Sustaining a philosophy research community

The European Network for Philosophy of Social Science (ENPOSS) completed its annual conference in Krakow last week. It was a stimulating and productive success, with scholars from many countries and at every level of seniority. ENPOSS is one of the most dynamic networks where genuinely excellent work in philosophy of social science is taking place (link). Philosophers from Germany, Poland, Norway, Spain, France, the Netherlands, the UK, and other countries came together for three intensive days of panels and discussions. The discussions made it clear that this is an integrated research community with a common understanding of a number of research problems and a common vocabulary. There is a sense of continuing progress on key issues -- micro-macro ontology, social mechanisms, naturalism, intentionality, institutional imperatives, fact-value issues, computational social science, and intersections of disciplinary perspectives, to name several.

Particular highlights were keynote addresses by Dan Hausman ("Social scientific naturalism revisited"), Anne Alexandrova ("Are social scientists experts on values?"), and Bartosz Brozek ("The architecture of the legal mind"). There were also lively book discussions on several current books in the philosophy of social science -- Chris Mantzavinos's Explanatory Pluralism, Lukasz Hardt's Economics Without Laws: Towards a New Philosophy of Economics, and my own New Directions in the Philosophy of Social Science. Thanks to Eleonora Montuschi, Gianluca Manzo, and Federica Russo for excellent and stimulating discussion of my book.

It is interesting to observe that the supposed divide between analytic and Continental philosophy is not in evidence in this network of scholars. These are philosophers whose Ph.D. training took place all over Europe -- Italy, Belgium, Finland, Germany, France, Spain, the UK ... They are European philosophers. But their philosophical ideas do not fall within the stereotyped boundaries of "Continental philosophy." The philosophical vocabulary in evidence is familiar from analytic philosophy. At the same time, this is not simply an extension of Anglo-American philosophy. The style of reasoning and analysis is not narrowly restricted to the paradigms reflected by Russell, Dummett, or Parfit. It is, perhaps, a new style of European philosophy. There is a broad commitment to engaging with the logic and content of particular social sciences at a level that would also make sense to the practitioners of sociology, political science, or economics. And there is a striking breadth to the substantive problems of social life that these philosophers are attempting to better understand. The overall impression is of a research community that has the features of what Imre Lakatos referred to as a "progressive research programme" in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge -- one in which problems are being addressed and treated in ways that sheds genuinely new light on the problem. Progress is taking place.

There were two large topic areas that perhaps surprisingly did not find expression in the ENPOSS program. One is the field of critical realism and the ideas about social explanation advanced by Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer. And the second is the theory of assemblages put forward by Deleuze and subsequently elaborated by DeLanda and Latour. These topic areas have drawn a fair amount of attention by social theorists and philosophers in other parts of the philosophy of social science research community. So it is interesting to realize that they were largely invisible in Krakow. This leads one to think that this particular network of scholars is simply not very much influenced by these ideas.

Part of the dynamism of the ENPOSS conference, both in Krakow and in prior years, is the broad sense that these issues matter a great deal. There was a sense of the underlying importance of the philosophy of social science. Participants seem to share the idea that the processes of social change and periodic crisis that we face in the contemporary world are both novel and potentially harmful to human flourishing, and that the social sciences need to develop better methods, ontologies, and theories if they are to help us to understand and improve the social world in which we live. So the philosophy of social science is not just a contribution to a minor area within the grand discipline of philosophy; more importantly, it is a substantial and valuable contribution to our collective ability to bring a scientific perspective to social problems and social progress.

Next year's meeting will take place in early September at the University of Hannover and will be a joint meeting with the US-based Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable. The call for papers will be posted on the ENPOSS website.