in favour of construing the relation between reason and action in causal terms but it seems as though he has nonetheless provided some reason for thinking that explanation in terms of reasons is a kind of causal explanation. If his opponents are to dispute that, he says that they must identify an alternative pattern of explanation.51
Davidson’s anti-Wittgensteinian arguments are formidable and have been enormously influential in terms of the way that many philosophers nowadays think about explanations of action in terms of reasons. What this demonstrates is that anyone who wants to defend a position along the lines that Winch wanted to defend must now deal with Davidson’s arguments. The debate has moved on since Winch published The Idea of a Social Science and non-Wittgensteinian thought now predominates in philosophy departments around the world.
1.3.3Is Winch Correct? – Tanney’s Response to Davidson
However, that is not to say that Davidson is correct and that a defence of ideas in the spirit of Winch cannot be given. Over the course of the past two decades, Julia Tanney has built up a powerful case against Davidson’s conception of explanations in terms of reasons and she has defended the Wittgensteinian view that Davidson attacked. She has written a series of articles about reasons and rule-following that are collected in the recent volume, Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge.52
In her article ‘Why Reasons May Not Be Causes’,53 Tanney examines various cases where somebody had a reason but did not act for that reason. This is the kind of case that Davidson suggested calls for thinking of the relation between reason and action in causal terms – to account for the force of the word ‘because’ where we say ‘the agent performed the action because they had the reason’. Tanney denies that we have to bring in the notion of causation in order to account for these cases; instead, ‘we just need to introduce judgements, weights, and values into the “anaemic” analysis of reasons’. What needs to be added in such cases is not the notion of causation but ‘a more complex justificatory machinery’.54 We can explain why someone acted for one reason rather than some other reason that they had by saying that the reason they acted on carried more weight for them than the others, or by adding something to the account about the agent’s values (or both).
Davidson challenged his opponents to identify a pattern of explanation that accounts for the relationship between reason and action in something other than causal terms and Tanney rises to that challenge in her paper, ‘Reasons as Non-Causal Context-Placing Explanations’.55 If the relationship between (1) a reason and (2) the action that it is the reason for is not causal then what is it? Tanney explains that ‘in many cases attributions of motives, intentions and reasons explain a performance by characterizing it as an action of a certain kind’.56 Rather than assimilating explanations in terms of reasons to causal explanations Tanney suggests that explanations in terms of reasons are similar to other kinds of explanations that are clearly not causal. An example she gives to illustrate this is of somebody walking out of a chemistry classroom and seeing the letters ‘c’, ‘a’, ‘t’ written on the board. They might ask one of their classmates, ‘why did the teacher write the word “cat” on the board?’ and their classmate could explain what was going on by saying that ‘the teacher was starting to write the word “catalyst” and you left the classroom before they finished writing’. This is clearly not a case of the model of causation Davidson subscribes to where there must be two logically independent events entering into the causal relation. In this case there is just one event (writing on the board by the teacher) which has not been understood and so an explanation is called for.57 Explanations of actions in terms of reasons are similar to this in that what they do is to place an event in context and make sense of it. They are also similar, Tanney suggests, because they do not require two independent occurrences related to each other.
The possibility that at least some explanations of human action in terms of reasons are categorially distinct from explanations in terms of causes gives us some reason to think that social sciences are not like natural sciences. As noted in Section 1.2, the existence of explanations in terms of reasons (and in terms of goals and motives) undermines the kind of materialism that says that we are to explain things simply in terms of what they are made of and this in turn undermines reductionists who think that this kind of materialism lends support to their view. Thus far we have two broad reasons for rejecting the view that social sciences are of a piece with the natural sciences. Social sciences are not reducible to natural sciences (Section 1.2) and they employ different kinds of explanations to the natural sciences, namely, explanations in terms of reasons, rules, motives, and so forth (Section 1.3). In the next section I will examine whether we might claim that social sciences are like natural sciences by claiming that they employ the same methodologies.58
1.4Methodology in the Natural and Social Sciences
Claims that the methodologies of the natural sciences are appropriate for use in the social sciences and that they are the only methods appropriate for use in the social sciences are driven by similar kinds of considerations to those that have motivated people to become reductionists. The enormous progress made in the natural sciences suggests that there is something right about the methodologies used in them and hints at the desirability of those methods in areas other than natural science. The rejection of dualism has led people to think that they should adopt a kind of monism, namely materialism or physicalism, and if social sciences study the same kinds of things as the natural sciences, namely physical things, then they should use the same kinds of methodologies. Another motivation for the claim that we should use the methods of the natural sciences to study social phenomena is verificationism. We might think that we cannot verify claims about, for example, other people’s mental states or claims about ethics and so all we can do in these areas is study relevant quantifiable physical attributes such as behaviour (construed in physicalist terms). Some logical positivists argued that ethics as traditionally conceived was unverifiable and should be replaced by science. Otto Neurath heralded a new era in which ‘instead of the priest we find the physiological physician and the sociological organizer. Definite conditions are tested for their effect upon happiness (Glückswirkungen), just as a machine is tested to measure its lifting effect.’59
A method is a way of establishing or accomplishing something. The ways in which the natural sciences establish truths within their domains include using observation and experiment. Observations might give us knowledge or they might lead us to infer that something is the case (perhaps something unobservable) or they might lead us to hypothesize that something is the case (which me might then test using further observations). Scientists have also had success by using explanations of phenomena in terms of their causes and by using mathematical notions to quantify and compare things.
It is certainly true that social scientists make observations, that they can sometimes quantify the things they are observing, and that they can test hypotheses that they formulate on the basis of observations. However, as noted above, there are explanations within the social sciences which are not causal explanations. In the social sciences we explain actions in terms of the reasons that people have and give for doing the things they do, their motives, and their goals. This suggests that there will be significant differences in the methods used by social scientists which
