structuration theory "establishes the internal logical coherence of
concepts within a theoretical network."[2]: 34
Giddens criticized many researchers who used structuration theory for
empirical research, critiquing their "en bloc" use of the theory's
abstract concepts in a burdensome way. "The works applying concepts from
the logical framework of structuration theory that Giddens approved of
were those that used them more selectively, 'in a spare and critical
fashion.'" Giddens and followers used structuration theory more as "a sensitizing device".
Structuration theory allows researchers to focus on any structure
or concept individually or in combination. In this way, structuration
theory prioritizes ontology over epistemology.
In his own work, Giddens focuses on production and reproduction of
social practices in some context. He looked for stasis and change, agent expectations, relative degrees of routine, tradition, behavior, and creative, skillful, and strategic thought simultaneously. He examined spatial organization, intended and unintended consequences, skilled and knowledgeable agents, discursive and tacit knowledge, dialectic of control, actions with motivational content, and constraints.
Structuration theorists conduct analytical research of social
relations, rather than organically discovering them, since they use
structuration theory to reveal specific research questions, though that
technique has been criticized as cherry-picking.
Giddens preferred strategic conduct analysis, which
focuses on contextually situated actions. It employs detailed accounts
of agents' knowledgeability, motivation, and the dialectic of control.
Criticisms and additions
Though
structuration theory has received critical expansion since its
origination, Giddens' concepts remained pivotal for later extension of
the theory, especially the duality of structure.
Strong structuration
Rob
Stones argued that many aspects of Gidden's original theory had little
place in its modern manifestation. Stones focused on clarifying its
scope, reconfiguring some concepts and inserting new ones, and refining
methodology and research orientations. Strong structuration:
"[t]he specific combinations of all the above in composite forms of research."
Discovers the "meso-level of ontology between the abstract, philosophical level of ontology and the in-situ, ontic level." Strong structuration allows varied abstract ontological concepts in experiential conditions.
Focuses on the meso-level at the temporal and spatial scale.
Conceptualises independent causal forces and irresistible causal forces,
which take into account how external structures, internal structures,
and active agency affect agent choices (or lack of them). "Irresistible
forces" are the connected concepts of a horizon of action with a set of
"actions-in-hand" and a hierarchical ordering of purposes and concerns.
An agent is affected by external influences. This aspect of strong
structuration helps reconcile an agent's dialectic of control and
his/her more constrained set of "real choices."
Post-structuration and dualism
Margaret Archer objected to the inseparability of structure and agency in structuration theory. She proposed a notion of dualism
rather than "duality of structure". She primarily examined structural
frameworks and the action within the limits allowed by those conditions.
She combined realist ontology and called her methodology analytical dualism.
Archer maintained that structure precedes agency in social structure
reproduction and analytical importance, and that they should be analysed
separately. She emphasised the importance of temporality in social
analysis, dividing it into four stages: structural conditioning, social
interaction, its immediate outcome and structural elaboration. Thus her
analysis considered embedded "structural conditions, emergent causal
powers and properties, social interactions between agents, and
subsequent structural changes or reproductions arising from the latter." Archer criticised structuration theory for denying time and place because of the inseparability between structure and agency.
Nicos Mouzelis reconstructed Giddens' original theories.
Mouzelis kept Giddens' original formulation of structure as "rules and
resources." However, he was considered a dualist, because he argued for
dualism to be as important in social analysis as the duality of
structure. Mouzelis reexamined human social action at the "syntagmatic"
(syntactic) level. He claimed that the duality of structure does not
account for all types of social relationships. Duality of structure
works when agents do not question or disrupt rules, and interaction
resembles "natural/performative" actions with a practical orientation.
However, in other contexts, the relationship between structure and
agency can resemble dualism more than duality, such as systems that are
the result of powerful agents. In these situations, rules are not viewed
as resources, but are in states of transition or redefinition, where
actions are seen from a "strategic/monitoring orientation."
In this orientation, dualism shows the distance between agents and
structures. He called these situations "syntagmatic duality". For
example, a professor can change the class he or she teaches, but has
little capability to change the larger university structure. "In that
case, syntagmatic duality gives way to syntagmatic dualism."
This implies that systems are the outcome, but not the medium, of
social actions. Mouzelis also criticised Giddens' lack of consideration
for social hierarchies.
John Parker built on Archer and Mouzelis's support for dualism to
propose a theoretical reclamation of historical sociology and
macro-structures using concrete historical cases, claiming that dualism
better explained the dynamics of social structures.
Equally, Robert Archer developed and applied analytical dualism in his
critical analysis of the impact of New Managerialism on education policy
in England and Wales during the 1990sand organization theory.
Though he agreed with the soundness and overall purposes of Giddens'
most expansive structuration concepts (i.e., against dualism and for the
study of structure in concert with agency), John B. Thompson ("a close
friend and colleague of Giddens at Cambridge University") wrote one of the most widely cited critiques of structuration theory.
His central argument was that it needed to be more specific and more
consistent both internally and with conventional social structure
theory. Thompson focused on problematic aspects of Giddens' concept of
structure as "rules and resources," focusing on "rules". He argued that
Giddens' concept of rule was too broad.
Thompson claimed that Giddens presupposed a criterion of importance
in contending that rules are a generalizable enough tool to apply to
every aspect of human action and interaction; "on the other hand,
Giddens is well aware that some rules, or some kinds or aspects
of rules, are much more important than others for the analysis of, for
example, the social structure of capitalist societies." He found the term to be imprecise and to not designate which rules are more relevant for which social structures.
Thompson used the example of linguistic analysis
to point out that the need for a prior framework which to enable
analysis of, for example, the social structure of an entire nation.
While semantic rules may be relevant to social structure, to study them "presupposes some structural points of reference which are not themselves rules, with regard to which [of] these semantic rules are differentiated" according to class, sex, region and so on. He called this structural differentiation.
Rules differently affect variously situated individuals. Thompson
gave the example of a private school which restricts enrollment and
thus participation. Thus rules—in this case, restrictions—"operate differentially, affecting unevenly various groups of individuals whose categorization depends on certain assumptions about social structures." The isolated analysis of rules does not incorporate differences among agents.
Thompson claimed that Giddens offered no way of formulating structural identity. Some "rules" are better conceived of as broad inherent elements that define a structure's identity (e.g., Henry Ford and Harold Macmillan
are "capitalistic"). These agents may differ, but have important traits
in common due to their "capitalistic" identity. Thompson theorized that
these traits were not rules in the sense that a manager could draw upon
a "rule" to fire a tardy employee; rather, they were elements which "limit the kinds of rules which are possible and which thereby delimit the scope for institutional variation." It is necessary to outline the broader social system to be able to analyze agents, actors, and rules within that system.
Thus Thompson concluded that Giddens' use of the term "rules" is
problematic. "Structure" is similarly objectionable: "But to adhere to
this conception of structure, while at the same time acknowledging the
need for the study of 'structural principles,' 'structural sets' and
'axes of structuration,' is simply a recipe for conceptual confusion."
Thompson proposed several amendments. He requested sharper
differentiation between the reproduction of institutions and the
reproduction of social structure. He proposed an altered version of the
structuration cycle. He defined "institutions"
as "characterized by rules, regulations and conventions of various
sorts, by differing kinds and quantities of resources and by
hierarchical power relations between the occupants of institutional
positions."
