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What is This?
This article defends laws in the social sciences. Arguments against social laws
are considered and rejected based on the "open" nature of social theory, the
Work on this article was supported by a grant from the American Council of Learned
Societies. George Graham, Alexander Rosenberg, Marthe Chandler, and Scott Arnold
made helpful comments on earlier drafts.
Phtlosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol 20 No 1, March 1990 56-83
@ 1990 York Uruversity, Toronto, and Contributors
56
tions, and laws both result from and help make possible that process.
Laws, explanation, and confirmation go hand in hand. Thus if one is
inclined to believe, as I am, that some parts of the social sciences
explain, then it is natural and perhaps necessary to defend social laws.
Section I of this article defends social laws against three common
criticisms: that social laws are impossible because (a) social kinds have
multiple physical realizations, (b) social theories are not &dquo;closed,&dquo; and
(c) there can be no laws relating belief, desire, and action. Another
popular argument rejects social laws because they are often about
social entities rather than individuals and/or are teleological in na-
ture. Section II spells out and rejects these criticisms. More serious
problems for social laws result from the fact that those laws are usually
conclusion, I assume.
Perhaps the crucial issue concerns not the open or closed nature of
actual systems but rather a theory’s ability to handle those outside
factors. A closed theory is complete: It can describe and explain in its
own terms all the forces acting in its domain. So, the argument runs,
forces affecting open physical systems can be fully handled within
physics itself. In the social sciences, however, outside factors are not
social in nature-and thus cannot be handled by social theory. Con-
sequently, alleged social laws are bound to be incomplete and thus
not laws.
This argument fails for several reasons. On some reasonable as-
sumptions, this argument proves too much-that is, that no physical
laws are possible, either. We know that biological, psychological, and
social events influence the physical universe. If, however, our biolog-
ical, psychological, and social theories are even in part irreducible,
then there is little prospect that exceptions to physical laws can be
handled in physical terms.
Biological factors, for example, will interfere in physical processes,
thus creating apparent exceptions to physical laws. Although such
factors are in the end composed of physical entities, that does not solve
the problem. For merely listing all known biological factors under
their particular physical description will not show physical laws
completely refinable in their own terms. Assuming that biological
kinds are not captured in physics-and this is what irreducibility
Thus this last argument for the impossibility of social laws fares no
better than its predecessors. Nonetheless, these arguments were in
part motivated by a concern I have yet to address: the desire to explain
the noticeable lack of progress in the social sciences. That concern will
be taken up indirectly in Section III and directly in Section IV. Before
that, however, it is necessary to defend a controversial assumption
used in my previous arguments, that is, that purely macro-level social
laws can be adequate.
II
III
While some laws are intuitively more universal than others, complete
universality is an elusive goal-even for the physical sciences.
Kepler’s laws, for example, refer to a particular: our solar system.
Does this mean that the universality requirement ought to be given
up? Not necessarily. Relative to disciplines and theories, we can
perhaps distinguish those statements that are universal from those
that are not. The fundamental processes described by molecular biol-
ogy-translation, transcription, protein synthesis, and the like-only
hold for entities governed by DNA. Nonetheless, these accounts are
universal once we set molecular biology as our domain of reference-
unlike any statement that refers to specific species or cell kinds in
describing basic processes. So, while social laws may be specific to
various domains, that still leaves room for universality, properly
understood.
A second complaint against social laws is that they are merely
generalizations and thus lack the &dquo;nomic force&dquo; necessary for real
laws. Such a complaint presupposes that there is some sharp distinc-
tion between &dquo;real laws&dquo; and those law-like statements that are
that they really should not be called scientific laws at all. Needless to
say, that arduous task has not been undertaken by critics of the social
sciences.24 (And I will present below some evidence to suggest that
that task could not be carried out.)
Now, let us look at the ceteris paribus objection. Certainly, social
laws are generally implicitly qualified, often in unspecified and un-
specifiable ways. However, there is no principled difference here
between the social and physical sciences. As Cartwright and others
have persuasively argued,&dquo; most theoretical laws of physics are either
false or implicitly qualified with ceteris paribus (or, more accurately,
ceteris absentus) clauses. They describe relations between variables
that would hold if no other factors intervened. The force between two
bodies, for example, varies inversely with the square of their distance
only if magnetic forces and so on are not present. Real events typically
involve multiple laws and the factors they describe. Getting an expla-
nation of the individual event in all its particularity requires some way
to compose the joint factors, some way of tying the counterfactual law
to reality. Typically, however, physics provides no automatic and
precise way to deal with such messy complexity. Rather, we have at
best numerous rules of thumb and somewhat ad hoc and piecemeal
principles for conjoining multiple ceteris paribus laws with reality.
Ceteris paribus clauses are prevalent and uneliminable in physics.
