After giving a brief summary of the dissertation in a previous post (and a bit of scurrying around to finish some other work, applying for jobby jobs, and instead of doing the virtuous deed in building academic capital of working on a journal article, I decided to come back to the blog and rethink one of the questions and gain a better sense of what I actually did).
So, the project itself raises several issues about the commensurability between disciplines. Not least between philosophy and the social sciences but also between the social sciences themselves. The disputes between psychology, anthropology, and sociology seem to be grounded in their respective methodologies, inferences, and underlying philosophical presuppositions. In simplified terms, social and cultural anthropology places its emphasis on fieldwork - to situate one's self within a particular context, participate, observe, and inquire into "things" by engaging with the people. Sociology also engages in qualitative methods through interviews but also conducts analysis through quantitative statistical methods on data obtained from questionnaires and surveys. Anthropology and sociology in this regard are truly sister disciplines both of which draw significant influence from Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and other social theorists such as Karl Marx. Psychology, by contrast, is modelled after the hard sciences in establishing experimental settings and the parameters of a study with a hypothesis, dependent and independent variables, and constructs itself such that studies may be reproduced and confirmed or falsified. As critical thinkers tend to do, each discipline has its criticisms of each other and most scholars within these disciplines, if, as they say, are "worth their salt" will have substantive criticisms of their own discipline as well. However, it's not my intention to cover their respective criticisms or internal critiques. Only noting their respective differences.
What I would like to address here is the question between anthropological and philosophical methods. As noted above, social and cultural anthropologists build their premises based on fieldwork, observations in context, participation, interviews, discussions, and developing a rapport with "informants" about the environment and the experience of situations. In this regard, if the brief summations/straw-men are correct, then anthropology develops a bottom-up approach. That is, by participating, observing, and interacting with persons, premises and inferences are made to develop theory. (*Fully acknowledging that there are sub-disciplines of anthropology and that biological or evolutionary anthropologists will conduct their investigations differently from social anthropologists.)
Similarly, there are different methodologies and styles of philosophical investigations. Many like to carve up a distinction between analytical and continental philosophers. While the actual distinctions and historical divisions are somewhat lost on me, and I am certainly no expert on this subject, what tends to stand out are their differences in styles of analysis. Although I have my criticisms of what is typically called analytical philosophy, I must admit that I use an epistemological distinction within this style of thought. More specifically, I draw on the distinction made between belief and acceptance. I do not discern between belief and knowledge nor do I make any claims about rationality or irrationality. Both knowledge and rationality are further wrought with semantic baggage that entails dealing with an ethnocentric perspective and historical messiness involved with colonialism, racism and various forms of imperialism with regard to "truth". One of the concerns with philosophy is its top-down approach. In other words, there are certain presuppositions and premises that are given from which conclusions are drawn. This raises the question about the extent to which philosophical presuppositions are based on some tradition of thought that may be implicated in past colonial dispositions of determining knowledge.
The contention is that philosophical and anthropological approaches may be incompatible or incommensurable in their foundations. When this question was raised, I argued that anthropological thought and inquiry also draws on previous schools of thought as well as insights from leading scholars in the field. In other words, although theories are indeed constructed from a bottom-up inductive approach (B, C, and D are observed to be true therefore A may be true) these theories are again drawn upon by other scholars for their own work. We can look to theories of gift, kinship, habitus, structure, myth and ritual. Each of these theoretical concepts have been applied in many different ways, either in support of data as a way of analysis/interpretation or as a way of contrast in illustrating the inadequacies of the theoretical construct - a method that can be akin to Popper's model of falsification. In this regard, I don't see too much difference in the use of theory from philosophy. Although the means by which philosophers come to their methodological distinctions is quite different from the anthropologist, in that philosophers use quite a bit of their own introspection, examples/thought experiments, and case studies to justify their distinctions, they too draw - in some sense - from a bottom-up approach (although a bit self-centred and subject to the w.e.i.r.d criticism). Nevertheless, much like illustrating the inadequacies of theoretical concepts in anthropology, philosophical distinctions are subject to the same. For example, when Kant draws on Newtonian physics to make deductive inferences (if A is true, then B, C, and D are true) what happens when Newtonian physics is inadequate or insufficient? How does it account for Quantum physics or Einstein's theory of relativity? I am not one to answer these questions nor am I entirely certain that these are the best questions to ask regarding the implications of an evolving science of physics. The point remains. If philosophers grounded certain assumptions on certain formulations of science of certain theological presuppositions, what happens when they change?
For anthropology, we can look to the theoretical developments of Malinowski, Boas, Durkheim, Weber, Marx, and so on and how they've developed their theoretical bases and how their thinking has influenced the social sciences and contemporary practices. In this sense, my argument would be that although the methodology in accruing data and making inferences may differ, we can go back to a philosophy of science and make parallels in their underlying theoretical assumptions. To this extent, I do not necessarily see an incompatibility between philosophy and the social sciences. It is not uncommon to see references to Foucault, Aristotle, Kant, Rousseau and other contemporary philosophers in social science research. The former three have been occurring quite a bit in my readings on the anthropology of morality and ethics.
I suppose my argument is then that in both philosophy and social science, in their respective theoretical and methodological assumptions, the distinction between inductive and deductive methods of inference is not a strong line in the sand but rather one that is in continuous oscillation. This not only gives significance to positivist approaches (though we should not forget Foucault's criticism as well as the post-colonial critique of noting that previous approaches are subject to implicitly coloured lenses, discursive practices, and that it is important to expose such implicit assumptions from time to time for evaluation), methods of falsification, and in greater hopes, potential Kuhnian revolutions of understanding. Of course, both philosophy and the social sciences have their issues with each of these but I am, at least at this stage of my thinking, reluctant to concede to a position of incommensurability between philosophy and the social sciences.
(*and of course, given the nature of the thesis, I have to take this position)
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