Idealism

Idealism is a philosophical position that underpins a great many epistemological stances in social science. All of these share a common view that reality is mind dependent or mind coordinated. Although idealism might be seen as contrary to realism, which postulates a mind-independent reality, idealist thought spans a range of positions. These positions do not reject outright the existence of an external reality; rather, they point to the limits of our knowledge of it.

Indeed, one of the most important idealist philosophers, Kant, held that the only way we can conceive of ourselves as mind-endowed beings is in the context of existing in a world of space and time (Körner, 1955, Chap. 4). What is important is that we can know phenomena only through mind-dependent perception of it, we cannot ever know the thing in itself, what he called noumena. Kant's transcendental idealism has been enormously influential both directly and indirectly, perhaps most importantly in the work of Max Weber. He shifted the issue of knowing away from the thing itself to a refinement of our instruments of knowing, specifically “ideal types.” Ideal types are not averages or the most desirable form of social phenomena, but ways in which an individual can reason from a shared rational faculty to a model or pure conceptual type that would exist if all agents acted perfectly rationally. Therefore, Weber's methodology depends crucially on rationality as the product of minds (Albrow, 1990).

Hegel's idealism is very different from Kant's. Kantian philosophy emphasizes the epistemological through a refinement of the instruments of knowing, whereas Hegel emphasizes the ontological through a development of our understanding of mind. Unlike Kant's noumena, Hegel believed mind (and minds as a universal category) could be known through a [Page 474]dialectical process of contradiction and resolution—ironically, a method most famously associated with Marx, a materialist and realist!

Most expressions of idealist social science are not obviously or directly traceable to Kant or Hegel, but simply begin from the premise that the social world consists of ideas, that it exists only because we think it exists, and we reproduce it on that basis. The means of that reproduction is considered to be language, and thus, idealism underpins the “linguistic turn” in social science. An important originator, at least in the Anglophone world, was Peter Winch (1958/1990), who argued that rule-following in social life consisted of linguistic practice and, because language is subject to variation (and shapes culture accordingly), then to know a culture, one must come to know the language of that culture. Winch's philosophy is an important constituent of ethnomethodology and, less directly, more recent postmodernist approaches.