My colleague Matthias just recently alerted me to this post, in which blogger Andrew Binstock discusses Dijkstra’s three golden rules for successful scientific research … and of course, as so often when natural scientists sit down and ponder about science, he discredits the social sciences as not being scientific at all … . While I really wish this controversy could be resolved once and for all, it probably will not be anytime soon – and maybe it can serve the social sciences as a constant reminder about the importance of empirical research and the scientific method.

Anyhow, with this blatant and crude argument, I just could not resist adding my own rant …

Max said …

I would like to take issue with this rule #2, particularly with the all too provocative remark on the Social Sciences. I believe that this statement, exemplarily for much of the debate and resentment between natural scientists and social scientists reflects a couple of misconceptions. First of all, anyone who has given some attention to current empirical research in the Social Sciences will agree that most contributors take the requirements of the scientific method very serious – to the degree that some discussions are, and rightfully so, dominated by methodological considerations.
But aside this apparent misrepresentation, there remain fundamental differences between the natural sciences and the social sciences, the latter appearing – at first sight – as less rigorous in its approach and less generalizable in its findings. I would argue that this difference stems from the subject under study, and not, as is implied in this critique, from inadequacy of the social sciences as an academic discipline. The study of human behavior and cognition, the societies, cultures and institutions they give rise to differs from the subject of the natural sciences in a number of ways. Most easily argued, the realm of the social sciences is characterized by a degree of complexity and opacity unknown to any other discipline. The analysis of any given social phenomena typically reveals and hints at plethora of possible explanatory factors, which are, in turn, often interrelated necessarily rendering a single comprehensive explanation impossible, at least given today’s technology and capacity for human abstraction. It is because of this overload that social scientists resort to the vagueness of theory and the limits of partial and contextual explanations – to bring order to the chaos, and to hint at preliminary results where other are unavailable or incomprehensible. A second, related source of problems for social scientists is that of measurement. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether a purely positivist approach is adequate for the study of humans and desirable for any agenda of change, it must be apparent to everyone who has ever read a paper on measurement in the social sciences, that their subject really is a moving target. In the social sciences, there are few, if any, measurements which could not arguably influence their vary response by imposing its a priori operationalization. In a way, every subject of social scientific investigation is characterized by heisenbergian uncertainty – not just the electrons. Moreover, in contrast to the electrons, for social subjects, there is no formal language readily available to describe them, but the language of their own reality: a social phenomenon can never fully be described mathematically, it’s last instance of abstraction always needs to retain meaning, which in turn, varies from subject to subject.
Moreover, as long as we uphold the notion of a free human will and of the reality of human consciousness, the study of the social world is structurally underdetermined. In contrast to the electron, the human has agency and can and will at any time defy whichever probabilistic or deterministic law s/he has previously given rise to.

To my knowledge, the “world formula”, unifying the macro and the micro has not been found yet, even in the natural sciences. But even without such perfection, researchers continue their work, improve our understanding, and sometimes, our world.
The same holds true for the social sciences, only that their job is so much harder and, their tools and theories so much less adequate. Social scientific research, for the foreseeable future will continue to be probabilistic, contextual, disintegrated and, occasionally, disconfirmed. It is this very discoursive process which drives progress in the social sciences.
Does all of this mean, the social sciences should abide by rule # 2 and close shop? Should we, in the absence of a unifying theory of the social, refrain from thinking about limited but possible progressions and setbacks? I believe that such a position is profoundly reactionary and anti-humanist, considering the improvements to human lifes that even the smallest increments of social scientific understanding have enabled. It may be so that social scientific understanding is, incidentally, an evolutionary process.

But even if we could, one day, find the unifying and universal social formula – should we seek it? This disenchanted social world, governed by a set of complex but limited and comprehensive deterministic laws, will it still be a habitable place for humans to live in?
I rest my case.