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From: eric@snark.UUCP
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Interpretive social science [was `Modern Man']
Message-ID: <125@snark.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 16-Jun-87 12:44:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: snark.125
Posted: Tue Jun 16 12:44:33 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 18-Jun-87 04:22:02 EDT
References: <3568624e.44e6@apollo.uucp> <678@gargoyle.UChicago.EDU>
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Xref: utgpu talk.religion.misc:2949 sci.philosophy.tech:176
Summary: Failure of intellectual nerve considered harmful

> nelson_p@apollo.uucp:
> Following are some excerpts from the editors' introduction to
> *Interpretive Social Science: A Reader*, ed. by Paul Rabinow and
> William M. Sullivan (U. Calif. Press, 1979).

If this is representative of 'advanced' thinking in the social sciences,
they are in even worse shape than I thought. The quoted portion contains
enough straw men, self-serving special pleadings and excuses for poor
methodology and sloppy thinking to gag a whale.
 
> As long as there has been a social science, the expectation has been
> that it would turn from its humanistic infancy to the maturity of
> hard science, thereby leaving behind its dependence on value,
> judgment, and individual insight.

The contrast being set up here is a false one (though many humanists are
fond of it, I know). Tell me that a theoretical physicist doesn't rely on
'value, judgment, and individual insight' in formulating theory and
designing experiments. What's really happening here is that the authors are
attempting to devalue 'hard science' by falsely identifying it with the
soulless execution of mechanical formulae, and inviting the reader to join
them in feeling 'humanistically' superior. It's an old scam.

>  The dream of modern Western man to
> be freed from his passions, his unconscious, his history, and his
> traditions through the liberating use of reason has been the deepest
> theme of contemporary social science thought.  Perhaps the deepest
> theme of the twentieth century, however, has been the shattering of
> the triumphalist view of history bequeathed to us by the nineteenth.
> What Comte saw as the inevitable achievement of man, positive reason,
> [Max] Weber saw as an iron cage [see the conclusion of Weber's *The
> Protestant Ethic* -- RC].

This is a masterpiece -- three individually plausible statements juxtaposed
in such a way as to suggest a falsehood. They confuse three separate issues.
The conjunction of the first two attempts to seduce the reader into
interpreting changes in historiography and social psychology as a refutation
of the epistemic program of hard science. The third is just a quote of a
value judgement by an 'authority'. The effect of the whole is to plant a
claim in the reader's mind that it's *good* to abandon the intentions of
science without making the bald assertion.

> The aim of this anthology is to present to a wide audience --
> historians, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians
> of religion, scientists, and philosophers -- a carefully selected
> group of papers exemplary of the interpretive or hermeneutic approach
> to the study of human society.
> 
> These readings address major theoretical issues by situating the
> approach critically against positivist, structuralist, and
> neo-Marxist positions. ...

In other words, we've given up on mundanities like 'predictive value' and
'repeatability' for debates after the manner of scholastic theologicians
(they even use the word 'hermeneutics!) -- and we've 'carefully selected'
these papers to demonstrate that this is a Good Thing and that it makes us
*better* (i.e more worthy of tenure and big audiences at cocktail parties)
than the nasty physicists and chemists and biologists.

I wish I thought this was an *intentional* sick joke.

> DECONSTRUCTION
> Interpreting the Crisis in the Social Sciences
> 
> Many contemporary searchers in the social sciences continue to see
> themselves, as did their predecessors, as the heralds of the new age
> of an at last established science.  They remain, like their
> predecessors, disappointed.
> 
> The strength of natural science, according to Thomas Kuhn, has lain
> in its ability to go beyond endless methodological discussions by
> developing general shared paradigms which define problems and
> procedures.  Social scientists have seized upon Kuhn's thesis in part
> as a way of explaining the embarrassing failure of any of the social
> sciences, including linguistics and economics, to develop either the
> agreement on method or the generally acknowledged classic examples of
> explanation characteristic of the natural sciences.

While I agree with the general thrust of this paragraph, I think
linguistics and economics make poor examples to put next to Kuhn's thesis.
In both areas, there are in fact very promising candidate paradigms which
have been semi-suppressed on behalf of a ruling orthodoxy for essentially
political reasons.

