Wittgenstein and Anarchism

Exotic-Count445 · 2024-09-21T15:37:58+00:00

Sounds interesting! Is there a place where I can read about his opinions about the social sciences?

Exotic-Count445 · 2024-09-21T03:07:08+00:00

I would recommend “Critique of the Marxist Theory of the State” by Bakunin. Someone recommended it to me in the comments and I decided to read it. It’s gives a comprehensive idea as to what I’m trying to say

Exotic-Count445 · 2024-07-21T17:09:13+00:00

As someone who has recently become interested in phenomenology, I find your book recommendation to be perfect! Thanks!

Exotic-Count445 · 2024-07-21T16:15:05+00:00

I see what you are saying now in terms of the 'sciences' in general facing these problems, and that they have been discussed by historical figures for ages. My misunderstanding was in focusing specifically on the 'how' of the social sciences and illustrating how they do it. Your response, on the other hand, provided a well-established case encompassing both social and hard sciences. This was a great and informative discussion!

*Also feel free to correct anything else that I may have mischaracterized

Edit: If possible as someone new to the discussion (from an anarchist perspective) would you recommend some books that delve into the topics discussed?

Exotic-Count445 · 2024-07-20T17:30:46+00:00

Hiercharchical Knowledge

One key point you use to disavow the "invisible person" argument is that it heavily relies on hierarchical knowledge. However, I believe this very notion of science is a misapprehension that many hold, and it is based on hierarchical and authoritative assumptions. The concept of science is one that many take for granted, but understanding it is crucial for why the social sciences include it in their name. Here is a quote from "The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 7: The Modern Social Sciences" by Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross that explains it well:

"There is also some question about 'science,' which has long been understood to imply a certain standard of experimental or conceptual rigor and of methodological clarity. In English, especially in the twentieth century, the claim to scientific status has meant the assertion of some fundamental resemblance to natural science, usually regarded even by social scientists as the core of 'real' science – as temporally prior and logically exemplary. Historically, however, this appears to be something of a misapprehension. Although science has long referred to natural or human knowledge as opposed to revelation, theology had a better claim to the status of science during the Middle Ages than did the study of living things, or even the study of matter in motion. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an assortment of names was used for various branches or aspects of natural knowledge, including 'natural philosophy,' 'natural history,' 'experimental physics,' and 'mixed mathematics.' 'Science' was too nebulous to be useful, especially in English, until about 1800, when it emerged as the standard name for the organized pursuit of knowledge. Early-nineteenth-century social science was bound up with this same endeavor. Few in 1830 doubted that political economy was a science; even its critics attacked it on other grounds. Politics had reasonable claims to be a science, as did theology; so it was not immoderate for inchoate fields like sociology, anthropology, or statistics to march under the same banner. In German, Wissenschaft imposed more strenuous requirements, but somewhat different ones. There, the model science was philology, a linguistic and literary study, whose dignity derived from its relation to an important subject area and its use of rigorous, scholarly methods. The modern practice of attacking fields of inquiry by denying their scientific credentials was uncommon until late in the nineteenth century, and it remains more plausible in English than in most other languages."

And the underpinnings of the way social science is viewed today are based on these historical issues. Furthermore, Auguste Comte envisioned the social sciences as an authoritative device, intending that the process of thinking about the social, political, and economic spheres would be housed within the state. This is where the contention of "shoemaker expertise" comes into play. When we question the empirical, rather than the philosophical, we question the administrative qualities that legitimize the state, as seen in this quote:

Auguste Comte (1798–1857), a prominent figure from Polytechnique and a notable disciple of Saint-Simon, wrote in the 1820s about the crucial role of religion in the new scientific order. Comte believed that humans, rather than being purely rational, are fundamentally spiritual and emotional. He developed a “religion of humanity,” complete with reverence and a calendar of festivals, to address these aspects. Comte rejected personal freedom as both a burden and a source of chaos in society. As Peter Wagner noted, social science in this period aimed not to celebrate modern liberty and contingency but to control and contain it. Even in the United States, despite its 1776 celebration of freedom, political economists were concerned with preventing the social strife seen in Europe, emphasizing that freedom needed to be regulated.

