The Theory of Structuration & the Politics of the Third Way
Giddens argues that social theory must incorporate reflexivity into its conceptual apparatus. The sociologist is not a scientific observer standing apart from the society and observing it “objectively”. Nor are they a “participant observer” interpreting the subjective responses of social agents from within these agents own self-understanding. Rather, the sociologist is a combination of both, a combination that moves beyond the subjective/objective polarity, towards what Giddens calls his “new rules of sociological method”. The reason for this shift “beyond” the subjective/objective dualism is straightforward: social agents in modernity employ expert systems, like sociology, in their everyday life, and therefore the relation between the social theorist and social agents should be conceived as a dialogue, where the actions and beliefs of agents influence and are influenced by the sociologist, who is also, from another perspective, an agent themselves.
This means a shift beyond the qualitative/quantitative (scientific/interpretive) methodological split, which Giddens views as a legacy of positivism. For the nineteenth century positivism of Comte, society could be regarded as a natural fact and treated with the methods of the natural sciences. In the twentieth century, positivism has meant the position that no statement is meaningful that cannot be experimentally verified, or, more broadly, that theoretical propositions are scientifically valid only when they can be (ultimately) empirically falsified (Popper). The hallmark of the maturity of social theory in the nineteenth century was therefore its ability to reduce social phenomena to mathematical formalisations - especially through the use of the emerging discipline of statistical methods - and to state the general laws governing all of social life. In reaction against this, nineteenth century hermeneutics proposed a rigid split between the natural sciences and the interpretive disciplines of the humanities, including sociology. Durkheim, for instance, advocated the approach of the positive sciences, supplemented where necessary with a sensitive interpretive social theory. Weber, by contrast, concentrated on the interpretation of social action through reconstruction of the intentions of the actors, supplemented where necessary with detailed economic and demographic data. Weber argued that the construction of “ideal types” - sociological generalisations or distillations into archetypes that might never be actually encountered in the pure for in reality - was a methodological necessity because social complexity tended to exceed the limits of sociological data collection. Marx, as is well known, argued that economic phenomena betrayed regularities that could be mapped “with the precision of the natural sciences,” but employed a sophisticated political hermeneutic to recover the significance of political events and ideological formulations, based on the disjunction between material interests and the consciousness of agents.
What all these figures concede to scientific positivism is the notion that facts exist aside from the theories for which they are facts. The classical positivist example is the observation statement, “the needle on the dial is pointing to the number six”. Now surely, the positivist argues, whether the theory in question is Newtonian physics, Einsteinian relativity or quack astrology, all observers agree on this observation statement - to say that they don’t drives you into the la-la land of subjective idealism and relativism, and ultimately to solipsism. Therefore there is always a basis for comparison of theories, since any genuinely scientific theory can be translated into a set of actual or possible observation statements and predictions of this kind. For Popper, the propositions of a theory that cannot be so translated are all metaphysics, to be consigned to the proverbial flames. Debates in the 1960s revealed that this was impossibly narrow and would lead to the conclusion that most of the propositions in the foundational theories of modern physics - at the time of their emergence and even today - are “metaphysics”. Therefore, in the work of later, “post-positivist” philosophers of science, such as Imré Lakatos, an attempt is made to divide theories into a set of “metaphysical core hypotheses” (such as, “the production of material life precedes and conditions the intellectual and social life processes in general”), and a periphery of observation statements and falsifiable hypotheses. Pseudo-sciences have no falsifiable propositions whatsoever. Competing scientific research programmes - scientifically valid but metaphysically distinct scientific theories - can be characterised as progressive or degenerating according to the balance between adjusting core hypotheses to account for the failure of peripheral propositions, and the expansion of the periphery so as to include new phenomena, on the basis of successful experiments. Despite the sophistication of Lakatos’ position, it is “post-positivist” rather than post-positivist, because Lakatos clings to the belief that there exist observation statements valid for all observers: an objective and independent world of “facts”.
Continuing the analysis of natural science before turning to social theory, research into the history of science since the 1970s (and not just by philosophers of science with a radical constructivist, “truth is just a social convention, an effect of power, and nothing to do with the Real,” axe to grind) demonstrates that this realm of objective facts does not exist. It is not that two observers cannot manage to decide whether the needle points to six - of course they can. But if the experiments are testing genuinely different scientific theories - theories separated by a “paradigm shift” for instance - then the experimental apparatus, the units of measure and the theoretical construction of which phenomena are significant and which represent “noise” or calibration problems are completely different. There is all the difference in the world between six electron volts and six units of quantum spin, despite the agreement of the observers on the numerical quantities in question. The question of whether the phenomena described overlap and are translatable between frameworks (that is, whether every observation in the theory of electro-magnetism can be explained as a local phenomenon within quantum electro-dynamics) cannot be solved with reference to observation statements alone - and this brings us back to my initial argument about regarding theories as diacritical totalities.
From here, it is easy to draw relativist conclusions, and this is precisely what Giddens does.[11] Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s relativist theory of scientific “paradigm shifts” between incommensurable theoretical universes, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Giddens argues that “there is no way of justifying commitment to scientific rationality rather than, say, to Zande sorcery, apart from premises and values which science itself presupposes, and indeed has drawn from historically in its evolution within Western culture”.[12] Likewise, the falsification of theories is not straightforward, for “what counts as a falsifying observation depends in some way on upon the theoretical system or paradigm within which the description of what is observed is couched”. Furthermore, theories have different means to incorporate instances of falsification without necessarily discarding the “core metaphysical hypotheses”.[13] It follows, for Giddens, that while empirical research is crucial to social theory, this mainly serves to substantiate, modify and extend the propositions of the social theory, rather than to lend it the weight of being a final “science of society”. Instead, Giddens advocates a pragmatic and hermeneutic social theory, which combines Wittgenstein’s theory of language pragmatics - the analysis of “what has to be done” in a social context through the application (and transformation) of social rules[14] — with an interpretive analysis of the reflexivity of social agents. This interpretive method is not auxilliary to sociology but its main function, for mutual understanding is “the very ontological condition of human life in society as such”.[15]
Giddens is therefore close to the cultural anthropology of the social theory known as “ethnomethodology”. This school concentrates on what Giddens calls the “practical consciousness” of agents in everyday life - the habitual actions and discourses of routine and confident performance. In this practical consciousness, agents formulate their self-identity and social roles through a social “language” that includes linguistic performances, commonly-understood gestures and actions, and the mobilisation of a tacit consensus regarding “normal” behaviour. This practical consciousness is therefore available for inspection, since it is externalised through the discourse of everyday actions, speech-acts and habits. This discourse of everyday life mobilises reflexive knowledge at the pre-conscious level: for instance, the performance of the majority of routine work tasks in the advanced industrialised world presupposes a high level of secondary school education, sedimented into work routines in the form of the easy comprehension of instructions, tasks, processes and communicative requirements. Indeed, the performance of everyday tasks normally presupposes that the agent grasps the situation as a rule-governed “language game” with a range of possible moves and outcomes.