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On Reproducing Social Reality: A Reply to Harrison
Feleppa, Robert
Feleppa, Robert
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1986
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Abstract
That social inquirers should be careful about the intrusion of biases and questionable
ethnocentric presuppositions is a widely accepted and unquestionably
cogent methodological dictum. Less widely accepted, and perhaps less cogent,
is the view that such intrusions are best avoided by inquirers adopting the
interpretive constructs, points of view, etc., of their subjects. Debates over this
latter point have flared up repeatedly in twentieth-century philosophical and
social-scientific literature, notably in the extensive discussions of Peter Winch’ss
The Idea of a Social Science (ISS) and ’Understanding a Primitive Society’
(UPS). His contention that proper social inquiry is actually a form of
conceptual-analytic epistemology, aimed necessarily at the recovery and use by
the inquirer of certain rules and criteria operative within the source-language
community in the individuation of social actions, makes Winch clearly a proponent
of the latter, controversial thesis.
The late Richard Rudner (’Some Essays at Objectivity’ [EO]) has challenged
’ Winch, contending that his thesis rests on what Rudner calls the ’reproductive
fallacy’ of assuming that the function of a social description is to reproduce
aspects of what it describes. Recently, Stanley Harrison (’Rudner’s Reproductive
Fallacy’ [RF]) has taken issue with Rudner’s critique, charging that it
commits a fallacy of somewhat older vintage, namely, of attacking a straw man.
Rudner, he claims, by not attending with care to Winch’s important distinction
between reflective and unreflective understanding, and by not keeping in mind
the differences in view between himself and Winch regarding the nature of
reflective understanding, creates the confusion and inconsistency he ostensibly
finds in Winch. However, I shall argue that Harrison has misconstrued the thrust
and content of Rudner’s argument, and though this may result in part from the
way Rudner formulates certain points, these can be clarified and Rudner’s telling
objections to Winch’s and related views sustained.
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Sage publications
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Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 16, no. 1, March 1986, pp. 89-99.;
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1741-2714