Typologising social theory

How to think about the terrain of social theory?  This is another post flailing around in connection to a vast literature I largely haven’t read, making basic points that will no doubt still manage to be wrong in important ways – but still, I want to draw some distinctions.

Start with the distinction between the natural and social sciences (or, archaically, the moral sciences; or, more broadly and loosely, the humanities) – Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft.  The idea here is that there is some kind of fundamental difference between the appropriate method and stance to take towards the study of nature and the study of humanity.

The first distinction to draw within the social sciences, then, is the distinction between those who agree with this distinction and those who do not.  One ‘scientistic’ approach within the social sciences argues that the exact same methods that are appropriate to the natural sciences are also appropriate to the social sciences: humanity is a natural phenomenon like any other, and can be studied in the same basic way one studies planets and atoms and mountains and so on and so forth.  This scientistic approach disdains the idea that there is some special meaning-stuff that requires special analytic techniques, when dealing with the human or social world.

Then there are a broad range of social-theoretic approaches that reject such ‘scientism’.  These approaches believe there is something in human social life which cannot be captured by the tools used to study the natural world.

What does this ‘special human sauce’ consist in?  My thinking here is very crude – hopefully I will come back to this typology and greatly improve it, down the road.  For now, though, I’m going to draw a distinction between those who emphasise intentionality and those who emphasise values.  

Intentionality, in this sense, is goal-oriented activity.  The idea is that objects in the natural world obey laws, but we cannot reasonably ascribe intentions or goals to those objects.  Humans, by contrast, exhibit goal-oriented behaviour.

We can further subdivide this ‘intentionality’ category, by asking: how is intentionality understood?  Here, again, my categories are very crude, but I’m going to draw a distinction between two models of intentionality.  

On the one hand, there is the ‘instrumental rationality’ approach.  Here we have goals that are ‘given’ as desires, and then the exercise of instrumental reason to guide the social actor towards those goals.  The most developed form of this approach is decision theory, which is a dauntingly vast field full of extremely developed formal resources for understanding decision principles given preferences.

On the other hand, there is what I’m going to call the ‘drives’ approach.  Here, again, we’re dealing with desire, but instrumental reason is backgrounded.  In the ‘drives’ approach, desire and action are more bound together.  I don’t feel like I really have a handle on how to characterise this category, but obviously my paradigm here is the psychoanalytic model of the psyche.

This is all on the ‘intentionality’ side of the distinction between ‘intentionality’ and ‘values’.  Shifting over to the ‘values’ side, I feel like my categories are even vaguer.  But this is where ‘norms’ live.  Theorists concerned with values think that what characterises the human is not intentionality per se, but rather the fact that we participate in some kind of moral substance.  From this perspective (or at least a popular version of it), animals can exhibit intentionality – animals can engage in goal-oriented activity – but animals cannot participate in a world of norms and values.  The goal of Geisteswissenschaft, then, is to study this moral content of the human world.

Alright.  All this is humiliatingly crude.  But it does the work I want it to do, for now.  In the first instance, I have a three-component typology – three different perspectives which take a different kind of object as their proper domain.

• The scientistic or naturalistic perspective.  This perspective treats human action as just one other kind of natural phenomenon.  Behaviourism is an example of this approach.
• The goal-oriented or intentional perspective.  This perspective sees the characteristic feature of human life as intentional action.  Rational choice theory is an example of this approach.
• The values-centred or moral perspective.  This perspective sees the characteristic feature of human life as participation in a world of values.  Weberian sociology would be an example of this approach.

Ok.  Now.  There is obviously a great deal of controversy about the relation between these three broad kinds of approaches.  In particular, there are reductionist ambitions on the part of the scientistic approach, to explain both intentionality and values in terms of natural-scientific categories.  There are also reductionist ambitions on the part of the intentional approach, to explain norms or values in terms of (take your pick:) instrumental reason or psychological drives.  The values-centred or moral perspective, by contrast, tends to disdain the other two approaches precisely for their reductionism.

All well and good.  My simple point, for now, is that Brandom’s philosophy is basically interested in the relationship between the first of these categories (the scientistic approach) and the third (norms or values).  It’s not that Brandom has nothing to say about goal-oriented action.  But, as I’ve said in recent posts, Brandom’s strong anti-psychologising commitments tend to evacuate much of the substance of this second (intentionality) approach.  Brandom is no friend of instrumental reason; nor does he have anything to say about psychological drives and their vicissitudes.  To a useful first approximation, Brandom is interested in the relation between what he calls ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ Sellarsian theoretical approaches: scientific naturalism, and an analysis of normativity in terms of the space of reasons.

I’m interested in approach number two, though.  This is where I want to live, on the blog, for quite some time.  This is where psychoanalysis lives; it’s where rational choice theory lives; it’s also (as I keep saying) the space that Hegel is wrestling with in important sections of the Phenomenology. The claim I keep making and remaking in recent posts on the blog, is that in his treatment of the Phenomenology Brandom conflates the kind of reductionism associated with the scientistic perspective with the kind of reductionism associated with the intentionality perspective. I think this conflation badly distorts A Spirit of Trust’s analysis of the Spirit chapter. In any case, I want to start thinking about everything from this intentionality perspective – at the cost of significant crudity, no doubt, but with some gains too, I hope, eventually.