[Edited by
]What is a soft science?
When somebody says “soft science” what is he saying, what kind of language conventions is he acknowledging and what reality is he alluding to? Soft science needs to be defined, but it needs to be defined in the most general and encompassing way; there are, for sure, many definitions of soft sciences, they all have two elements in common: They make reference to the humanities and predicate imperfection of these scientific disciplines. All definitions of “soft science” consider a soft science to be a human or social science, a science that studies man qua man,1 also, all definition convey that the humanities are imperfectly scientific, or not even sciences in the strict sense. The biggest disagreement concerning the soft sciences is whether they can advance to become a hard science, or whether they will indefinitely remain soft. Examples of soft sciences are sociology, anthropology or psychology. Most don’t consider history a science, without much thought, they say it is a “discipline”, or a field of study, probably out of a subconscious respect for a discipline much older, more ancient, than any of the Newtonian disciplines; one that was already mature, with the Greek historians, at the time when astronomy, still in the hands of pure philosophers, was but in its infancy.
Philosophers of science, epistemologists and intellectuals more general have produced many theories to explain why and how the soft sciences are soft. The usual explanation has to do with the difficulty of submitting the subject that is to be studied, man, to the scrutiny of scientific experimentation, with the difficulty to build models based on mathematics and the complexity of the (human) phenomena at hand. Simply put, since one cannot put “middle class”, “democracy” and “capitalism” in a laboratory and test them, the way one can test with rats or observe the galaxies far away, it would seem that these sciences can merely observe, without a method that rests upon technologies. Repeated experiments cannot be done upon men, nor can the complexity of their world be divided into different fields, therefore, sciences such as sociology or history will never reach the heights of rigor that physics or chemistry have.
The Moderate Position, Karl Popper
In the XIX century, after a slow process of gradual distinction and independence, science, the natural sciences that is, was separate from philosophy, no longer calling itself natural philosophy. In the XX century, philosophers turned their attention to these natural sciences and pondered upon them: their worth, their history, ultimately, the knowledge they conveyed. Already in the first half of this century, a new philosophical field was carved out of Plato’s science: Philosophy of science became a new realm of philosophy. The man who is generally considered the first entry in this field, in the introductory books and courses at universities, is the much known Karl Popper. We are interested in the social sciences, hence, we avoid to delve upon the entirety of philosophy of science, this was done in a piece of mine: Against Karl Popper I and II. What is Karl Popper, the conventionally established first philosopher of science’s position concerning the social or soft sciences?
His position is a moderate one, it neither tries to make the social sciences more important than the natural sciences, and, without undervaluing them, the moderate considers them to be less precise, when put next to the natural sciences. The extreme positions, on the contrary, are, by logical exclusion, those who consider that the social sciences have to be modelled on the natural sciences, because these sciences are the archetypical science, on the other hand, there are those who consider the human and social sciences to be something unrelated to “science” as the term is commonly understood, and is allowed to avoid the methodological commitment of such a naturalistic creed. Historically, on the one extreme, one can put logical positivists, such as Otto Neurath, who have in mind, as an ideal, a “social physics” or, in psychology, behaviorists; on the other extreme, historicists, such as the theoretician of history and historian Wilhelm Dilthey or the German hermeneutician Hans-Georg Gadamer can be placed.2
The Problem with Positivism
What I want to contend with here is not Karl Popper’s critical rationalism, Otto Neurath’s logical positivism or Gadamer’s hermeneutics as different epistemologies or philosophies of sciences. You see, the problem is not so much each view but what they all have in common. There are presuppositions that are a priori, which they are not even aware of or even supposedly against. These presuppositions can be defined in one philosophical key word: Positivism. To be sure, positivism is the philosophical system that rejects metaphysics as a false knowledge and outdated critique of religious theology, and considers the sciences to be the true form of knowledge both as a model and as the only truly human knowledge, and believes that they have the function of predicting the future, so therefore, they are also the basis for human planning and action, as well as the improvement of society.
To be sure, except for logical positivists, to an extent, and Karl Popper, people such as Gadamer or Heidegger are not philosophically positivists. What makes here all these philosophers positivistic in a broad sense is not their philosophical school, but their historical interpretation. All these philosophers share a common narrative or myth of the history or origin of science, which makes talk of “soft sciences” and “hard sciences” even make sense. They are also amazingly simple interpretations, among others: The natural sciences become mature before the social sciences, both the natural sciences and the social sciences share a common scientific method, or accept the same standards of scientific rationality and, most importantly of all, the social sciences can either be built upon the natural sciences as a form of social physics, or they are closer to the “arts” than properly scientific. These understanding might not be refuted in one blow, but the history of such a mythological, more aptly put, ideological understanding can be established, so as to counter mystifying history with veridic history.
