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
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
(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
(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
(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
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 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 epicenter. Then, erase one of the stations, along with the circle drawn around it. Using information from the other two stations, and retaining your knowledge of the location of the epicenter, try to determine the position of the third seismographic station. Voilà! It is harder to find than Graham Greene's third man; in fact, one cannot find it. My (null) hypothesis, then, derived from geology, is that the perspectives adopted as we interpret the real world, as we try to locate what we consider the major social epicenters, will not necessarily tell our readers anything about our own location, our own presuppositions, even if readers have an epicenter and two snitches.
There are excellent social scientists who have repeated the truism about large and inescapable biases so many times that they now accept it as gospel, virtually without reservation, and my fear is that the habit tends to induce give-up-itis, or at least to contribute to the failure of nerve mentioned above. Why should we insist that our science has any special merit, when it is as fallible as any other system of thought? In Alan Sica's (1988:257) sad claim--the sadness is mitigated by the fact that Sica is probably wrong--social scientists do not know much more about human fertility than do the more militant members of pro-choice or pro-life movements.
Scientists are people who have special skills in semantics, syntactics, and empirics (Hepp, 1956). In Chapter 4 we argue that although social scientists are relatively weak in the area of semantics--the discipline of definition and measurement--we are surprisingly sophisticated in the realms of syntactics and empirics. We have considerable skill in the use of deductive models of all sorts from Aristotelian syllogisms to the stable population model to modern statistics to kinship networks to the propositional calculi of learning theory. And in the realm of empirics, social scientists know a great deal about how to observe the world, about how to register social phenomena such as fertility, mortality, migration, marriage, divorce, crime, contagious disease, abortion, and economic activity, about how to conduct social surveys of all varieties from censuses to political "exit polls," and about how to make plausible estimates, say, of the North American native population of 1492 (Thornton, 1987).
Among our most highly developed deductive models are those which enable us to make causal inferences, and this chapter explores the issues raised by modern scholars who suggest that the pursuit of causal explanation in the social sciences ought to be played down, if not abandoned.
In Chapter 5, we discuss "reverse" regression models and "forward" regression models--the latter often called simulations--as ways of testing causal ideas. For instance, ideas about ways in which the sex preselection of children might influence the sex ratio, ideas about monetary rewards and their allocation in bureaucratic settings such as the modern university, or the idea that it is possible to design a highly efficient, "optimal" traffic-control system for a central city. We then develop the argument that one of the major advantages of the American federated system, and perhaps of the new commonwealth that has replaced the Soviet Union, is that these entities may provide many jurisdictions willing to carry out their own unique experiments. Modern nations and commonwealths should be conducting systematic social science experiments in large numbers, and we should be introducing the results of these experiments into our best social theories while simultaneously seeking opportunities to conduct "social engineering" (Henshel, 1976). We are not yet very good at social engineering, but we are much better than those who currently have the responsibility for it (Dye, 1990).
Chapter 6 argues that the best social science research of the future will make use of biosociological and cultural materialist perspectives within a functionalist/systemic theoretical framework, with appropriate attention to experimentation, to simulations that tie together the past, present, and future, and to interpretationism. This chapter tries to clinch a central argument: The most promising works of the social sciences excel primarily because they triangulate. They do so by combining a satisfactory conceptual scheme, appropriate empirics, and appropriate syntactics; by making sure that the syntactics of a given hypothesis are capable of predicting a fairly wide range of testable consequences; by using an assortment of instruments and methods2 to test a given hypothesis and its consequences; by invoking existing knowledge from several related scientific fields; by presenting findings in a way that exemplifies the skillful use of several different symbol systems--verbal systems, quantitative systems, those that are both verbal and quantitative (e.g., programming languages), and those that are neither (e.g., graphics, motion pictures).