Agents acting within institutions and conforming to institutional rules
and regulations or using institutionally endowed power reproduce the
institution. "If, in so doing, the institutions continue to satisfy
certain structural conditions, both in the sense of conditions which
delimit the scope for institutional variation and the conditions which underlie the operation of structural differentiation, then the agents may be said to reproduce social structure."
Thompson also proposed adding a range of alternatives to
Giddens' conception of constraints on human action. He pointed out the
paradoxical relationship between Giddens' "dialectic of control" and his
acknowledgement that constraints may leave an agent with no choice. He
demanded that Giddens better show how wants and desires relate to
choice.
Giddens replied that a structural principle is not equivalent with rules, and pointed to his definition from A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism:
"Structural principles are principles of organisation implicated in
those practices most "deeply" (in time) and "pervasively" (in space)
sedimented in society", and described structuration as a "mode of institutional articulation" with emphasis on the relationship between time and space and a host of
institutional orderings including, but not limited to, rules.
Ultimately, Thompson concluded that the concept of structure as
"rules and resources" in an elemental and ontological way resulted in
conceptual confusion. Many theorists supported Thompson's argument that
an analysis "based on structuration's ontology of structures as norms,
interpretative schemes and power resources radically limits itself if it
does not frame and locate itself within a more broadly conceived notion
of social structures."
Change
Sewell
provided a useful summary that included one of the theory's less
specified aspects: the question "Why are structural transformations
possible?" He claimed that Giddens' overrelied on rules and modified
Giddens' argument by re-defining "resources" as the embodiment of
cultural schemas. He argued that change arises from the multiplicity of structures, the transposable nature of schemas, the unpredictability of resource accumulation, the polysemy of resources and the intersection of structures.
The existence of multiple structures implies that the
knowledgeable agents whose actions produce systems are capable of
applying different schemas to contexts with differing resources,
contrary to the conception of a universal habitus
(learned dispositions, skills and ways of acting). He wrote that
"Societies are based on practices that derived from many distinct
structures, which exist at different levels, operate in different
modalities, and are themselves based on widely varying types and
quantities of resources. ...It is never true that all of them are
homologous."
Originally from Bourdieu, transposable
schemas can be "applied to a wide and not fully predictable range of
cases outside the context in which they were initially learned." That
capacity "is inherent in the knowledge of cultural schemas that
characterizes all minimally competent members of society."
Agents may modify schemas even though their use does not
predictably accumulate resources. For example, the effect of a joke is
never quite certain, but a comedian may alter it based on the amount of
laughter it garners regardless of this variability.
Agents may interpret a particular resource according to different
schemas. E.g., a commander could attribute his wealth to military
prowess, while others could see it as a blessing from the gods or a
coincidental initial advantage.
Structures often overlap, confusing interpretation (e.g., the
structure of capitalist society includes production from both private
property and worker solidarity).
This theory was adapted and augmented by researchers interested in the relationship between technology and social structures, such as information technology in organizations. DeSanctis and Poole
proposed an "adaptive structuration theory" with respect to the
emergence and use of group decision support systems. In particular, they
chose Giddens' notion of modalities to consider how technology is used
with respect to its "spirit". "Appropriations"
are the immediate, visible actions that reveal deeper structuration
processes and are enacted with "moves". Appropriations may be faithful
or unfaithful, be instrumental and be used with various attitudes.
Wanda Orlikowski
applied the duality of structure to technology: "The duality of
technology identifies prior views of technology as either objective
force or as socially constructed product–as a false dichotomy."
She compared this to previous models (the technological imperative,
strategic choice, and technology as a trigger) and considered the
importance of meaning, power, norms, and interpretive flexibility.
Orlikowski later replaced the notion of embedded properties
for enactment (use). The "practice lens" shows how people enact
structures which shape their use of technology that they employ in their
practices.
While Orlikowski's work focused on corporations, it is equally
applicable to the technology cultures that have emerged in smaller
community-based organizations, and can be adapted through the gender sensitivity lens in approaches to technology governance.
Workman, Ford and Allen rearticulated structuration theory as structuration agency theory for modeling socio-biologically inspired structuration in security software.
Software agents join humans to engage in social actions of information
exchange, giving and receiving instructions, responding to other agents,
and pursuing goals individually or jointly.
Four-flows-model
The four flows model of organizing is grounded in structuration theory. McPhee and Pamela Zaug (2001)
identify four communication flows that collectively perform key
organizational functions and distinguish organizations from less formal
social groups:
Membership negotiation—socialization, but also identification and self-positioning;
Organizational self-structuring—reflexive, especially managerial, structuring and control activities;
Activity coordination—Interacting to align or adjust local work activities;
Institutional positioning in the social order of institutions—mostly
external communication to gain recognition and inclusion in the web of
social transactions.
Group communication
Poole, Seibold, and McPhee wrote that "group structuration theory," provides "a theory of group interaction commensurate with the complexities of the phenomenon."
The theory attempts to integrate macrosocial theories and
individuals or small groups, as well as how to avoid the binary
categorization of either "stable" or "emergent" groups.
Waldeck et al. concluded that the theory needs to better predict outcomes, rather than merely explaining them. Decision rules
support decision-making, which produces a communication pattern that
can be directly observable. Research has not yet examined the "rational"
function of group communication and decision-making (i.e., how well it
achieves goals), nor structural production or constraints. Researchers
must empirically demonstrate the recursivity of action and structure,
examine how structures stabilize and change over time due to group
communication, and may want to integrate argumentation research.
Public relations
Falkheimer claimed that integrating structuration theory into public relations
(PR) strategies could result in a less agency-driven business, return
theoretical focus to the role of power structures in PR, and reject
massive PR campaigns in favor of a more "holistic understanding of how
PR may be used in local contexts both as a reproductive and
[transformational] social instrument."
Falkheimer portrayed PR as a method of communication and action whereby
social systems emerge and reproduce. Structuration theory reinvigorates
the study of space and time in PR theory. Applied structuration theory
may emphasize community-based approaches, storytelling, rituals, and
informal communication systems. Moreover, structuration theory
integrates all organizational members in PR actions, integrating PR into
all organizational levels rather than a separate office. Finally,
structuration reveals interesting ethical considerations relating to
whether a social system should transform.
COVID-19 and structure
the COVID-19 pandemic had huge impact on society since the beginning.
When investigating those impacts, many researchers found helpful using
structuration theory to explain the change in society. Oliver (2021)
used “a theoretical framework derived from Giddens’ structuration
theory to analyze societal information cultures, concentrating on
information and health literacy perspectives.” And this framework
focused on “the three modalities of structuration, i.e., interpretive
schemes, resources, and norms.” And in Oliver’s research, those three
modalities are “resources”, “information freedom” and “formal and
informal concepts and rules of behavior”. After analyzing four countries
framework, Oliver and his research team concluded “All our case studies
show a number of competing information sources – from traditional media
and official websites to various social media platforms used by both
the government and the general public – that complicate the information
landscape in which we all try to navigate what we know, and what we do
not yet know, about the pandemic.”
In the research of interpreting how remote work environment change during COVID-19 in South Africa, Walter (2020)
applied structuration theory because “it addresses the relationship
between actors (or persons) and social structures and how these social
structures ultimately realign and conform to the actions of actors”
Plus, “these social structures from Giddens's structuration theory
assist people to navigate through everyday life.”