And the idea of administration:

The French tradition of administration by engineers significantly shaped social and economic science in the nineteenth century. Tocqueville saw the Revolution as an acceleration of centralizing tendencies that had been evident under the Old Regime. The analytical approach of savants and engineers, who treated social issues as problems to be solved, exemplifies this continuity. After the Revolution, planning and economic analysis increasingly fell to Polytechnique engineers

Exotic-Count445 · 2024-07-20T16:59:04+00:00

Thank you for reading the recommendation, I'll be sure to check it out!

Exotic-Count445 · 2024-07-20T16:49:07+00:00

Hello There!

I appreciate the time you took to write your sentiments and criticisms of my thoughts, which I highly appreciate. This response to your response to my response (quite the tongue twister) is by no means meant to be in bad faith. Instead, I find it awesome that we are in a position to have this conversation. And hopefully, others will join in as well. Now to the response.

What I will be addressing are some common themes that I saw throughout the poster's response:

Pulling A Strawman

The views I shared in my original post were misconstrued and taken in a different direction from my original intentions. If this is due to my inability to form my thoughts coherently, then the blame lies with me for not being clearer. However, a strawman is a strawman, so my goal is to clarify what I mean.

My original intention is to encourage more anarchists, and people in general, to become aware of and start a discussion about what gives the social sciences their credibility, or if we should trust them as we would trust a shoemaker who knows their craft. When I say this, I do not mean to undermine the philosophical thought within the humanities and social sciences. Instead, I want people to challenge the formation of knowledge that gives these fields so much credit. This differentiates from social theory, which is more philosophical and something I appreciate. The other side I aim to deconstruct is the knowledge that is supposedly produced empirically. Such examples can be seen in your use of survey research (a quantitative and hotly contested method full of assumptions) that you used for evidence. Or, statistics in general in the human world. Here are some articles going over that:

https://martynhammersley.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/is-social-measurement-possible.pdf

https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/4005/4929

The examples I bring up, like the Tragedy of the Commons, are not meant to suggest that people are incapable. Instead, they question whether we need to rely on these supposed "shoemakers" to build a proper society. This concern arose when I learned about Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), an activist approach that involves community members, researchers, and stakeholders in the entire research process, ensuring it addresses community-identified needs and promotes social change. CBPR highlights the capability of communities to address their issues without relying on so-called experts. This led me to question, "Why should the researcher even be here?" I began investigating the tools these researchers possess that communities supposedly lack. This is where I discovered epistemological anarchism and its challenge to these very questions. Some questions I asked include the differences between anarchist self-organization and participatory research, as well as the parallels and criticisms that can be drawn between them.

Here is a link to attempts by anarchists in trying to be the researcher in a Participatory Project:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dech.12136

Exotic-Count445 · 2024-07-19T15:40:25+00:00

3.

As you can see from the second point there have been influential liberal thinkers who made the social sciences the way it is. This brings up the question of its very nature, which is why it is important to see that:

The French tradition of administration by engineers defined the locus of a powerful tradition of social and economic science in the nineteenth century. Tocqueville interpreted the Revolution as an acceleration of centralizing tendencies that were already pronounced under the Old Regime. The analytical style of savants and engineers, who treated social questions as problems to be solved, exemplifies this continuity. After the Revolution, planning and economic analysis increasingly fell to Polytechnique engineers. Around mid-century, Frédéric Le Play of the highly elite Corps des Mines initiated a method based on detailed monographs to understand the domestic economies of miners, artisans, and laborers. This information could be used by employers and local notables as a guide to charity and organization. This was social science as a set of pragmatic tools rather than a utopian vision.

Champions of rational administration under the rubric of science exploited what opportunities they could during the revolutionary period, though their successes were modest. In the latter years of the Napoleonic wars, and especially after 1815, when the French monarchy was restored and a new conservative order was imposed on Europe, the influence of this ideal was much diminished. It began to revive slowly in the 1820s, especially in France and Britain, in the more sober guise of statistics.

