Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again
Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781316099032 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/15/2001 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 686 KB |
Read an Excerpt
THE SCIENCE WARS: A WAY OUT
“Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is
truth.”
Aristotle
PHYSICS ENVY AND PRE-KANTIAN SHAMANS
When the May 1996 issue of the journal Social Text appeared, an issue
devoted to the understanding of “Science Wars,” the editors became targets in
these “Wars” in ways they had not imagined. The issue included a bogus article
by New York University mathematical physicist Alan Sokal, who feigned an earnest
reflection on the political and philosophical implications of recent physics
research for cultural studies.
Sokal revealed the hoax himself, and it immediately became a hotly
debated issue in academic and popular media around the world. The appearance of the article was not
only taken as a sign of shoddy scholarship by the Social Text editors but as an
exposé of cultural studies and social science in general. For instance, Nobel
prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg used the hoax to identify what he calls
a fundamental “opposition” between natural and social scientists, especially
regarding what Weinberg sees as dangerous anti-rationalism and relativism in
social science and cultural studies. Those on the other side of the “Wars”
countered by criticizing Sokal and calling Weinberg and like-minded natural
scientists for “pre-Kantian shaman[s]” repeating the “mantras of particle
physicists,” with their “reductionist view of
science.”
The year before Sokal’s hoax, the “Wars” had raged over the
scientific status of a high-profile U.S. National Opinion Research Center study,
which had been launched as a “definitive survey” of sexual practices in the
United States. Here, too, doubts
were raised not only about the status of scholarship of the study in question,
but of sociology and social science as such. The study had received the doubtful
honor of becoming the topic of an editorial in The Economist under the heading
“74.6% of Sociology is Bunk.” In
The New York Review of Books, Harvard biologist and statistician R. C. Lewontin
criticized the researchers behind the study for believing what people said when
filling in the survey-questionnaires on which the study builds. “It is
frightening,” Lewontin wrote, “to think that social science is in the hands of
professionals who are so deaf to human nuance that they believe that people do
not lie to themselves [and to others] about the most freighted aspects of their
own lives.” Lewontin concluded his
review by warning social scientists that in pretending to a kind of knowledge
that it cannot achieve, “social science can only engender the scorn of natural
scientists.” Other social science
critics participating in the debate talked of “dumbed-down” sociology and social
scientists’ “physics envy.” The
authors of the NORC study responded in kind by calling Lewontin’s review
“professionally incompetent” and motivated by an “evident animus against the
social sciences in general.” The
authors also observed that the notion that an economist or a sociologist should
review work in population genetics, one of Lewontin’s fields of competence,
“would probably be greeted with derision.”
While one might well agree with the latter point, the author’s use of
name-calling instead of substantive arguments in their attempt to refute
Lewontin’s criticism, leaves us wondering, not about the validity of this
criticism, but about what it is regarding natural and social science that makes
it fairly common practice for natural scientists to review social science,
whereas the opposite is less common.
GOOD OR BAD?
However entertaining for bystanders, the mudslinging of the Science
Wars is unproductive. The Wars undoubtedly serve political and ideological
purposes in the competition for research funds and in defining what Charles
Lindblom and Michel Foucault have called society’s “truth politics.” Judged by intellectual standards,
however, the Science Wars are misguided. In this book, I will present a way out
of the Wars by developing a conception of social science based on a contemporary
interpretation of the Aristotelian concept of phronesis, variously translated as
prudence or practical wisdom. In Aristotle’s words phronesis is a “true state,
reasoned, and capable of action with regard to things that are good or bad for
man.” Phronesis goes beyond both
analytical, scientific knowledge (episteme) and technical knowledge or know-how
(techne) and involves judgments and decisions made in the manner of a virtuoso
social and political actor. I will argue that phronesis is commonly involved in
social practice, and that therefore attempts to reduce social science and theory
either to episteme or techne, or to comprehend them in those terms, are
misguided.