Rivers of ink have been spilt talking about the difference between the humanities and the sciences; what makes this Substack entry relevant? To be sure, few philosophers or scientist believe, or at least say publicly, that the social sciences are underneath the physical sciences, there is plenty of awareness campaigns about “saving the humanities”, this article has nothing to do with cries for taxpayer funding. What this text intends to show is that positivism, runs deep, it is not something easy to throw away, it is not simply enough to call oneself an “anti-positivists” or a “post-positivist”, this text wants to push philosophers, and all people of good intent, to actually commit, be it to a consistent positivism, or a consistent rejection of positivism. In the worst case, it hopes to make the history of ideas intelligible. So please, enjoy your stay.
But briefly, a broad and general definition of “soft science” is pertinent and needed, so that the history of such a idea can even be elaborated.
What is “Soft Science”?
Soft science is a word from everyday language, there is really no rigorous or true definition. In such cases, a good source is Wikipedia, because, more importantly than anything else, it tells us what is a common or consented understanding by us all. The entry for Hard and soft sciences is a solid one, both for its content and its references, the definition it gives for soft and hard sciences is therefore a pertinent starting point:
Hard science and soft science are colloquial terms used to compare scientific fields on the basis of perceived methodological rigor, exactitude, and objectivity.[1][2][3] In general, the formal sciences and natural sciences are considered hard science, whereas the social sciences and other sciences are described as soft science.[4]
The history of the soft sciences can of course trace the entire evolution of the sciences, but here, the interest is not so much the history of science as such, the history of the humanities, that would be, for instance, the study of historiography or of sociology’s history. Here, we cover the history of the idea of “soft science”, that requires from us that we trace it to a singular and important philosopher that transcended his time and made history. History is written, ultimately, by those who write it, and made by those who make it. It is evident, that any talk about the myth of soft sciences has to address primarily one thinker.
Ultimately, the myth of soft sciences is arrived at by a false analogy, like most errors: The idea of progress makes sense when applied to technology and the natural sciences, but it cannot be applied to the human sciences, nor can there be progress without the human sciences already being established to begin with.
The History of Softness
Why did Caesar cross the Rubicon? Psychology, logic, physics, biology can all give access to a different dimension of this choice, but history, ultimately, will explain the crossing of the Rubicon by appeal to uniqueness, historians will say: Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon because he is Julius Caesar.
Scientist these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. John R. Platt is in contemporary usage the first man to coin the terms hard and soft science, this is the first line of his piece, one can imagine, with the context of this article, what he thought of dividing the scientific realm in soft and hard sciences.
The Ghost of the XXI Century
History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. With this twist, Mark Twain corrected George Santayana, who famously said that history repeats itself. John R. Platt, unaware as he might have been, was moved by a certain spirit that has not been alluded to enough by my publication, the SyntherChronicles: Auguste Comte.
Look, John R. Platt had an interesting consideration bout how the social sciences could improve with a different system, the thing is, there is need for understanding. When he talks of some sciences being less equal than others, when he talks of the imperfect state of the social sciences, there are so many ideas legitimately taken for granted, as there always is, that one needs a deep breath. Philosophy of science, and philosophy of the natural sciences more specifically, is a mess, a large part of it is due to not really understanding what the father, or at least grandfather of this field actually argued for philosophically.
This lack of understanding makes the fate of our world much the worse: The ideas of Auguste Comte are ideas known to all intellectually inclined, even if not by name, anyone has heard scientistic, naturalistic or materialistic ideas, everyone knows of the New Atheists Cristopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, all philosophy majors have studied the four horsemen of philosophy of science: Karl Popper and his 3 great critics Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos; as well as his comrades from the Vienna Circle or Kreis.
Auguste Comte, however, is just taken for granted, in a similar way to Karl Marx, the difference being, there is a deeper and more general understanding of Marx, even by lay people, than of Comte. Most know of Comte through some positivist or naturalist philosopher who himself criticizes Comte, a good case is Fredrich Hayek (brilliant) Counter Revolution of Science, a critic of Comte who is also committed to a biological and evolutionary build of the social sciences. Since he is so widely known yet forgotten Comte is a bit like a ghost, he is in a way a haunted figure, and ghosts like this need exorcism. All this long paragraph is to excuse oneself for bringing again to the table, in an OCD manner, the Priest of Haunted Humanity. He is repeatedly brought back because he is like a ghost that needs an exorcism or, for the pagan audience, someone to do his last request, so his soul may rest.
