Deductive Explanation in The Social Sciences

Abstract

In' the game of Eleusis, the dealer deals a pack of cards to the players and writes down a secret Rule of play. The players proffer a card in turn, which the dealer accepts or rejects according to his secret Rule. Accepted cards are added to a growing line and rejects are put aside face up. The players thus have an increasing stock of positive and negative evidence to aid them in testing hypotheses about the Rule and the game stops as soon as one player has finally had all his cards accepted. For reasons of the scoring, the dealer does well to pick a Rule which is economical, not too restrictive, unobvious but likely to be detected by a few of the players. (For instance the Rule 'Play red on black and black on red' would be economical and unrestrictive but too obvious.) The game is a sort of secular, tea-table echo of Kepler's conviction that science is thinking God's thoughts after Him. Eleusis is often presented as a cameo study in scientific method. The usual point of analogy is the presence of both hypotheticoand deductive elements and it is used to illustrate a sophisticated inductivism. On reflection, however, the analogy seems more pleasing to Kepler or Leibniz than to the Vienna Circle. The dealer watches his chosen word unfold by rational principles of internal self-development. The players overcome their 'confused perceptions' and 'inadequate ideas' by crediting the Dealer with having chosen the best possible Rule consistent with the phenomena and, ideally, by expressing the implications of this insight in a characteristica universalis. Eleusis cannot be played without assuming a Rule in nature designed to maximise some kind of rational satisfaction. As soon as the Dealer is thought of as a purposeless empirical nature, instead of as God the Mathemagician, and as soon as natural laws are treated in Positive spirit as merely the simplest summary of frequent concomitances in a repeating pattern, then the