WHAT's WRONG with the SOCIAL SCIENCES? the Perils of the Postmodern
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WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE SOCIAL SCIENCES? The Perils of the Postmodern Michael A. Faia College of William & Mary 1993 For Caitlin, Josephine, Gusty, and Pancho Et si je connais, moi, une fleur unique au monde, qui n'existe nulle part, sauf dans ma planète, et qu'un petit mouton peut anéantir d'un seul coup, comme ça, un matin, sans se rendre compte de ce qu'il fait, ce n'est pas important ça! —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry iii Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE SOCIAL SCIENCES? 1 (1) The dialectics of disenchantment 2 (1.1) Predictability, vulcanology, seismology, and (especially) meteorology 6 (1.2) Molecular mysteries and habits of the quark 8 (1.3) Rosaldo revisited: How would the catcher in the rye have felt? 12 (2) The trouble with feminist theory 13 (3) Titles and tribulations 17 (4) Solicitous gatekeepers, #1 25 (5) Itching and scratching: a Lazarsfeldian digression through an SPSS 27 hologram (6) Transcending the transcendentalists 30 (7) What do you presuppose, and when did you presuppose it? The Sisyphus of the social sciences 33 (8) The meaning of politics and the politics of meaning 38 Chapter 2: MICHEL FOUCAULT, MACHINES WHO THINK, AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES 57 (1) “Man the machine—man the impersonal engine” 57 (2) Good, bad, or ugly? 67 (3) Mitigating circumstances 70 iv (4) In conclusion: Oodles of Boodles 74 (5) Why Foucault needed Lindroth, and why Lindroth needed Foucault 75 Chapter 3: IN PRAISE OF THE NULL HYPOTHESIS: THE MYTH OF “THE VALUE-FREE MYTH” 83 (1) The nature and extent of bias in scientific research 83 (2) Quashing the indictment: Can a Comtean rule a country? 85 (2.1) Positions 86 (2.2) Correctives 87 (2.3) Motives: A series of acts contrary ... 88 (3) Quashing the indictment: The case against functional analysis 89 (3.1) From Spencer to Weber 90 (3.2) Pareto 94 (3.3) Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown 95 (3.4) Parsons 96 (4) Overturned on appeal: Research on political power 101 (5) A new hypothesis 102 (6) Conclusion: Science as bias control 102 Chapter 4: SOCIAL SCIENCE SYNTACTICS AND EMPIRICS: ALLEGED PROBLEMS ... 111 (1) Three papers in search of an argument 111 (1.1) The causal conundrum 112 (1.2) A transcendence of triangulation 120 (1.3) The contours of quantiphobia 127 v (2) Solicitous gatekeepers, #2 131 Chapter 5: ... AND HAPPY PROSPECTS 141 (1) Introduction 141 (2) Sex discrimination in faculty salaries: Toward projections of the middle range 145 (3) Allocating faculty salaries with Minitab BASIC, and allowing feedback from future states 154 (4) From a FIRM grip on reality to the AIDS epidemic: The future of social simulations 156 (5) Conclusions 159 Chapter 6: CULTURAL MATERIALISM IN THE SYSTEMIC MODE 171 (1) An excursion into “cultural” functionalism 171 (1.1) An emergent consensus 172 (1.2) Sub-cranial worlds and other pitfalls 174 (2) The POET paradigm: A transcendence of hierarchy 178 (3) Reciprocal interaction: Organization and technology 179 (3.1) Wagons, waterways, and William F. Ogburn 179 (3.2) A functionalist overview of an ecosystem 186 Chapter 7: SOCIAL SCIENCE SEMANTICS: A SAD STORY 195 (1) Introduction 195 (2) Contemporary thesauri with taxonomic overtones 200 (3) The logic of taxonomies 205 (4) Sampling, search, and test strategies for Sociological Abstracts: Hierarchies without perks 209 vi (5) First conclusion 214 (6) Codicil 1991 215 (7) Frequencies and amplitudes: Toward a taxonomy of time series 216 (8) Online searches as a data source: Notes on the future of taxonomy 219 (8.1) Data reduction: Obtaining simple counts 221 (8.2) Data reduction: The REPORT command 222 (9) Final conclusion 223 Index vii Introduction The contention of this book is that the contemporary social sciences in America have the qualities of a 1936 Cadillac V-12 sedan making a belated trip to the repair shop: The classic lines, the elegance, the power; the smooth, sonorous forward thrust usually evident, but momentarily interrupted by an assortment of minor failures and afflictions, as yet undiagnosed, brought about by many years of not entirely benign neglect, by a shortage of replacement parts, and by bad luck; the unhappy proprietors vaguely conscious of flashier models whizzing past wildly, their half-crazed occupants oblivious of the nature of real workmanship, real quality, real substance, real inspiration, real art; and finally the hope, the faith, that a few new wires here and there, a better thermostat that no longer permits the cooling system to overheat, a little grease pumped into the strange sounding transmission, a few carefully sewn patches over nicely tucked but tattered upholstery—and once again we take to the highways, once again we have a touring car that gives us, and gives our passengers, free and easy access to exotic places that