“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” –The Declaration of Independence
I believe in justice and democracy. It is easy to say this, and most would agree out of hand. But it is harder to truly live in testament to these ideals if the nurse checked off most of the boxes of privilege on your birth certificate.
Posted in Rants
In the 1980s and 1990s, the social sciences entered into what has been called the ‘post-modern turn’, in which researchers began to ‘trouble’ or ‘problematize’ the idea that society could be understood using the strict, rigid tools of the sciences. Researchers began to question the utility of interviews or observations, and began to wonder if perhaps the presence of the researcher in the event might somehow be altering how it occurred. Other researchers began to question if the things social scientists were looking at could be described objectively at all; how did intersections of race, gender, age, ability (or disability), and class alter a researcher’s perceptions of events? The hardest-hit areas of the social sciences were the qualitative realms, where researchers began to deconstruct just about every single methodological tool they had in their tool kits. Other post-modern researchers began to attack the physical sciences, arguing that the claims to objectivity made by physicists, biologists, chemists, and others were dangerously naïve. A number of studies published on the nature of scientific research lent some credence to these assertions; scientists were apparently human after all, and bias and subjectivity had a way of creeping into their experiments despite their best efforts; some post-modernists alleged that it was the protocols used by scientists that were the problem. They alleged that the protocols themselves masked bias and granted the illusion of objectivity, which had the effect of hiding subjective interpretations and biases beneath a veneer of scientific neutrality. This, understandably, caused severe friction between the social sciences and the physical sciences, which culminated in the now-infamous ‘Sokal Affair’. Contrary to the jubilant crowing of the pro-science crowd however, the Sokal Affair didn’t ‘prove’ post-modernity or the social sciences in general were bullshit; it simply proved that some of the newly-minted post-modern research journals were crap and their stable of reviewers were weak, which is what you’d expect from journals with less than a decade of experience. Nevertheless, the blow had been dealt, and the already widening rift between university science departments and their colleagues in the social sciences was wrenched wider still.
The post-modern turn brought a number of important concepts to the fore in the social sciences, despite some of its deeper problems: it returned the concept of the ‘subject’ to the discourse, and it highlighted the complexity of the human experience. People are odd entities; they are logical, irrational, dispassionate, emotional, jealous, loving, patient, impetuous, kind, and cruel – often all in the same body. A person’s attitudes, beliefs, even how they think or solve problems can change from day to day, depending on a host of often unrelated factors, and all of these things can be effected – and effect – the relationship between the researcher and the researched. Suppose that you are being interviewed by a sociologist who wants to understand gender. Your gender will affect how you interact with that researcher, as will their gender. If the researcher is a different gender than you, you may react differently; if they (or you) are a gender that the other party doesn’t recognize, that will change the nature of the interview. If you don’t like me, or if you think I’m ‘out to get you’, you might lie, misdirect, or even threaten me; if you like me (or are attracted to me), you may decide to answer questions differently. Where the interview takes place, what time of the day it is, even how the interviewer dresses or behaves can alter the nature of the interview. It doesn’t matter how ‘controlled’ or ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ the researcher, research environment, or questions asked are, the participants in the interview space – researched and researcher – come together in unanticipated ways to produce something wholly unique and difficult – if not impossible – to replicate. But as important as this understanding was, it also served to spell doom for the post-modern turn.
The erroneous conclusion that many post-modern scholars drew from their understandings of human complexity and subjectivity was that things like protocols, ethics, rigour, reliability, and generalizability were chimera that didn’t need to be present in social science research. Some post-modern researchers began to present their research in strange, often obscure ways; poetry, song, and dance came to be seen as acceptable forms of knowledge translation, and as a result, the overall quality of the knowledge gleaned from research went down. The post-modern project began to construct fantastic new theories of knowledge for itself, and began to use increasingly obtuse and hard to interpret jargon when speaking. It became so bad that other academics began to distance themselves from their post-modern counterparts, and by the end of the 1990s, post-modern scholars were frequently only talking to themselves. They had turned navel gazing into an art form, and had effectively walled themselves off from the rest of academia. These days, very few people are still fully committed to the post-modern project, while many others have been quite happy to celebrate its demise.
