Science and Interpretation in Social Theory

PS: 333

Gary Herrigel

Pick 423

tel.: 2-8067

email: g-herrigel@uchicago.edu

This course is designed to provide a general survey of contemporary thinking on the philosophy of natural and social science. It pays particular attention to problems surrounding interpretation, interpretive method and social construction.

The requirements for the course are that students do all of the reading and participate actively in class discussions. This will count for at least half of the final grade. There will also be a take home midterm and final exam.

Required Books: (available at Seminary Co-op & On Reserve at Regenstein)

Charles Sanders Peirce, Peirce on Signs (Chapel Hill: UNC Press,)

Andrew Sayer, Method in Social Science. A Realist Approach (New York: Routledge)

Peter Galinson and David J Stump, eds., The Disunity of Science. Boundaries, Contexts and Power, (Palo Alto: Stanford Up,)

Ian Hacking, ed., Scientific Revolutions, (Oxford-Paper)

Students are expected to read all of the readings assigned each week. You are not required to read the recommended readings. These are listed simply to provide you with a sense of the size of the universe in the topic area covered in each particular week.

Week One: Contextualizing Science: Knowledge, History, Way of Life

M. Heidegger"The Age of the World Picture" in idem., The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays ( New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977) pages 115-154--notes optional

Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” in Gerth & Mills, From Max Weber (Oxford, 1946) pages 129-158

Hilary Putnam, “The Idea of Science” in idem, Words and Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) page numbers are in the mail

recommended:

Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, (New York: Free Press, 1949)

A. Brecht Political Theory. The Foundations of Twentieth Century Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959)

D. Ross The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge University Press, 1991)

P. Novick, That Noble Dream (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

M. Horkheimer

T. Adonrno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment (New York: Seabury, 1982)

R.Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)

C. West The American Evasion of Philosophy. A Geneology of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press)

G.Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin Press, 1974)

F. Dolan, “Representing the Political System: American Political Science in the Age of the World Picture” in diacritics, summer 1990, pages 93-108

James Chandler, Arnold Davidson & Harry Harootunian, eds.,

Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice and Persuasion across the Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)

JG Gunning, The Descent of Political Theory. The Geneology of an American Vocation (University of Chicago Press, 1993)

H. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (MIT Press1985)

T. Burger Max Weber's Theory of Concept Formation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987)

Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the experimental life (Princeton, 1985)

Week Two: Natural and Social Science: Mutually Sustaining Rigidities

Carl Hempel ,“The Function of General Laws in History” in CG Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation and other essays in the Philosophy of Science (Free Press) pages 231-244

E. Nagel,"Problems of Concepts and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences" in Science, Language and Human Rights, American Philosophical Association, ed. Vol.1, (Philadelphia, 1952)

C. Hempel,"Typological Methods in the Natural and Social Sciences" in Science, Language and Human Rights, American Philosophical Association, ed. Vol.1, (Philadelphia, 1952)

A. Schutz,"Concepts and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences" in idem. Collected Papers, Volume One, Maurice Natanson, ed., (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971) pages 48-67

Louis Mink, “The Autonomy of Historical Understanding” in idem. Historical Understanding (Vann & Fay eds.) (Ithaca: Cornell, 1987) pages 61-88

Recommended:

K-O Apel, Understanding and Explanation, (MIT, 1984)

J.D.Moon, "The Logic of Political Inquiry" in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, eds., Political Science: Scope and Theory, vol. 1,(ReadingMA.: Addison Wesley, 1975) pages 131-208

R.J. Berstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976)

E. Nagel, The Structure of Science, (New York: Harcourt Brace World, 1961)

A. Ryan, ed., The Philosophy of Social Explanation, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973)

Fritz Machlup “Are the Social Sciences Really Inferior?” in Michael Martin & Lee MacIntyre, eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1994) pages 5-20

Michael Martin & Lee MacIntyre, eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1994)

D. Davidson “Psychology as Philosophy” in idem. Essays on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) pages 229-244

Juha Manninen & Raimo Tuomela, eds. Essays on explanation and understanding : studies in the foundations of humanities and social sciences ( Dordrecht, Holland ; Boston : D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1976.

