Method for study in a History of Society
Syntheses and hypotheses, contradictions and intuitions
Method and Concepts
By creating concepts that identify and categorise the patterns of problems and solutions in the evolution of societies we may ‘learn from history’. My objective is to examine the consistent forms in which challenges of governing social order have been manifested throughout history, and the persistent ingenuity of responses to these challenges. I propose a framework of commonalities and differentiations for understanding the long trajectory, the reasons why problems arise or recur, the patterning of failures and solutions, and the nature of the innovations that proved to be the most realistic selections.
Since my focus is on concerns that remained fairly constant at all times throughout the world, I select or create concepts that can be universally valid in simple early societies and in complex modern societies.
A solutions-oriented social science requires also that the concepts used to explain the the patterns of the past can be a source of insight into the likely opportunities and risks of current and future innovations in the governance of society.
The first step (which I completed in 2021 and is not part of the Social Science Files 2023 project) is to identify concepts I will employ for naming and categorising the historical patterns. These concepts aim to be syntheses of analyses of histories.
A social scientist will usually select a research topic based on preexisting empirical or theoretical interests. After that, the approach ideally begins with analysis, proceeds to synthesis, and returns to analysis. When the results are presented, however, the order has to be reversed. Syntheses are presented first, as concepts. The purposes of the concepts are revealed. Linkages between them are outlined. The concepts are unpacked layer by layer to reveal their elements and meanings with reference to the findings of the analyses. Concepts are synthetics and hypotheticals. They are not ‘the final word’. Synthetic concepts and hypotheses provide the guidance for the thought process. They are the beginning of the social science.
Thus, the nine lives of society are hypotheses relating to categories of differentiation designed for structuring an exploration which, as yet, is far from reaching completion.
Syntheses and Hypotheses
The creation of appropriate concepts presumes a prior choice about methods for theorising. A major assumption I make is that from the beginning of human society people have intuited or hypothesised truths about the governance of society for evolutionary purposes. Before science, members of societies performed mentally much like social scientist observers now, conceptualising and calculating social reality and the prospects and potentials for society’s survival.
Although I draw on knowledge from several disciplines, my methodology for identification and verification of reality through concepts owes much to the sciences of Leibniz and Weber.
I begin with Leibniz who combined ideas that are relevant to methods and concepts for dealing productively with intuitions gained or explored through synthetic hypotheses with built-in contradictions.
If we call something necessary, we deny the possibility of its opposite. It therefore suffices to demonstrate the necessary connections between things and their consequences in this way: by deducing them from a clear and distinct intuition … through a continuous series of definitions which imply them. … It is obvious that all necessary propositions … which have eternal truth … can be demonstrated or reduced to primary truths by ideas or definitions alone, that is, by the analysis of terms, so that it is made clear that their opposite implies a contradiction and conflicts with some identity or primary truth. … The method [thus] proceeds by hypotheses, assuming certain causes, perhaps, without proof, and showing that the things which now happen would follow from these assumptions. A hypothesis of this kind is like the key to a cryptograph, and the simpler it is, and the greater the number of events that can be explained by it, the more probable it is. … The number of phenomena which are happily explained by a given hypothesis may be so great that it must be taken as morally certain. Indeed, hypotheses of these kind are sufficient for everyday use. Yet it is also useful to apply less perfect hypotheses as substitutes for truth until a better one occurs. … There is no danger in this if we carefully distinguish the certain from the probable. … When everything which enters into a definition or distinct knowledge is known distinctly, down to the primitive concepts, I call such knowledge adequate. And when my mind grasps all the primitive ingredients of a concept at once and distinctly, it possesses an intuitive knowledge. … [It is] only when our knowledge of confused concepts is clear, and our knowledge of distinct concepts is intuitive, that we see their whole. [Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Elements of Natural Law (1671); On the General Characteristic (1679); On the Elements of Natural Science (1684); Discourse on Metaphysics (1686)]
Leibniz used the analogy of a shop full of objects of knowledge, the ‘compound’ results of many separate analyses. But these wares are not listed or arranged in order. While browsing through them we are absorbed only with piecemeal observations. In our impatience we put analysis ahead of synthesis.
Instead, the priority should be the place the objects in order, grouping them by their qualities, by their similarities and dissimilarities, by their familial connections, by the sequences of their discovery, and by their heuristic progressions. All formulas for truth-finding combine data. In Leibniz’s terminology, the knowledge ‘shop’ displays ‘composite-compound’ concepts for each item. But the acquisition of more complete knowledge of categories of phenomena demands that we formulate synthesised ‘primary-primitive’ concepts that can be represented in hypotheses.