Cartwright often makes this picture sound paradoxical: Theoretical
laws explain only when they are false and cannot explain when they
are true. But her point is a perfectly coherent one about models and
paribus laws describe what would be the case. How can they then
explain what is the case? And once we say how that is possible, we
still need some criteria for judging when ceteris paribus laws explain
a given event and when they do not. Since many qualified ldws
So, we can see how laws about what does not obtain can nonethe-
less explain what does obtain-they cite factors, aspects, and tenden-
cies of a complex situation. Given that we can at least make sense of
how ceteris paribus laws explain, we must next (a) say how we can
confirm ceteris paribus laws in the first place-since they are often
about conditions that do not exist-and (b) give criteria for telling
when a particular ceteris paribus law explains a particular event and
when it is irrelevant. The two questions are intimately related, I think,
and answering one goes hand in hand with answering the other.
Standard scientific methods do help confirm ceteris paribus laws and
they tell us when those laws explain. While I cannot defend these
claims in detail here, I can sketch a variety of testing practices that
lend credence to ceteris paribus laws2’:
1. We can sometimes show that in some narrow range of cases the ceteris
IV
In this final section, I want to make at least a prima facie case that
the social laws are a reality: There are sections of the social sciences
that have produced confirmed laws according to more or less stan-
dard scientific procedures. My argument will take both direct and
indirect routes. The more direct argument will cite two fundamental
laws in economics that are relatively well-confirmed via the processes
outlined in the last section. Proceeding more indirectly, I shall then
argue that some parts of the social sciences are roughly in the same
boat-when it comes to kinds of laws, qualifications, explanations,
and level of confirmation-as is much good work in the biological
sciences. The case for social laws should thus be strengthened by a
kind of &dquo;merit by association.&dquo;
Economics is arguably the most developed of the social sciences.
Within economic theory, laws of market behavior are probably most
thoroughly developed. They are also a fundamental part of divergent
economic theories: Marxists and Austrians share with defenders of
neoclassical theory, I would argue, a commitment to certain laws
relating supply and demand. Albeit qualified with ceteris paribus
clauses, these laws have been steadily confirmed by the routes listed
above. They have a strong claim to scientific respectability.
Consider the following elementary laws about market behavior:
transitivity of preferences,
and so on-that frequently do not hold.
How should we these assumptions? At least two approaches
treat
suggest themselves, which are commensurate with the argument of
this article:
1.We can take the assumptions as specifying the mechanism that brings
about these macro-level laws. The laws describe the behavior of aggre-
gates ; the assumptions specify the mechanisms that realize them.
Proceeding this way, these assumptions need not be established to
confirm the two laws because (a) in line with the previous arguments
of this article, the mechanism must not be identified to confirm, and
(b) alternative mechanisms may be possible if these assumptions are
false (e.g., by substituting selection mechanisms for rational preference
mechanisms to explain profit maximization).
2. On the other hand, we can take these assumptions as implicit ceteris
paribus clauses. Price and quantity demanded, for example, are re-
lated, assuming that preferences are transitive and so on.
So, it seems that these basic social laws are in the same boat as are
many relatively well-confirmed laws in the other special sciences.
Without doubt, they apply to a certain range of phenomena. In many
other cases, however, these laws do not strictly hold, but they none-
theless explain, because we have some idea of the counteracting
influences and because they unify a diverse set of events. Of course,
these laws depend on abstractions and idealizations-noneconomic
influences, for example, are entirely ignored. Nonetheless, we remain
convinced that the connection among supply, demand, and price tells
us something about reality, despite these complications. The evidence
cited earlier helps justify that belief.
Two laws of supply and demand are of course not much. Are they
simply rare jewels in the morass of bad social science? A careful look
at other empirical work in the social sciences suggests not. In what
follows I first discuss some central results in biology in order to draw
a general characterization of what laws, explanation, and confirma-
tion in that domain look like, and then argue that some empirical work
in the social sciences proceeds in much the same way. The upshot
should be a prima facie stronger case that social laws are a reality.
Both evolutionary biology and ecology rely primarily on field data.
While laboratory or field manipulation is sometimes possible, much
evidence comes from field observations of relative abundance of
species or individuals, rates of change in abiotic factors, relative
survivor rates for one phenotype or another, and so on. Such data are
manipulated using standard statistical techniques searching for con-
nections while holding other explanatory causes constant.
From such data, ecology and evolutionary biology produce some
law-like claims. Typically, those claims describe a connection between
two phenomena that holds only ceteris paribus. And just as typically,
we do not know all the likely intervening factors that might counter-
act the law. Rather, we can identify the primary counteracting causes;
sometimes, we can specify their precise influence and how they
citing the causal basis for that relation. Laws in ecology and evolution
are also frequently functional in the other sense: They describe the
functions which various items have and sometimes go on to attribute
these items’ existence to that function. Finally, the vast majority of
law-like claims in these sciences are relativized to specific domains-a
type of ecological community, environment, species, and so on.
