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On the Need for Contextualist Criteria: A Reply to Professor Gunnell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Arthur S. Goldberg
Arthur S. Goldberg*
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
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Extract

Professor Gunnell seems to be arguing that if political scientists follow the deductivist path they will almost certainly fall into a bottomless and sterile abyss. My understanding of the deductivist conception of science, and my verstehen about social phenomena lead me to believe that this is a very real risk. The risk derives from the apparent complexity of social phenomena and the relatively limited ability of the human mind to deal with complexity in a rigorous deductive manner. It is just possible that social phenomena are sufficiently complex that they will never be manageable within the neat framework of deductive models. It is precisely for this reason that, at least at this point in time, I would prefer not to have the whole of the discipline tread this path. But why should even one man risk a lifetime of scholarly endeavor against such a possible outcome? Well, if there is another possible outcome to which he attaches a sufficiently high utility, he will take the gamble. I suggest that there is another possible outcome, and hope that, for some, its utility will be sufficiently high to warrant the gamble. That outcome consists in the production of a cumulatively reliable body of knowledge about those social phenomena called political. Consider the worth of being able to reduce the errors of calculation on the parts of voters, office seekers, secretaries of state, etc.

Type
Symposium on Scientific Explanation in Political Science
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , December 1969 , pp. 1247 - 1250
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1969

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References

1 Scriven, Michael, “Truisms as the Grounds for Historical Explanation,” in Gardiner, Patrick (ed.), Theories of History (New York: The Free Press, 1959), p. 456 Google Scholar.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 On re traduction, see Hanson, Norwood Russell, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), chap. ivGoogle Scholar.

5 Gunnell, John G., “Deduction, Explanation and Social Scientific Inquiry,” this Review, LXIII (12, 1969), p. 1243 Google Scholar.

6 See Goldberg, Arthur S., “Social Determinism and Rationality as Bases of Party Identification, this Review, LXIII (03, 1969), 5–25 Google Scholar.

7 Riker, William H., The Theory of Political Coalitions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

8 Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1957)Google Scholar.

9 Gunnell, op. cit., p. 1246.

10 For an excellent treatment of one aspect of understanding, see Abel, Theodore, “The Operation Called Verslehen ,” American Journal of Sociology LIV (1948), 211–218 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Scriven, Michael, “Explanations, Predictions, and Laws,” in Feigl, Herbert and Maxwell, Grover (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. III (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), p. 225 Google Scholar. The reader should note that while I disagree with Scriven on the matter of objectivity, I do not disagree with him in much of his work. His general theme seems to be that there are a whole host of decisions that one must make, and that one cannot wait upon formal deductive theorists. One therefore uses other ways of trying to make sense of things. Professor Gunnell, however, pushes the argument much further, seeking to carve out domains of epistemological appropriateness, and to label all of them “scientific.”

12 Hanson, op. cit., p. 64.

13 Easton, David, The Political System (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), p. 53 Google Scholar.

14 Gunnell, op. cit., p. 1240.

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