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Philosophy Index The following appeared in Volume 96, Number 2 (Spring 1997) of the APA Newsletters.
Antony Flew. Thinking About Social Thinking, Second edition. New York: Prometheus Books 1995, 278 pp. Paper, $17.95 Reviewed by Berel Dov Lerner, Tel-Aviv University
Antony Flew describes his book as "an essay in the philosophy of the social sciences, intended to be serviceable as a set book for courses...which surely should be required of all those who aspire to become any sort of social scientist" (pg. 1). He intends to enable people to make "up their own minds, in the light of their own judgments and values, about the correct interpretations and applications" (pg. 3) of the findings of social scientists. His success is only partial.
Flew’s own two descriptions of his book reveal its underlying ambiguity of purpose-on the one hand, a philosophical treatise dealing with theoretical issues such as free action and the ontological status of social institutions, and on the other hand, a practical handbook of critical thinking applied to the social sciences. One finds, however, that Flew has relatively little to say about the actual "correct interpretation and application" of opinion polls, interviews, ethnography, etc. which constitute the data of the social sciences. In addition, instead of engaging philosophical opponents in scholarly dialogue, Flew often merely treats their views as exemplary instances of invalid argumentation.
Thinking About Social Thinking enjoys neither the coherence of an essay nor the comprehensiveness of a textbook. It might have been better titled Things That Really Bother Me About the Social Sciences and What I Would Have Instead. Of course, many of the things which bother Flew are of great importance.
The first two chapters vividly describe the frequent unwillingness of sociologists to deal honestly with empirical disconfirmations of their theories and with the ineffectiveness of governmental policies based upon them. These sections should be required reading for anyone entering a career in the social sciences. On the other hand, the book includes several relatively obscure discussions (a prime example is the critical treatment of Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism, pp. 136-42) which are unlikely to be of much value to readers who are not already acquainted with the relevant literature.
Further chapters in the book deal with actors’ reasons as an explanation of behavior, methodological individualism, "invisible hand" explanations, differences between the natural and the social sciences, linguistic confusions in the social sciences, value-free science, and, finally, cognitive relativism and the sociology of knowledge. Flew does not try to offer the student a broad introduction to the philosophical discussion of these issues. Instead, he develops his own ideas about them while arguing only against those alternative conceptions which particularly interest him. Although this is done in a clear style, Flew’s prose is peppered with references (e.g. to "those who have learnt everything they think they know about ‘Linguistic Philosophy’ immediately or ultimately from Gellner’s Words and Things. (pg. 95) which may stop philosophically innocent readers dead in their tracks.
Several major topics which one would expect to find in a "set book [required text] for courses" (pg. 1) in the philosophy of the social sciences are conspicuous in their absence. Although Flew depicts Adam Smith as a paragon of social-scientific virtue, he offers no discussion of rationality assumptions which are so crucial to the proper evaluation of classical and neo-classical economics. Sociobiology is not even mentioned, critical theory is reduced to "a code-word" for Marxism (pg. 44) and structuralism is disposed of in three pages.
In a nutshell, the book’s positive doctrine holds that social phenomena and social institutions are ultimately explainable in terms of the behavior of individuals, and that an individual’s own reasons and intentions constitute the fundamental explanation of his or her behavior. Flew concedes three crucial complications: 1) that people base their reasons for acting on their own view of their situation, which may be different from the view of the investigator, or even plainly misinformed; 2) that it is legitimate to make reference to social institutions in the explanation of human behavior, as long as we continue to recognize that these institutions are themselves constituted by "the acts of individual human beings" (pg. 65); and 3) that the choices made by people as individuals may have surprising consequences in the aggregate. (Notoriously, if everyone decides to beat morning traffic by leaving for work at four A.M., all will find the roads jammed at precisely that ungodly hour.) More importantly, some key social institutions, such as language, did not arise as the intended product of human decisions but, presumably, evolved in the course of countless individual attempts at communication which were addressed to much more immediate concerns than the invention of grammar. (My own example; one can imagine a pre-historic human struggling to express the point that this particular piece of meat belongs to her without attributing to her the aspiration to invent the demonstrative adjective.) Nonetheless, it is Flew’s view that even such unplanned social institutions remain under the sway of essentially free human choice.
Not surprisingly, the two heroes of this book are Max Weber, because of his belief in the explanatory value of actors’ reasons (and his advocacy of value-free science) and Adam Smith, for his depiction of the market economy as the great unintended joint product of the behavior of individuals. Hume also commands Flew’s respect, and serves as the book’s leading source of philosophical inspiration. Villains include, among others, Margaret Mead (whose ideological predilections led her to misrepresent Samoan sexual attitudes), B.F. Skinner (who was blind to the valid coexistence of different types and levels of explanation) and, above all, Karl Marx (who thought that social institutions could not outlive their functions, embraced social determinism, and refused to face up to empirical disconformations of his theories). Indeed, the book’s frequent anti-Marxist and anti-Soviet jibes may appear bewilderingly irrelevant to students in the 1990s.
Flew does not pull his punches when treating more timely political issues: the welfare state and the educational establishment are among his victims. Philosophical miscreants include Thomas Kuhn and Peter Winch who are taken to task for their presumed advocacy of relativism. One less critical section which is of special interest highlights the differences between the social and the natural sciences by contrasting Malthus’s population theory with Newtonian mechanics (pp. 111-22). While Newton dealt with physical bodies which thoughtlessly observe natural laws, Malthus understood that human beings may reflect on the results of their actions and change their behavior accordingly. Unfortunately, as Flew points out, even Malthus did not go far enough in realizing the extent to which free human choice could impair the accuracy of his demographic predictions.
Almost all of Flew’s points are thoroughly documented, with the embarrassing exception of his critique of relativism. At one point (pg. 242) he seems to be paraphrasing chapter two of Word and Object, yet he does not cite Quine, nor does he mention Davidson or any of the other philosophers who have criticized Kuhn’s ideas.
The book includes an extensive list of references, as well as separate indexes of names and subjects.