August Comte’s Philosophy of Science
Auguste Comte does not have a philosophy of science in the XX and XXI centuries understanding, because he does not believe the logic of sciences can be invented philosophically, rather, he considers to study the history of science, rather than its method, the only way to understand what the method of science is. For contemporary philosophers it would be much more useful to call Auguste Comte a historicist rather than a naturalist or a positivist, because it would be less misleading.
By contrast, Karl Popper, the founder of philosophy of science as it is currently studied in universities across the West (and Earth) wanted to know what the method of science was, to develop its logic or more strictly put its epistemology. To compare: Karl Popper develops critical rationalism, a theory of scientific knowledge that explains science and distinguishes it from false science by defining science as a falsifying activity, that is, that science does not say what truth is in dogmatic fashion but instead, and rather, opens itself up to refutation to, this way, enter a continued and never ending process of improvement where it might not discover truth, but increasingly get closer to it, in asymptotic fashion (increasingly closer, but never reaching the point, “ever closer, but no cigar”).
To explain what science is, Auguste Comte tells a story, he does not make an analysis or a synthesis, maybe both, he does not develop a method. At first glance, it would seem that Karl Popper, and also more modern positivists-nihilists such as Carnap, Bertrand Russell or Willard Van Orman Quine would have refined his approach.
According to most people, including modern naturalists, Auguste Comte makes a “philosophy of history”, Auguste Comte, without historical research or logical deduction simply states, as a manner of fact, that knowledge goes through three stages: Theological, Metaphysical, Positive or Scientific. Karl Popper, or Quine, prefer to reflect logically and rationally upon physics and its different fields and understand how “the scientific conception of the world” rationally displays itself. Karl Popper, the father of modern philosophy of science, started with the Vienna Circle or Kreis, this group is often called Neopositivism, but they themselves and others prefer to call them logical empiricists. It is probably best to consider people such as Rudolf Carnap, Russell, or Quine, but also modern “physical eliminativists” (who believe consciousness can be entirely explained in physical jargon without appeal to a different reality of mind).
What most today call “scientism”, the reduction of all knowledge to the knowledge of the natural sciences, or naturalism, the belief that reality is fundamentally the natural world as it is explained or knowable to the natural sciences, is not a good guide to understand Auguste Comte. One of the points I want to make with this article, and all the articles I write concerning Auguste Comte, is that Auguste Comte made a much stronger case for “scientism,” “naturalism,” or “new atheism” than most modern philosophers who supposedly follow the same principles do. And I do this as someone who himself is not committed to such a worldview.
The One Science?
Auguste Comte had three problems which occupied both his personal and his philosophical, or priestly, life:
The spiritual emptiness that happened as a consequence of Christianity’s (inevitable) demise.
The need for a coherent, logical and systematic scientific worldview. One which addressed the philosophical questions and the practical problems of the historical moment.
The need of a political philosophy in a world that had radically changed after the the erosion of the binding values, beliefs and principles that had been working previously, in the Ancien régime, in the old order before the French Revolution.
*SHAMELESS PLUG FROM THE EDITOR*
If you would like to learn more about the horrors and the truth of the Ancien régime and the French Revolution click this link below:
Auguste Comte found that all 3 questions could be given one answer: Sociology. For Auguste Comte, sociology was “political philosophy” in the true sense, that is, a social science and therefore it developed a political philosophy which worked in a world after 1789. Sociology also completed the need for a coherent scientific worldview because it developed the remaining scientific field for all the possible fields, because everything that could be known from the stars to animals had a science working on it, but human culture and society was still outside the bounds of scientific scrutiny. Finally, Auguste Comte found out that Christianity was an asocial religion, since it was a “otherworldly religion”, and understood that it could not fix the worldly, but also real, problem of chaos and disorder the French revolution brought forth. He also understood that the French Revolution could only have happened in a world were Christianity had made its presence known by separating the political aspect from the spiritual aspect of man “Render to Caesar what is to Caesar”.
Therefore, to answer the first problem, sociology would also be the “theology for the religion of Humanity” or, in other words, sociology would not only develop accurate political philosophy, it would also be the basis for a true religion of man which was according to his “nature” (a metaphysical word not of his liking, but inevitable in this stage of early access), and not against it.
It is amazing that such a daunting task can even be undertaken, and such a vast project is contended here, with this second hand consideration, a digital writ. We will not focus, therefore, on the first or second problem, we will consider “only” the 3rd problem, in the meditation of this problem the origin of the “soft sciences” will be found.
What is Science?
