Lecture 3

Great event of the 19" century: Hume’s induction problem was forgotten, so also Kant.
The knowledge of science was not considered a problem. and if there is no problem there was no need to think about
it. after the industrial revolution, it was commonly accepted that science in the form of technology transforms the
world. Here's why:
In the communist manifesto Marx describes how railways are changing the world. The first railway from Liverpool to
Manchester was installed 18 years before Marx, and when he writes there are already 10,000 kilometers of railroads in
the UK alone.

In the second half of the 19" century, the second half of the industrial resolution takes place, Marx still lives in a time
of steel, coal, railroads. Chemistry gets developed as a technological process (like Haber's process for the production
of ammonia mentioned in the previous lecture). Electricity is developed to light cities, and the entire combustion
industry is set in motion.

Founders of the EU had grown up in a world without cars. Weber, who died in 1920, may have never made a
telephone call. Between 1800 and 1900 the world changed more rapidly than between 1900 and 2000. Our world
today resembles more the world of the 1900s than the 1900s resemble the 1800s.

And when there is such transformation of social life due to technology that is science-based, the reliability of science
is unquestioned. This is the century where Europe takes over the world. There was hardly a place in the world that was
not governed by Europeans. This is due to military advances too.

Therefore, the induction problem of Hume was once again forgotten. Kant wasn't really necessary anymore either.

August Comte
He was trained as an engineer. In his youth he was a secretary of Henri de Saint-Simon, a French political, economic
and socialist theorist and businessman whose thought had a substantial influence on politics, economics, sociology
and the philosophy of science. Comte got from him the need to think about society and make the world a better place.
Comte's books are unreadable for us (multiple volumes of hundreds of pages), but in the 19th century he was really
popular. He's the only philosopher that is remembered on a flag: "ordem e progresso" can be found on the Brazilian
one. He was also a great inspiration to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey after its
liberation from the Ottoman Empire. Wanted to create a modern state and be as powerful in the west

In Great Britain, the philosopher John Stuart Mill was deeply impressed by Comte and his description of the role of
science in the modern world. The history of humanity is the history of science according to Comte. While working on
the history of science, for example, when explaining how astronomy worked, Comte demonstrated that understanding
the inner workings of science and understanding the philosophy of science, how it knows what it knows, are one and
the same thing. Describing how science achieved its results explains why it's reliable. It doesn't have any need of
philosophical proof. Science has proved itself .

How science has achieved its results is described in very short sentences:
"Savoir pour prevoir, prevoir pour pouvoir" (to know in order to predict, to predict in order to control). For knowledge
being able to say how the world works is necessary to be able to act in the world in a planfull way and acting in a
planfull way makes us powerful: knowledge makes us powerful.

The culmination of Comte’s research will be sociology (a word coined by Comte). He is the first to say that there will
be something like sociology.

Description of science as the overwhelming actor in the history of humanity was not considered a problem at all, it
was all about the description of Science.

John Stuart Mill’s Critique

Comte described what science did was doing could be doing and that it was a good thing if science went on to do what
he thought was going to do. There was a common thought at the time that there had been a disenchantment of the
world, that the world became rational. The modern thinkers thought this would lead to the extermination of religion.
That’s why Comte talked about the arrival of the religion of humanity (it needed to take the place of previous
discarded religions).

Science was to be the religion of humanity. It was supposed to be about altruism (think about someone else). Comte
believed science would teach people to take care of each other, would have a doctrine that would embed itself in
society and would make Earth the ultimate home of humanity. Scientists would tell/propagate people how the world
works and what they ought to do.

Comte predicted that members of the church of humanity would wear shirts with their buttons on the back, so that
they could not button themselves up, to be reminded every morning of the need for someone else; be reminded by
necessity altruism. Also, he said we would have to wipe out all animals and all plants that were not useful for
humanity.

John Stuart Mill really hated this idea of religion of humanity.

“The deeper layer of Mill’s analysis is a critique of [Comte’s] bias towards systems of unity. Comte is tempted into a
massive systematization. Mill, the proponent of utilitarianism, is here rather ready to dismiss all ideals of coherence
and collective unanimity.”

Comte himself did not consider himself a philosopher because he wasn't legislating for humanity. Rather, he described
what science had been doing, and what it will do in the future. Some could say he was boring, but in the way he
looked at the world, we could also say that he was an acute observer. If you look at the world today, NGOs, activists,
humanitarian aid, can be considered a religion of humanity in the way he predicted it to be, focused on altruism.

