Customer Reviews

Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation, and Reality in the Natural and the Social Sciences

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

In this book Richard Miller offers an ``adequate'' scientific explanation of phenomena as an alternative to the positivist ``covering law'' model (Hume, Hempel, etc.), which is still dominant among practicing social scientists today despite that it had already been severely criticized and rejected in the field of philosophy. Miller claims that the persistent popularity of positivist methodology is due to the absence of a genuine alternative method to replace good-old positivism.

The first part criticizes of the covering law model (i.e explanation by law-like regularity), which requires any valid law (1) to be universal in its application, (2) to be empirically verifiable, and (3) to reduce causality to mere statistical correlation.

After explaining how these criteria are actually irrelevant to scientific theory, Miller develops his alternative model of ``causal mechanism,'' which, without falling into hermeneutics, adequately explains causal phenomena.

It may not be an easy read for students without the background of philosophy. After all the title of the book is _Fact and Method_; it reminds me of the likes of _Truth and Method_ and _Being and Time_. (^_^; Like the previous reviewer I read this book for Quantitative Method course tpp. We were also assigned Elster's ``Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences'' and other like short articles with it. Elster's should be easier to understand, but if you want to know the more rich, philosophical foundation of their methodology, you've got to read _Fact and Method_.

I remember trying to read this book a few years ago. Like many contemporary professional academics, Miller is hopelessly inept as a writer.

A review here states: "Fact and Method is written in a distinctive style." What irony therein!

I know of no field of intellectual endeavour in which English compositional skills are so parsimoniously displayed as in Anglophone `philosophy', at least since about 1960. I have finally given up reading new `philosophy' books in the last few years, simply because the writing is so horrid. The last one was this one. It's dreadfully written. All the appeal of a rotting banana skin. I'm not talking in any case about presenting conceptual difficulty, but simply the inability to write a coherent English sentence. The only `philosophy' I read now is Umberto Eco. I note that someone else here has similar opinions of Miller's travesty.

I hold a degree in philosophy, by the way.

Ostensibly, Miller is interested in the ways in which political biases can and should influence research methodology, and in ways of removing bad, often politically motivated methodology and encouraging methodology that is good, either politics free or (he thinks more often) motivated by correct politics. Certainly the influence of politics is quite pervasive, and those who claim to be "above" politics are more often than not disingenuous.

However, this goal is ill-served by Miller's placing of the discussion in terms of the dispute between old-fashioned positivism and more recent scientific realist philosophy of science. While Miller discusses many, many examples of what he sees as poor (conservative) science, and of what he sees as better (Marxist-leaning) science, in no case does he convincingly show that positivism encourages conservative science or that scientific realism encourages his prefered Marxist-leaning science. Much of the allegedly bad science he criticizes fails to live up to the old positivist standards, so it is unclear how positivism can be to blame for it, and surely the conservatives who lie about whether they're really following the positivists' rules will be just as ready to lie about whether they're following Miller's rules.

It is probably revealing that Miller seems blissfully unaware of the politics of the actual postivists and their scientific realist successors; if the debate between positivism and scientific realism were as thoroughly enmeshed in politics as Miller thinks, with realism providing support for Miller's prefered Marxist politics, it would be a point of data in need of some explanation that Neurath and Carnap, the leaders of the Logical Positivist movement, were openly Marxist in their politics, while scientific realism in the philosophy of science has mostly drawn inspiration from the arch-conservative Quine. Of course, there might be an explanation for this which is consistent with Miller's theses, but it is certainly not to be found in this book.

Having been forced to read this book as part of my MA course in Research Methods I was determined to make the best of it. Unfortunately after 2 hours of trying again and again to make sense of each paragraph (and I'm not normally stupid) I had to give up.

A little sample "The requirement of qualitativeness must be dropped. Yet many true generalisations restricted to particular times, places or things do seem incapable of supporting explanations. That every coin in my pocket is made of copper does not explain whey the dirty coin in my pocket is made of copper" p55 - What?

Unfortunately it gets worse and he spends another 5 pages going on about the dirty copper/ not copper coin.

It's not to say that you shouldn't attempt to read the book, but if you suceed in understanding it I truly do salute you.

Annabella