Sixty-Five Years of an Idea
Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Understanding from the Inside
In 1958, British philosopher Peter Winch (1926–1997) published a little work that was to be consequential for social science in the next few decades. The Idea of a Social Science proposed that the study of society should really be associated with philosophy, not with hard sciences like physics. If ‘science’ equals ‘natural science’, the very idea of a ‘social science’ is misconceived. Instead, social research must build bridges to history, philosophy and literature. Winch found his theoretical starting points in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas about language, as well as in R. G. Collingwood’s vision of history as an independent form of inquiry, pursuing a type of questions quite distinct from those asked by natural scientists.
This thesis is less revolutionary now than it was in 1958. Europe was clearing the mess after its latest total war (Winch served for a while in the British troops in Germany). How could this ever happen, was the question everyone was asking. Answers were sought with attitude measurements, looking for the ‘authoritarian personality’ ultimately responsible for totalitarianism. Many people were fed up with ideology, hoping finally to build a rational society based on research. Modern social sciences would contribute to social engineering by measuring and predicting the effects of social reforms. The same attitude made its mark in the humanities. Art history, comparative religion and comparative literature distanced themselves from history and looked for quantifiable results. Roughly at the same time, C. P. Snow published an essay on ‘two cultures’, focusing on the perils of insulating the humanities from science. The humanities should unite with physics, psychology and social science under the umbrella of ‘the unity of science’. Not an unusual idea today, either.
Winch was swimming against the tide. The main idea of his book was that social science cannot emulate the hard sciences. We must look at social relations from the inside, not from the outside as the natural sciences do. A physicist who conducts experiments with elementary particles will not be asking the particles how they think of their own behaviour. This is not the case with human beings. People, who live in societies and perform conscious actions, always have ideas of what their actions mean. In fact, what they think their actions mean is a central reason why they perform those actions in the first place. Their perspective from the inside must not be left out of social research.
A Timely Intervention
The theoretical argument starts from what Winch calls the internal character of social relations. Actions, performed in a social context, are at the same time expressions of ideas or concepts. There is an ‘internal’ – or if you like – ‘logical’ interdependence between concepts and actions. An example: a family is a formation that at least typically implies biological relations. Yet, biological connections as such do not dictate the identity of the family as a social unit (for instance, people can be siblings and parents without knowing it, in which case they do not constitute a family). To live together as a family implies the mutual recognition of other family members as parents, children and siblings. This means that individuals have some understanding of their roles as family members, with all that it implies about being someone’s father, mother, child, brother and sister. Without those ideas, the family would not exist as a social unit, even if the biological connection would remain.
Typically, ideas about the family imply things like solidarity, subordination and the duty of the parents to support their children. However, different cultures have different conceptions of family life, which also means that their families live differently. Winch cites Bronislaw Malinowski’s descriptions of family life in the Trobriand Islands, where the mother’s brother, rather than the family father, is the male head of the household. Malinowski argued that Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, which reflects European family values, cannot be applied straight off to the matrilinear societies of the Trobriands.
Similarly, war is not simply violence, but violence organised according to certain principles, involving ideas of an enemy, chains of command and so on. To leave out those ideas and only focus on physical fighting is to make war unintelligible.
To understand family life, and war, and social life in general, is, according to Winch, to understand the rules for combining different concepts and expressing them in concrete relations between people. Sociology and psychology cannot survive without the analysis of concepts.
A few years later (1964) Winch published a sequel, ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’. Ironically (thinking of the title), this essay was an important nail in the coffin of the entire, colonial idea of the non-rational, ‘primitive man’. Even ideas of witchcraft and magic need to be understood from the inside, starting with the agents’ self-understanding. Belief in witchcraft is not a primitive substitute for science. Rather, it is one of many human ways to tackle with a world full of conflicts and contingencies. The best way to avoid misunderstandings about alien customs is to try and see them as language games with rules of their own.
Winch’s analysis had striking similarities with Thomas Kuhn’s work some years later, also of a Wittgensteinian inspiration. An ‘alien’ science, such as Aristotle’s physics, was not an inferior attempt to do something that modern science has done more successfully. Instead, it was a game with rules of its own. The transition from Aristotle to modern physics involved a shift of focus, a change of world-views. The questions that were central to Aristotle became marginal for modern science and vice versa.
At this point, not only critics, but also Winch himself raised a question: Should we think of language games as self-contained, isolated bubbles? In other words, is this an invitation to relativism? An important point for him was that language games – for instance, connected with witch-hunts, science or religion – are meaningful only because they always connect with something else, a wider context of human life. To understand the point of the game is to see those connections.
