social scientists. Both romantic philosophers and romantic scientists maintain that the sciences of culture differ fundamentally in their aim from the sciences of nature. Romantics view the aim of the social sciences as the development of explanations in terms of subjective psychological motivations to explain observed social interaction in terms of purposeful human actions in society.
Some romantics call this type of explanation “interpretative understanding” and others call it “substantive reasoning”. Using this concept of the aim of social science they often say that an explanation must be “convincing” or must “make substantive sense” to the social scientist due to the scientist’s introspection upon his actual or imaginary personal experiences, especially when he is a participating member of the same culture as the social members he is investigating.
Examples of these romantics are sociologists like Talcott Parsons and his academic entourage, who advocate variations on the philosophy of the sociologist Max Weber, in which vicarious understanding called “verstehen” is a criterion for criticism that they believe trumps empirical evidence. Verstehen sociology is therefore also known as “folk sociology” or “pop[ular] sociology”. Enforcing this criterion has obstructed the evolution of sociology into a modern empirical science in the twentieth century. Cultural anthropologists furthermore reject verstehen as a fallacy of ethnocentrism.
The 1989 Nobel-laureate econometrician Trygve Haavelmo and his academic entourage of classical economists supply another example. These econometricians do not reject the aim of prediction, simulation, optimization and policy formulation using econometric models; with their econometric modeling they enable it. But they subordinate the selection of “explanatory” variables in their models to factors that are derived from their heroically imputed maximizing rationality postulates, which identify the motivating factors explaining the decisions of the economic agents such as buyers and sellers in a market. Thus they exclude econometrics from discovery and limit its function to testing romantic “theory”. In his Philosophy of Social Science Alexander Rosenberg describes the economists’ theory of rational choice, i.e., the use of the maximizing rationality postulates, as “folk psychology formalized”.
Readers wishing to read more about the romantics including Parsons, Weber, Haavelmo and others are referred to BOOK VIII below.
4.04 More Recent Ideas
Most of the twentieth-century post-positivist proposals for the aim of science are less dogmatic than those listed above and arise from examination of important developmental episodes in the history of the natural sciences. Some noteworthy examples:
Einstein: Reflection on his relativity theory influenced Albert Einstein’s concept of the aim of science, which he set forth as his “programmatic aim of all physics” stated in his “Reply to Criticisms” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist edited by Paul A. Schilpp. The aim of science in Einstein’s view is a comprehension as complete as possible of the connections among sense impressions in their totality, and the accomplishment of this comprehension by the use of a minimum of primary concepts and relations. Einstein did not reject empiricism, but he included a coherence agenda in his aim of science. This thesis also implies a uniform ontology for physics, and Einstein found statistical quantum theory to be “incomplete” according to his aim.
Popper: Karl Popper was an early post-positivist philosopher of science and also critical of the romantics. Reflecting on Eddington’s historic 1919 test of Einstein’s relativity theory in physics he proposed in his Logic of Scientific Discovery that the aim of science is to produce tested and nonfalsified theories having greater universality and more information content than their predecessor theories addressing the same subject. His concept of the aim of science thus focuses on the growth of scientific knowledge. And in his Realism and the Aim of Science he maintains that realism explains the possibility of falsifying test outcomes in scientific criticism. The title of his Logic of Scientific Discovery notwithstanding Popper denies that discovery can be addressed by either logic or philosophy, but says instead that discovery is a proper subject for psychology. Cognitive psychologists today would agree.
Hanson: Norwood Russell Hanson reflecting on the development of quantum theory states in his Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science that inquiry in research science is directed to the discovery of new patterns in data to develop new hypotheses for deductive explanation. He calls such practices “research science”, which he opposes to “completed science” or “catalogue science”, which is merely re-arranging established facts into more elegant formal axiomatic patterns. He follows Charles Peirce who called hypothesis formation “abduction”. Today mechanized discovery systems search for patterns in data.
Kuhn: Thomas S. Kuhn, reflecting on the development of the Copernican heliocentric cosmology in his The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought maintained in his famous Structure of Scientific Revolutions that the prevailing theory, which he called the “consensus paradigm” has institutional status. He proposed that small incremental changes extending the consensus paradigm, to which scientists seek to conform, defines the institutionalized aim of science, which he called “normal science”. On the other hand he said that scientists neither desire nor aim consciously to produce revolutionary new theories, which he called “extraordinary science.” Kuhn therefore defined scientific revolutions as institutional changes in science, which he excludes from the aim of science.
Feyerabend: Paul K. Feyerabend reflecting on the development of quantum theory in his Against Method proposed that each scientist has his own aim, and that anything institutional is a conformist impediment to the advancement of science. He said that historically successful scientists always “break the rules”, and he ridiculed Popper’s view of the aim of science calling it “ratiomania” and “law-and-order science”. Therefore Feyerabend proposes that successful science is literally “anarchical”, and borrowing a slogan from the Marxist, Leon Trotsky, he advocates “revolution in permanence”.
Readers wishing to know more about the philosophies of Popper, Kuhn, Hanson and Feyerabend are referred to BOOKs V, VI and VII below.
4.05 Aim of Maximizing “Explanatory Coherence”
Thagard: Computational philosopher of science Paul Thagard proposes that the aim of science is “best explanation”, a thesis that is also called “explanationism”. The thesis refers to an explanation that aims to maximize the explanatory coherence of one’s overall set of beliefs. This aim of science is thus explicitly a coherence agenda.
Thagard developed a computerized cognitive system ECHO, an acronym for “Explanatory Coherence by Harmony Optimization”, in order to explore the operative criteria in theory choice by mechanically simulating noteworthy past episodes in the history of science. His system described in his Conceptual Revolutions simulated the realization of the aim of maximizing “explanatory coherence” by replicating various episodes of theory choice. In his system “explanation” is an undefined primitive term. He applied his system ECHO to several revolutionary episodes in the history of science including (1) Lavoisier’s oxygen theory of combustion, (2) Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species, (3) Copernicus’ heliocentric astronomical theory of the planets, (4) Newton’s theory of gravitation, and (5) Hess’ geological theory of plate tectonics.
In reviewing his historical simulations Thagard reports that ECHO indicates that the criterion making the largest contribution historically to explanatory coherence in scientific revolutions is explanatory breadth – the preference for the theory that explains more evidence than its competitors. But he adds that the simplicity and analogy criteria are also historically operative although less important. He maintains that the aim of maximizing explanatory coherence with these criteria yields the “best explanation”.
Explanationism, maximizing the explanatory coherence of one’s overall set of beliefs, is inherently conservative. The ECHO system appears to document the historical fact that the coherence aim is psychologically satisfying and occasions strong motivation for accepting theories, while theories describing reality as incoherent with established beliefs are psychologically disturbing.