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Soc 446: Philosophy and Social Sciences

Fall 2021/ Final Exam

In social sciences, there are lots of approaches to understand an social event. These approaches
differentiate from each other with the tools that used to understand the event, like effects,
consequences, the object, or objects that are active in that event, the subject etc. They can even
be divided on understanding. In other words, some approaches give their focus on to explain the
event to understand while some of them focus on interpretation to understand. As I understand
from the question, I will give my focus on positivist and hermeneutical approaches, respectively.
Firstly, After the notion of fact is defined historically, the explanation and prediction of the fact
will be told. Then, it will be discussed why and how hermeneutics oppose this through Frankfurt
School. In a nutshell, I will try to interpret positivistic approach and hermeneutic approach
through what I think I understood from what my beloved professor taught and from the articles I
read.

 First of all, the reason has an important role in reaching the fact, according to
positivism. To reach the fact, positivism suggests a posteriori reasoning. In other
words, it suggests empirical examination of the knowledge that already exists. The
reason that is mentioned, is the substantive reason that is tries to achieve the good.
So, the knowledge should be external observations which has an objectivity, like
statistics and legal codes. Because social sciences should have an objectivity
according to positivism. For example, according to Durkheim who is positivist,
sociology’s objectivity is a matter of treating social facts as things, i.e. as realities
having characteristics. The objectivity of the sociology that Durkheim points out
lies in acknowledging that social facts are reality and character. He says that if we
know and understand all of these characters, we can achieve the objectivity of
sociology. Hempel makes a similar sentiment for the general law. He said that for
a theory to become law, it must be valid anytime, anywhere. In other words, law is
a regular recurrence of causal relationship. Additionally, to say that a law is always
valid everywhere is based on the knowledge that the same results that we have
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already obtained come from the same conditions. For example, there is gravity all
over the world. It's a law, and all objects are affected. If there was no gravity
anywhere in the world, there would be no life there because the particles that make
up the air would lose their intensity so that the creatures could not breathe or,
every time you stop holding an object, you see it fall out of your hand. If you don't
want to stop holding an object, you will drop out the object to somewhere because
you predict it will fall because of gravity and that’s why, you don’t want to let go
of it all at once. According to Weber, another positivist, social scientists reflect
their own values on the product that they produce when producing, and this is not
true. Because in social sciences, the object and the subject must be separate from
each other. Here we are as subjects performing social sciences and social sciences
as objects. In other words, social scientists should put aside our own values and try
to be objective when producing science. According to my conclusion from these
three different quotes, the ultimate goal of the positivist approach is to access and
universal social facts, and in order to access it, we need to be free of everything
that is earthly. Because what is earthly is not the same everywhere, so it may not
give the right result, but they are still trying to find what is the same everywhere,
despite what can be different everywhere. That's the pastor's own contradiction. As
a sociologist, unlike positivists, I don't think it's right to create an obsession with
objectivity. Because the best way to understand society is to be involved, so that
we can better observe the factors, but in doing so, being affected by those factors
does not mean that our result is wrong, but rather that we interpret the right factors
because it has already affected us. Moreover, explanation and prediction are most
important perpetrator. According to positivism, If, we have enough objective
explanation, we can predict the future. According to Hempel, all explanations
should be able to replace prediction to be a law because laws are empirical
interpretation of knowledge from the past which is also which is also valid in the
future. Therefore, Positivist science explains or predicts at something that is used
right in a certain initial conditions and reality is deduced from this loss and
positivistic science wants to come up with a set of laws from which entire reality
could deduced. In a nutshell, the notion of fact’s purpose is to explain what already
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exists outside with science, empiricism, and causality to predict the future with the
knowledge that already reached through these methods and, it contains precise
characteristics such as objectivity and universality, according to positivism.
 When we came to the second question, the tradition that mentioned is critical
thinking, hermeneutics. It would be appropriate to focus on the early Frankfurt
school for critical thinking. People who lived between the two world wars had no
concerns about achieving the ultimate good, as in positivism. Because they didn't
believe there was anything like the ultimate good. For example, according to
Adorno who was in the early period of Frankfurt School, there was no good life,
and bad life cannot be lived good. That’s why, they aimed not to achieve good life,
but to reach comfort. In other words, considering the effects of their time, critical
thinkers believed that there were not absolute good in the world, that is, that there
was nothing good for everyone. For instance, what was good for the Germans in
the 1940s was not for the Jews. They had seen atomic bombs and genocides.
Witnessing these events can leave unforgettable scars on a person, as you can see,
and there are traces in social sciences, too. Critical thinkers who reject absolute
good here also reject the substantiveness of the mind that allows us to achieve
absolute good with it. On the contrary, the mind becomes something that serves
what the good in everyone’s way, rather than reaching what is good for all, like
reason is used to achieve the good that each person has determined in their own
way. This makes it instrumental because it now serves to access self-interest. And
that's the worst thing in the world because what everyone does to achieve their
own good can be framed in the frame of mind and victims can be ignored. For
example, there is not a single European country today that condemns the U.S.
embargo on Cuba. Because they know that if they do, they won't be able to
cooperate with the U.S. in any way. They make this choice in accordance with the
good concept they have constructed in their minds. Does that make them bad
because they're not defending Cuba? To me, yes, because no country in the world
needs another country completely. Products can be found elsewhere, produced
elsewhere. Yet the Europeans who made this choice do not want to face the
consequences of their decisions. They talk about human rights, commercial rights,
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etc. Moreover, critical thinkers suggests that there is no certainty, no absolute, so
we should interpret what we have, rather than examine the social event as a whole
with its factors and consequences.
Human reason cannot help people towards the idea of good life, just little help for
practices. It's more important to get to the meaning of the event than to understand
it. Because I as an agent, understand the world within my own values. What I
understand may not be true for anyone else, and that doesn't mean I misunderstand
what I think I understand. The only thing that can be seen here is that perception
doesn't have the same filters for everyone. In short, expression and the meaning are
totally different things. We can say that an expression can have more than one
meaning and having different meanings does not misunderstand that expression.
We need to have any common denominator in order to understand someone else's
expression. For instance, I can't communicate verbally if I'm confronted only by
someone who speaks Dutch. Because I don't speak that language. But we could
still get along with body language, basically. But if this person was blind, I
couldn't communicate. To continue with denominators, I would like to remind you
that the distinction between object and subject in positivism. Critical thinkers are
arguing the opposite. They are not two different categorical things that interpret
the world and the world that we interpret. Anyway, if we see ourselves as an agent,
the reason we see it is because we are already interpreting ourselves. So, we build
the object through we interpret ourselves. To conclude, according to hermeneutics,
there is no need for prediction, precise explanations in social sciences because
there are many factors in both the individual, society and their relations with each
other. So, we can interpret the information of the past in the post-dictum and
access one of the meanings of today.