By introducing phronesis into the discussion of what social science
is and can be, we will see that Lewontin and others are right, albeit perhaps
not for the reasons they believe, when they say that social science has set
itself an impossible task when it attempts to emulate natural science and
produce explanatory and predictive, that is, epistemic, theory. We will also
see, however, that this conclusion does not imply the oft-seen image of impotent
social sciences versus potent natural sciences, which is at the core of the
Science Wars. This image derives from the fact that both types of science tend
to be compared in terms of their epistemic qualities. This book will argue that
such a comparison is misleading. The two types of science have their respective
strengths and weaknesses along fundamentally different dimensions, a point,
which Aristotle demonstrated but which has since been forgotten. At present,
social science is locked in a fight it cannot hope to win, because it has
accepted to fight on terms that are self-defeating. We will see that in their
role as phronesis, the social sciences are strongest where the natural sciences
are weakest: Just as the social sciences have not contributed much to
explanatory and predictive theory, neither have the natural sciences contributed
to the reflexive analysis and discussion of values and interests, which is the
prerequisite for an enlightened political, economic, and cultural development in
any society, and which is at the core of phronesis. This should also be the core
of social science if we want to transcend the current malaise of the Science
Wars.
VIRTUE LOST
Aristotle, the philosopher of phronesis par excellence, never
elaborated his conception of phronesis to include explicit considerations of
power. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s authoritative and contemporary conception of
phronesis also overlooks issues of power.
Yet as Richard Bernstein points out, if we are to think about what can be
done to the problems and risks of our time, we must advance from the original
conception of phronesis to one explicitly including power. Unfortunately, Bernstein himself has not
integrated his work on phronesis with issues of power. Nor, to my knowledge, has
anyone else. I will argue that in
modern society, conflict and power are phenomena constitutive of social and
political inquiry. And I will develop the classic concept of phronesis to
include issues of power.
Aristotle, in arguing that natural and social science are and should
be different ventures, discusses the three intellectual virtues, episteme,
techne, and phronesis. Whereas episteme is found in the modern words
“epistemology” and “epistemic,” and techne in “technology” and “technical,” it
is indicative of the degree to which thinking in the social sciences has allowed
itself to be colonized by natural and technical science that we today do not
even have a word for the one intellectual virtue, phronesis, which Aristotle saw
not only as the necessary basis for social and political inquiry, but as the
most important of the intellectual virtues. Phronesis is most important because
it is that activity by which instrumental rationality is balanced by
value-rationality, and because such balancing is crucial to the sustained
happiness of the citizens in any society, according to Aristotle. In what
follows we will redress the imbalance between the intellectual virtues by
submitting the concept of phronesis to a current reinterpretation in terms of
the needs of contemporary social science. The goal is to help restore social
science to its classical position as a practical, intellectual activity aimed at
clarifying the problems, risks, and possibilities we face as humans and
societies, and at contributing to social and political
praxis.
A
BRIEF OVERVIEW
Based on a critique of cognitivism and naturalism, Part One of the
book shows why social science never has been, and probably never will be, able
to develop the type of explanatory and predictive theory that is the ideal and
hallmark of natural science. Chapter 2 demonstrates that context and judgment
are irreducibly central to understanding human action. On this basis, following
works by Hubert Dreyfus, Pierre Bourdieu, and Harold Garfinkel, Chapters 3 and 4
explore the question of whether a theory of context and judgment is possible.
The answer to this question is negative and the conclusion is that social
science emulation of natural science is a cul-de-sac; mainstream social theory
and social science methodology stand in need of
reorientation.
Part Two is an attempt at such a reorientation based on phronesis.
Chapter 5 introduces Aristotle’s
original thoughts on the subject and explores the relationship between phronesis
and social science. The following chapters then develop the concept of phronesis
on three fronts to make for a more contemporary interpretation. First, Chapter 6
takes its point of departure in Aristotle’s insight that case knowledge is
crucial to the practice of phronesis; on this basis the chapter clarifies the
status and uses of case studies in social science. Second, based on works by Michel
Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Friedrich Nietzsche, Chapters 7 and 8 elaborate
the classical conception of phronesis to include considerations on power, thus
expanding the classical concept from one of values to one of values and power.
Third, Chapter 9 further refines the approach by developing a set of
methodological guidelines for doing what I call “phronetic social science.”
Chapter 10 contains illustrations and examples of such an approach, while
Chapter 11 sums up the perspective of the book.
My aims with this book are simply to call attention to a central problem in the social sciences and to outline a possible answer. I see the problem—the fact that the social sciences have not had the type of theoretical and methodological success that the natural sciences have—as fairly well-defined and well-documented. The answer, however, seems less clear, and I do not think there is a single answer. My own attempt at an answer—phronetic social science—should be considered only one attempt among many possible. It should also be seen as only a first approximation that will undoubtedly need further theoretical and methodological refinement, just as it will need to be developed through further practical employment in social science research. Despite such qualifications, I hope the reader will agree that given what is at stake—social sciences that can hold their own in the Science Wars, in the academic community, and in society at large—the attempt at reforming these sciences is worth making.