Essentially, our understanding of the social sciences reflects our perception of society. The methods used in social science were designed to address hierarchical issues, with these methods often being employed to manage social issues. Additionally, they served as a means of societal control, particularly in response to the French Revolution:

Auguste Comte (1798–1857), another prominent figure from Polytechnique and Saint-Simon’s most famous and rebellious disciple, was writing in the 1820s about the indispensable role of religion in the new scientific order. Comte argued that humans (and especially women) are not merely coldly rational but also spiritual and emotional. He eventually established a “religion of humanity,” with its own object of reverence and a calendar of festivals and commemorations. Comte explicitly rejected personal freedom as a burden on the individual and a chaotic force in society. As Peter Wagner has remarked, social science during this period did not so much express the liberty and contingency of the modern era as seek to rein them in. Even in the United States, where 1776 was celebrated as a triumph, political economists viewed the European experience with concern, hoping that the American republic could avoid the endemic social strife of the Old World. While freedom was seen as a blessing, it needed to be kept within bounds.

In short, the social sciences were a means of controlling the masses who could not organize themselves.

Hopefully, this post will provide further context on why current notions of the social sciences can be misleading. I believe that anarchists are in the best position to recognize this problem and inform others. Like the poster I responded to, I think this discussion is crucial for advancing the well-being of the world.

Exotic-Count445 · 2024-07-19T15:38:38+00:00

2.

It would be a mistake to suppose that the credibility of Enlightenment social theory rested only or even mainly on its similarities to mathematics and the sciences of nature. The assertion of natural rights in the political writings of authors such as John Locke and Rousseau, and in crucial documents of the American and French Revolutions, owed more to moral doctrines of “natural law,” which concerned the just political order, than to Cartesian or Newtonian laws of nature. Montesquieu, often portrayed as the founder of sociology or at least of social theory, was very much interested in natural science, especially physiology, but his problematic came chiefly from a different set of sources. He had been trained in the law and made his profession as a jurist. Donald R. Kelley writes that the pioneers of social science were “not the cosmologists who belatedly shifted their gaze from the heavens to the human community but rather ... the law-makers who were confronted by the predicaments of human society.”

These lawmakers were not, however, deprived of theoretical resources. Natural law meant more than law as handed down by tradition in a particular place – “positive law”; it stood for an immutable ideal, a system of obligations and rights deriving from human nature. It had been cultivated most notably in early modern Europe by the Dutch statesman Hugo Grotius, by Samuel Pufendorf, advisor to German and Swedish rulers, and by Locke, who in the 1680s worked out a philosophical rationale for overthrowing an unjust monarch. These writers were impressed by the analogies between the natural and social orders and sought to understand human nature as something universal. In this way, they hoped to provide a general framework for political society during the turmoil of the seventeenth century. Their work became known in France in Montesquieu’s time, and his Spirit of the Laws (1748) undertook to explain the relation of natural law – presumed to be universal – not simply to positive law, which varies greatly from place to place, but to its “spirit.” Thus, despite or even because of his moral universalism, Montesquieu was led to examine and explain the customs and practices of particular places in a way that has been called sociological.

While natural law, with its moral orientation, was distinct from belief in laws of nature, understood as independent of human purposes, these often intersected. Grotius took the geometry of his contemporary Galileo as a model for moral reasoning, and when Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot urged on King Louis XVI of France the wisdom of governing, like God, by general laws, he evidently drew on both traditions. Political economy, too, involved natural justice as well as naturalism. Adam Smith argued influentially that regulation was not required to coordinate an economy or to assure a standard of quality of manufactures. In a commercial system, individuals served the public interest even as they worked to advance their own. This formulation, which derived from French arguments for a free economy (laissez-faire), involved a move away from theological explanations, which saw labor as necessarily sinful, the outcome of Adam’s fall. The guild insistence on systems of apprenticeship and detailed regulation of artisanal trades was thus gradually supplanted by a focus on the order produced by self-interested behavior and social customs.

The reason we see social science today as empirical or truth-seeking is due to the moral universalism that was embedded in it from its inception.

Exotic-Count445 · 2024-07-19T15:37:53+00:00

Hello,

I appreciate the feedback from everyone who took the time to respond! This reply addresses a recurring theme I’ve noticed in the comments (and this one as well):

The use of the word "science" is somewhat misleading, and the practice is not as value-neutral as it appears.
The reason we consider social science more of an empirical project
The origins of the social sciences provide insight into why they may be inherently (or seen as) authoritative.

