Social Science Nixed. Social What Left?

August 15th, 2007 Posted in Method, Social Science?

Sociology is not a science. A huge disappointment. A forest of mysteries were to have been felled by this method. During its peak popularly, with the support and good will of the people, it had been an expanding balloon of grants, awards, stipends and official acclaim.

Lead by persons of genius, ranks of theorists and technicians busily at work expecting significant breakthroughs momentarily. And then the slow deflation, signaled for me by the radical critique accompanying the Vietnam imbroglio of the early 1970s.

The universities and the established social scientists were accused of bias in their works–of projecting political and economic programs based on patriotism, and on economic self-interest, and on a narrowness of purpose and attention. Results in theory and research slanted toward the expectations of powerful clients. The critique emphasized willfulness and intention and suggested that errors of fact and concept could be corrected, that a scientific sociology was possible for those who cleaved to objectivity, value neutrality, empirical fact based only on the human senses.

But the disability was beyond will and desire. It was embedded in the qualities of the field itself. The whole socio-economic spectrum of sociologists were delusional in their claims of objectivity. The slants and gaps we can not see or sense set the ultimate limits.

1. The unconscious energetic, the animal drive of life, transformed and hidden in conventional language, thought of as a psychological defense. One does not see the aggression or the passivity or the projection or the inhibition, yet it is present and operational, a transference, a bias. A scientist can not correct what he does not know about himself.

2. The scientist like everyone else has a place in the pattern of his society or group. His fit within the economic, political and prestige order contributes to the quality and arc of his life. Like a geographic location this social spot governs what he can see and experience. This is another limit on perception. Even from the highest hilltop certain areas are blocked from view–depression and defilade, vegetation and housing, people camouflaged in the landscape. One never sees all, some things remain hidden.

3. Another human quality, the participation in a cultural consensus, a universal fate, surfaces as language, religion, ideology, and describes certain facts as universally true when they are not and vice-versa. Until challenged these continue as built-in biases. They cover all social sectors. Contentious gender and ethnic and class perceptions and definitions are obvious here. A mountain of consensus, social stereotypes, superstitions. myths. These kinds of built-in specialized fact continue unseen by all who participate until forcefully critiqued, and some even continue after. They set a biased social realty

4. Most critical, the distinction of the observer from the observed, which is a central requirement of the hard scientific method, is impossible in sociology. The social field contains persons of the same species as the observer. They have all of his capacities of sensing and acting. The observing of the one by the other is reciprocated. This means that the observer and the observed are within a mutually adjusting interactive sequence. The observer scientist is always drawn into the field and is implicated and self-interested in the process–he always loses his objectivity, becomes one of the gang.

Further the insider is as capable of an independent act as the scientist. He can move the field and break its pattern. This quality makes the application of the scientific method impossible.

5. Men (including all scientists) have a moral sense that sets limits and directions (however imperfectly) to their actions. Even if all the arguments above fail this one will continue on. This attitude varies among men but it has some probability of governing and to that extent negates the working of a pure hard science.

6. The positivist perspective with its emphasis on the here and now misses the ignored, rejected, repressed. The difference represents a choice, a decision, a contradiction that is not attended. In practice a huge bias.

7. Then there is the bias of the easy way. Select the more comfortable issue and avoid the hassle and confusion and contention of the hot button. The image of the three monkeys–hear, see, and speak no evil.

I am not arguing for evil, only showing that the notion of evil and our responses to it will be a bias and an error under the regime of scientific objectivity.

In general we do not have to correct these unconscious inclinations or limited visions or untested assumptions or distracted attentions. We only have to point out that they exist and that we are all likely to fall into them even when we try to be scrupulous social scientists.

Take the case of the anthropologist researcher at a cannibal feast–the victim in the pot, the fire lit. Does the scientist intervene? If he does, he imposes himself into the field of action and loses his objective observer status. If he doesn’t he is abetting a crime and acting against his own deeply grained moral self. Suppose the cannibal host places the interviewer in the pot? The dilemma becomes a really serious fall into participation where whatever the scientist does he will be wrong.

Convinced? Listen. Sociology and associated studies have been down the toilet and up the creek since the close of the Vietnam era. Grants and stipends reduced or ended. Geniuses moved down to Wall Street. For teachers, nothing left but where we were in the old days of pious rote recitations–now political-economic indoctrination. I imagine that some even continue to teach the old scientific sociology, a moment of nostalgia for their students but something like teaching swimming in the Gobi Desert. It’s hardly worth jumping off your pony.

We have to recognize that taking this first step of admitting the misappropriation of hard science for sociology is in itself a scientific act You are immediately on more solid ground. We want to save as much of the scientific way as we can; we don’t want to go on to doggerel and brain washing and spin. We still want to make the ordinary sociology sharp and sophisticated. We have to accept and understand the limit, and we need to consciously construct an appropriate new method.

Can there be another proximate-objective way? Can we salvage and perhaps reconstitute the grand sociological project? Replace the mirage with a real oasis?