Lars P. Syll — What is an explanation?

One of the most important tasks of social sciences is to explain the events, processes, and structures that take place and act in society. But the researcher cannot stop at this. As a consequence of the relations and connections that the researcher finds, a will and demand arise for critical reflection on the findings. To show that unemployment depends on rigid social institutions or adaptations to European economic aspirations to integration, for instance, constitutes at the same time a critique of these conditions. It also entails an implicit critique of other explanations that one can show to be built on false beliefs. The researcher can never be satisfied with establishing that false beliefs exist but must go on to seek an explanation for why they exist. What is it that maintains and reproduces them? To show that something causes false beliefs – and to explain why – constitutes at the same time a critique of that thing.
This I think is something particular to the humanities and social sciences. There is no full equivalent in the natural sciences, since the objects of their study are not fundamentally created by human beings in the same sense as the objects of study in social sciences. We do not criticize apples for falling to earth in accordance with the law of gravitation.

The explanatory critique that constitutes all good social science thus has repercussions on the reflective person in society. To digest the explanations and understandings that social sciences can provide means a simultaneous questioning and critique of one’s self-understanding and the actions and attitudes it gives rise to. Science can play an important emancipating role in this way. Human beings can fulfill and develop themselves only if they do not base their thoughts and actions on false beliefs about reality. Fulfillment may also require changing fundamental structures of society.

Understanding of the need for this change may issue from various sources like everyday praxis and reflection as well as from science....

This cuts to the core of the Western intellectual tradition that began in ancient Greece. Aristotle said that speculation begins with wonder. The satisfier, he concluded, was a causal explanation. This launched the investigation into causal explanation that is still very much underway.

Socrates, the teacher of Aristotle's teacher, Plato, famously said that a life not reflected upon is not worth the living. Human life should be a critical process if one is to live up to one's potential as a human being whose goal is to live a good life in a good society with others of good will. This doesn't just happen naturally since humans have tendencies they share with other animals that are instinct-driven as well as controlled by selfish desires like lust, anger, and greed, as well as rational tendencies that are driven by intellect and modulated by noble desires like love and the altruism it leads to.

Lars goes on to show how closed systems cannot adequately represent social reality, which requires open systems since human behavior is reflexive, adaptive, and emergent — in other words, complex. Moreover, social behavior is culturally and institutionally influenced.

With a non-reductionist approach we avoid both determinism and voluntarism. For although the individual in society is formed and influenced by social structures that he does not construct himself, he can as an individual influence and change the given structures in another direction through his own actions. In society the individual is situated in roles or social positions that give limited freedom of action (through conventions, norms, material restrictions, etc.), but at the same time there is no principal necessity that we must blindly follow or accept these limitations. However, as long as social structures and positions are reproduced (rather than transformed), the actions of the individual will have a tendency to go in a certain direction.

Where I disagree somewhat with Lars is over his contention that reality is independent of mind and that through a properly scientific approach, we can approach "reality" in our explanatory theories. Being a constructionist and pragmatist, I take "reality" to refer to experience rather than "things in themselves." Human construct their reality in groups and tend to associate in groups that validate their experience. Humans structure their experience in terms of an overarching model or "worldview" (Weltanschauung). Social reality is different from individual reality as personal experience, in that groups influence the way that people experience, interpret their experience, and construe it linguistically. See John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1996).

There is a great deal of divergence in worldviews even within overarching worldviews such as the Western worldview in contrast with the Chinese worldview, the Islamic worldview and the Indian worldview. While a single worldview is emerging with globalization it will take considerable time to develop into a coherent worldview. A great deal of the present political and economic turmoil is a result of the attempt to impose a Western and specifically American worldview on globalization.

A person that would be regarded as insane, superstitious or ignorance in a group seldom either associates with such a group other than out of necessity or else conceals one's real views from those who do not share them, and especially when this would result in a disadvantage.

Science is not merely a method of observation and theory construction. It takes place within a social milieu with an established culture and institutions, using ordinary language. Wittgenstein showed in his later work that ordinary language embeds a worldview (Weltbild). The use of "Bild" emphasizes that this is a model constructed in logical space.

To use a metaphor from physics, humans don't act as simply cameras recording objects existing in relation to each other in absolute space. Rather, humans experience in terms of a field having certain affects some of which are objective, e.g., sense data, but much of which is imposed subjectively, e.g., norms. While there is a great agreement based on sense data, as shown by the inter-translatability of languages, there is also not a one to one correspondence, also shown by the difficulty in translating many concepts precisely owing to nuance of context and construction.

Cognitive science has since supported this view. See, for example, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999), as well as Metaphors We Live By (1980). We think in terms of conceptual models built from metaphors traceable to experience. These metaphors are both cognitive and affective.

The issue is that while sense-experience is more or less the same for all humans given the shared physiology, the agreement stops there for the most part. Even the "facts" are often in dispute in that the same data is structured differently as information. The quality of the signal is then compared not only with the data but also with the worldview in which experience is embedded. The same input can be construed in many ways and there are no absolute criteria independent of worldviews.

Therefore, the criterion is "experience," which is not only the fundamental criterion of science but of naive common sense. But as history reveals, naive common sense has often been wrong about the seemingly the most obvious things like the sun rising and setting. Coupled with the religious teaching of the centrality of Earth, it was a logic step to conclude that Earth is the center of the universe. While "science" subsequently showed the error in logic, how to be sure that contemporary science is not subject to similar errors.

For example, the worldview of mystics the world over is radically different from that of science, which takes the reality of ordinary experience to be actual reality. Mystics report exactly the opposite based on their non-ordinary experience, and those who follow spiritual paths report having similar experiences. Some of these have been or are scientists. Some Western scientists who do not assert such experience have also held that this view makes the most sense. Who is correct? How to decide?

What is an explanation?
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University