Anthropology

In these lectures I propose to talk about the nature of social science. I am reporting something of what I have learned about social science in the twenty years or more during which I have had something to do with it. Into the report will go experience in teaching, in research, and in administration, for it has been my good luck to see social science from the viewpoint which each of these activities provides. But especially will my remarks be shaped by the presumptions and habits of mind of the anthropologist. An anthropologist may study social science just as he would study anything else in a society. Social science is one of the many systems of attitudes and practices that make up a culture and a society. In our present-day society it is an institution, just as the market, the family, and the church are institutions. In these lectures I invite you to consider with me what is done by economists and sociologists and psychologists and other social scientists-all that they study and teach-in the same spirit and asking the same questions that were represented when Professor Fei Hsiao-tung studied the agricultural and industrial institutions of communities in Yunnan, China, or that were represented when Professor Everett C. Hughes studied the familial and industrial institutions of a French-Canadian town. Social science and social scientists as a part of modern society and culture: that is my subject.

In investigating this subject we are prepared, as anthropologists of some experience, for the necessity to look at our subject freshly, as if we had not seen it before. We must come to it from the outside, so as to free ourselves from the limiting effects of our own close association with it. We know we cannot accept, as full understanding of what social science is, what the social scientists themselves are in the habit of saying about it. We cannot do this any more than the student of the kinship system of an unfamiliar people can accept as a complete and adequate understanding of the nature of that system what the people who use that system say about it. What they say about it only partly represents the scientific “truth.” Social scientists, until they come to study the actual nature of their social science, as it really is in our society, may merely repeat what they have learned to say about their social science. No, now we must approach social science as if we were anthropologists come to study this society, and we must look at what particular people, social scientists and others, in fact do think and feel about social science. We must look to see how the social science that is taught and studied actually affects the lives of social scientists and people who are not social scientists. It is a kind of anthropological field work.

It is useful to have some preliminary concepts to guide us in arranging our facts and in reaching our conclusions. I propose to adopt a distinction that is common among anthropologists: the distinction between structure and function. When we look at the structure of a cultural object or institution, we need not consider any of the other objects or institutions of the society in which we find it. We consider it as if it were alone, and, having recognized it as something separable from all else, we attend to the way in which its parts are related to each other. We are concerned with its internal order. I can recognize a table, and describe its structure by describing the way in which the legs support the top. I can describe the structure of a clock by showing how its parts go together so as to produce the movements which make a clock something different from a phonograph. But in doing this I need not take account of what use people make of a clock or what they think and feel about clocks as regulators of their lives or perhaps disturbers of their sleep.

When we consider the function of the clock or the table or the institution, we do have to think of what it means in the lives of the people of that society. Then we ask ourselves what contribution this thing that we are studying makes toward fulfilling the needs and desires of people. Also we look to see what contribution it makes toward enabling all the parts and institutions of the society to work together so as to enable the society to persist. The function of anything, in this sense, is its place in making up the going concern in which the activity of that thing is one element.

In speaking of the “structure” of social science, we are then concerned with its internal order. We attend to the way in which men use their minds, the way in which they apprehend and make order of their experiences of man in society when they do what we recognize as “science.” As this way is constituted of rules and habits of observing and thinking, we might speak of the structure of a science as its “logic.” We distinguish the scientific ways of getting understanding of man in society from other ways of getting such understanding by looking at the rules and habits of observing and reasoning-and also of communicating-which characterize science.

Science is one of the ways men have to make sense of experience. It is, perhaps emphatically, a method, a kind of procedure for getting understanding. Also we think of “science” as the product of that method: this is “science” in the sense of “scientific knowledge.” And also we sometime, use the word “science” as in the phrase “A Science of Society,” in the title of a book which records this kind of knowledge; “a science” is one kind of written work.

Let us here think of science as method, as a way of understanding.

From what other ways of understanding, of making order of experience, is it to be distinguished? For one thing, it is to be distinguished from common sense, and for another it is to be distinguished from mysticism. Common sense and mysticism are also ways of getting understanding of society as of anything else; the one is open to everybody with normal wits, common sayings perhaps to the contrary; the other is open, apparently, only to those having the inclinations and the powers of the mystic. The mystic’s ordering of experience is on the whole a matter private to him-its very incommunicability is the test of its mystic nature-while common sense has a considerable currency: what one man learns by that way he can in many cases make known to others.