The major purpose of chapter 7 is to evaluate the semantics of the social sciences by ascertaining whether the Lazarsfeld generalization-specification model, also known as the "elaboration model," has been routinely and effectively used by social science researchers. If the Lazarsfeld model were widely exploited, then highly abstract assertions--e.g., "factors of type X tend to have a causal impact on variables of type Y"--would be tested for their applicability to a broad range of specific instances of both X and Y.3 For example, the literature discusses a number of situations in which deterrence allegedly increases conformity; generalizations have been derived from these specifications, and the generalizations seem to produce new specifications.
Using the Sociological Abstracts thesaurus of sociological concepts, in combination with online searches of the social science literature, this chapter assesses the extent to which researchers use systematic taxonomies and exploit them through application of generalization-specification strategies. Briefly, the chapter raises questions such as the following: First, do social science researchers and teachers, in a popular metaphor, tend "to mix apples and oranges"--and perhaps an occasional persimmon? Secondly, when they do so, do they arrive at generalizations applicable to broad categories? Thirdly, do they then test new hypotheses about narrowly delimited instances of these broad categories?
Chapter 7 concludes that, despite SA's listing of "broader" and "narrower" terms in relation to a given thesaurus entry, there is little evidence of the use of highly structured taxonomies in the social science literature.
When I speak of the structure of a taxonomy, I definitely intend the implication that the concepts of a scientific discipline, as Durkheim suggests, should have a sort of social organization. Durkheim would surely agree that a single concept has a lot in common with a single personality: It is an abstraction that cannot be clearly understood until it is related to the structures that surround it. The chapter concludes further that in creating workable taxonomies we would do well to begin with the limited classification schemes already available in fields such as "ecological demography" (Namboodiri, 1988), and that it would be wise for us to develop, early on, a taxonomy of time-series processes; the chapter then outlines preliminary steps toward both these objectives. The final section suggests that social science data of the future, gathered primarily by people who are not themselves social scientists, will come to us largely by way of telephone lines, optical cable, and satellite transmissions, and that we need to try to influence the organization of these masses of data.
NOTES (Introduction)
(1) I understand that it is also possible to find a "shadow zone," 180 degrees away from an epicenter, where seismic waves suddenly disappear.
Spencer (1910:83) gives a similar example: While standing by a lakeside in the moonlight, one sees "... flashes from the sides of separate wavelets ...," but one's "... position in relation to certain wavelets brings into view their reflections of the moon's light, while it keeps out of view the like reflections from all other wavelets."
(2) For instance, one would alternate between personal interviews and mailed questionnaires; among surveys and laboratory experiments and library investigations; between exploratory methods and approaches that are highly structured in their use of multivariate causal models, feedback, time-series data, etc. For a discussion of the relationship between theoretical and methodological aspects of research, see Faia (1986:128-41).
(3) When we extend the scope of a generalization, we are in essence applying Mill's method of agreement. In a paper written some years ago (Faia, 1968:117-8) I argued that while we make substantial use of Mill's method of concomitant variation (correlation) and his method of difference, we neglect the method of agreement. This claim is close to one of the central theses of this book: That while we have high skill in the realms of empirics and syntactics, we remain weak on the forms of conceptualization that support the method of agreement.
REFERENCES (Introduction)
Dye, Thomas R. 1990. Who's Running America? Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Faia, Michael A. 1968. "On Alienation, Structural Strain, and Deviancy: A
Reply." Social Problems 16:117-20.
Faia, Michael A. 1986. Dynamic Functionalism: Strategy and Tactics. Cambridge University Press.
Henshel, Richard L. 1976. On the Future of Social Prediction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Hepp, Maylon H. 1956. Thinking Things Through: An Introduction to Logic. New York: Scribner's.
Namboodiri, Krishnan. 1988. "Ecological demography: its place in sociology." American Sociological Review 53:619-33.
Spencer, Herbert. 1910. The Study of Sociology. New York: D. Appleton and Co.
Thornton, Russell. 1987. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Wildavsky, Aaron. 1988. Searching for Safety. New Brunswick: Transaction.