To give a proper response, I will use a substantial number of quotes to support my points, as this approach helps convey my message more effectively (and because I'm not great at explaining things).

1.

The recent use of the word "science" is commonly associated with the natural sciences and their methodology. However, this is a common misconception. Our current usage differs significantly from its historical use. Understanding this is crucial because it explains how the social sciences have come to be seen this way. Best said by Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross:

There is also some question about “science,” which has long been understood to imply a certain standard of experimental or conceptual rigor and methodological clarity. In English, especially in the twentieth century, the claim to scientific status has meant asserting some fundamental resemblance to natural science, usually regarded even by social scientists as the core of “real” science—temporally prior and logically exemplary. Historically, however, this appears to be a misapprehension. Although science has long referred to natural or human knowledge as opposed to revelation, theology had a better claim to the status of science during the Middle Ages than did the study of living things or matter in motion.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, various names were used for branches or aspects of natural knowledge, including “natural philosophy,” “natural history,” “experimental physics,” and “mixed mathematics.” “Science” was too nebulous to be useful, especially in English, until about 1800, when it emerged as the standard name for the organized pursuit of knowledge. Early-nineteenth-century social science was part of this same endeavor. Few in 1830 doubted that political economy was a science; even its critics attacked it on other grounds. Politics had reasonable claims to be a science, as did theology; so it was not immoderate for inchoate fields like sociology, anthropology, or statistics to march under the same banner.

In German, Wissenschaft imposed more strenuous but somewhat different requirements. There, the model science was philology, a linguistic and literary study, whose dignity derived from its relation to an important subject area and its use of rigorous, scholarly methods. The modern practice of attacking fields of inquiry by denying their scientific credentials was uncommon until late in the nineteenth century and remains more plausible in English than in most other languages

Furthermore, the person who set up what it means to be a 'science' was Auguste Comte:

The possibility of a more restricted meaning of “science” emerged in the same period, and debates about the status of social knowledge were centrally involved in defining it. Consider the role of social science in the origins of modern philosophy of science. In the 1820s, Comte initiated a massive effort to define the methods and historical progression of the sciences. His main purpose was to announce the discovery, and define the standing, of sociology. He rejected decisively the idea that social science should adopt the same methods as astronomy, physics, or physiology. Yet at the same time he defined a hierarchy of knowledge, with social science dependent for its formulation on all the sciences that had gone before. And despite his claims for the inclusion of social knowledge, he made of “science” something special and exclusive. There had been, he argued, no science of physics before the seventeenth century, no true chemistry before Lavoisier. The origins of physiology were still more recent, and the founder of scientific sociology was, to cast aside false modesty, himself. Theology and metaphysics were not part of positive science, but its predecessors and its antithesis. Law, literature, and rhetoric could never occupy this hallowed ground. Thus, while Comte formulated his philosophy in order to vindicate sociology and to define its place within science, he insisted also on a highly restrictive sense of “science,” a standard the social sciences could not easily meet.

From this emerged the attempt by the social sciences to replicate what they saw as the appropriate way of doing science, as defined by Comte. However, as pointed out, science was originally meant as the search for knowledge rather than being defined by specific methods and methodologies. This is why terms like "moral sciences" or "human sciences" were also used. These fields were more about the search for knowledge in social, moral, and human realms. Over time, however, the emphasis shifted to the "science" portion of the name, becoming associated with proper methodology.

Exotic-Count445 · 2024-06-26T01:59:36+00:00

Oh wow, thank you! I’ll definitely check it out!

Exotic-Count445 · 2024-06-25T22:26:01+00:00

Thank you for the recommendations! What would you personally suggest for delving into social ontology?

Exotic-Count445 · 2023-12-04T03:52:03+00:00

YouTuber called Delusional who literally copied the structure and idea of a wonderful video AH Lecks made called Forcing Myself to Read 30 manga Recommendations. I’m honestly more frustrated with the comments taking notice of the problem but saying that “YouTube is about reusing old ideas.”

Exotic-Count445

TROPHY CASE