Zvokuomba (2021) also used Giddens' theory of structuration “to reflect at the various levels of fragilities within the context of COVID-19 lockdown
measures.” One example in the research is that “theory of structuration
and agency point to situations when individuals and groups of people
either in compliance or defiance of community norms and rules of
survival adopt certain practices.” And during pandemic, researched
pointed out “reverting to the traditional midwifery became a pragmatic
approach to a problem.” One example to support this point is that “As
medical centers were partly closed, with no basic medication and health
staff, the only alternative was seek traditional medical services. ”
Business and structure
Structuration theory can also be used in explaining business related issues including operating, managing and marketing.
Clifton Scott and Karen Myers (2010)studied
how the duality of structure can explain the shifts of members' actions
during the membership negotiations in an organization by This is an
example of how structure evolves with the interaction of a group of
people.
Another case study done by Dutta (2016)
and his research team shows how the models shift because of the action
of individuals. The article examines the relationship between CEO’s behavior and a company’s cross-border acquisition.
This case can also demonstrate one of the major dimensions in the
duality of structure, the sense of power from the CEO. Authors found out
that the process follows the theory of duality of structure: under the
circumstances of CEO is overconfident, and the company is the limitation of resources, the process of cross-border acquisition is likely to be different than before.
Yuan ElaineJ (2011)’s
research focused on a certain demographic of people under the
structure. Authors studied Chinese TV shows and audiences’ flavor of the
show. The author concludes in the relationship between the audience and
the TV shows producers, audiences’ behavior has higher-order patterns.
Pavlou and Majchrzak argued that research on business-to-business e-commerce portrayed technology as overly deterministic.
The authors employed structuration theory to re-examine outcomes such
as economic/business success as well as trust, coordination, innovation,
and shared knowledge. They looked beyond technology into organizational
structure and practices, and examined the effects on the structure of
adapting to new technologies. The authors held that technology needs to
be aligned and compatible with the existing "trustworthy"
practices and organizational and market structure. The authors
recommended measuring long-term adaptations using ethnography,
monitoring and other methods to observe causal relationships and
generate better predictions.
Inductivism is the traditional and still commonplace philosophy of scientific method to develop scientific theories. Inductivism aims to neutrally observe a domain, infer laws from examined cases—hence, inductive reasoning—and thus objectively discover the sole naturally true theory of the observed.
Inductivism's basis is, in sum, "the idea that theories can be derived from, or established on the basis of, facts". Evolving in phases, inductivism's conceptual reign spanned four centuries since Francis Bacon's 1620 proposal of such against Western Europe's prevailing model, scholasticism, which reasoned deductively from preconceived beliefs.[
In the 19th and 20th centuries, inductivism succumbed to hypotheticodeductivism—sometimes worded deductivism—as scientific method's realistic idealization. Yet scientific theories as such are now widely attributed to occasions of inference to the best explanation, IBE, which, like scientists' actual methods, are diverse and not formally prescribable.
Philosophers' debates
Inductivist endorsement
Francis Bacon, articulating inductivism in England, is often falsely stereotyped as a naive inductivist. Crudely explained, the "Baconian model" advises to observe nature, propose a modest law
that generalizes an observed pattern, confirm it by many observations,
venture a modestly broader law, and confirm that, too, by many more
observations, while discarding disconfirmed laws.
Growing ever broader, the laws never quite exceed observations.
Scientists, freed from preconceptions, thus gradually uncover nature's
causal and material structure. Newton's theory of universal gravitation—modeling motion as an effect of a force—resembled inductivism's paramount triumph.
Near 1740, David Hume, in Scotland, identified multiple obstacles to inferring causality from experience. Hume noted the formal illogicality of enumerative induction—unrestricted
generalization from particular instances to all instances, and stating a
universal law—since humans observe sequences of sensory events, not
cause and effect. Perceiving neither logical nor natural necessity or impossibility among events, humans tacitly postulate uniformity of nature, unproved. Later philosophers would select, highlight, and nickname Humean principles—Hume's fork, the problem of induction, and Hume's law—although Hume respected and accepted the empirical sciences as inevitably inductive, after all.
Immanuel Kant, in Germany, alarmed by Hume's seemingly radical empiricism, identified its apparent opposite, rationalism, in Descartes, and sought a middleground. Kant intuited that necessity exists, indeed, bridging the world in itself to human experience, and that it is the mind, having innate constants that determine space, time, and substance, and thus ensure the empirically correct physical theory's universal truth. Thus shielding Newtonian physics by discarding scientific realism, Kant's view limited science to tracing appearances, mere phenomena, never unveiling external reality, the noumena. Kant's transcendental idealism launched German idealism, a group of speculative metaphysics.
While philosophers widely continued awkward confidence in empirical sciences as inductive, John Stuart Mill, in England, proposed five methods to discern causality, how genuine inductivism purportedly exceeds enumerative induction. In the 1830s, opposing metaphysics, Auguste Comte, in France, explicated positivism, which, unlike Bacon's model, emphasizes predictions, confirming them, and laying scientific laws, irrefutable by theology or metaphysics. Mill, viewing experience as affirming uniformity of nature and thus justifying enumerative induction, endorsed positivism—the first modern philosophy of science—which, also a political philosophy, upheld scientific knowledge as the only genuine knowledge.
Inductivist repudiation
Nearing 1840, William Whewell,
in England, deemed the inductive sciences not so simple, and argued for
recognition of "superinduction", an explanatory scope or principle
invented by the mind to unite facts, but not present in the facts. John Stuart Mill rejected Whewell's hypotheticodeductivism as science's method. Whewell believed it to sometimes, upon the evidence, potentially including unlikely signs, including consilience, render scientific theories that are probably true metaphysically. By 1880, C S Peirce,
in America, clarified the basis of deductive inference and, although
acknowledging induction, proposed a third type of inference. Peirce
called it "abduction", now termed inference to the best explanation, IBE.
The logical positivists arose in the 1920s, rebuked metaphysical
philosophies, accepted hypotheticodeductivist theory origin, and sought
to objectively vet scientific theories—or any statement beyond
emotive—as provably false or true as to merely empirical facts and
logical relations, a campaign termed verificationism. In its milder variant, Rudolf Carnap
tried, but always failed, to find an inductive logic whereby a
universal law's truth via observational evidence could be quantified by
"degree of confirmation". Karl Popper,
asserting a strong hypotheticodeductivism since the 1930s, attacked
inductivism and its positivist variants, then in 1963 called enumerative
induction "a myth", a deductive inference from a tacit explanatory
theory. In 1965, Gilbert Harman explained enumerative induction as a masked IBE.
Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book, a cultural landmark, explains that periods of normal science as but paradigms
of science are each overturned by revolutionary science, whose radical
paradigm becomes the normal science new. Kuhn's thesis dissolved
logical positivism's grip on Western academia, and inductivism fell.
Besides Popper and Kuhn, other postpositivist philosophers of science—including Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos, and Larry Laudan—have
all but unanimously rejected inductivism. Those who assert scientific
realism—which interprets scientific theory as reliably and literally, if
approximate, true regarding nature's unobservable aspects—generally
attribute new theories to IBE. And yet IBE, which, so far, cannot be
trained, lacks particular rules of inference. By the 21st century's turn, inductivism's heir was Bayesianism.
