Social Science vs. Natural Science
My dear old friend Marcus, also a PhD student (congratulations!), commented on my entry "Is social reality "fluffy" reality?":
Although this doesn't mean that critisms along the line of "too fluffy" should be taken lightly. The person utering the words doesn't necessarily have to be blind, but might as well be clever enough to see the (often abundant) faults and errors in new and often immature parts of the general field of social science.
I guess it's even possible that, at times, these errors can be more obvious to people experienced in more mature scientific fields, ie natural science, were the logical consistency is more developed.
E.g. a professional fotball player (well developed science) might, at times, have an easy time to see the faults in the game play of professional computer game (new science) player (or more likely, in the training and teamwork of the computer gamer).
But like your post describes, at most times though, the fotboll player would probably be way off and not "see" the merits of the gamers applied tacticts.
To give good advince would often require some effort to understand the settings and rules of the computer game compared to fotball.
Well, well, I'd better get back to work. :)
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Here is my answer to his comment:
Hmm...This is a tough one. There are two issues here that I am not entirely comfortable with:
- Labeling natural science as a "mature" science compared to social sciences
- Comparing natural science and social science according to the same scales
- Science that grounds itself in observation and confirmation and disconfirmation of theory. This is classic natural sciences.
- Interpretative science that deciphers the meanings, from a human perspective, of social objects, dynamics and systems according to culture (collective patterns of judgment and behavior). Cultural studies, critical theory and postmodernism are examples of this type of science
- Introspective science. Gaining knowledge through looking into ones own mind and subconscious to see what we can learn about our self, consciousness and humanity. Buddhists frequently refer to themselves as "students of the consciousness" or a "science of mind".
Recently I read the book "Leadership and the New Science". The narrative of the book centers on the adoption of Newtonian models by social sciences and their practices, and the negative effects of this. Think about terms such as "social engineering" (favored by Swedish social democrats such as Jan Myrdal) or "re-engineering" within business theory. They all point towards an adoption of Newtonian ideals in the practical fields of business and government. Newton essentially viewed the universe as a large clockwork, a machine. While this theory yields considerable results within engineering and natural science, it does not necessarily have a positive impact on human beings and the ways in which they organize themselves (communism is perhaps the largest and most unfortunate example of the dissapointing results that viewing society as a large machine yields). Natural science is now moving away from Newton towards more esoteric and dynamic theories such as quantum mechanics, string theory and chaos theory, just to mention a few. Social sciences still mimic Newtonian natural science, which is very unfortunate.
What I am trying to get at is that social science and introspective science needs to have their foundations in human nature and experience. Only then can it yield results which are positive for our societies, organizations and ourselves.
Coming back to the "fluffiness". I agree with Marcus that accusations of "fluffiness" should be taken seriously and be used as an incentive to increase the clarity of our worldviews and scientific theories. However, a constant, generalizing lament of:
"Oh, why can't the social sciences be as exact, quantitative and clear as the natural sciences?"
is not going to yield any positive results. Human experience is far messier and complex than any process describable by natural science ever can be. Why? Because human experience, by necessity, must transcend and include natural science theory.
Social science theory is far more difficult to confirm or disconfirm than natural science theory. I guess the major reason is the lack of possibilities to conduct actual social sciences experiments. Possibly real life experiements are necessary for social sciences to evolve. Maybe communism was necessary, as an experiment, showing us some principles for how not to organize our societies.
Still, we would need a clear language to describe and converse about our own personal experiences, the dynamics of groups and the proper organization of organizations and societies. Such a language (a set of theories) could drastically decrease the purported "fluffiness" of social reality.
As I am writing these lines, I also realize that the natural messiness of the human experience also forbids the same kind of clarity that was demanded by Newtonian models of reality. However, new developments in natural science also seem to introduce aspects of "fluffiness" into the natural sciences, at least when exploring fundamental physical process, close to metaphysics.
posted by Aron Lindberg @ 12:09
1 Comments
1 Comments:
At least a PhD student in four months - and in social science (!), although at a technical university. :)
Your post again deserves a comment, especially since you used my last comment as a basis for it.
In general, I tend to agree with most of what you say.
Actually, this argument brings to mind a brief discussion I had with my supervisor during one of the interviews. It was a very brief discussion, no more than one or two minutes. In essence it was about a similar topic: I took a very positivistic stance, talking about models that can predict social phenomomen and that are actionable and relevant. She agreed to the latter part, but I remember her briefly refuting my positivistic views.
Needless to say, she's also (like you) experienced me as being slightly sceptic to "softer" parts of her expert areas. I am not sure that really I am.
I am actually not all that sceptic towards social science in general. Except that I am convinced that it is much easier to hide crappy research behind fancy wording in the social sciences than in the natural sciences. However, I do believe that it is a newer and less mature science than the natural sciences. I have the impression that most fields of social science are younger than e.g. Gallileos model of gravity (16th century A.D) or Copernicus model of the planets, Keplers model of planetary motion etc. (There is of course e.g. the greek Platon and his Republic, but is not as much of a science in my opinion as the physicists mentioned above. This connects to the discussion about definition below.)
Thus, if you combine the fact that social science has been successfully around for a shorter time with the notion that it is probably more complex that you imply in your post, the idea that social science is less mature as a field of study is not so far fetched. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Newton was a brilliant scientist even though his field of research (natural philosophy) was fairly immature during his times. This opinion is actually one of the reasons I decided to venture into the field (and not inte natural science), I percieve that there is more stuff with a large impact on our lives soon to be discovered there.
Now, as for the second issue of comparing the two on the same scales. I think this mostly is a matter of how one chooses to use the word "science". I simply don't normally denote bullets 2 and 3 in Wilber's list as science. They are what I would normally refer to as philosophy (with the notion that all scientific fields start as philosophy and eventually make it into scientific fields of research; psychology during Freuds time being the most famous case of such a transition). That said, I think Freud made a terrific contribution to human knowledge!
Also, you shouldn't be so hard on newtonian models. They, as other types of models, can still add value in the social sciences. There are some pretty successful but at the same time very "newtonian" models of human/social phenomena. I'm thinking primarily of economics, chicago school stuff about inflation etc. But I am sure you probably agree with me on this issue. :)
Also, as you yourself point out, natural science is way more complex today than it was three hundred years ago. Some of that complexity is probably enough to capture a lot of interesting social phenomena in a good way. Although not all of them. I don't know anyone fairly acquianted with natural science who still believes in a "clockwork universe" as described by Newton. And albeit the related notion of predermination is still not settled it is now considered, as far as I know, a philosophical issue.
In other words, I think much (although probably not all) of our disagreement simply boils down to a matter of definition of the word science.
By the way, now that you mention Integral theory, I actually have an acquaintance in Växjö, Johannes, who's very deep into that stuff. Last time we met (2 years ago) he was going to start a school about the world view in Sweden. I'll tell him about you when I meet him again!
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