First and foremost: What is science? a systematic discipline that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the world. This is the answer given by Wikipedia. But what would science be according to Auguste Comte? Philosophers of science have the temptation of getting lost on the details. Theoreticians of knowledge or epistemologist would usually try to outline what the differential and unique method of science is, they might talk of experimentation, building models, showing claims to be true or to be false, submitting tests to public scrutiny without bias or worldviews interfering, etc. This would not do for Auguste Comte, he would consider it to be the explanation of how science works, but not of what science itself is. Auguste Comte lived in the first half of the XIX century, the end of modern philosophy (the last stage of classical philosophy). Comte went along with the spirit of the times, accordingly, he considered that the defining element of science was spirit. Science was a spiritual phenomenon, and science rested ultimately not on a certain method but on a definite spirit. The spirit that moves science, which also was the spirit that had moved our ancestors and made man human, was the positive spirit, the philosophy that upholds this spirit is positive philosophy, in the same sense that Thomas Aquinas might be said to have made Christian philosophy.3
Therefore, for Comte, the need to separate or unite the sciences was mitigated. Comte is definitely the father of “soft sciences” or social sciences, but he is ironically so, because he did not intend to make the social sciences into copies of natural science’s blueprints. For Comte, method could not be separated from history, because it could not be separated from spirit. According to Auguste Comte, what made mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, physiology and sociology one cohesive worldview was a method: They studied different things such as rocks, animals or Mozart, but they were united by a method, bound by a spirit.
For Comte, what makes the sciences, “Science”, is not to find a ultimate scientific law, what makes the sciences, Science, is spirit, the positive spirit, which happens to be the spirit of Humanity. The distinctive feature of man is Humanity, among other things, what makes man human is intelligence, which is best expressed in devotion to science. Method bound by spirit makes of the heterogeneity of sciences a common scientific endeavor, the spirit of science is its method, and vice versa.
Wasn’t this whole piece about soft sciences, are you just going around the topic of why there are in 2024 soft and hard sciences? In a sense, yes, it is difficult to go straight to the point. Explaining Auguste Comte’s “philosophy” of science was necessary, because he articulates the older and more sophisticated version of the, nowadays colloquial and everyday, expression “soft science”. Soft science is Auguste Comte's Sociology made vulgar4.
Auguste Comte thought History mattered, substantially. If he could be brought to life in 2024, his understanding of scientific method, when it came to the social sciences, would actually be closer to the Austrian School’s rationalism than it would be to empiricists. Auguste Comte, this might surprise some, considered mathematical modelling and “empirical experimentation”, what current Naturalists consider the go to method in the social and human sciences, to be a bad, or at least secondary, methods when it came to studying man. For Auguste Comte, history was the only true method to study man, he would interchangeably talk about “philosophy of history” and “sociology”, although he disliked the former and loved the latter when it came to expressing his philosophy. Auguste Comte considered a misguided and even downright false belief the claim that sociology, the science of man or society, should be built, modelled or developed upon the natural sciences. In many ways, Auguste Comte thought that sociology would discover the true basis for physics being society, not the other way around.
In Auguste Comte’s understanding, the first scientists conquered the stars by systematically, for the first time, applying mathematics; Tales is here the hero. After some mathematical training, he found out that he could understand the alignment of the celestial bodies, such as the sun or the moon, predict their movement and act consequently, even getting rich.
Slowly, the theological worldview was replaced by a positive worldview, mediating, was philosophy, or metaphysics, “deconstructing” or rather critiquing theology. After the stars came the solid and material structure of the things around him, as well as their changes and composition, physics and chemistry. Afterwards, man’s desire for knowledge, as well as power, would lead man to understand what the principles of animal behavior were, and, closely linked, not only the way to cure his bodily illness, but also the way to improve his own body beyond its limitations.
After this long travel across stars, rocks and bodies, man would finally arrive at his home, he would find what was, in a way, already there in the background. While he conquered, intellectually, the stars, solved the riddles of gravity and penetrated living organism in the background was always the spirit of man, the spirit of science, which made all this knowledge possible, the “I”. What Comte found out, however, and the scientific spirit too, was that there was no such “I”, instead, there was an “Us”. Behind all the conquests of knowledge, technology and therapy that had given rise to human civilization, behind mathematics, physics, engineering, war and religion lay not individual man, but Humanity’s Civilization.