Scientific methods
From the 17th to the 20th centuries, inductivism was widely conceived as scientific method's ideal. Even at the 21st century's turn, popular presentations of scientific discovery and progress naively, erroneously suggested it. The 20th was the first century producing more scientists than philosopherscientists. Earlier scientists, "natural philosophers," pondered and debated their philosophies of method. Einstein remarked, "Science without epistemology is—in so far as it is thinkable at all—primitive and muddled".
Particularly after the 1960s, scientists became unfamiliar with
the historical and philosophical underpinnings of their won research
programs, and often unfamiliar with logic.
Scientists thus often struggle to evaluate and communicate their own
work against question or attack or to optimize methods and progress. In any case, during the 20th century, philosophers of science accepted that scientific method's truer idealization is hypotheticodeductivism, which, especially in its strongest form, Karl Popper's falsificationism, is also termed deductivism.
Inductivism
Inductivism infers from observations of similar effects to similar causes, and generalizes unrestrictedly—that is, by enumerative induction—to a universal law.
Extending inductivism, Comteanpositivism explicitly aims to oppose metaphysics, shuns imaginative theorizing, emphasizes observation, then making predictions, confirming them, and stating laws.
Logical positivism
would accept hypotheticodeductivsm in theory development, but sought an
inductive logic to objectively quantity a theory's confirmation by
empirical evidence and, additionally, objectively compare rival
theories.
Confirmation
Whereas a theory's proof—were such possible—may be termed verification. A theory's support is termed confirmation. But to reason from confirmation to verification—If A, then B; in fact B, and so A—is the deductive fallacy called "affirming the consequent." Inferring the relation A to B implies the relation B to A
supposes, for instance, "If the lamp is broken, then the room will be
dark, and so the room's being dark means the lamp is broken." Even if B holds, A could be due to X or Y or Z, or to XYZ combined. Or the sequence A and then B could be consequence of U—utterly undetected—whereby B always trails A by constant conjunction instead of by causation. Maybe, in fact, U can cease, disconnecting A from B.
Disconfirmation
A natural deductivereasoning form is logically valid without postulates and true by simply the principle of nonselfcontradiction. "Denying the consequent" is a natural deduction—If A, then B; not B, so not A—whereby one can logically disconfirm the hypothesis A. Thus, there also is eliminative induction, using this
Determination
At least logically, any phenomenon can host multiple, conflicting explanations—the problem of underdetermination—why inference from data to theory lacks any formal logic, any deductive rules of inference. A counterargument is the difficulty of finding even one empirically adequate theory.
Still, however difficult to attain one, one after another has been
replaced by a radically different theory, the problem of unconceived
alternatives.
In the meantime, many confirming instances of a theory's predictions
can occur even if many of the theory's other predictions are false.
Scientific method cannot ensure that scientists will imagine,
much less will or even can perform, inquiries or experiments inviting
disconfirmations. Further, any data collection projects a horizon of
expectation—how even objective facts, direct observations, are laden with theory—whereby incompatible facts may go unnoticed. And the experimenter's regress
permits disconfirmation to be rejected by inferring that unnoticed
entities or aspects unexpectedly altered the test conditions. A hypothesis can be tested only conjoined to countless auxiliary hypotheses, mostly neglected until disconfirmation.
Deductivism
In
hypotheticodeductivism, the HD model, one introduces some explanation
or principle from any source, such as imagination or even a dream,
infers logical consequences of it—that is, deductive inferences—and compares those with observations, perhaps experimental. In simple or Whewellian
hypotheticodeductivism, one might accept a theory as metaphysically
true or probably true if its predictions display certain traits that
appear doubtful of a false theory.
In Popperian
hypotheticodeductivism, sometimes called falsificationism, although one
aims for a true theory, one's main tests of the theory are efforts to
empirically refute it. Falsification's main value on confirmations is when testing risky predictions that seem likeliest to fail. If the theory's bizarre prediction is empirically confirmed, then the theory is strongly corroborated, but, never upheld as metaphysically true, it is granted simply verisimilitude, the appearance of truth and thus a likeness to truth.
Inductivist reign
Francis Bacon introduced inductivism—and Isaac Newton soon emulated it—in England of the 17th century. In the 18th century, David Hume, in Scotland, raised scandal by philosophical skepticism at inductivism's rationality, whereas Immanuel Kant, in a German state, deflected Hume's fork,
as it were, to shield Newtonian physics as well as philosophical
metaphysics, but in the feat implied that science could at best reflect
and predict observations, structured by the mind. Kant's metaphysics led Hegel's metaphysics, which Karl Marx transposed from spiritual to material and others gave it a nationalist reading.
Auguste Comte, in France of the early 19th century, opposing metaphysics, introducing positivism as, in essence, refined inductivism and
a political philosophy. The contemporary urgency of the positivists and
of the neopositivists—the logical positivists, emerging in Germany and
Vienna in World War I's aftermath, and attenuating into the logical
empiricists in America and England after World War II—reflected the
sociopolitical climate of their own eras. The philosophers perceived
dire threats to society via metaphysical theories, which associated with
religious, sociopolitical, and thereby social and military conflicts.
Bacon
In 1620 in England, Francis Bacon's treatise Novum Organum alleged that scholasticism's Aristotelian method of deductive inference via syllogistic logic upon traditional categories was impeding society's progress.
Admonishing allegedly classic induction for inferring straight from
"sense and particulars up to the most general propositions" and then
applying the axioms onto new particulars without empirically verifying
them, Bacon stated the "true and perfect Induction". In Bacon's inductivist method, a scientist, until the late 19th century a natural philosopher,
ventures an axiom of modest scope, makes many observations, accepts the
axiom if it is confirmed and never disconfirmed, then ventures another
axiom only modestly broader, collects many more observations, and
accepts that axiom, too, only if it is confirmed, never disconfirmed.
In Novus Organum, Bacon uses the term hypothesis rarely, and usually uses it in pejorative senses, as prevalent in Bacon's time. Yet ultimately, as applied, Bacon's term axiom is more similar now to the term hypothesis than to the term law. By now, a law are nearer to an axiom, a rule of inference. By the 20th century's close, historians
and philosophers of science generally agreed that Bacon's actual
counsel was far more balanced than it had long been stereotyped, while
some assessment even ventured that Bacon had described falsificationism,
presumably as far from inductivism as one can get. In any case, Bacon was not a strict inductivist and included aspects of hypotheticodeductivism, but those aspects of Bacon's model were neglected by others, and the "Baconian model" was regarded as true inductivism—which it mostly was.
In Bacon's estimation, during this repeating process of modest
axiomatization confirmed by extensive and minute observations, axioms
expand in scope and deepen in penetrance tightly in accord with all the
observations. This, Bacon proposed, would open a clear and true view of nature as it exists independently of human preconceptions.
Ultimately, the general axioms concerning observables would render
matter's unobservable structure and nature's causal mechanisms
discernible by humans.
But, as Bacon provides no clear way to frame axioms, let alone develop
principles or theoretical constructs universally true, researchers
might observe and collect data endlessly.
For this vast venture, Bacon's advised precise record keeping and
collaboration among researchers—a vision resembling today's research
institutes—while the true understanding of nature would permit
technological innovation, heralding a New Atlantis.
