involving non-human agents. So, for example, social science research involves questionnaires, surveys, polls, and interviews, in which human beings are asked about the things they do and why they do them. Although social investigations, like the natural sciences, involve observation, the character of the observation is different in each. Coming to understand human action through observation involves knowledge of social practices, norms, and conventions, and the explanations arrived at by social scientists are not nomological explanations as they are in the natural sciences.60 No laws of human behaviour or of human psychology have been discovered and we have no good reason to think that they will be.
Moreover, the methods employed by philosophy, of clarifying concepts by presenting overviews of their grammar, are categorially distinct from the methods employed by those working in the natural sciences. Grammatical claims are not hypotheses or reports of observations. They are not justified or tested by reference to empirical reality at all. As Wittgenstein said, ‘There should be no theories, and nothing hypothetical, in philosophy.’61 Getting clear about the meaning of the expressions one uses is something that one should do before one embarks on any scientific investigation.
So, it seems that natural sciences and social sciences, as a matter of fact, employ a variety of different methods. What of the motivations for thinking that perhaps they should employ the same methods – verificationism, materialism, and the progress made by science? Problems with materialism have already been discussed in Section 1.2.3 in discussing problems with reductionism. Verificationism, especially the variety presented by the logical positivists, is now widely rejected by philosophers with good reason. Wittgenstein made sharp criticisms of the view that the ‘inner’ world is hidden from us and all we can see is bare behaviour (although Wittgenstein’s criticisms have still not been heeded by many philosophers today). We do not infer that somebody is in pain when we see them stub their toe and cry.62 In that case we can see that they are in pain and we can distinguish that case from one in which we do make an inference, for example, when we see a packet of paracetamol opened next to a half-drunk glass of water on the table. There is a logical connection between pain and pain behaviour, namely that pain behaviours are (defeasible) criteria for someone being in pain. So, neither materialism nor verificationism provide us with good reasons for thinking that methodology in the social and natural sciences should be the same. The issue of progress in the social and natural sciences will be discussed in the next section below.
1.5Progress
As already noted above, the impressive progress made in the natural sciences is one of the motivations to have the social sciences emulate the natural ones in one way or another. Academic philosophers and scientists have been unimpressed by the results of psychological theorizing and philosophical argument by contrast with rapid developments in physics, biology, and chemistry as well as by the lack of agreement among social scientists in contrast to natural scientists. For example, Semir Zeki, an academic working in neuroesthetics, has complained about ‘the poverty of the results’ in philosophy ‘in terms of understanding our brains and their mental constitution’63 and the philosopher Paul Churchland has lamented the lack of progress made by ‘folk psychology’ (the name he gives to our ordinary framework of psychological concepts, which he takes to be a theory of human behaviour) which he thinks has not progressed in 2,500 years.64 More recently the physicist Stephen Hawking has declared that ‘philosophy is dead’ and claimed that it has been superseded by developments in science. Zeki thinks that neurobiology should take over problems about the mind (as well as problems concerning justice and honour) from philosophy, Churchland thinks that ‘folk psychology’ (our ordinary framework of psychological concepts as well as concepts employed in psychology) should be abandoned in favour of a neuroscientific psychology, and Hawking thinks that philosophers should give up on questions like ‘why are we here?’ and ‘where do we come from?’ and leave them to science.65
There is surely something to these worries about a lack of progress in philosophy. Philosophers still puzzle over Zeno’s paradoxes from 2,500 years ago. There are contemporary Aristotelian ethicists but there aren’t any contemporary Ptolemaic scientists. Philosophers are still troubled by sceptical doubts about our senses and by disagreements about what it is that we see and hear. More than two millennia ago Plato made attempts to define knowledge and philosophers today are still making similar attempts. Is it any wonder that people like Hawking think that philosophy might as well just be abandoned?
Ludwig Wittgenstein had an explanation for why it is that philosophical confusions have endured for millennia. It is that these problems are conceptual problems, that is, problems that result from misunderstanding certain concepts, and that the ‘traps’ set by language – the features of language that cause confusion – have remained in place:
One keeps hearing the remark that philosophy really makes no progress, that the same philosophical problems that had occupied the Greeks are still occupying us. But those who say that do not understand the reason it is // must be // so. The reason is that our language has remained the same and seduces us into asking the same questions over and over again. As long as there is a verb ‘to be’ which seems to function like ‘to eat’ and ‘to drink’, as long as there are adjectives like ‘identical’, ‘true’, ‘false’, ‘possible’, as long as one talks about a flow of time and an expanse of space, etc. etc. humans will continue to bump against the same mysterious difficulties, and stare at something that no explanation seems capable of removing.66
It could be claimed that progress, of a sort, has been made in philosophy but that some philosophers and scientists have failed to recognize it as such. In his later work Wittgenstein laid out some of the confusions that have troubled philosophers over the centuries and contrasted their confused formulations with ‘surveyable representations’ of the problematic expressions. Surveyable representations clarify the meaning of expressions that are causing confusion, showing the way in which the relevant expression is ordinarily used, and perhaps contrasting it with other similar expressions or giving examples of conceptual connections with other expressions – whatever helps to reduce confusion and produce clarity and understanding. One example of this is Wittgenstein’s discussion of the concept of ‘knowledge’ (discussed above, in Section 1.2.3). Elsewhere he dissolves problems from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, ‘Can one step into the same river twice?’;67 clarifies a centuries-old question from Augustine, ‘how is it possible to measure time?’;68 describes the correct use of words like ‘know’, ‘believe’, ‘certainty’, and ‘doubt’ in dissolving sceptical problems;69 discusses problems resulting from thinking of sensations as private;70 as well as many other philosophical problems from over the past centuries.
Whereas progress in science consists in making empirical discoveries and devising ever more powerful theories, progress in philosophy consists in clarification of concepts which are causing puzzlement and does not involve constructing theories at all. Philosophy should not be blamed for failing to uncover or discover truths about our brains since that is the task of biology and of neuroscience. What philosophers can do is clarify concepts employed in neuroscientific and psychological research (and in other areas of scientific