Presumably, this characterization rings true for those familiar with
empirical work in evolutionary theory and ecology. Let me mention
some obvious examples that illustrate these features:
SUMMARY
NOTES
1. Cf. B. van Fraassen, The scientific image (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980),
Chap. 5.
2. For example, Donald Davidson, "Causal relations," Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967):
691-703.
3.I do not pretend to cover all popular objections to social laws; in particular, some
traditional criticisms flowing from the verstehen tradition concerning interpretation and
objectivity are beyond the scope of this article.
4. J. Searle, Minds, brains and behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1984), 78.
5. Ibid., 79.
6. P. Churchland, Scientific realism and the plasticity of mind (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979), 113; A. Rosenberg, Sociobiology and the pre-emption of the social
sciences (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 107.
7. See A. Rosenberg, "The supervenience ofbiological concepts," Philosophy of Science
45 (1978): 368-86.
8. See my "Molecular biology and the unity of science," Philosophy of Science,
forthcoming.
9. Donald Davidson has argued in this fashion. See "Mental events," in Experience
and theory edited by L. Foster and J. Swanson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1970).
10. D. Porpora, "On the prospects for a nomothetic theory of social structure," Journal
for the Theory of Social Behavior 13 (1983):243-64.
11. T. Horgan and J. Woodward, "Folk psychology is here to stay," Philosophical
Review 94 (1985):197-226.
12. J. Elster, Making sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), 5-8.
13. van Fraassen, The scientific image; P. Achinstein, The nature of explanation (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
14. Elster, Making sense of Marx.
15. J. Endler, Natural selection in the wild (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1986).
16. Elliot Sober, The nature of selection (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), Chap. 3.
17. See A. Grafen, "Natural selection, kin selection and group selection," in J. Krebs
and N. Davies, Behavioral ecology: An evolutionary approach (Sunderland: Sinauer Asso-
ciates, 1984), 65.
18. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s theory of history (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1978), Chap. IX.
19. It is not clear to me that they are, strictly speaking, necessary either. Locomotion
probably exists among organisms because of its contribution to fitness, despite the fact
that the corresponding consequence law is false-trees would be better off if they could
move to the sun, but structural factors have prevented that. So, while it is not true that
if locomotion would be good for organisms, it thus comes to exist.
20. Rosenberg, "Surveillance," and Sociobiology and the pre-emption of the social
sciences.
21. Rosenberg, "Surveillance." But to be fair, it should be noted that Rosenberg does
so as part of a larger and more subtle argument that cannot be discussed here. I should
also note that my views here are in fact much closer to Rosenberg’s earlier position in
Microeconomic laws (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
22. Nelson Goodman, Fact, fiction and forecast (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).
23. Brian Skyrms, Causal necessity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980).
24. It should be noted that this same point can be made even if one rejects a Humean
account of laws—for even on a realist, necessitarian account of laws, our epistemological
judgments about which generalizations are real laws will rely on something like
projectability or resilience. See Fred Wilson, Laws and other worlds (Dordrecht: Reidel,
1986), Chap. 2.
25. Nancy Cartwright, How the laws of physics lie (New York: Oxford University Press,
1983).
26. D. Hausman, Capital, profits and prices (New York: Columbia University Press,
1981), Chap. 7.
27. Criteria similar to some of those listed here are also discussed in D. Hausman,
Capital, profits and prices
, Chap. 7.
28. I say almost because the deduction follows only assuming that extraeconomic
events (e.g., the death of the solar system) do not intervene.
29. A. Weinstein, "Transitivity of preference," Journal of Political Economy 76
(1968):307-11; R. Battalio et al. "A test of consumer demand theory using observations
of individual consumer preferences," Western Economic Journal 11 (1973):415-21.
30. G. Becker, The economic approach to human behavior (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1976).
31. M. McElroy, and M. Homey, "Nash-bargained household decisions: Toward a
generalization of the theory of demand," International Economic Review 22 (1981):
333-348.
32. G. Becker, The economic approach
.
33. J. Buchanan, The limits of liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
34. For a review of the data, see David Levinson and Martin Malone, Toward
explaining human culture (New Haven, CT: HRAF Press, 1980), Chap. 2.
35. Frederick Pryor, The origins of the economy (New York: Academic Press, 1977).
36. Roy Rappaport, Pigs for the ancestors (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1984).
37. William Divale, "Migration, external warfare, and matrilocal residence," Behavior
Science Research 9 (1974):75-133.
38. Clark Glymour, R. Scheines, P. Spirtes, and K. Kelly, Discovering causal structures
(New York: Academic Press, 1987).