Concepts become simple only when the composites are resolved into primitives. Synthetic concepts abbreviate complexity in order that knowledge can be presented and remembered.
As in Weber’s ideal type, the creation of a primitive concept is the method of synthesising observed elements of complex realities using a pure abstraction that accentuates the special qualities of a generalisable phenomenon of social action. This facilitates comparisons across periods and places.
Weber agreed with Leibniz that the hypothesis logically follows the synthesis. An ideal type, he wrote, is a “synthesis” and “offers guidance to the construction of hypotheses”.
The ideal typical concept will help to develop our skill in imputation in research. It is no ‘hypothesis’ but it offers guidance to the construction of hypotheses. It is not a description of reality but it aims to give unambiguous means of expression to such a description. … An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuatIon of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasised viewpoints into a unified analytical construct. In its conceptual purity, this mental construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality. … Historical research faces the task of determining in each individual case, the extent to which this ideal-construct approximates to or diverges from reality. [Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (1949), emphasis added]
The methodological exercises described by Leibniz and Weber are rigorous social science processes, demanding high standards of data collection, analysis and synthesis, and extensive knowledge of many things. But if we follow Leibniz’s analogy of ‘the shop’ [above] we also realise that shop managers could have accomplished a process of compound-to-primitive categorisation before the arrival of their customers. The latter would be directed first to primitive categories such as hardware, household, and husbandry, then to compound categories like hammers, hangers, and hoses.
Librarians perform an equivalent role for readers. Social Science Files attempts the same with its Archive. Its search function is assisted by artificial intelligence. Well organised households do something similar in their cooking places. And the most intelligent part of cooking, the one most analogous to intuition and hypotheses, is in experimentation with tools, methods and ingredients. These are all examples of ‘primitive’ action and reason, which has been vital to human life ever since societies and markets emerged.
I mildly diverge from Weber and Leibniz in two ways.
I do not believe that a rigorous scientific process is always required in order to process synthetic and intuitive concepts. Much of what constitutes society and its governance remains essentially and necessarily ‘primitive’ (‘simple’) even when, as in the eventual separation of powers, it has become complex and subtle.
I will assume, unless and until incontrovertible knowledge from biology or archeology and recorded history shows otherwise, that even early humans would not be confused by the central concept relating to π that is presented as part of my hypothesis.
Secondly, if I create a synthesis or ideal type I already only do so with a fairly realistic expectation of being able to find it empirically. I am fairly confident, for example, of being able to re-find the evidence on my book shelf or in the Archive.
As for the hypothesis itself, it should be simple and memorable, and probable or persuasively conjecturable. The more phenomena it can apply to, and the fewer assumptions it contains, the more likely it is to be true. In order to minimise assumptions the concepts should be clearly and simply defined.
Leibniz claimed: “An idea is true when the concept is possible; it is false when it implies a contradiction”. Even if it is not provable as a cause or the effect in a single case, the hypothesis may be deemed valid if it can be shown to be adequate and believable for a large number of cases. In addition, a well founded hypothesis may be used to predict phenomena that cannot be tested because they do not yet exist. Furthermore, although a hypothesis is false if it is itself contradictory, it will perform more usefully if it can display its own contrary as a falsification reference.
Contradiction and intuition [preliminary]
The relevance of ‘contradiction’ and ‘intuition’ to the concepts I am using will quickly become apparent. I propose a causal hypothesis because I think (from synthesis) that a form of causation exists. I hope to show it is true. But the process already assumes an accumulation of knowledge. Much of the analysis, definition, and synthesis has been done, and the possibility of a contradiction has already been ‘eliminated’. Yet I arrived at the proposal by sensing that, if it is true, its contrary cannot be right. Every proposition of primary truth can be demonstrated, Leibniz argued, “by ideas or definitions alone … by analysis of terms, so that it is made clear that their opposite implies a contradiction and conflicts with … primary truth”.
I conclude, then, that identification of opposites and contraries belongs to the search for truth. This insight will prove its usefulness when we encounter societies that use ‘signal coding’ while ‘striving for system’ and ‘selecting for survival’.
An intuition can be a formal hypothesis, formalised by the social scientist. For the earliest humans on their equivalent cognitive journeys intuition will have been an informal and commonplace but nevertheless solid perception that something exists.
In these discovery processes, awareness of a truth will have entailed a denial that its opposite could also be true. To state this strongly: intuition (or instinct) would not be possible unless an opposition or a contradiction is seen, or unless a contrary (path or opinion) is rejected (logically or emotionally). I will return to this subject whenever the discussion encounters questions about signals and rules for organising governance.
The first priority is to examine the Types of Society concretely, one by one. That is the only 2023 project for Social Science Files. The hardest and slowest part begins.
by Michael G. Heller
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