Then man would find himself as the basis and building block of the quest for truth, the natural scientist would become a sociologist, a religion of Humanity would succeed a supernatural, but also a “natural religion”, it would be a true religion of History, he would later call its worship “Sociolatry”. This way, finally, the world from physical particles to worshiping societies would be united in one great prayer, because Humanity was not only what lay behind the human ego, Humanity, for Comte, was also “Nature” and “Life”, the Universe, because humanity was a recapitulation, a encyclopedia of everything that is physical, material, biological, mathematical and spiritual, therefore, humanity and the Universe were included in Humanity. In other words, where Comte says “Humanity” one might as well say “Being” or “World” or “Totality” and it would suffice, somewhat. This was August Comte’s vast and ambitious understanding of philosophy, which might be called metaphysical, but he would hate anyone who uttered the word “metaphysics” in a positive sense, for him, metaphysics was just a negation of sincere belief, it was just criticism, not knowledge or devotion.
Auguste Comte understood something on a philosophical level: He truly understood the idea of Progress. The contemporary mythology or expanded universe, the Star Wars franchise of history, is the idea of Progress. Here, of course, the whole idea does not need to be treated, but then, why bring progress in into an already unfolding script in the first place, dear “Sych”?
Here is where the issue at hand, the soft sciences, appear. Auguste Comte understood that the only meaningful way to talk of progress was scientific progress. While most, intuitively, consider progress a “moral idea” first and foremost, the way Immanuel Kant, the father of progressivism, did, Auguste Comte understood that Progress meant something very simple: For man to become human. He understood, as most historians and philosophers of science now do, that progress applies primarily to the techno-scientific improvement over the course of History.
What has progress to do with soft science and what has Comte understood?
Soft Progress
Progress is a big word, it also arises political passions, more importantly, the idea of progress is a moral claim, for and against the idea of progress progressives and conservatives, meliorists and traditionalists, modernists and perennialists take their stand… But all ideas have humble beginnings. Here we are concerned with the humble beginnings of the idea of progress, that is, not with the theological or philosophical underpinnings of the idea of progress, but with something simpler: The historical learning curve of the natural sciences. We are to deal with the history of scientific and technological progress, because it is the first and most basic form of progress.
In this day and age, the idea of Progress is first and foremost a moral concept that generally has to do with being on “the right side of history”, there are many philosophers who might be said to underpin this definition of progress as moral, and ultimately, the idea of progress stands or falls on moral grounds, man is a moral animal, inescapably. The idea of Progress is not the question whether History accounts any form of real progress.
Like all ideas that become beliefs, the idea of Progress had of course some “fact” behind it, in other words, progress was an explanation of certain events unfolding, from this humble beginning, of saying inventions are being made, manners are changing, nature is being transformed in new and novel ways, this seems like a general trend towards a definite better world arose the Idea of Progress. In other words, the idea of progress started in the Enlightenment, for better or for worse, in an age when intellectuals combined optimism with a practical, even utilitarian outlook at ideas, and looked at scientific development as God’s Providence becoming a historical fact, or even, as God’s Providence unmasked as Humanity’s struggle for a better and more rational world.
Every philosopher has a different definition of progress. Herbert Spencer, the true successor of Auguste Comte, thought it was the change from disorganized homogeneity to organized heterogeneity, for others, it was freedom, for some, a revolution was needed instead of steadily progress towards a better world.
There are, however, two figures who historically walk above and beyond all men of this historical moment: the first half of the XIX century, the period where most of the present contemporary world originates. These men were Immanuel Kant and Napoleon Bonaparte; as a man of his age, Auguste Comte was influenced by both of them, as mortals always are by the gods who bless and torment them. Both are to be looked at from the lenses of Auguste Comte, that means, to understand what he took from each: From Immanuel Kant, Comte took a problem, from Napoleon Bonaparte he took a model. Kant made Comte turn to sociology, Napoleon made him turn to conservatives.
Immanuel Kant wrote a relatively well known text: Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan perspective. 5 Auguste Comte was an engineer in a Napoleonic university: École polytechnique. While critical of Napoleon, he saw his dictatorial (in the roman sense, not in the XX century totalitarian sense, not directly that is) demeanor as a guide to scientific, positive and post-revolutionary politics (although disliking him because of “ideology”). Again, Comte “the conservative” is interesting because he will tell plenty about Comte the philosopher, of science. A great text, by the High Priest himself, is a sinfully neglected piece of his: Appeal to conservatives.
All great ideas, after this world was created, are a combination; man cannot make things from nothing, so he has to put two and two together, it is his genius. Comte combined Kant’s problem and Napoleon’s personal model. He took Kant’s (and others’) problem to ground in science the moral-philosophical Idea of Progress with his training as a Napoleonic engineer, and his practical mentality. In other words, Comte is asking how a sociologist can talk of progress, compared to Kant who in his view is a metaphysician, even if admittedly a weak one. From his Napoleonic outlook, Comte took the mentality of an engineer, not only technologically, but also spiritually, as a social type, he was always a polytechnician by vocation. These two considerations, in the wider context of inheriting the Enlightenment leads Comte to one very radical idea: Progress is sociologically scientific and technological progress.