As an important side-effect, by looking at alien ways of thinking, Winch and Kuhn also threw new light on the self-understanding of modern culture. Comparisons with other societies show that our own lives, too, contain elements that are both non-scientific and, at the same time, quite indispensable to normal life.
Winch’s work turned out to be a timely intervention in the debate, after all. Social scientists themselves were gradually getting second thoughts about modernity. Statistical research methods had reached perfection, but after the first enthusiasm, social scientists started asking whether they really knew what they had been measuring. A usual complaint was that quantitative methods only gave trivial results. The debate in social science in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies involved the confrontation between qualitative and quantitative methods. This internal debate really subsided only with the demise of the Soviet Block, which gave rise to a whole new set of pressing questions. Today, most social scientists would accept the need of both quantitative and qualitative methods. In fact, no method can be only quantitative. Before you can measure anything at all you must understand what your measurements are about.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, there was a growing demand for a critique of modernity, and Winch seemed to fit the bill nicely. He was assigned a role he was not quite comfortable with. Some social scientists believed his book was an attack on social science as such. Both enthusiasts and opponents understood Winch to be a relativist, who believed that all of reality was socially and linguistically constructed. Ethnomethodology and constructivism adopted him as a leading light. In social anthropology, relativism had been accepted already earlier as the right attitude. That trend ended only with 9/11, with the ensuing general turn to patriotism and absolute ‘Western’ values.
The actual point that Winch had been making had been misunderstood, for he never argued against a rational social inquiry as such. He wanted social scientists to be alive to the forms of social understanding that already exist, the background understanding that we always carry with us, even before engaging in any kind of social inquiry. Not only qualitative, but also quantitative research has an inside perspective at its bottom. As social beings, we have this perspective as a matter of course. It is just that we forget about it and do not employ it in full. The similarities with R. G. Collingwood’s book The Idea of History (1946) is striking on this score. In The Idea of History, Collingwood wanted to spell out historical understanding as a specific form of understanding. He believed that history was, on the whole, on the right track, although its starting points needed articulation and defence. Historical understanding involves the systematic application of our everyday understanding of human action. But historians themselves do not always articulate clear ideas of what their method in fact implies. Here Collingwood highlights factors like historical imagination and the re-enactment of past ideas and decisions.
Also a Critique of Philosophy
The Idea of a Social Science has, besides, a second aspect which was quite left out of the debate. Winch not only criticised the self-understanding of the social sciences, but also that of philosophy. If actions and concepts are two sides of a coin, it means that traditional philosophy has understood its own task in a one-sided way. The perspective from the inside is needed also in philosophy.
Philosophers think they deal with eternal concepts like rationality, reality and logical contradiction. In order to see what those concepts really mean we must turn to society. Concepts get their meaning in use. ‘Logical contradiction’ means what it does only in a concrete situation. It involves people reacting to ideas as either contradictory or compatible. Philosophy cannot use its abstract conceptual analysis as a blunt instrument to hammer at ways of thinking it does not understand. Philosophy must learn to live with a kind of impurity at its very core: philosophical understanding requires the understanding of questions and experiences that are already there, in human life, before pure philosophy can enter.
The similarity between Winch and Collingwood is visible once more. Collingwood had wanted to reconstruct philosophy as a kind of historical discipline. Philosophy would analyse concepts, not as eternal essences, but as ideas whose meaning comes from the historical context. The link that connects Winch to Collingwood is the hope to understand the inherent historicity of philosophical thinking – an issue that has been near invisible in the Analytic, as opposed to the Continental, philosophical tradition.
Winch carried out the later part of his career in the more sheltered environment of professional philosophy, not on the open marketplace of social debates. A persistent theme was his attempt to show what a perspective from the inside would imply in philosophy itself. The Idea of a Social Science has made a difference as a critique of a scientistic approach to social research – let be that it is still easy to find examples of research that ignores its insights. Within pure philosophy, work remains to be done. We still need to spell out the full consequences of his critique of scientistic ideas. Especially in English-speaking philosophy, naturalism is the name of the game. Naturalism is the world-view where natural science is the supreme arbiter of truth, while the conceptual questions of philosophy are reduced to sociological or psychological tendencies, to be sorted out with empirical experiments or polls. The leading idea for Winch – that the specific character of philosophy is bound up with the specific character of social science – is more topical than ever: for social science as well as for philosophy.
Olli Lagerspetz 1 and Jonas Ahlskog 2
[1] The University of Pardubice and Åbo Akademi University, olagersp@abo.fi
[2] Åbo Akademi University, jonahlsk@abo.fi