Newton
Modern science arose against Aristotelian physics. Geocentric were both Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy, which latter was a basis of astrology, a basis of medicine. Nicolaus Copernicus proposed heliocentrism, perhaps to better fit astronomy to Aristotelian physics' fifth element—the
universal essence, or quintessence, the aether—whose intrinsic motion,
explaining celestial observations, was perpetual, perfect circles. Yet Johannes Keplermodified Copernican orbits to ellipses soon after Galileo Galilei's telescopic
observations disputed the Moon's composition by aether, and Galilei's
experiments with earthly bodies attacked Aristotelian physics. Galilean
principles were subsumed by René Descartes, whose Cartesian physics structured his Cartesian cosmology, modeling heliocentrism and employing mechanical philosophy. Mechanical philosophy's first principle, stated by Descartes, was No action at a distance. Yet it was British chemist Robert Boyle who imparted, here, the term mechanical philosophy. Boyle sought for chemistry, by way of corpuscularism—a Cartesian hypothesis that matter is particulate but not necessarily atomic—a mechanical basis and thereby a divorce from alchemy.
In 1666, Isaac Newton fled London from the plague.[30] Isolated, he applied rigorous experimentation and mathematics, including development of calculus, and reduced both terrestrial motion and celestial motion—that is, both physics and astronomy—to one theory stating Newton's laws of motion, several corollary principles, and law of universal gravitation, set in a framework of postulated absolute space and absolute time.
Newton's unification of celestial and terrestrial phenomena overthrew
vestiges of Aristotelian physics, and disconnected physics from
chemistry, which each then followed its own course. Newton became the exemplar of the modern scientist, and the Newtonian research program became the modern model of knowledge. Although absolute space, revealed by no experience, and a force
acting at a distance discomforted Newton, he and physicists for some
200 years more would seldom suspect the fictional character of the
Newtonian foundation, as they believed not that physical concepts and
laws are "free inventions of the human mind", as Einstein in 1933 called
them, but could be inferred logically from experience. Supposedly, Newton maintained that toward his gravitational theory, he had "framed" no hypotheses.
Hume
At 1740, Hume sorted truths into two, divergent categories—"relations of ideas" versus "matters of fact and real existence"—as later termed Hume's fork.
"Relations of ideas", such as the abstract truths of logic and
mathematics, known true without experience of particular instances,
offer a priori knowledge. Yet the quests of empirical science concern "matters of fact and real existence", known true only through experience, thus a posteriori
knowledge. As no number of examined instances logically entails the
conformity of unexamined instances, a universal law's unrestricted
generalization bears no formally logical basis, but one justifies it by
adding the principle uniformity of nature—itself unverified—thus a major induction to justify a minor induction. This apparent obstacle to empirical science was later termed the problem of induction.
For Hume, humans experience sequences of events, not cause and
effect, by pieces of sensory data whereby similar experiences might
exhibit merely constant conjunction—first an event like A, and always an event like B—but there is no revelation of causality to reveal either necessity or impossibility. Although Hume apparently enjoyed the scandal that trailed his explanations, Hume did not view them as fatal, and interpreted enumerative induction to be among the mind's unavoidable customs, required in order for one to live.
Rather, Hume sought to counter Copernican displacement of humankind
from the Universe's center, and to redirect intellectual attention to
human nature as the central point of knowledge.
Hume proceeded with inductivism not only toward enumerative
induction but toward unobservable aspects of nature, too. Not
demolishing Newton's theory, Hume placed his own philosophy on par with
it, then. Though skeptical at common metaphysics or theology,
Hume accepted "genuine Theism and Religion" and found a rational person
must believe in God to explain the structure of nature and order of the
universe.
Still, Hume had urged, "When we run over libraries, persuaded of these
principles, what havoc must we make? If we take into our hand any
volume—of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance—let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion".
Kant
Awakened from "dogmatic slumber" by Hume's work, Immanuel Kant sought to explain how metaphysics is possible. Kant's 1781 book introduced the distinction rationalism, whereby some knowledge results not by empiricism, but instead by "pure reason". Concluding it impossible to know reality in itself, however, Kant discarded the philosopher's task of unveiling appearance to view the noumena, and limited science to organizing the phenomena. Reasoning that the mind contains categories organizing sense data into the experiences substance, space, and time, Kant thereby inferred uniformity of nature, after all, in the form of a priori knowledge.
Kant sorted statements, rather, into two types, analytic versus synthetic. The analytic, true by their terms' arrangement and meanings, are tautologies, mere logical truths—thus true by necessity—whereas the synthetic apply meanings toward factual states, which are contingent. Yet some synthetic statements, presumably contingent, are necessarily true, because of the mind, Kant argued. Kant's synthetic a priori, then, buttressed both physics—at the time, Newtonian—and metaphysics, too, but discarded scientific realism. This realism regards scientific theories as literally true descriptions of the external world. Kant's transcendental idealism triggered German idealism, including G F W Hegel's absolute idealism.
Positivism
Comte
In the French Revolution's aftermath, fearing Western society's ruin again, Auguste Comte was fed up with metaphysics. As suggested in 1620 by Francis Bacon, developed by Saint-Simon, and promulgated in the 1830s by his former student Comte, positivism was the first modern philosophy of science.
Human knowledge had evolved from religion to metaphysics to science,
explained Comte, which had flowed from mathematics to astronomy to
physics to chemistry to biology to sociology—in
that order—describing increasingly intricate domains, all of society's
knowledge having become scientific, whereas questions of theology and of
metaphysics remained unanswerable, Comte argued.
Comte considered, enumerative induction to be reliable, upon the basis
of experience available, and asserted that science's proper use is
improving human society, not attaining metaphysical truth.
According to Comte, scientific method constrains itself to observations, but frames predictions,
confirms these, rather, and states laws—positive statements—irrefutable
by theology and by metaphysics, and then lays the laws as foundation for subsequent knowledge. Later, concluding science insufficient for society, however, Comte launched Religion of Humanity, whose churches, honoring eminent scientists, led worship of humankind. Comte coined the term altruism, and emphasized science's application for humankind's social welfare, which would be revealed by Comte's spearheaded science, sociology. Comte's influence is prominent in Herbert Spencer of England and in Émile Durkheim of France, both establishing modern empirical, functionalist sociology. Influential in the latter 19th century, positivism was often linked to evolutionary theory, yet was eclipsed in the 20th century by neopositivism: logical positivism or logical empiricism.
Mill
J S Mill thought, unlike Comte, that scientific laws were susceptible to recall or revision. And Mill abstained from Comte's Religion of Humanity. Still, regarding experience to justify enumerative induction by having shown, indeed, the uniformity of nature, Mill commended Comte's positivism. Mill noted that within the empirical sciences, the natural sciences had well surpassed the alleged Baconian model, too simplistic, whereas the human sciences, such ethics and political philosophy, lagged even Baconian scrutiny of immediate experience and enumerative induction. Similarly, economists of the 19th century tended to pose explanations a priori, and reject disconfirmation by posing circuitous routes of reasoning to maintain their a priori laws. In 1843, Mill's A System of Logic introduced Mill's methods: the five principles whereby causal laws can be discerned to enhance the empirical sciences as, indeed, the inductive sciences. For Mill, all explanations have the same logical structure, while society can be explained by natural laws.
Social
In the 17th century, England, with Isaac Newton and industrialization, led in science. In the 18th century, France led, particularly in chemistry, as by Antoine Lavoisier. During the 19th century, French chemists were influential, like Antoine Béchamp and Louis Pasteur, who inaugurated biomedicine, yet Germany gained the lead in science, by combining physics, physiology, pathology, medical bacteriology, and appliedchemistry. In the 20th, America led. These shifts influenced each country's contemporary, envisioned roles for science.