we do not ordinarily expect to see. As far as I'm concerned there never will be a trade-in: The new models do not impress me, I love the old Caddy, and I'm willing to ante up in order to get her fixed. By 1936, the year of my vintage Cadillac, market segmentation had not yet been discovered (or invented). Detroit had not yet begun producing cars designed mainly for the female market, let alone cars for white female yuppies earning $70,000 or more per year, or cars for rural retired elderly gentlemen of Latin-American extraction and with a need for high motility in a harsh climate, or cars for wives of young black blue-collar aristocrats with strong Republican proclivities, an overweight mortgage, and two kids in private schools. The 1936 Cadillac was classy, and it was also androgynous: It combined the best of the masculine with the best of the feminine. Achieving such a combination is one of the central intentions of this book, which originally was to have been entitled Androgynous Sociology. Chapters 1 and 2 argue that, for mysterious reasons, a vociferous anti-science movement has developed in recent years among students of society. While the size, structure, and sources of this movement remain obscure—although I think feminist theory and qualitative methodology have given it impetus—it has attracted the support of several influential scholars within the social science disciplines. The movement may be an attempted adaptation to a contemporary state of affairs in which, according to a recent President of the American Sociological Association, the field finds itself “in the doldrums.” These opening viii chapters anticipate remaining parts of the book by arguing (1) that the social sciences already have achieved successes that rival those of the natural sciences, and that the current round of self-criticism, bordering on self-flagellation, is therefore an inexplicable failure of nerve; (2) that anti-science, arising in part from math phobia, is an indirect and unjustifiable attack on quantitative structuralism; (3) that advocates of anti-science wish to focus primarily on questions that lie outside the realm of science, or that constitute the preliminaries of scientific inquiry, or that constitute only one aspect of scientific inquiry; (4) that advocates of anti-science misconstrue the similarities and differences between scientific and non-scientific thought patterns, and do not appreciate the interactions and complementarities of these thought patterns; (5) that the anti-science movement wrongly asserts an ineluctable tension between science and “interpretationism,” the latter exemplified by scholars such as Foucault, with their strong nominalist and logocentric tendencies; and (6) that the embattled advocates of interpretationism and structuralism should declare an immediate and open-ended truce. Chapter 3, derived from my own brief history of functionalist theory (Faia, 1986: appendix), asserts that in recent years we have made a shibboleth of the belief that social science theories are inescapably invaded, pervaded, and distorted by one's values, ideology, social class background, current class situation, age, sex, race, and so forth; in brief, by one's “biases.” Sometimes the process is alleged to operate in reverse: One's theoretical commitments, for instance, are said to influence one's ideology. Because shibboleths tend to terminate thought, hardly anybody bothers to define and distinguish among the central terms of the discourse, such as theory, values, ideology, class background, gender. Nor is there strong concern about testing the shibboleth as if it were just another hypothesis, which it is. I have found an intriguing way of illustrating my argument, presented mainly in Chapter 3, about bias. This illustration uses the idea of triangulation, an idea that is to be of central importance throughout this book. When seismologists try to find the epicenter of an earthquake, they use triangulation. A given seismographic observation station, analyzing the various wave series set in motion through the earth's crust by an earthquake, ascertains the distance from the station to the epicenter; the direction cannot be ascertained. A circle is then drawn around the station, with a radius equal to this measured distance, and it is assumed that the circle, at some point, must touch the epicenter. If a second station follows the same procedure, the two circles usually will intersect at two points, one of which is the epicenter. A third station, swinging a similar arc, then decides between these two intersections. If the process does not work, then presumably somebody's measurements are off; or, something may be wrong with theories about earthquake foci, epicenters, seismic wave behavior, etc.1 Now, go to your blackboard. Draw a diagram of this elaborate search process. You will see that three seismographic stations do indeed enable us to find an ix epicenter. Then, erase one of the stations, along with the circle drawn around it.