The second lecture in the Research & Development Lecture Series was delivered on Friday, the 22nd of September, 2017 by Dr. Tirumalai Kannan, Professor of Sociology at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.
The session commenced with Dr. Santhosh R. ’s welcome address. Dr. Kannan then began to deliver the lecture. Throughout the session, he primarily dealt with the main characteristics of Positivism as a methodology in Social Science and the problems associated with it.
One of the defining features of social science research in India has been its positivist way of looking at social reality. This aspect – while it has had enormous influence in the development of the Social Sciences – comes with strings attached. As Michel Foucault notes, positivism creates two major problems in research. Firstly, it tries to explain things rationally, effectively preventing a deeper understanding of social reality. Secondly, in its attempt to crescent everything into a coherent beam, positivism ‘objectivises’ social reality. This ‘objectivisation’ is quite visible in law today, which converts social suffering into mere categories.
Dr. Kannan spoke about the under-representation of the ‘politics’ of positivism in educational institutions today. Positivism at an undergraduate level, he thinks, is taught rather drily. In order to better explicate the ‘politics’ of positivism, Dr. Kannan invoked the Frankfurt School’s critique of positivism. The Frankfurt School of thought recognises five main characteristics of positivism:
- All knowledge is based on sensory experience.
- Meaning is grounded in observation.
- Concepts and generalisations only represent the particulars from which they have been extracted.
- The sciences are unified. This is to imply indirectly that the methods of natural science can be used in social science.
- Values are not facts and thus, value-judgement has no place in knowledge enquiry.
In short, the goal of positivism is to construct the empirical and systematic foundation for knowledge. And this knowledge is obtained only when facts, untainted with values, are systematised.
Frankfurt School thinker Theodor Adorno, however, contends that observation does not present a copy of a given objective world. Rather, the world of objects is always the world of our interpretations of those objects. No field of study, not even natural science, can make any sense without intersubjectivity. Dr. Kannan added here that even crime is constructed; it is not a mere collection of systematised facts.
Adorno further avers that any given object can only be understood in its social context. Positivists fail to comprehend that their process of understanding is severed from the historical struggles of the human mind. Foucault, too, notes that the field of psychiatry has also become positivist, in the sense that we tend to judge ourselves ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ based on psychiatric science. The parallels between the Frankfurt School and Foucault thus become evident.
Dr. Kannan noted that, although Marx, Durkheim and Weber show significant positivist tendencies in their writings, there are no signs of separation between theory and method in their works. Theory and method, he says, are inextricably linked. Positivism, however, takes methodology in isolation from the object of study, which results in the institutionalisation of the discipline.
Sociologist Jürgen Habermas finds a greater problem with neo-classical positivism. It takes a cognitive interest in the acquisition of knowledge and makes the process of knowledge enquiry technical. Dr. Kannan cited the example of poverty indices – they attempt to reflect great social suffering in numbers. Thus, in adopting this technical approach, science is reduced to methodology, when it is in fact, methodology in abstract form.
Karl Popper, eminent British philosopher, believes that the debate on whether social science is a science or not is unnecessary. He rejects naturalism in the social sciences and positivism in the natural sciences. For Popper, the verification method of universalising a particular incident is wrongly placed in the social sciences. He would rather the falsification method of particularising the universal was used – in both the natural and social sciences – for it would take into account a wider range of perspectives, thereby contributing to a better understanding of social reality.
Dr. Kannan concluded his lecture by saying that it is ‘us’ who constitute society and therefore one needs to move away from mere objectivity and give place for subjectivity in social science research. There is, obviously, a trade-off between subjectivity and objectivity; nevertheless, by moderating or reducing one’s distance from the object of study, one can hope to achieve a more holistic understanding.
Report by Sruthi Ranjani.
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