G. H. v. Wright, Explanation and understanding. (Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press [1971])

G. H. v. Wright, The tree of knowledge and other essays (Leiden/ New York : E.J. Brill, 1993.)

Week Three: Post Empiricism: Blurring Boundaries

Dudley Shapere “Meaning and Scientific Change” in Hacking, ed. Scientific Revolutions pages 28-59

Hilary Putnam “The ‘Corroboration’ of Theories” in Hacking, ed. Scientific Revolutions pages 60-79

Thomas Kuhn “Second Thoughts on Paradigms” in F. Suppe, The Structure of Scientific Theories, 2nd ed., (Illinois) pages 459-482

F. Suppe “Exemplars, Theories and Disciplinary Matrixes” in F. Suppe, The Structure of Scientific Theories, 2nd ed., (Illinois) pages 483-517 (Note--this includes “Discussion” pages 500-517)

recommended:

T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)

I Lakatos & A. Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970)

P. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1978)

K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1972)

A. Musgrave "Method or Madness" in R.S. Cohen et. al., eds., Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976)

D. Redman, Economics and the Philosophy of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)

M. Hesse, Revolution and Reconstructions in The Philosophy of Science (Brighton,Eng.: Harvester Press, 1980)

I. Lakatos, "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs" in idem. and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970) pages 91-196

I. Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986)

F. Suppe “The Search for Philosophic Understanding of Scientific Theories” in F. Suppe, The Structure of Scientific Theories, 2nd ed., (Illinois) pages 3-232

Week Four:Realism, Practice & Interpretation: What’s at Stake?

Hilary Putnam, “Realism without Absolutes” & “The Question of Realism” both in idem. Words and Truth, (Harvard University Press)

Andrew Sayer, Method in Social Science. A Realist Approach (Routledge) Chapters 1-3, 5 & Appendix

L. Wittgenstein, “Intentionality” and “Following a Rule” both in A Wittgenstein Reader (Blackwell) pages in the mail

recommended:

H. Dreyfus "Holism and Hermeneutics"

C. Taylor "Understanding in Human Science"

R.Rorty "A Reply to Dreyfus and Taylor"

Rorty, Taylor &

Dreyfus "A Discussion"

all in Review of Metaphysics, 1980, pages 3-56

D. Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge" in Alan Malachowski, ed. Reading Rorty (London: Blackwell, 1990) pages 120-139

R. Bhaskar, Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (London: Blackwell, 1991)

H. Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1987)

W. Outhwaite, New Philosophies of Social Science (London: MacMillan, 1987)

R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton Universtiy Press, 1979)

R. Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism. A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1989--second edition)

M. Heidegger, Basic Writings (Harper & Row, 1977)

John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, (Collected Writings of John Dewey, Jean Boydston, ed.) Southern Illinois Press

John Dewey, “The Practical Character of Reality” in H.S. Thayer, ed., Pragmatism. The Classical Writings, (Hackett) pages 275-289

John Dewey, Experience and Nature (Lasalle Il: Open Court Classics)

Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism (Blackwell)

Week Five: Rationality, Relativism and the Possibility of Explanation: Being Sensible Without Foundations (?)

D. Davidson "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" in idem., Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford Universtiy Press, 1986) pages 183-198

Mario Biagoli, “From Relativism to Contingentism”

Simon Schaffer, “Contextualizing the Canon”

Arthur Fine, “Science Made Up: Constructivist Sociology of Scientific Knowledge”

Evelyn Fox Keller, “The Dilemma of Scientific Subjectivity in Postvital Culture”

---- all in Peter Galison and David J. Stump, eds., The Disunity of Science. Boundaries, Contexts and Power, (Palo Alto: Stanford) pages 189-254; 417-427

recommended:

John Connolly & Thomas Kuetner, eds, Hermeneutics versus Science? Three German Views: Wolfgang Stegmüller, Hans Georg Gadamer, Ernst Konrad Specht, (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press)

Social Text, 46-47: Special Issue on “Science Wars” 1996

Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice. Time Agency and Science (Chicago)

Michael Lynch & Steve Woolgar, Representation in Scientific Practice (MIT Press)

Helen E. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge. Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry, (Princeton)

A. Pickering, ed. Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)

J. Bohman, New Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1992)

M. Hollis & S.Lukes,eds., Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge, MA.: MIT, 1982)

P. Winch, The Idea of Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959)

Joseph Rouse, Engaging Science. How to Understand its Practices Philosophically (Cornell-Paper)

B. Wilson, ed., Rationality, (London: Blackwell, 1970)

R. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983)

Note: Midterm Assignment This Week

Week Six: Interpretation 1: Semiotics, Hermenuetics and Critical Theory

C.S. Pearce “Questions concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man”, “On the Nature of Signs” “The Fixation of Belief” & “How to Make our Ideas Clear” all in CS Peirce, Peirce on Signs (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1991) pages 34-53, 141-179