As I alluded to earlier, not everything that came out of the post-modern turn was bad; some of it was actually pretty foundational. As an example, if you’ve ever read or heard arguments about schools or the public education system that have portrayed those establishments as ‘prisons’ or ‘disciplinary systems’ designed to teach people how to be good little unquestioning citizens and consumers, then congratulations; you’re hearing the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault’s ideas about power were far more subtle and impressive than the pithy thing I just typed however, and his understanding of the unconscious and often invisible nature of power in society is one of the most central concepts of the social sciences. I’ve often felt that Foucault was wrongly tied to the post-modern movement; certainly his work was dense, difficult to understand, and more often than not took liberties with the traditional meanings of words, but his thoughts helped social researchers critically re-align their investigations into social power. They helped to show us that more often than not, governments do not need to rely on the jackboots of the army or law enforcement to maintain control; all they need to do is control school curricula – teach us in subtle ways to control ourselves. And we do; all the time. But that’s a digression for another time…
The social sciences in the 21st Century are in many ways a radically different collection of disciplines, traditions, and epistemologies than they were even twenty years ago. Researchers are often less likely to make grand pronouncements or generalizations about groups or institutions in society, largely due to the recognition that the inherently complex nature of human interactions necessarily limit what sorts of generalizations can be made. For example, the research on social inequality illustrates that the majority of Western societies have become increasingly more unequal over time, but those same researchers often disagree about the root causes. Many argue that capitalist systems will necessarily create social inequality – it’s a feature of the system, not a bug – while others point out that the deep and pervasive roots of systemic racism, particularly in the United States also serve to exacerbate inequality. Still others maintain that the gendered nature of organizations and institutions maintain and reproduce inequality between men, women, and gender minorities. The growing understanding is that all of these things interact and intersect with one another – that there is no one cause of social inequality but rather a plurality of sources. One of the newest buzzwords in social research is ‘intersectionality’ and many researchers take special pains to examine at least some of the ways that different values, practices, processes, and group identities interact.
I’ve been a part of the skeptical movement for a number of years, and I’ve been more than willing to let my own knowledge and expertise take a back seat to the more traditionally scientific work of people like Michael Shermer, or people like Steven Novella, David Gorski and the gang over at Science-Based Medicine – even at the local level, where I am most commonly found lurking. But I’ve also begun to notice a bit of a problem in the skeptical movement, a sort of creeping scientism that has emerged, I believe, from a fundamental lack of expertise on the part of many of the grassroots members of the movement. That overwhelming majority of skeptics are, like me, avid fans of all things scientific; we love the awesomeness of new scientific discoveries or technological advancements; we recognize the promise that comes with the sorts of ‘big science’ projects like the Large Hadron Collider or the hopefully-soon-to-launch James Webb telescope array. We love to listen and watch and read all that we can about the almost daily discoveries in all fields of the physical sciences, and we bond through skeptical ‘in-jokes’ (“This technology is only five years away!“). But many of us will be lucky if we grasp even the fundamentals of the theories behind all the things that we enthuse about. Unless you are an engineer – and a very specific kind of engineer at that – you probably will never know precisely how the nuclear fuel cell on board the Voyager probes works. And that’s fine, because we are not expected to know it all – that’s what experts are for. But where the problems emerge is when our love of science begins to morph into the fetishization of science and our enthusiasm turns into the conviction that the only things worth knowing – or able to be known at all – are those things that can be measured empirically. Now, I’m not saying that we should all start believing in Xenu or dunking ourselves in homeopathic showers because hey, we can’t measure everything so magic is real! What I’m saying is that we must be cognizant of the limitations of science. Contrary to the assertions of folks like Sam Harris, we cannot yet plug someone into an MRI and learn what they are thinking about, any more than we can build a machine to step outside of the universe to see what colour it is. Science remains one of the very best tools to answer empirical questions about the world – how old is it, how do stars form, how did human organisms emerge – but what it is remarkably bad at is telling us what we ‘ought’ to believe, how we ‘ought’ to treat one another; what economic system or form of government is ‘best’ for us to use. Science may be able to reveal, for example, a predisposition towards aggression among young men, but it has little to say about what form that aggression might take – how it manifests, is valorized (or vilified), or why and how different cultures deal with aggression in different ways. For those sorts of questions, we need a different set of tools. Laboratory research or double-blinded, clinical trials are of no use to us here, and ethical considerations prevent us from simply repeating a series of experiments of unknowing – and non-consenting – subjects. There are few experiments that I can think of that could allow scientists to understand the motivations behind the 9/11 truth movement for example. Oh sure, we might be able to point out that humans are pattern-seeking creatures, or that cognitive biases play a role in leading otherwise smart people to believe dumb things, but so what? If humans are pattern-recognition machines, then knowing that only tells us something about all humans; it doesn’t help us to better understand a particular social movement. What can help however would be a series of interviews conducted by sociologists or anthropologists wherein individual truthers construct a deeply personal narrative about their introduction to the movement and subsequent affiliation with it.
The point to this long, long, LONG ramble is this: skeptics of all stripes would be well served to take the time to learn about the social sciences, and to incorporate social research methods into their skeptical investigations. I am well aware that many of us already do this, and I am extremely happy about that, but more of us need to get on board. I am tired of hearing the worn-out dismissal of ‘well, the social sciences aren’t really science so we can’t use them to know anything’; it tells me that the person doing the speaking knows quite a bit less than they think.