Chapter 1
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE SOCIAL SCIENCES?
The current controversy about science versus the humanities and the arts is ... quite absurd. The assumption seems to be that the advancement of science and especially of social science must be at the expense of the other intellectual, artistic, and religious pursuits of man. This is a preposterous assumption. It implies that human knowledge is a finite quantity so that any increase in one department must be at the expense of some other. Actually, the advancement of science can only liberate, stimulate, and advance also the arts.
--George Lundberg (1947:14-15)
As a field for cultivation, literature starts with two advantages: it deals with common experience, couched usually in common language, and it has a long tradition of being looked at and talked about. The corollary is that when the man of science finds it difficult or impossible to read Dickens, the deficiency is in him or in his training; but when the humanist finds it difficult or impossible to talk about science, the deficiency is in him, in his training, and also in the present state of the subject.
--Jacques Barzun (1964:26)
When scientists deal with each other, they should never think about tactics. Or, at worst, they should think about tactics only in the way a happily married couple does.
--Anonymous
Pain is a perception, not a reality.
--Shirley MacLaine, in Time magazine,
Pearl Harbor Day, 1987
Introduction
Lundberg's lively little volume arrived at the bookstalls nearly half a century ago. It was standard reading for us undergraduates of the early postwar years, and given what we knew about famine, disease, war, depression, genocide, and political repression, the book made big promises. I don't know whether the social sciences have delivered on these promises, but I do know that we have established a credible basis for continuing the effort, more or less unimpeded and with an appropriate Lundbergian optimism. I have many colleagues, however, who do not share this assessment, and they have launched an attack--sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly--against the established positivist premises of the social sciences.1 In my opinion these colleagues are basically wrong, perhaps disastrously wrong, and if they succeed in destroying the social sciences they will find themselves enjoying the spoils of a Carthaginian victory.
Perhaps, however, the forlorn victors will be able to deny the reality of their disappointment: The world according to MacLaine is a free-lance filibuster constructed on a simplistic denial of Barrington Moore's (1973) universal forms of human misery. Or, perhaps I'm simply wrong. I am told that I exaggerate, and that the anti-science critique is not all that deadly. But on the other hand, it is possible that the victors will eventually stumble upon a fundamental truth: Sub-cranial pain falls mainly on MacLaine,2 while the realities of pain fall upon the rest of us like inexorable Malthusian checks. In any case, and with due respect for Jacques Barzun, I would be satisfied if the anti-science philosophers were to learn the language of science in the same way that most of us learn the language of Dickens: We use it--with at least a modicum of skill.
(1) The dialectics of disenchantment
... during the interwar years, [there was] a widespread questioning of the founding program of the American historical profession: the scientific and detached search for impartial, objective historical truth. ... the interwar criticism of the objectivist posture was a moment in a philosophical debate that went back to Aristotle and Protagoras.
--Peter Novick (1988:250)
There is, then, nothing new under the sun. However:
Karen Winkler's early aperçu on antipositivist opinion (26 June 1985) should not surprise anybody when it claims (with George Lundberg) that the social sciences have ties to the humanities. The natural sciences have similar ties, and these derive largely from the fact that all the sciences have their origins in the humane disciplines. This historical reality negates the deplorable tendency among Winkler's interviewees to suppose an irreconcilable conflict between the thought patterns of the humanities and those of the sciences. As Arthur Koestler (1964) argued in The Act of Creation many years ago, the thoughtways of the sage, the artist, and the humorist, although not identical, have large areas of overlap. The disastrous confrontational atmosphere created by Winkler and her interviewees is degraded further by the absurd claims that "the discipline of economics is impervious" to non-scientific thought and that "the mainstream of sociology still almost unconsciously accepts the natural-science model." If we tend to do things unconsciously we will surely find it difficult to "interpret" what we do--a point to which I shall return. For now, suffice it to say that if there is an "arbitrary boundary" between the social sciences and the humanities, then surely Winkler's brand of journalism--and the anti-science school is big on journalism--helps to produce and perpetuate it. But intellectual boundaries, I believe, have no objective existence; they are akin to the boundaries that create "periodization" in history. In fact, the "scientific" and "artistic" hemispheres of the human brain are joined together objectively by a structure called the corpus callosum, the ideational equivalent of which we desperately need.
