Jeffrey C Alexander is a leading sociologist in theUS, an ambitious and industrious scholar who set out to make a serious mark in the business. He wrote a four-volume opus early in his career to lay the foundations for more philosophically and methodologically sophisticated work in sociology.
The title of the whole work is Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1980) and Volume One is Positivism, Presuppositions and Current Controversies.
He realised the need to operate across the full range of components of theoretical development, from what he called the Metaphysical Environment to the Empirical Environment, passing through General presuppositions, Models, Concepts, Definitions, Classifications, Laws, Complex and simple propositions, Correlations, Methodological assumptions to Observations.
One of his first lines of argument aimed to establish that the old form of empiricism or positivism was out of date due to developments in the philosophy of science. Some will appreciate that by 1980 when this work was published, Popperian critical rationalism had rendered positivism “old hat” in 1935 with the publication of Logik der Forschung. Much of this work was done at Berkeleyand Alexander took the opportunity to pass the manuscript to Ian Jarvie who was working there at the same time. It seems that many mistakes remain in the book which Jarvie would have identified in the manuscript.
Alexander started with the history of positivism from the 1930s to the Popperian challenge, followed by others who effectively replaced “the positivist persuasion” with a “postpositivist” philosophy of science (though many sociological theorists took a long time to appreciate the change).
On page 19 he wrote: “Karl Popper and his followers rejected ‘verification’ as a theoretical criterion [of what?] because there would always remain the logical possibility of discovering a falsifying event. Popper then argued, however, that ‘falsification’ could constitute such a criterion…the rejection [of verificationism] was in no sense based on a repudiation of the radical duality between fact and theory…[Popperian] empiricism commits itself to an unproblematic perception of data as capable of being conceptualized in a relatively pure observational language.”
This overlooks Popper’s insistence on the theory-dependence of observations
He went on “Although as one of the earliest and most formidable critics of radical positivism Popper correctly emphasized the significance of more general conceptual frameworks, he erred in assigning the decisive role of falsification to the necessity for every scientific statement to be capable of being tested by experiment”, citing LSD New York 1959 p 41 “It must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience”.
In note 73 to that passage Alexander wrote “This ambiguity in Popper’s work is implicitly illustrated by Imre Lakatos’ use of Popper [with subscripts] in referring to three distinctive nonpositivist positions that have been attributed to Popper by historians and philosophers of science”.
Comment: There is no ambiguity when the distinction between the logic of falsifiability is distinguished from the practical matter of falsification.
Alexander has some good citations in this footnotes here to indicate the way social theorists persisted with positivism as though it was the state of the art for decades after the program was challenged and even when it was replaced in the history and philosophy of science after the 1960s.
He identified “this internal ambiguity” [in Popper?] as a defect in the revised form of “Popperian empiricism” that prompted attacks against empiricism which began to gain support in the 1960s…This third, postempiricist or postpositivist position became influential only in the recent period; yet its intellectual foundations were established much earlier and it is in these earlier works that the fundamental alternatives to the postulates of the positivist persuasion are most clearly articulated”. (p 20).
He turned to Polanyi for the early foundations, especially Personal Knowledge 1958, also influential works by Koyre, a favourable reference to Collingwood from the 1940s and then he moved on to more contemporary elaborations by the Kuhn and Holton.
That history ignores Mises and the Austrians, does not do full justice to Popper (1935) and appears to neglect The Poverty of Historicism (1944/5 and 1957) and The Open Society (1945).
He concludes the chapter with a section on The Postpositivist Persuasion: Rehabilitation of the Theoretical.
“(a) All scientific data are theoretically informed. This alternative to the positivist conception of the fact/theory distinction as concrete has been most sharply articulated by the neo-Popperian Lakatos.” (p 30)
That was actually one of the points emphasised by Popper in his introductory course on scientific method at the LSE which he delivered for over a decade through the 1950s (check dates).
“Theoretical formulation does not proceed, as Popper’s empiricism would have it, according to the law of ‘the fiercest struggle for survival’, (LSD p 42) basing generalizations only on positions which have not yet been empirically falsified and subjecting such formulations in a completely open-minded and purely skeptical manner to critical empirical attack.” In a note he records “this faith in the disinterested rationality of the scientist is itself, of course, a certain type of nonempirical assumption. As Habermas wrote in reference to Popper, “a critique of knowledge that claims to be free of presuppositions…must already know more than it can know according to its own stated premises”. (Knowledge and Human Interests, 1971 p 120.
He cited a passage to show that Popper knew how adverse data can he handled without ditching the theory, “It is always possible to find some way of avoiding falsification…”
Indeed Popper wrote (possibly unhelpfully) that a degree of dogmatism may be desirable to develop a theory through a period of difficulties in case it “delivers the goods” eventually. Bartley suggested that a better formulation would simply recognise that adverse observations render a theory problematic and further work is required to find whether the fault lies with the theory under investigation, or the data, or some other theory that is involved. Duhem made that point over a hundred years ago and Popper became aware of Duhem’s contribution when Joe Agassi drew his attention to it.
“Fundamental shifts in scientific belief occur only when empirical changes are matched by the availability of alternative theoretical commitments”. P 32
See the relevant piece of LSD which states that a hypothesis will not be given up due to adverse evidence unless there is a better option available.
What difference could it have made to his lifelong career if he had got a better grip on Popper, and also expanded his interest to the Austrian economists?
This is an essay on the way his program developed – the interesting thing is the way he ended up with a “deep cultural program” which draws on just about every school of social thought with the exception of CR and the Austrians!
