The contemporary philosophy of science (epistemology) featuring K.Popper, T.Kuhn, I.Lakatos, P.Feyerabend, Hanson among others, has exercised a decisive critique to the dominant views of the positivist and neo-positivist model of knowledge and has in fact undermined its credibility. The most important attacks on positivism are focusing on its fundamental tenets presented below:
Scientism, or the unity of scientific method. The positivist methodology does not see any difference between the natural and the social sciences. The adoption however, of the unity of the scientific method is accepted in tandem with the notion of the predominant role of the natural sciences, in which the social sciences see their model. The outcome is what we call scientism, that is the view that only the natural sciences can produce the semantic interpretation of knowledge.
In the following commentary we will schematically present the criticisms that have been addressed to the positivist and naturalistic knowledge paradigm. All the thinkers and all the currents of social theory that are opposed to positivism, converge to the following point: The method of natural sciences cannot be transported to the social sciences; and this because the object of study of social sciences is a pre-interpreted world of events, that is a social world in which the categories of experience have already been formulated by and through the context of noematic–semantic behavior of the human subjects and the communicative exchanges and interactions that are taking place. The social scientist is not a mere observer of natural events but participates as an active social subject in the symbolic-semantic systems that she/he examines. The necessary implication is that she cannot study the social events ‘from the outside’, as if the latter were mere ‘objects’. The purpose of her study is to interpret and understand the justifications, the expectations and the multitude of ways through which human subjects go by in their social interactions and also how this experience affects them.
The social scientist can understand human subjects because he is part of the social world and is also the ‘subject’ of his study. In this way, his hermeneutic endeavor cannot attain an ideological or evaluative neutrality.
The aim of the social scientist is not to search for laws that govern human behavior or the social world, but the understanding of its significance and the discovery of the social and psychological preconditions that contributed to the character of the former.
Historical and social phenomena are unique and unrepeatable, are related to values and aims, while natural phenomena are connected with relations of causation. As a consequence, the social scientist cannot articulate laws and proceed to projections. The intention of positivist sociology to discover social ‘laws’ turns sociology into social technology.
Relevant to the issue at hand, the phenomenological hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, introduced the notion of understanding as the ontological precondition of the human society. Understanding predates the cognitive process of the subject and it is in this sense that the distinction between natural and social sciences disappears. Understanding forms the archetypical existential condition of being and is connected to the potentiality of being, as a temporality, which is the structural element of human existence. From this point of view, the meaning of the phrase ‘the Being-in-itself is time’ is that the nature of human existence lies in its historicity and temporality is literally ‘in the world’. The historicity of the life-world is the a priori condition that makes knowledge and self-conscience possible. Through the hermeneutic process, understanding emerges as the specific manner in which the historicity of nature takes its form.
The ideal of objective knowledge, of impartiality and precision as targets of the modernistic thought and their connection to the method of the natural sciences, is rejected and refuted. Any cognitive operation is par excellence a hermeneutic activity. The interpreter is pre-dispossessed inside the historic life-world that substantiated his existence. And even if we try to forge the natural vs the social sciences distinction as a division of methods and tools, the hermeneutic experience cannot be separated from the methodological scrutiny. As a result of all this, the ideal of an a-historic, objective and universal truth is being seriously challenged, while the historical nature of knowledge and interpretation come to the fore. The phenomenological hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer lies in parallel to the newer developments in the philosophy of science. Roy Bashkar, ‘things exist and act independently of our descriptions, but we are capable to know them only through the specific descriptions. Descriptions exist in the world of human society, objects in the world of nature. We express our own understanding of nature and thought.’
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