"Economic man," that quintessential human machine created centuries ago by the earliest economists, has been suspect for as long as he has existed, but Winkler and her interviewees decided that it might be fun to trot him out once again. Nobody who has studied sex or violence or non-answers to Donald McCloskey's question "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" has failed to notice that the "means-end, cost-benefit model is far from covering all aspects of human activity and experience." Social scientists who study capital punishment, or who experiment with ways of punishing men who beat women, have known for many decades that deterrence--a simple principle based on the cost-benefit model--cannot be relied upon as a means of social control. And when students of teenage fertility discover adolescents who believe that the withdrawal method of birth control cannot fail, or that they are too young to get pregnant, or that they can only get pregnant just before or just after menstruation, or that they can avoid pregnancy by standing during sexual intercourse and perhaps (both?) facing north, we are in the presence not of rationality but of poetry. Ironically, Economic Man has been converting himself lately into a handy straw man, despite the fact that very few contemporary social scientists have ever tried to prop him up. Like Joan Rivers, we only prop up a dead man when we're desperate.
In American intellectual history it is not unprecedented for economists to make large departures from the means-ends, cost-benefit model. The famous "Phillips school," for instance, believed that the staunchest supporters of slavery in the United States continued to favor the institution despite its irrationality from a cost-effectiveness standpoint. To Phillips and his followers slavery persisted largely because its advocates believed it to be a morally superior form of socio-ecological organization (Fogel and Engerman, 1974:II,176). The Phillips school no longer prevails, but one does wish that its willingness to treat the means-ends model as a mere hypothesis, rather than as a normative goal toward which society ought to strive, were impressed on several unreflective economists currently in the employ of the American embassy in Mexico City, who seem to believe that it is divinely preordained that the central valley of Mexico be transformed into a replica of the San Joaquin valley of California. Don't bet on it.
Remember, too, that one woman's rationality is another woman's madness, even when the women in question happen to be social scientists. Discussing the San Joaquin model as applied to Mexico, De Janvry and Vandeman (1987:107) conclude that
For Third World countries under the imperative to rapidly increase food production and reduce rural poverty and slow down urban migration, the U.S. model is of little relevance. Nevertheless, increasing food production through large-scale farming, international transfers of technology, and a dominant agribusiness is clearly a tempting way to satisfy such pressing needs. ... The Third World increasingly is adopting this approach. Yet because they lack the labor absorption capacity and off-farm income sources that characterized the U.S. development, these countries are finding the social costs of the U.S. model simply unbearable. ... If rural development policy is dominated, as it is in the United States, by large landholders' lobbies, its purpose will be agricultural development couched in the rhetoric of rural development.
De Janvry and Vandeman (1987:98-104) also point out that agribusinesses do not emerge solely through the operation of market forces. They are highly subsidized. Beyond that, there is a possibility that the "unbearable" costs of agricultural technology may fall more heavily on women than on men (Harriss and Watson, 1987:100-101); among native Americans of the far north, the unbearable costs of the highly efficient snowmobile impose themselves without regard to gender (Georges, 1993).
In any case, McCloskey is wrong. Social scientists--excepting those assigned to the U.S. embassy in Mexico City--are clearly capable of evaluating the cost-benefit model scientifically. It is ironic that a book devoted largely to a critique of positivism, empirical investigation, quantitative methods, the rationality model, and their alleged dominance in the social sciences (Sica, 1988:20, 40, 78-9, 94-5, 118, 136-41, 259), ends by concluding that both Weber and Pareto gave large play to irrational elements in human behavior. It is untenable to argue, as Sica does (1988:262), that "...human rationality is a relatively rare event, ..." and it is equally untenable to argue that social scientists have had little aptitude for the irrational.
