ABSTRACT
During the last 40 years of the twentieth century the decline of various positivist philosophies of science was accompanied by a rise in a variety of realist philosophies of science (contrary to Skinner 1990: 5-6, 1-20). This realist turn is evidenced in the works of Jerrold L. Aronson (1984, 1995), Roy Bhaskar (1975 [1998]), Mario Bunge (1979 [1959], 1996), Rom Harré (1970, 1975, 1986, 1993), Stephen Mumford (1998), and William A. Wallace (1974, 1996). At the margins of the social sciences with the 1970s and since, this new development worked its way into the philosophy of social science and thus promoted a quiet and modest pursuit of the possibility of naturalism in the social sciences. This was initially reflected in the work of Margaret Archer (1995, 1996 [1988], 2000), Roy Bhaskar (1979,1991), Rom Harré (1979, 1984, 1991), Russell Keat and John Urry (1975), Peter T. Manicas (1987, 2006), and John Shotter (1993). There are three major results of the realist turn that I will be briefly dealing with here in order to bring out both the historical context that justifies Science for Humanism: the Recovery of Human Agency, and the theoretical framework that promotes it. In my judgment, there has been a particular result of the shift to scientific
realism in the social sciences that is of cardinal importance: the reopening of the Science and Humanism debate on the ontology of human being, especially with respect to its key problem of freedom and determinism. In the second half of twentieth-century social science that problem has gone through two critical formulations: while Parsons’s vocabulary of “(social) system and (individual) voluntarism” dominated the three decades from the 1950s to the 1970s, the last 25 years of the twentieth century witnessed its transformation into Giddens’s new vocabulary of “(social) structure and agency.” As we will now see, the realist turn in the philosophy of science is presupposed by the sociological problem of social structure and human agency, and that very fact encourages the move to generalize it to be the problem of deterministic structures and human agency. In each of the social sciences their respective theoretical interests have
given us the traditional structures of the psychological, the social, and the
cultural. I now want to propose that the theoretical thread that connects these three structures into a fundamental metaphysical problem is based on the non-traditional structures of biology and language. Biology can then be understood as resolving into two internally related concepts: the organism and the body; and language can also be understood as resolving into two internally related concepts: practices and discourse. The second somatic revolution in the social scientific theorizing of embodiment that stems from the combined work of Drid Williams, Brenda Farnell, and Charles Varela leads to the proposal that biology and language can be assimilated under the key concept of dynamically embodied discursive practices (Farnell and Varela 2008 in press; Williams 1982: 161-82). Hence, I can now assert that the general problem of structure(s) and agency can be given an enriched formulation: the problem of deterministic structures and dynamically embodied discursive agency. In this book, my interest is restricted to the fundamental problem of
deterministic structure and human agency. For the sake of convenience, although he never presented it, as far as I know, with this generalization and enrichment in mind, I will refer to this new formulation simply as Giddens’s problem of structure and agency. The realist turn and the problem of structure and agency, furthermore, are
connected in what I will refer to as Giddens’s Call. The “Call” is articulated in the New Rules of Sociological Method (1976: 91): a viable theory of structuration is in need of a suitable realist philosophy of science in order to ground its concept of human agency in a concept of “agent causality.” Particularly important for this book’s interest is the understanding that there is a specific implication in Giddens’s theory of structuration: any prospect of a solution to the structure and agency problem will take the form of an answer to that “Call.” The second result of the realist turn is an examination of the phenomen-
ological theory of freedom that threads together the philosophical work of Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty from the perspective of Giddens’s Call. This theory of freedom in all of its varieties has been of great importance, for it has informed and fueled the Humanist revolt against Science in the social sciences in the three decades that spanned the 1950s to the 1970s. The use of Giddens’s perspective allows us to discover that the theory of phenomenological freedom turns out to be, itself, the crucial reason for the demise of the Science and Humanism debate as we entered the 1980s. In other words, the death of traditional Humanism in the social sciences must be laid at the doorstep of the phenomenological tradition. To see this clearly, the key theorist here is Merleau-Ponty: his representative theory of freedom openly addresses the structure and agency problem, and in doing so, human freedom is, technically speaking, actually being cast as the “power of agency.” However, in Merleau-Ponty’s traditional phenomenological denial of science that was his signature to the very end, it will be shown that this concept of
freedom as a power of agency is thus deprived of any possibility of being correctly grounded in a concept of “agent causality.” Thus, this particular effort to rescue freedom from determinism is fatally limited to being a defiance of determinism by the theoretically ineffective act of merely affirming freedom. Here, precisely, is the very reason why the phenomenological theory of freedom leads to the death of traditional Humanism. And yet, MerleauPonty’s theory of agency as a “power” can be given a new lease of life if it is simply addressed in terms of the entire metaphysical context of Giddens’s problem of structure and agency. Indeed, I now want to propose that this entire context of the problem of structure and agency, the call to ground agency in “agent causality,” and the turn to scientific realism that the call implies, is indeed the emergence of a New Humanism in the social sciences. The third major result will be an examination of both the Postmodernism
of Knowledge and its complementary, the Postmodern Philosophy of Science (Best and Kellner 2003: 285-88; Giddens 1979; Harré 1998: 353-77; Newton 1997: 8-44). The two Postmodernisms together make up a serious challenge to the view taken here, that structure and agency is a genuine problem, and thus is open to possible solutions under the auspices of a suitable realist philosophy of science. The challenge to this view from the Postmodernism of Knowledge is found in Jacques Derrida’s theory of language and in Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyper-reality. Specifically, it is an implication of Derrida’s theory that human freedom is to be identified with the spontaneous structural activity of human language that constitutes a reality wholly unto itself. Thus, the world of natural causation is not a problem for human freedom because the latter is imprisoned in the solipsism of the lived life of human language. The other challenge from the Postmodernism of Knowledge in the case of Jean Baudrillard goes one step further. His outright banishment of “reality” and the “social” seems to eliminate both “structure” and “agency” as possible problems. For, the implication is that there is no natural reality for there to be any problem of deterministic structures, and there is no social reality for there to be any issue of human agency. But there is another similar but deeper challenge to taking seriously Giddens’s problem and its possible solution that issues from the Postmodernism of the philosophy of science. Harré’s analysis of the idea of science in the works of Nelson Goodman,
Richard Rorty, Bruno Latour, and Ian Hacking, indicates that they converge, however unwittingly, on a common outcome: the delegitimation of the rational and empirical authority of natural science. The concept of nature, the sovereign pillar of Western theological, philosophical, and scientific realism, is exclusively reduced to being the social construction of the scientific cultural community. And as a direct consequence, science itself thus is taken to be just another community that of course arbitrarily privileges its ontological beliefs. From such a standpoint, the problem of deterministic structures and the freedom of human agency is an artifact of a radical social constructionism. In short, there can be no such problem.