Peter says that saying "football is a religion" is an exaggeration. But saying there is a religion of humanity is not far
from reality: scientists do tell people what to do (how to live healthily), and they are taken very seriously. And the
notion that human life ought to be altruistically treated is deeply engrained into modern society today, into the
Declaration of Human Rights for example. Comte says scientists ought to act like a clergy. It is not so far from the
truth. And what he said about exterminating every living thing that was not useful for us: it is happening, every day.

Belief in science and that is a force for the good and a force to help humanity, to become a mortal community, in
which everyone could have a good life.

Comte says that science is about creating a good life for humanity. And this belief in science was not even shocked by
WWI (not even with examples like Haber <science makes social actors powerful, and therefore could not be trusted to
make a better place>). People did take it as a warning against believing that science and progress are the same thing.
But the belief that we needed more science, more power over nature, that belief stayed.

Albert Einstein
Einstein argued that Newton himself had been wrong. There was no absolute time or space, gravity was not to be
observed as a force but as a curvature of time and space. And Einstein's new theory of relativity was proven right. In
1920, during an eclipse, scientists were able to observe stars that should've been hidden behind the sun, thus proving
that the gravity of the sun created a curvature, and the light from the stars behind it travelled in a curved line, to reach
us. This is something Newton hadn't even thought of. Newton was thought to have reached a mathematical certitude,
but he was proven wrong. How was this possible?

Karl Popper
Popper made the most of this discovery. Around the 1920s, he is the first one who took Hume's problem of induction
seriously again. Hume was right: empirical observations, gathering of facts, can never lead to science. What makes a
true scientific theory is not its confirmation through experience, but rather its falsifiability. To come back to the white
swan example, a valid theory would be that all swans are white as long as you don't find a black swan. As long as it
hasn't been falsified, your hypothesis stands, and it is the hypothesis of a true scientist because it could be falsifiable
through observation.

Newton was a true scientist because he made claims that could be refuted. He was wrong, but he was a scientist.
Marx had predicted that communism would develop in a highly capitalist society (it would bring about its own
downfall when the gap would become too big between the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat).

Falsifiable theory = good scientist. The communist revolution happened in 1917, in Russia, (not in germany, the most
developed capitalist society) with just 20,000 industrial workers, the most backward country (a city in Germany would
have more workers). Marx was wrong, but this proves that his theory was a viable scientific theory. Marxists, after the
communist revolution, came up with a lot of explanations “shit” as to why things happened. Differently than Marx had
predicted - these are not true scientists because they are making Marxism into something it was not. They are trying to
make Marxism into something which cannot be falsified. Then science turns into ideology.
So philosophy science has to have this double agenda of making hypotheses that can be falsified and, once falsified,
making other hypotheses to replace them. The validity of science lies in its rationality. You have to know how
scientists do it; they do it by falsification, by formulating theories that can be falsified and then trying to falsify them.
when thy are falsified, starting again and them making a better hypothesis. How do you know if science is a science?
Then you should be able to falsify a theory.

Freud's psychoanalysis cannot be falsified because any answer goes: whether I am attracted to my mother, or not,
Freud would find an explanation that still supports his Oedipus complex theory. Psychoanalysis cannot be refuted so it
cannot be considered science (Popper). The mark of true science is its falsifiability. Criticism is how science advances,
and how we have to understand science.

When Popper died in the 90s he was seriously described by some people as the greatest philosopher of the 20st
century. He was the ideological cold warrior - "we in the West are rational beings who rely on science that is
constantly improved through ongoing criticism; reacting to criticism and making the world a better place". They in the
East (communists) are in the grasp of ideology. They are not liberals, scientific, they do not do criticism, therefore
their science is awful, therefore their political liberty is awful. This is Poppers contribution to the cold war. His
philosophy does not work.

If we take Popper seriously, what does this mean for the social sciences?f

Some remarks:
1. Popper works in the tradition of Kant. Scientific knowledge doesn't rest on us gathering observations and making a
theory. It rests on the basis that we make theories of the world that can be refuted after. But it rests on theories that we
make, on the productivity of the human mind, which comes back to Kant's transcendental reason.

2. A great example of the double agenda of the philosophy of science: Popper's theory is explicitly founded on the
desire to find true science, and on the other hand discredit a host of knowledge claims which pretend to be scientific
but are not (Marxism, psycho-analysis, religions).