> While not
> denying the persistence and theoretical fruitfulness of certain
> explanatory schemes in the social sciences, social investigators have
> never reached the extraordinary degree of basic agreement that
> characterizes modern natural science.

> [paraphrase of Kuhn's description of paradigmatic science omitted]
>
> This much of Kuhn's argument might be construed to buttress the
> defenses of social sciences waiting to ``take off'' into a paradigm
> stage of science.  Behaviorism, structural-functionalism, various
> schools of materialism, Keynesianism, structuralism, and others have
> all put themselves forward at some time as paradigm candidates.  If
> none has yet succeeded in silencing its opponents with Newtonian
> authority, perhaps a few more studies, or theories, or methodological
> battles and our paradigms will emerge, at last triumphant.  

Yes. Learning about the world takes *time* and *effort*. For cripes
sakes, most of the soft sciences are less than 150 years old! Whaddya
want, instant gratification? ;-)

> However,
> even if we admit this as a possibility -- and we shall show shortly
> that there are compelling reasons for *not* admitting it

Of course you will. Your establishment has fucked up so badly that you
*need* to believe there's something wrong with the aims of science.

> -- Kuhn's
> account of scientific development concludes on a disquieting note.
> He shows that in the history of science even after the breakthrough
> into the paradigm stage occurs, the stability achieved is only a
> relative one.  The great paradigms of natural science have all, after
> flourishing, finally been replaced by others.

In other words, if we can't have a single paradigm that explains things
for all time, paradigm hunting isn't good enough for us. Notice again
the similarity to theologicians?

> The epochal case is
> the revolution in twentieth-century physics in which relativity
> theory and quantum mechanics undermined and succeeded the Newtonian
> system.  From that point on, in physics the nineteenth century's
> conception of logical, cumulative progress through a purely objective
> science of observation and deductive explanation has been
> progressively undermined.

Ah yes, now we invoke the twentieth century's sovereign justification
for sloppy thinking -- quantum mechanics. If God plays dice with the
Universe, mundane old scientific method is just no good any more (goes
this brand of cop-out). Oh yeah? Tell that to my desktop computer. Tell
it to the people who are living on genengineered insulin. Tell it to
the plaque on the Mare Tranquilitatis.

> Yet the issue for the human sciences is not simply that all
> scientific facts depend on a context of theory, nor that no logic of
> inquiry can be formulated to match the rigor of the procedures of
> scientific verification.  The Kantian critical philosophy already
> emphasized the relations between the objects of observation and the
> subject of knowledge.  For Kant and his followers the universal and
> objective validity of proven hypotheses is guaranteed precisely
> because the subject constituting the fields of objects is a universal
> and purely formal one.  The explanatory power of science is the
> consequence of its basis in a logical, epistemic subject whose
> activities can be generalized and understood as context-free
> operations.

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY FALSE!! The explanatory power of science is a
consequence of the self-correction inherent in its *methods*. Would
the authors claim that (say) the biochemical behavior of a cell in vivo
is 'context free'?

> However, for comprehending the human world Kant
> acknowledged the necessity of a ``practical anthropology'' focusing
> on a subject not reducible to the pure theoretical subject of the
> *Critique of Pure Reason*.  This subject knows himself through
> reflection upon his own actions in the world as a subject not simply
> of experience but of intentional action as well.  While the
> interpretive approach [expounded here] is not in any strict sense
> Kantian, it shares the postulate that practical understanding in
> context cannot be reduced to a system of categories defined only in
> terms of their relations to each other.

What a straw man. No science is or is about 'a system of categories defined
only in terms of their relations to each other' -- only pure mathematics
fits this description. Science is about systems of categories defined in
terms of their relationship to *observation* -- it's *grounded* in
something. Science is predictive.

> To put forward an approach to the human sciences as a paradigm
> candidate requires that one accept the analogy to natural science
> according to which human actions can be fixed in their meaning by
> being subsumed under the law like operations of the epistemic
> subject.  

I'm not sure that last sentence even makes sense.