Before Germany's lead in science, France's was upended by the first French Revolution, whose Reign of Terror beheaded Lavoisier, reputedly for selling diluted beer, and led to Napoleon's wars. Amid such crisis and tumult, Auguste Comte inferred that society's natural condition is order, not change. As in Saint-Simon's industrial utopianism, Comte's vision, as later upheld by modernity, positioned science as the only objective true knowledge and thus also as industrial society's secularspiritualism, whereby science would offer political and ethical guide.
Positivism reached Britain well after Britain's own lead in science had ended. British positivism, as witnessed in Victorian ethics of utilitarianism—for instance, J S Mill's utilitarianism and later in Herbert Spencer's social evolutionism—associated science with moral improvement, but rejected science for political leadership.
For Mill, all explanations held the same logical structure—thus,
society could be explained by natural laws—yet Mill criticized
"scientific politics". From its outset, then, sociology was pulled between moral reform versus administrative policy.
Herbert Spencer helped popularize the word sociology in England, and compiled vast data aiming to infer general theory through empirical analysis. Spencer's 1850 book Social Statics shows Comtean as well as Victorian concern for social order.
Yet whereas Comte's social science was a social physics, as it were,
Spencer took biology—later by way of Darwinism, so called, which arrived
in 1859—as the model of science, a model for social science to emulate. Spencer's functionalist, evolutionary account identified social structures as functions that adapt, such that analysis of them would explain social change.
In France, Comte's sociology influence shows with Émile Durkheim, whose Rules for the Sociological Method, 1895, likewise posed natural science as sociology's model. For Durkheim, social phenomena are functions without psychologism—that
is, operating without consciousness of individuals—while sociology is
antinaturalist, in that social facts differ from natural facts. Still, per Durkheim, social representations are real entities observable, without prior theory, by assessing raw data.
Durkheim's sociology was thus realist and inductive, whereby theory
would trail observations while scientific method proceeds from social
facts to hypotheses to causal laws discovered inductively.
Logical
World War erupted in 1914 and closed in 1919 with a treaty upon reparations that British economist John Maynard Keynes immediately, vehemently predicted would crumble German society by hyperinflation, a prediction fulfilled by 1923. Via the solar eclipse of May, 29, 1919, Einstein's gravitational theory, confirmed in its astonishing prediction, apparently overthrew Newton's gravitional theory. This revolution in science was bitterly resisted by many scientists, yet was completed nearing 1930. Not yet dismissed as pseudoscience, race science flourished, overtaking medicine and public health, even in America, with excesses of negative eugenics. In the 1920s, some philosophers and scientists were appalled by the flaring nationalism, racism, and bigotry, yet perhaps no less by the countermovements toward metaphysics, intuitionism, and mysticism.
Also optimistic, some of the appalled German and Austrian intellectuals were inspired by breakthroughs in philosophy, mathematics, logic, and physics,
and sought to lend humankind a transparent, universal language
competent to vet statements for either logical truth or empirical truth,
no more confusion and irrationality. In their envisioned, radical reform of Western philosophy to transform it into scientific philosophy, they studied exemplary cases of empirical science in their quest to turn philosophy into a special science, like biology and economics. The Vienna Circle, including Otto Neurath, was led by Moritz Schlick, and had converted to the ambitious program by its member Rudolf Carnap, whom the Berlin Circle's leader Hans Reichenbach had introduced to Schlick. Carl Hempel,
who had studied under Reichenbach, and would be a Vienna Circle
alumnus, would later lead the movement from America, which, along with
England, received emigration of many logical positivists during Hitler's
regime.
The Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle became called—or, soon, were often stereotyped as—the logical positivists or, in a milder connotation, the logical empiricists or, in any case, the neopositivists. Rejecting Kant's synthetic a priori, they asserted Hume's fork. Staking it at the analytic/synthetic gap, they sought to dissolve confusions by freeing language from "pseudostatements". And appropriating Ludwig Wittgenstein's verifiability criterion, many asserted that only statements logically or empirically verifiable are cognitively meaningful, whereas the rest are merely emotively meaningful. Further, they presumed a semantic gulf between observational terms versus theoretical terms. Altogether, then, many withheld credence from science's claims about nature's unobservable aspects. Thus rejecting scientific realism, many embraced instrumentalism, whereby scientific theory is simply useful to predict human observations, while sometimes regarding talk of unobservables as either metaphorical or meaningless.
In friendly spirit, the Vienna Circle's Otto Neurath nicknamed Karl Popper, a fellow philosopher in Vienna, "the Official Opposition".
Popper asserted that any effort to verify a scientific theory, or even
to inductively confirm a scientific law, is fundamentally misguided.
Popper asserted that although exemplary science is not dogmatic,
science inevitably relies on "prejudices". Popper accepted Hume's
criticism—the problem of induction—as revealing verification to be impossible.
Popper accepted hypotheticodeductivism, sometimes termed it deductivism, but restricted it to denying the consequent, and thereby, refuting verificationism, reframed it as falsificationism. As to law or theory, Popper held confirmation of probable truth to be untenable,
as any number confirmations is finite: empirical evidence approaching
0% probability of truth amid a universal law's predictive run to
infinity. Popper even held that a scientific theory is better if its
truth appears most improbable. Logical positivism, Popper asserted, "is defeated by its typically inductivist prejudice".
Problems
Having highlighted Hume's problem of induction, John Maynard Keynes posed logical probability to answer it—but then figured not quite. Bertrand Russell held Keynes's book A Treatise on Probability as induction's best examination, and if read with Jean Nicod's Le Probleme logique de l'induction as well as R B Braithwaite's review of that in the October 1925 issue of Mind,
to provide "most of what is known about induction", although the
"subject is technical and difficult, involving a good deal of
mathematics".
Rather than validate enumerative induction—the futile task of showing it a deductive inference—some sought simply to vindicate it. Herbert Feigl as well as Hans Reichenbach,
apparently independently, thus sought to show enumerative induction
simply useful, either a "good" or the "best" method for the goal at
hand, making predictions. Feigl posed it as a rule, thus neither a priori nor a posteriori but a fortiori. Reichenbach's treatment, similar to Pascal's wager, posed it as entailing greater predictive success versus the alternative of not using it.
In 1936, Rudolf Carnap switched the goal of scientific statements' verification, clearly impossible, to the goal of simply their confirmation. Meanwhile, similarly, ardent logical positivist A J Ayer identified two types of verification—strong versus weak—the strong being impossible, but the weak being attained when the statement's truth is probable.
In such mission, Carnap sought to apply probability theory to
formalize inductive logic by discovering an algorithm that would reveal
"degree of confirmation".
Employing abundant logical and mathematical tools, yet never attaining
the goal, Carnap's formulations of inductive logic always held a
universal law's degree of confirmation at zero.
Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem of 1931 made the logical positivists' logicism, or reduction of mathematics to logic, doubtful. But then Alfred Tarski's undefinability theorem of 1934 made it hopeless. Some, including logical empiricist Carl Hempel, argued for its possibility, anyway. After all, nonEuclidean geometry had shown that even geometry's truth via axioms occurs among postulates, by definition unproved. Meanwhile, as to mere formalism, rather, which coverts everyday talk into logical forms, but does not reduce it to logic, neopositivists, though accepting hypotheticodeductivist theory development, upheld symbolic logic as the language to justify, by verification or confirmation, its results. But then Hempel's paradox of confirmation highlighted that formalizing confirmatory evidence of the hypothesized, universal law All ravens are black—implying All nonblack things are not ravens—formalizes defining a white shoe, in turn, as a case confirming All ravens are black.
Early criticism
During the 1830s and 1840s, the French Auguste Comte and the British J S Mill were the leading philosophers of science. Debating in the 1840s, J S Mill claimed that science proceeds by inductivism, whereas William Whewell, also British, claimed that it proceeds by hypotheticodeductivism.
Whewell
William Whewell found the "inductive sciences" not so simple, but, amid the climate of esteem for inductivism, described "superinduction". Whewell proposed recognition of "the peculiar import of the term Induction", as "there is some Conception superinduced
upon the facts", that is, "the Invention of a new Conception in every
inductive inference". Rarely spotted by Whewell's predecessors, such
mental inventions rapidly evade notice. Whewell explains,
"Although we bind together facts by
superinducing upon them a new Conception, this Conception, once
introduced and applied, is looked upon as inseparably connected with the
facts, and necessarily implied in them. Having once had the phenomena
bound together in their minds in virtue of the Conception, men can no
longer easily restore them back to detached and incoherent condition in
which they were before they were thus combined".
Once one observes the facts, "there is introduced some general
conception, which is given, not by the phenomena, but by the mind".
Whewell this called this "colligation", uniting the facts with a
"hypothesis"—an explanation—that is an "invention" and a "conjecture".
In fact, one can colligate the facts via multiple, conflicting
hypotheses. So the next step is testing the hypothesis. Whewell seeks,
ultimately, four signs: coverage, abundance, consilience, and coherence.
First, the idea must explain all phenomena that prompted it. Second, it must predict more phenomena, too. Third, in consilience, it must be discovered to encompass phenomena of a different type.
Fourth, the idea must nest in a theoretical system that, not framed all
at once, developed over time and yet became simpler meanwhile. On these
criteria, the colligating idea is naturally true, or probably so.
Although devoting several chapters to "methods of induction" and
mentioned "logic of induction", Whewell stressed that the colligating
"superinduction" lacks rules and cannot be trained.
Whewell also held that Bacon, not a strict inductivist, "held the
balance, with no partial or feeble hand, between phenomena and ideas".
Peirce
As Kant had noted in 1787, the theory of deductive inference had not progressed since antiquity. In the 1870s, C S Peirce and Gottlob Frege, unbeknownst to one another, revolutionized deductive logic through vast efforts identifying it with mathematical proof. An American who originated pragmatism—or, since 1905, pragmaticism,
distinguished from more recent appropriations of his original
term—Peirce recognized induction, too, but continuously insisted on a
third type of inference that Pierce variously termed abduction, or retroduction, or hypothesis, or presumption. Later philosophers gave Peirce's abduction, and so on, the synonyminference to the best explanation, or IBE. Many philosophers of science later espousing scientific realism have maintained that IBE is how scientists develop approximately true scientific theories about nature.
Inductivist fall
After defeat of National Socialism via World War II
in 1945, logical positivists lost their revolutionary zeal and led
Western academia's philosophy departments to develop the niche philosophy of science, researching such riddles of scientific method, theories, knowledge, and so on. The movement shifted, thus, into a milder variant bettered termed logical empiricism or, but still a neopositivism, led principally by Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel.
Amid increasingly apparent contradictions in neopositivism's central tenets—the verifiability principle, the analytic/synthetic
division, and the observation/theory gap—Hempel in 1965 abandoned the
program a far wider conception of "degrees of significance". This signaled neopositivism's official demise. Neopositivism became mostly maligned, while credit for its fall generally has gone to W V O Quine and to Thomas S Kuhn, although its "murder" had been prematurely confessed to by Karl R Popper in the 1930s.
Fuzziness
Willard Van Orman Quine's 1951 paper "Two dogmas of empiricism"—explaining semantic holism, whereby any term's meaning draws from the speaker's beliefs about the whole world—cast Hume's fork, which posed the analytic/synthetic division as unbridgeable, as itself untenable. Among verificationism's greatest internal critics, Carl Hempel
had recently concluded that the verifiability criterion, too, is
untenable, as it would cast not only religious assertions and
metaphysical statements, but even scientific laws of universal type as
cognitively meaningless.
In 1958, Norwood Hanson's book Patterns of Discovery
subverted the putative gap between observational terms and theoretical
terms, a putative gap whereby direct observation would permit neutral
comparison of rival theories. Hanson explains that even direct
observations, the scientific facts, are laden with theory,
which guides the collection, sorting, prioritization, and
interpretation of direct observations, and even shapes the researcher's
ability to apprehend a phenomenon. Meanwhile, even as to general knowledge, Quine's thesis eroded foundationalism, which retreated to modesty.
Structure explains science as puzzlesolving toward a
vision projected by the "ruling class" of a scientific specialty's
community, whose "unwritten rulebook" dictates acceptable problems and
solutions, altogether normal science. The scientists reinterpret ambiguous data, discard anomalous data, and try to stuff nature into the box of their shared paradigm—a
theoretical matrix or fundamental view of nature—until compatible data
become scarce, anomalies accumulate, and scientific "crisis" ensues. Newly training, some young scientists defect to revolutionary science,
which, simultaneously explaining both the normal data and the anomalous
data, resolves the crisis by setting a new "exemplar" that contradicts
normal science.
Kuhn explains that rival paradigms, having incompatible languages, are incommensurable.
Trying to resolve conflict, scientists talk past each other, as even
direct observations—for example, that the Sun is "rising"—get
fundamentally conflicting interpretations. Some working scientists
convert by a perspectival shift that—to their astonishment—snaps the new
paradigm, suddenly obvious, into view. Others, never attaining such gestalt switch,
remain holdouts, committed for life to the old paradigm. One by one,
holdouts die. Thus, the new exemplar—the new, unwritten rulebook—settles
in the new normal science.
The old theoretical matrix becomes so shrouded by the meanings of terms
in the new theoretical matrix that even philosophers of science misread
the old science.
And thus, Kuhn explains, a revolution in science is fulfilled. Kuhn's thesis critically destabilized confidence in foundationalism, which was generally, although erroneously, presumed to be one of logical empiricism's key tenets. As logical empiricism was extremely influential in the social sciences, Kuhn's ideas were rapidly adopted by scholars in disciplines well outside of the natural sciences, where Kuhn's analysis occurs. Kuhn's thesis in turn was attacked, however, even by some of logical empiricism's opponents. In Structure's 1970 postscript, Kuhn asserted, mildly, that science at least lacks an algorithm. On that point, even Kuhn's critics agreed. Reinforcing Quine's assault on logical empiricism, Kuhn ushered American and English academia into postpositivism or postempiricism.
Critical rationalism
Karl Popper's 1959 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery,
originally published in German in 1934, reached readers of English at a
time when logical empiricism, with its ancestrally verificationist
program, was so dominant that a book reviewer mistook it for a new
version of verificationism. Instead, Popper's philosophy, later called critical rationalism, fundamentally refuted verificationism. Popper's demarcation principle of falsifiability grants a theory the status of scientific—simply, being empirically testable—not the status of meaningful, a status that Popper did not aim to arbiter. Popper found no scientific theory either verifiable or, as in Carnap's "liberalization of empiricism", confirmable, and found unscientific, metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic statements
often rich in meaning while also underpinning or fueling science as the
origin of scientific theories. The only confirmations particularly relevant are those of risky predictions, such as ones conventionally predicted to fail.