Auguste Comte would, latter on, create a positive religion and delve upon how politics would be in a positive future, but first and foremost, he considered progress to be technological and scientific because of two reasons:
Progress has to be progress towards something.
Progress has to do, for all theoreticians as well as lay people, with man becoming human, that is, that the distinct attributes of man, intelligence and sociability he thought they were, are worked upon.
Science creates a common mindset by its discipline and its technological application creates industrial society, it can also be traced back to the origins of man, slowly over time, since dawn of civilization. What makes Auguste Comte understanding of progress different from “Whig history”, i.e., the belief that history is a steady advancement towards a better world, is that Comte is not making a moral claim but a sociological claim. Some disciples would bring this into a different philosophy: utilitarianism, which equates happiness with general utility (greater happiness for the greatest number). Comte, au contraire, had a moral philosophy, but for Comte, moral progress was first and foremost scientific progress.
Auguste Comte, in his great works, would develop a general history of progress, which, while open to criticism by historians and revisionism, is definitely accepted by a wide group of people as the standard reading of history, of science.
Putting the Sciences on a Progressive Scale
Basically, the historical, or “horizontal” development, as well as the dogmatic or “vertical” ascension went together. The oldest science was also the most basic science, and, as scientific progress advances, each new science becomes more complex, relating to phenomena which are richer, and more specific, treats a smaller bundle of phenomena. Anyone can see that the philosophers of sciences cited above, and the idea of soft science, can be squarely added to this scheme: Soft science is a different and more vulgar way of naming the more complex and specific, therefore, less experimental and defined, social science, the most modern science. In other word, Comte has two unique views of social science which is generally shared even by his contemporary detractors:6
The social sciences are the newest sciences.
The social sciences are more complex, because man is complex, and less general, because it relates to a more defined part of reality.
Therefore, one can conclude that Auguste Comte made the idea of progress leave philosophy to become a scientific idea, more specifically, a sociological idea, he is in that sense the father, or grandfather, of much “evolutionary” social science, as it is done today. He made it a scientific idea by rooting progress in the technological development across history, which also is the building block of scientific development. His views are, as all interesting philosophical claims, controversial, but, to make his case, one can say that the only historical explanation for the progress of natural science is its rooting in human technology, that agriculture, the need to cure the sick, taking care of animals and instruments such as telescopes, microscopes and, recently, the development of artificial intelligence and computers, are what makes progress not just a religious delusion, but a historical claim.7
Why Auguste Comte is wrong
At least as it relates to the social sciences.
Killing two birds with one stone is an economic exercise, it is evident that Auguste Comte makes the strongest case for why it makes sense to talk about “soft sciences” and “hard sciences”: he puts all these sciences on a historical scale of steady development; all these with an interdisciplinary and systematic understanding of religion, history, natural sciences, technology, culture, art… He is a thinker of first rate, up there with Hegel and Nietzsche, if he dies, it is another proof that gods can, in fact, be killed.
More importantly, it is the vast influence of Comte both among philosophers and layman that which originates the idea of “soft science”. There are of course other wider historical factors: Man lives in society and has a culture, the idea of “social physics” was made by people before and after Comte. Every time someone claims that a man, thinker or politician, is the first at something, everyone can use another example, and, to a certain extent, Comte would not have developed any of his ideas without a longer trajectory. But sometimes one has to put his gloves on and get synthetical, history is written by those who bother to write history, others could have, measuring the state of civilization and the true struggles of civilization, developed ideas that Comte understood to be ideas already acknowledged by most people. History is written by those who bother to write it: Comte bothered, his influence up to this day is like Karl Marx’s or Napoleon’s incommensurable, to try to falsify it is a mix of dull and irrelevant, ultimately, wrong.
The Life of Ideas Beyond the Grave: Comte’s Box
History is the life, not the logic of ideas. History knows of no “intellectual property,” the moment a idea is put into print it becomes anyone else’s idea and, more importantly, it lives on its own, somewhat. If Karl Marx or Jesus Christ would agree with people who today call themselves Christians or Communists can be disputed, ultimately, the only way to make sure your ideas are protected from third parties making use them, is to have loyal disciples: Christ had the Apostles, Marx had Engels. Auguste Comte, however, had nobody; Auguste Comte was left for dead, a ghost among men. People would take up his ideas, it has actually happened frequently, it happened in Britain with utilitarianism, it happened in Vienna with the new positivists, it happens today with people committed to “scientism” and “naturalism”, who might never name him, a ghost among men.