3. The clearer you write, the more you exclude, the more explicit you are, the easier it is to falsify your claim,
therefore making it more scientific. You make lesser arguments on the one hand and more on the other, the more you
are saying and the easier you are to falsify.

4. A difference with Kant and Hume: Popper says that science is above all a social process. Criticism comes from a
community of other scientists that share the value that it is a great idea to subject our own theories to the criticism of
peers. It's hard (we tend to cling to our own opinions) but it's beneficial. Science is not something to do on your own.
Science is the product of a scientific community.

Still, what makes science is its falsifiability. And the greatest way to do this is prediction: the greatest scientists engage
in prediction all the time. (e. g. I can say that a proton and neutron will behave this way and this interaction will result
in this type of particles and energy). This is what makes the natural sciences falsifiable.
Now, if you look at the social sciences, how many theories are there which can predict something, and how many are
falsifiable?

The Social Sciences

No economist saw the 2008 crisis happen, and it almost brought capitalism down - the whole economic system could
have crashed down. Everyone believed that the way economy had developed would not allow for such crises.
Afterwards economists understood why it happened, but no one could have predicted it.

Popper says that social scientists are not scientists because they have not successfully predicted anything. The fall of
the USSR is also an impactful event that was not predicted (the social scientist's general opinion was that it would
perdure). Social scientists can understand afterwards but cannot predict.

Sociology and political sciences are making great strides towards working with mathematical models, gathering data,
to come closer to a natural science methodology. But for anthropology it's not a possibility, so what can we do?
Are we a science, is it important to say we are a science? How can we say that we are a science? The way this is
mostly done is by referring to the German tradition of thinking, Weber 1900s being a prime example.
Geistenswischenschaffen (human worlds, who may have causes, but we live in a world of purposes).
Naturwischensaffen (explain what happens in nature. causes. nature as a clockmechanism. causes which explain
something).
Max Weber
In Germany, it was considered that the social sciences, the humanities, and theology have a different method than the
natural sciences. The natural sciences explained nature as a clock mechanism, with causes as we had seen in lecture 1.
But the social sciences dealt with the human world, not the natural world. And we humans live in a world in which we
have purposes. If we ask why students are here, all answers will be formulated in the form of purposes: we do it for a
reason.

We as human beings can understand purposes. It may be difficult but through various methods we can understand
them. And understanding purposes is very different from understanding causes. Weber talked of Verstehen, a word that
has multiple layers but most importantly means understanding what purpose there is behind an individual's behavior.
It's a different thing than chasing after basic causality. We as social scientists are translators of purpose.

There are different purposes for different causes, different groups throughout history. What kind of purposes always
differs. Understanding general purposes is impossible. It's always about individuals.

There are no general purposes common to human beings. Nature has general rules and causes, but in the social
sciences there are always concrete, particular examples.

5 Objections
Peter is very fond of Weber. Still, he says there is more to the social sciences than simply understanding purposes. He
presents us 5 great objections to Weber's theory:

Objection 1
It is much more difficult than we think to understand cultural purposes. Weber wrote a great book titled The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he argued that the necessary emergence for capitalism was Calvinism
(Protestantism). He explained Calvinists believe that God, before the creation of the world, had arbitrarily decided
who will go to Hell and who will go to Heaven. And there is nothing in a human life that can change God's decision.
Weber argued that if people were to survive this awful doctrine, they would want to know where they belonged (Hell
or Heaven). And to prove to themselves that they belonged in Heaven, Calvinists started working very hard, because
that would confirm their belief that they were part of the elect.

But Peter said that Weber was mistaken. How did Calvinists really deal with their doctrine? The overwhelming
majority of Calvinists used it to be confident that God has chosen them to go to Heaven. They found comfort in their
faith, indulging in small mishaps because they believed themselves predestined for Heaven; used it to be confident; it
was a liberating doctrine. Weber made a very sophisticated argument but he was wrong.
People can draw all kinds of purposes that are not inherent to a doctrine in and of itself. Detecting purposes is very
difficult. We have to look at what people are doing (and sometimes it might not even be enough).