Postpositivism
At 1967, historian of philosophy John Passmore concluded, "Logical positivism is dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes".
Logical positivism, or logical empiricism, or verificationism, or, as
the overarching term for this sum movement, neopositivism soon became
philosophy of science's bogeyman.
Kuhn's influential thesis was soon attacked for portraying science as irrational—cultural relativism similar to religious experience. Postpositivism's
poster became Popper's view of human knowledge as hypothetical,
continually growing, always tentative, open to criticism and revision. But then even Popper became unpopular, allegedly unrealistic.
Problem of induction
In 1945, Bertrand Russell had proposed enumerative induction as an "independent logical principle",
one "incapable of being inferred either from experience or from other
logical principles, and that without this principle, science is
impossible". And yet in 1963, Karl Popper declared, "Induction, i.e.
inference based on many observations, is a myth. It is neither a
psychological fact, nor a fact of ordinary life, nor one of scientific
procedure". Popper's 1972 book Objective Knowledge opens, "I think I have solved a major philosophical problem: the problem of induction".
Popper's schema of theory evolution is a superficially stepwise but otherwise cyclical process: Problem1 → Tentative Solution → Critical Test → Error Elimination → Problem2. The tentative solution
is improvised, an imaginative leap unguided by inductive rules, and the
resulting universal law is deductive, an entailed consequence of all,
included explanatory considerations.
Popper calls enumerative induction, then, "a kind of optical illusion"
that shrouds steps of conjecture and refutation during a problem shift. Still, debate continued over the problem of induction, or whether it even poses a problem to science.
Some have argued that although inductive inference is often
obscured by language—as in news reporting that experiments have proved a
substance is to be safe—and that enumerative induction ought to be
tempered by proper clarification, inductive inference is used liberally
in science, that science requires it, and that Popper is obviously
wrong. There are, more actually, strong arguments on both sides. Enumerative induction obviously occurs as a summary conclusion, but its literal operation is unclear, as it may, as Popper explains, reflect deductive inference from an underlying, unstated explanation of the observations.
In a 1965 paper now classic, Gilbert Harman explains enumerative induction as a masked effect of what C S Pierce had termed abduction, that is, inference to the best explanation, or IBE. Philosophers of science who espouse scientific realism
have usually maintained that IBE is how scientists develop, about the
putative mind-independent world, scientific theories approximately true. Thus, calling Popper obviously wrong—since scientists use induction in effort to "prove" their theories true—reflects conflicting semantics. By now, enumerative induction has been shown to exist, but is found rarely, as in programs of machine learning in artificial intelligence. Likewise, machines can be programmed to operate on probabilistic inference of near certainty. Yet sheer enumerative induction is overwhelmingly absent from science conducted by humans. Although much talked of, IBE proceeds by humans' imaginations and creativity without rules of inference, which IBE's discussants provide nothing resembling.
Logical bogeymen
Popperian falsificationism, too, became widely criticized and soon unpopular among philosophers of science. Still, Popper has been the only philosopher of science often praised by scientists.
On the other hand, likened to economists of the 19th century who took
circuitous, protracted measures to deflect falsification of their own
preconceived principles, the verificationists—that is, the logical positivists—became identified as pillars of scientism, allegedly asserting strict inductivism, as well as foundationalism, to ground all empirical sciences to a foundation of direct sensory experience.
Rehashing neopositivism's alleged failures became a popular tactic of
subsequent philosophers before launching argument for their own views, often built atop misrepresentations and outright falsehoods about neopositivism.
Not seeking to overhaul and regulate empirical sciences or their
practices, the neopositivists had sought to analyze and understand them,
and thereupon overhaul philosophy to scientifically organize human knowledge.
Logical empiricists indeed conceived the unity of science to network all special sciences and to reduce the special sciences' laws—by stating boundary conditions, supplying bridge laws, and heeding the deductivenomological model—to, at least in principle, the fundamental science, that is, fundamental physics. And Rudolf Carnap sought to formalize inductive logic to confirm universal laws through probability as "degree of confirmation". Yet the Vienna Circle had pioneered nonfoundationalism, a legacy especially of its member Otto Neurath, whose coherentism—the main alternative to foundationalism—likened science to a boat that scientists must rebuild at sea without ever touching shore. And neopositivists did not seek rules of inductive logic to regulate scientific discovery or theorizing, but to verify or confirm laws and theories once scientists pose them. Practicing what Popper had preached—conjectures and refutations—neopositivism simply ran its course. So its chief rival, Popper, initially a contentious misfit, emerged from interwar Vienna vindicated.
Scientific anarchy
In the early 1950s, studying philosophy of quantum mechanics under Popper at the London School of Economics, Paul Feyerabend found falsificationism
to be not a breakthrough but rather obvious, and thus the controversy
over it to suggest instead endemic poverty in the academic discipline
philosophy of science.
And yet, there witnessing Popper's attacks on inductivism—"the idea
that theories can be derived from, or established on the basis of,
facts"—Feyerabend was impressed by a Popper talk at the British Society for the Philosophy of Science. Popper showed that higher-level laws, far from reducible to, often conflict with laws supposedly more fundamental.
Popper's prime example, already made by the French classical physicist and philosopher of science Pierre Duhem decades earlier, was Kepler's laws of planetary motion, long famed to be, and yet not actually, reducible to Newton's law of universal gravitation. For Feyerabend, the sham of inductivism was pivotal. Feyerabend investigated, eventually concluding that even in the natural sciences, the unifying method is Anything goes—often rhetoric, circular reasoning, propaganda, deception, and subterfuge—methodological lawlessness, scientific anarchy. At persistent claims that faith in induction is a necessary precondition of reason, Feyerabend's 1987 book sardonically bids Farewell to Reason.
Research programmes
Imre Lakatos deemed Popper's falsificationism neither practiced by scientists nor even realistically practical, but held Kuhn's paradigms of science to be more monopolistic than actual. Lakatos found multiple, vying research programmes to coexist, taking turns at leading in scientific progress.
A research programme stakes a hard core of principles, such as the Cartesian rule No action at a distance, that resists falsification, deflected by a protective belt of malleable theories that advance the hard core via theoretical progress, spreading the hard core into new empirical territories.
Corroborating the new theoretical claims is empirical progress, making the research programme progressive—or else it degenerates.
But even an eclipsed research programme may linger, Lakatos finds, and
can resume progress by later revisions to its protective belt.
In any case, Lakatos concluded inductivism to be rather farcical
and never in the history of science actually practiced. Lakatos alleged
that Newton had fallaciously posed his own research programme as
inductivist to publicly legitimize itself.
Research traditions
Lakatos's putative methodology of scientific research programmes was criticized by sociologists of science
and by some philosophers of science, too, as being too idealized and
omitting scientific communities' interplay with the wider society's
social configurations and dynamics. Philosopher of science Larry Laudan argued that the stable elements are not research programmes, but rather are research traditions.
Inductivist heir
By the 21st century's turn, Bayesianism had become the heir of inductivism.