It is therefore, in cases such as Comte’s, much more difficult to trace the influence of his ideas, the best way to make intelligible Auguste Comte’s influence on the modern world is myth, not because of its poetic force mind you, but rather, because Auguste Comte is a bit of a contemporary myth (or a return of mythical and magical thinking if you are inclined to so call it).
You might have heard of the myth of Pandora’s Box, it is quite straightforward. The mortal Pandora, at the mercy of Zeus’s cunning, opens a box that God gave to her husband. She could not resist curiosity, Zeus’s cunning, so she opened the box. And then, out of it came all sorts of unspecified evils, to haunt mankind from that day onwards. Luckily, there was wisdom to be found at the bottom of the box, for out from it, after all the evils, came Hope. Out from it came Hope, so that mankind, from that day onward, from time to time, could look forward to something unspecified; when ghosts of evil came to haunt them.
Beautiful, maybe even scientific, because Comte himself actually has a Box, and of course, that box is “sociology,” social science as it is nowadays called. However, the ancient myth was twisted by the sociologist. To not make things repeat themselves, therefore, he first brought forth the hope of steady and increasing scientific progress, at the end of this long march, a final science of society. Man would be able to stir himself, live a orderly life, order and progress. At the bottom of the box, however, lay the twist, the small writing in the contract so to speak: Despair.
Ultimately, Auguste Comte asked of man a impossible task, he asked of the social sciences to do Sisyphus bidding, raising the rock up on the hill so that it could fall down. Again and again, great thinkers have taken the rock of sociology and brought it up to the top, be it Hegel’s hidden sociology behind his philosophy of law, be it John Dewey’s pedagogy, be it Karl Marx’s scientific socialism, be it that terrible book by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature.
It is an impossible task, because it rests on a erroneous historical narrative, and nothing hurts more than error, except for lies. It is an impossible task, because the social sciences have nothing to do with technology. There is nothing bad with technology, great wonder of man and pride of the West, but sociology cannot make progress, not the same way physics can. Comte might not have believed that sociology was just needed the application of naturalistic methods to history, like many now try to do, Ultimately, though, his ideas lead there, here we are. It hurts to say so, but from Auguste Comte to Steven Pinker there is a straight line, painfully drawn.
Conclusions: A Remnant of Hope?
Some things are best left open ended, historians are prudent when they have an open “ending”. The reason is simple: The historians might be finished writing his history, but history itself is not finished, it keeps on its long march. It is not that the future cannot be known, as many social sciences like to say. It is not that the future of History cannot be known, because there is no future to be known. The truth is, no one, except for God and he who he inspires, knows what will happen because it is still being decided. The future cannot be written, simply put, because someone still has to write it.
The idea of soft science is a mundane idea, a worldly idea, everyone is acquainted with it, most don’t think about it and intellectuals don’t think much about it. When looked at with understanding eyes, one can clearly see the mark of History upon such a simple and mundane idea.
Philosophers of language like to distinguish ordinary language and ideal language, from an actors point of view, the distinction is inexistent, at best, it is blurry. The idea of soft science is the sour taste left behind after two centuries of the social sciences not living up to expectations. When the student of sociology, anthropology, social psychology, linguistics, history, socio-biology or social philosophy looks at this word and grasps its meaning, he understands how despairing just the utterance of such a word is. Ordinarily, it reminds everyone of the minor tragedies of far fetched dreams.
Ultimately, only ideas can counter ideas, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words never will” is true, but ideas, beyond their necessary physiological utterance and response, do not need broken bones, or healthy ones; an idea needs nothing else but despaired or contented souls. What is needed: to understand that the social sciences find themselves in a historical and epistemological critical condition, the bones might be fixed, but they need an expedient doctor. To simply dismiss this as pessimism, believing that the social sciences simply need to abandon its pride, its false expectations and that will fix, is wrong. The social scientists are found to really like an identity of their own, even more so than philosophy, Westerners, Christians at the moment. Postmodernity is all about letting everyone tell their own story, not because it is important, but rather, because it is true, or at least truthful. In a similar manner, the fact that “history of science” means “history of natural science” says so much that no further comment is needed.
More importantly than another sociologist and economist indignant about the disrespect towards his discipline though, in a world that grows every day more specialized, to properly understand the historical moment we are living in, we need to understand the lens with which we look at it, the lens of science, social, natural, formal and philosophical. This is a scientific world, the social sciences are a loose piece of that world, which is hanging around. Make no mistake, such things as “Critical Theory”, “Intersectionality” or “Postmodernism” have much to do with the state of relativism, anarchism and nihilism the social sciences find themselves in.