Objection 2
People live in worlds they have to live in, ordained by material realities. Often purposes are imposed upon us instead
of chosen. Sometimes personal purposes are created to make up for objective conditions that are out of our control.
Peter first used the fable of the fox. There is a fox walking through a vineyard. It wants to eat grapes, but the grapes
are just out of reach. The fox declares that the grapes are not ripe yet, so will not eat them, and walks out of the
vineyard. Were the grapes really not ripe (made-up/understanding purpose), or were they just out of reach (material
reality)?
Then there was the Maserati story. Do I not own a Maserati because I am climate-conscious and find it a silly mark of
consumerism (made-up purpose), or do I not own a Maserati because I cannot afford it (material reality)?
People make up all sort of purposes to live in circumstances they cannot change. If you want to understand their lives,
you have to look at what is the function of these purposes in their life.

Objection 3
People can be driven by purposes which they do not want to recognize, and about which they cannot, or will not
speak.

In the novel Irretrievable by Theodor Fontane, a woman gets cheated on by her husband. As per her Christian faith,
she remains with him, but she ends up committing suicide because she cannot live with the humiliation she suffered
from as a wife, and also with her loss of honor as a human being. She cannot acknowledge that she was insulted in her
honor as a sexual being, she knows this but she cannot say it. There are things we know but do not say publicly. Here,
there was something more powerful than her declared purpose. No one who had talked to her could have predicted her
behavior, because she held a different discourse than what her actions led to.
Purpose of university —> class difference reproduction: we do not want to know this as university teachers. So we
don’t talk about class but about diversity and show how we are devoted to this. The driver for this is to look away
from the reproduction of class. So is it the case that we are good leftwing people because of the attention to diversity?
Serious social science question if this is really the purpose.

This is one of the justifications of anthropological fieldwork and participant observation, formulated in the
(apocryphal) Malinovski's Law: people tell you they do something, but do in fact something else, and do not note the
difference. There are things which we do not know, do not want to know, cannot talk about.

Objection 4
Powerful arguments have been made that modern, industrial societies discipline their members by having them
internalize the exercise of this discipline: their inner purposes are created by social practices. What we have to
understand are these concrete techniques of producing subjects, not their purposes, which are a secondary
phenomenon. This is basically Foucault's theory. Peter said, for example, that the University system in the Netherlands
declared that it will produce smart, independent students, but what it was actually doing was simply reproducing class
differences.

Objection 5
There has been lots of research that does not focus on individual purpose. We as social scientists do more than just
look at purpose. And it's useful to do so.

For example:

- Thomas Piketty's great study of the growth of inequality in modern societies over time: Le Capital au XXle siècle
(2013), translated as Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014). (Although it must be noted that Piketty, in his follow-
up volume (Capital et Idéologie, 2019, translated as Capital and Ideology, 2020) stresses that these mechanisms do
presuppose a 'world-view', a set of reasons given, to ensure their working).
- economic mechanism without purpose mentioned, its just happening
- Gerd Baumann, Andre Gingrich (eds), Grammars of Identity/Alterity: a Structural Approach (2004), which offers an
elegant analysis of the three possible ways in which the other can be constructed.
- three ways of othering others; we and them, us and them. three different grammars of alterity. —> do this for
various purposes, but in the description itself, purposes do not really play a role, but this is still good social sciences.

Social sciences do not always operate with a clear-cut purpose. The idea that one could construct a logical framework
for social sciences solely by comprehending their purposes is challenging. Sometimes, purposes are shaped by
objective circumstances, and individuals must navigate their lives and devise purposes that align with their existing
situations. There have been assertions that contemporary industrial societies influence their members to self-discipline
in novel ways, with the argument that individuals discipline themselves within these societies. Despite Peter's
assertion that we all work much harder, take everything seriously, and strive in our pursuits, he, in contrast, displayed
apathy and laziness.

Our heightened self-discipline is posited as a product of modern late capitalism, ensuring that we become competent
neo-liberal disciplined consumers and workers, as argued by Foucault. This perspective suggests that our purposes are
not inherently interesting; rather, they are installed in us, and it becomes intriguing to observe how this installation
occurs in our minds. While the veracity of this argument may be debatable, it represents a facet of real social science
where purposes may not necessarily play a significant role.

The initial challenge in social sciences was to create a logical framework based on the notion of "verstehen" or
understanding purposes. However, upon closer examination, this approach appears flawed. This leaves us grappling
with the question: where does this realization leave the field of social sciences? The complexity of human behavior
and the multifaceted nature of purposes make it difficult to derive a convincing and all-encompassing logic for social
sciences.