HG Gadamer “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem”

J Habermas “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality”

HG Gadamer “Reply to my Critics”

--all in, Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift, eds., The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990)

recommended:

R. Bernstein, Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985)

J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1987)

Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe & Albrecht Wellmer, eds., Cultural-Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, (MIT Press)

H.S. Thayer, ed. Pragmatism. The Classic Writings (Hackett)

HG Gadamer Reason in the Age of Science (Cambridge,MA: MIT, 1981)

P. Ricoeur Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981) pages 197-221

P. Rabinow, & W. Sullivan, eds. Interpretive Social Science. A Second Look, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), esp introduction by editors

C. Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, V. 2, (New York: Cambridge, 1985)

P. Ricoeur, From Text to Action (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991)

C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1975)

A. Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston: Northwestern Universtiy Press, nd)

HG Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Columbia, 1974)

F. Dallmayr & T. McCarthy, eds, Understanding and Social Inquiry (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Univrsity Press, 1977)

Hans Joas Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago, 1993)

E. Rochberg-Halton, Meaning and Modernity: Social Theory and the pragmatic Attitude (Chicago, 1986)

Martin. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little Brown, nd)

W. Benjamin. Illuminations (Schocken)

J. Habermas On the Logic of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1988)

G. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1971)

Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory. Selected Essays (New York: Seabury, 1992)

F. Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)

Moishe Postone, Time, labor and social domination: A reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory (Cambridge, 1993)

Week Seven: Interpretation 2: Structuralism and Post Structuralism

R. Barthes "The Structuralist Activity" in Richard and Fernande DeGeorge, eds., The Structuralists. From Marx to Levi-Strauss (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1972) pages 148-154

M. Foucault "Two Lectures" and "Truth and Power" in idem., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980) pages 78-133

C. Levi-Strauss The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966)--last chapter, “History and the Dialectic”

recommended:

J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell Universtiy Press, nd)

J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973)

D.C. Hoy,ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) esp. essays by Taylor and Hacking

P. Dews, Logics of Disintegration. Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987)

T. Mitchell, On Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge, 1988)

S. Fish, Is There a Text in the Class? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980)

J. Clifford & G. Marcus, Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: Unicversity of California Press, 1986)

J-F Lyotard, The Post Modern Condition (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)

J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)

D.R. Hiley, J. Bohman & R. Schusterman, The Interpretive Turn. Philosophy, Science, Culture (Cornell U. P. , 1991)

Michael Kelly, ed., Critique and Power. Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (MIT Press)

Week 8: Feminism: Constructivist Science

Regenia Gagnier, “Feminist Postmodernism: The End of Feminism or the Ends of Theory”..

John Dupre, “Global versus Local Perspectives on Sexual Difference”

both in Deborah Rhode, ed., Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference, (California-?) pages 21-32 & 47-62

Jessica Benjamin, “The First Bond” in C Roman, S. Juhasz & C. Miller, eds., The Woman and Language Debate, (Routledge), pages 165-198

Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy” in S. Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference, (Princeton) pages 120-136

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” in idem, Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, (Routledge, 1991) pages 149-182

recommended:

J. Butler, J. Scott, eds. Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge, 1992)

T. deLauretis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington, IN: Indiana, 1987)

Simon de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Vintage)

Linda Nicholson, ed. Feminist Contentions. A Philosophical Exchange (Routledge, 1995)

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Gender and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge,1990)

Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993)

Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton, 1994)

Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, (Columbia, 1988)

Sandra Harding, Whose Science, Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)

Barbara Laslett, Johanna Brenner & Yesim Arat, eds., Rethinking the Political. Gender, Resistance and the State, (Chicago, 1995)

Week 9: Democratic Problems From a Constructivist Point of View

Hilary Putnam, “A Recondsideration of Deweyan Democracy” in idem., Renewing Philosophy (Harvard, 1992)

Charles F. Sabel, “Design, Deliberation, and Democracy: On the New Pragmatism of Firms and Public Institutions” ms--available on Sabel’s homepage: http://www.columbia.edu/~cfs11/

Evelyn Fox Keller, “The Paradox of Scientific Subjectivity” in Allan MeGill, ed., Rethinking Objectivity, (Duke UP, 1992) pages 313-333

Final Take Home on Interpretation & Social Construction due in time to be read and graded by the time grades are due.