Can something be learned from two centuries of failure after failure in economic prediction, sociological theory, anthropological adventuring and revolutionary despair? Among other things, that Descartes was right, not entirely right, but quite right, the rationalists at least got half of the picture right. Does it need to be said, well, here it goes: Man needs to be studied with methods according to his humanity, not as a part of the Universe, but as someone who partakes in the World. Simple ideas need simple statements, the thing with this idea, which is called methodological dualism, is that philosophers and social scientists need to stop talking of this idea and actually put it into practice. The world needs to change, and interpretations be true.
History is still to be written, what will be said about those who searched, and found the proper study, the true philosophy of man?
Useful Reading
Here are four useful books, all of them have influenced my understanding and reading of Auguste Comte. Anyone interested in finding them on the web, please, contact me.
A Discourse on the Positive Philosophy. Auguste Comte.
Comte After Positivism. Robert C. Sharff
The Counter-Revolution of Science. Friedrich Hayek
The Map and The Territory. Michel Houllebeq
From the editor:
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The terms humanities, social sciences or human sciences will be used interchangeably, and they are all the correct and formal term, while soft science is a colloquial and informal term. All these words mean the same things: The sciences that study man as such, rather than as part of nature, as an animal, an organism or a chunk of matter.
These various philosophers all have very distinct systems of philosophy. Generally speaking though, logical positivism can be classified, for simplicity’s sake, as empiricism: the view that all knowledge arrives from the senses and all claims are eithers propositions about contingent facts, that can be traced back to experience or self evident propositions or tautologies that add no knowledge about the world, philosophically, all knowledge amounts to synthetical a posteriori claims, the realms of the sciences, which are all natural in a broad sense, and analytical a priori claims, which are the claims of logic and math (all bachelors are married). Historicists and hermeneuticians consider a better model for the human sciences and any scientific or philosophical discipline to be a book, a piece of writing; they consider that culture, rather than nature, is were all knowledge comes from and, therefore, that all knowledge is relative to the sociocultural context. As one can see, ultimately, both empiricists/logical positivists and historicists/hermeneuticians are committed to both epistemological and ethical relativism. For more on this topic, Hans Hermann Hoppe’s work In Defense of Extreme Rationalism is a good place.
Christian philosophy is one of the most mischievous words that ever came to be, here, it is meant merely in a historical sense, as philosophy developed by men who were actively and consciously Christian. A much better word, used by Popes up to the XIX century officially, is Christian Wisdom, “Sapientia Christiana”. This is off topic.
Vulgar does not mean bad, all successful ideas become vulgar at some point, when it becomes accepted beyond a small circle and becomes a belief. Soft science, therefore, is not so much a philosophical idea as it is a common belief. Beliefs are not bad, the thing is, when they are mistaken, it is much harder to root them out. It is also dangerous when belief mascaraed themselves as scientific propositions, a common theme since the Enlightenment.
To be certain, Comte would not have considered Kant the great theoretician of progress, subjectively, Auguste Comte would have preferred to quote Condorcet. Again, Kant is in the DNA of contemporary philosophers, he is the origin of our species of intellectuals, so we will stick to him.
To be sure, Comte had some particular views that most, even his followers, would not share, for instance, he rejected both law and psychology as sciences, and did not distinguish as it is now common between anthropology and sociology, he had not much to say about economics. These particular views of his do not mean that most people agree with his general history of social science which, as it turns out, is also a belief without much historical nor epistemological rooting, after the rest of his system is left for the dustbin of memory lanes.
Up to this point, what Comte talks about could make the case for progress with a small p, not Progress with a capital P, the thing is, it is not the point of this piece to argue for or against progress. Even if it is true that there is continued and steady progress across the totality of history in the realm of the natural sciences, it is illegitimate to extrapolate this to the study of man, for better or for worse.
Also, on the point of scientific progress I will have to make reference to the German philosopher, no longer among us, Peter Janich, and more generally, the constructivist/culturalistic approach to science, both philosophically and historically. A good book of his is What is Information.
I think the hard and soft sciences can be distinguished by what the science is studying. Hard sciences studies physical realities, physical realties that would exist even if man had never existed. Soft sciences are about man, specifically, what and how we think.
Hard sciences endeavor to factor out man's biases and see reality as if omnipotent. Soft sciences endeavor to do the opposite, to make EVEYTHING about man and his world.
Reality works by the same unchangeable rules, consistent since the Big Bang. All we have to do is dig deeper in order to comprehend more. Soft sciences invent their own reality, changeable to whatever extent people care to change it. It does not progress, it morphs. Lately, the soft sciences have been getting us nowhere.