This blog is written by someone who calls himself a “social scientist”, hinting at a well-known condition of “penis envy” vis-à-vis the traditional sciences – witness the penetration of economics and political science in particular by mathematical modelling in the last 70 years.
A few months back, I had a strange post which used Stephen Pinker’s latest book Rationality – what it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters as an excuse first for some reminiscences on how the post-war priority given by American social scientists to the issue of “decision-making” had influenced the direction my life subsequently took; and then for some extensive notes on reading I had just come across on the role the American military had played in the development of post-war social science in that country whose culture (let alone military) had such power and authority
I felt I needed to return to the post – partly because I had left Pinker hanging but mainly because the notes were precisely that; inconclusive extracts from reading which didn’t lead anywhere. But the musings of the past few days are taking me into very complicated fields about human knowledge and “scientific proof” and I’m getting utterly lost…When I get blocked in this way, I’ve found a good technique is to pull back and attempt a simple description of each element. As I do so, I suddenly see the way to make connections….
So, on the basis that I
don’t know where this train of thought is leading me, let me try to extract
some messages from the reading that post flagged up.
I took an Honours degree in “Economics and Politics” in 1964 at the University of Glasgow In those days there was no pretence of scientific status – after all, Adam Smith had been a Professor at the University in the 18th Century; but in Moral Philosophy! And there was certainly nothing scientific about my course – the economics stream gave us no sense of basic methodologies – just statements that simplifying assumptions about human nature were being made which would be relaxed at a later stage. They never were. Nor did we deal with the subject of how understanding and knowledge developed – let alone the controversies around such issues. My one glimpse of that field was in the politics stream when we got a couple of lectures about Karl Mannheim’s Sociology of Knowledge. But that didn’t stop me from using my status as an economics lecturer to intimidate others – changing my focus to public administration proved to be no hindrance as public management became flavour of the month in the 90s when I moved into international consultancy.
I had been aware of the controversy surrounding the delivery in 1959 by CP Snow of the famous lecture which critiqued the UK for its Two Cultures which Snow updated in a booklet he produced a few years later. CP Snow was an interesting character – a chemist from a modest background who was also a novelist, he had been a Civil Service Commissioner from 1945-1960 and in charge of the recruitment of scientists. So not exactly a “hard” scientist – but he had that reputation. His lecture opened a can of worms – with its analysis of how the world of gentlemen amateurs had held scientists down in a second-class position – and helped spawn the field of declinism which I remember vividly from the 1960s and which still haunts the country today.
By far and away the best treatment of the significance of the Two Cultures debate is the one contained in the booklet issued in 1998 which contains the update Snow wrote in 1961 as well as an extensive introduction by Stefan Collini which superbly analyses the implications and consequences of the debate for our contemporary understanding of claims to scientific standing…Collini is probably Britain’s best intellectual historian who gave us recently a great collection of essays Common Writing
In practice, it is clear that we still find it convenient to go on using terms like 'the humanities' and 'the sciences', and for most purposes we roughly know what we mean by them. But this conventional usage is not now underpinned by any agreed definitional criteria - it has become a matter of lively debate whether we should even be trying to identify any one method of enquiry or one range of subject matter or one professional or cultural ethos as distinguishing 'science' from 'non-science'. There is, of course, a rich and illuminating history of attempts to establish the basis for such a distinction, attempts which flourished with particular abundance once the nineteenth century had endowed the category of science with the prestige and burden of being the only provider of reliable, objective knowledge. Philosophers such as Wilhelm Dilthey in the late-nineteenth century or Karl Popper in the mid-twentieth endeavoured to draft the relevant conceptual legislation, stipulating the general properties needing to be possessed by a form of knowledge or mode of enquiry never commanded general assent, least of all among other philosophers of science. The activities conventionally referred to as 'the sciences' do not, it is argued, all proceed by experimental methods, do not all cast their findings in quantifiable form, do not all pursue falsification, do not all work on 'nature' rather than human beings; nor are they alone in seeking to produce general laws, replicable results, and cumulative knowledge.
…..The very nature of the revolutionary work in theoretical physics, astronomy, and cosmology has helped to challenge the model of scientific thinking which represented it as proceeding by a combination of rigorous deduction and controlled inferences from
empirical observation. The role of imagination, of metaphor and analogy, of category-transforming speculation and off-beat intuitions has come to the fore much more (some would argue that these had always had their place in the actual processes of scientific
discovery, whatever the prevailing account of 'scientific method'), As a result, more now tends to be heard about the similarity rather than the difference of mental operations across the science/humanities divide, even though some of the similarities, it must be said, seem to be of a rather strained or at best analogical kind.
In other words, things are in a state of flux. Old certainties have vanished – under the influences of new discoveries and the multiple perspectives of postmodernity. Positivism indeed has become a term of abuse. I had wanted to refer my readers to a short, clearly written piece on the issue but the author I had in mind Alan Ryan seems to have written only The Philosophy of the social sciences which is more than 50 years old. In its stead, I offer another book but as clearly written as the subject permits - Philosophy and Public Administration (2020) which helps explain the importance in our search for understanding of such things as epistemology and ontology
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