It is from common sense that we feel the need to distinguish science.

The nature of that distinction is a commonplace in treatises on scientific method. There we read how scientific method is objective. It requires a detachment of the scientist’s personal attitudes from his subject matter and from his conclusions. Science is “impersonal.” The scientist must deliberately doubt his own thoughts on the matter at hand and subject his procedures and his conclusions to testing. He has the word “hypothesis” to dignify these temporary conclusions in process of testing. Moreover, we are told that science aims for perfect communicability-so far as possible the propositions must be formulated so that they will mean the same thing to any two scientists. So propositions in the form of numbers have high value in science: 92 per cent, we are told, is 92 per cent to everybody.

We are talking also of the form or logic of science when we say that it tends to become systematic and comprehensive. Common-sense knowledge is a medley, a collection. But scientific knowledge seems always to be struggling toward an architecture of description. Its effort is to represent the world in the form of propositions that are related to each other by a sort of natural order. Lesser generalizations are marshaled under generalizations of wider scope. A proposition that follows from acceptance of an anterior proposition is declared and shown to be so related. The connections between some particular facts and more inclusive propositions are made plain, and like matters are grouped because they are alike. The likeness is felt to arise within the facts, and without necessary relation to the practical interests of men. The movement is toward compendency, toward linking of propositions with one another; and at the same time toward comprehensiveness: the propositions are widened as observations authorize the widening. For a comprehensive proposition that scientists are at the time not interested in proving or disproving, we have the phrase “natural law.”

This characterization of science in its formal or logical nature, made familiar to us in treatises on the subject, applies to social science. It applies, but not so well as it applies to physics or mathematics. In coming to understand man in society we can use more than common sense and more (or shall we say less!) than the occasional private insight of the seer. Social scientists are in no small part engaged in making order of experience, an order that is objective, systematic, and comprehensive. For society, as for matter and organisms, there grows a structured body of knowledge that belongs to no one thinker, that is accessible to all who will study it, and that is the work of many men. The result is perhaps less objective than is the corresponding result ill physics or biology, for it is harder to be objective about a famine or the threat of war than it is about a star or a starfish. In some of his work the physicist or the chemist may be as anxious about the results of what he does as is the social scientist. The physicists and chemists who saw their studies of nuclear energy go into the making of atomic bombs were certainly anxious. But the situation of the social scientist is different in that many, probably most, of his scientific problems are also problems of immediate practical concern and in the further fact that his very subject matter is made up of human beings, rather than of matter or animal life. As the subject matter of social science is humanity, it would be inhuman not to care. Indeed, in my opinion, a good social scientist does care. He cares about the race relations or the village economy that he studies; he would not do as good a job if he looked at the village or the racial situation with inhuman indifference to it. At the same time he must be self-critical; he must be ready to give up any conclusion for another nearer the truth. Now this is harder to do when the very thing you are looking at, as scientist, is a thing that as a man you feel for and with. Yet it is done, and as it is done social science results.

Nor is social science as systematic or as comprehensive as physics or biology, and in my opinion it is not likely to catch up with the “natural” sciences in these qualities. Perhaps the generalization in social science has there a somewhat different role to play. Perhaps it is not so much a final or nearly final summing up of accepted understanding as it is a provider of a more tentative and yet illuminating point of view. Perhaps the generalization in social science is a sort of searchlight on each particular case. It throws light on it-from one side-but it does throw light. Another generalization, also tentative and not too substantially reported, will perhaps be offered to illuminate the case from another side. I think that in much of social science the generalizations tend to be constructions some considerable way from thoroughly acceptable “truth.” They guide us among real cases that always escape the generalization, and escape by amounts and in ways that are less definable than is the departure of an actual falling stone from the law of falling bodies. But we grasp and deal with the case the better for looking at it with the generalization.

The remarks so far made may be reduced to a sentence: Social science, looked at with regard to its inner or logical nature, as one of the ways men use to understand the world around them, has the chief formal characteristics of other sciences, although in less degree, although as modified because of the peculiar humanity of its subject matter.