> Gregory Bateson's recent attempt to apply models from
> systems theory to the problems of the relations of mind to society,
> and Jean Piaget's development of the structuralist project, represent
> significant advances over what Piaget terms the atomistic empiricism
> of causal explanation in social science.  For both the key focus is
> upon holism, for which Bateson uses the metaphor of ecology.

Good, we've invoked another sacred buzzword -- holism.

> Holistic explanation in these new forms seeks to organize a wide
> variety of human phenomena that cannot be comprehended through models
> based upon linear relations among elements.

A bit of a straw man again here. It's only in the social sciences
themselves that model-builders habitually make linearity assumptions.
Hard scientists have to learn real mathematics, so they get used to
things like nonlinearity and the importance of initial conditions.

> The emphasis on mutually
> determining relationships is the powerful central insight of
> cybernetic and structuralist thinking.

Yes indeed. And those schools are clearly the soft sciences' best shots at
a Kuhnian paradigm...

> However, it is crucial that
> these relations are conceived as reducible to specific operations
> that can be defined without reference to the particular context of
> human action.

Nonsense. What is 'the context of human action' here? Is it somehow
less scrutable than the 'context' of a cell in vivo? or of a molecule
of an intermediate in a complex autocatalytic chemical reaction?

What we have here is a disguised form of special pleading. The authors
are appealing to the reader's vanity as a human being to support an
unstated premise that human behavior is somehow intrinsically more
opaque to analysis than the emergent systems phenomena successfully
studied by hard science. There are principled defenses of such a position
(Searle's 'intrinsic causal powers' case etc) but these clowns never reach
a level of rigor that would make such a discussion meaningful.

> Although this position is an advance in
> sophistication, it remains an effort to integrate the sciences of man
> within a natural scientific paradigm.

Can't have that, can we? We might have to find *honest work*...

> Action in the historical,
> cultural context is again reduced to the operations of a purely
> epistemic subject.  The Kantian criticism of this effort remains
> unsurpassed or at least unrefuted in that the problem of the
> concrete, practical subject remains unresolved.

This is pure blather. The Kantian criticism was ill-formed to
begin with.

> Now the time seems ripe, even overdue, to announce that there is not
> going to be an age of paradigm in the social sciences.  

Uh huh. Time to announce a divine revelation to the unwashed masses...

> We contend
> that the failure to achieve paradigm takeoff is not merely the result
> of methodological immaturity, but reflects something fundamental
> about the human world.  If we are correct, the crisis of social
> science concerns the nature of social investigation itself.  The
> conception of the human sciences as somehow necessarily destined to
> follow the path of the modern investigation of nature is at the root
> of this crisis.

More likely, the crisis of social science concerns the nature of social
investigators themelves -- if this excerpt is any guide.

> Preoccupation with that ruling expectation is
> chronic in social science; that *idee fixe* has often driven
> investigators away from a serious concern with the human world into
> the sterility of purely formal argument and debate.  As in
> development theory, one can only wait so long for the takeoff.  The
> cargo-cult view of the ``about to arrive science'' just won't do.

Instead, we'll have the sterility of purely formal argument and debate
on hermeneutics and whose school of 'interpretation' is in this week.

> [obligatory piety about holism and complex webs of relationships omitted]
>
>  All this is by no means to exalt ``subjective''
> awareness over a presumed detached scientific objectivity, in the
> manner of nineteenth-century Romanticism.  Quite the contrary, the
> interpretive approach denies and overcomes the almost de rigueur
> opposition of subjectivity and objectivity.

How very well-intentioned. But by renouncing the physical-science
aim of predictivity as a goal, you sever yourself from any objective,
operational check on the validity of your interpretations.

> [more pieties about holism deleted]
>
> [P. Rabinow and W. M. Sullivan]
> ________________
> 
> I may or may not post further excerpts from the book later on.
> 
> Richard Carnes

Please don't!

-- 
      Eric S. Raymond
      UUCP:  {{seismo,ihnp4,rutgers}!cbmvax,sdcrdcf!burdvax}!snark!eric
      Post:  22 South Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355
      Phone: (215)-296-5718
-- 
      Eric S. Raymond
      UUCP:  {{seismo,ihnp4,rutgers}!cbmvax,sdcrdcf!burdvax}!snark!eric
      Post:  22 South Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355
      Phone: (215)-296-5718