And even though McCloskey may be justified in accusing many economists of relying too heavily on formal tests of statistical significance (1985: Chapter 9), one must point out that a major controversy over statistical significance occurred in sociology a generation ago (Morrison and Henkel, 1970) and was more or less resolved in favor of the notion that statistical significance is merely one means to the attainment of "substantive" significance (Selvin, 1957; Walster and Cleary, 1970). One of my students (Flippo, 1987) recently completed a master's thesis in which she was interested primarily in whether high educational attainment tends to delay sexual initiation for a longer time among nonwhite women than among white women. Her idea was that ambitious minority women develop a higher aptitude for deferred gratification than do ambitious majority women. I don't recall whether the observed difference in sexual initiation--age at first intercourse--between the two groups was statistically significant, but I do know that it was not substantively significant.
What bothers me about McCloskey is that he does not acknowledge these processes of intellectual evolution, and he therefore does not see the adaptive character of social science knowledge.
Historians, whether "scientific" or not, always have had strong ties to the humanities, and many universities still cannot decide whether to classify the history department within the humanities or the social sciences. It is not surprising that traditional historians often express their misgivings about cliometrics and other exotic forms of scientific history. But cliometrics is here to stay, probably because historians perforce must deal more and more with historical epochs in which human beings had long since established themselves as a "data-generating animal." The media have arrived, and we cannot ignore the message. Historians should welcome the opportunity to triangulate among speculative history, text analysis, the intensive case-study method, and scientific, quantitative, data-oriented history. Anybody who believes, with Randall Collins (1984:331), that historians are better off when they do not permit "inroads from the statistical side," should take a close look at Fogel and Engerman (1974).
Winkler quotes Alan Sica to the effect that various historical circumstances have contributed to the latest outburst of antipositivism. Sica's speculation about the impact of NSF funding policies would have far greater validity, however, if it were tested by cliometricians with a talent for deriving and assessing its empirical consequences. Sica implies that Congress must have expressed great faith in the scientific value of the social sciences back in the golden days of the 'fifties and 'sixties, that social scientists who had the benefit of Congressional largesse must have shared a similar perspective, and that the recent reduction of funding has somehow undermined the scientific faith among these erstwhile advocates and exemplars of a pure social science. I suspect, on the contrary, that the attitude of Congressmen and of "scientific" social scientists has changed very little, and that the challenge to positivism has occurred primarily because the antipositivists in academe have discovered that less money for their colleagues means less power.3 The Reagan/Bush administrations did not create a revolution in our minds; they created a revolution in our budgets. On the other hand, perhaps Sica is right. Perhaps diminishing public support, involving explicit disparagement of sociology by the president of the United States, has created a crisis of confidence in which the discipline finds itself "in the doldrums," a prospect taken seriously by a recent president of the American Sociological Association--this is not a healthy form of presidential accord. If we actually have allowed Reaganite anti-intellectualism to undermine our confidence in ourselves as scientists, then I say that our behavior is approximately as rational as that of the adolescent lovers mentioned earlier.
(1.1) Predictability, vulcanology, seismology, and (especially) meteorology
The cases presented here ... give evidence of the fact that social science research can be effective. ... an extreme view of the ineffectiveness of social science research, it would now seem, is untenable.
--Bernard Barber (1987:154)
The antipositivist's claim that social scientists cannot make predictions is nonsense, and anybody who plans to abandon scientific thoughtways because of this alleged defect is conducting a most inauspicious withdrawal--I cannot seem to escape adolescent techniques. Social scientists have become so good at predicting electoral results that we allegedly keep people away from polling places. Using an extraordinarily powerful theory known as the stable population model, we can predict (among other things) the future burden of social security; if the Social Security Administration did not have the benefit of our predictions (or "projections," as demographers prefer to say) the results could well be disastrous. We can predict, again within a small margin of error, the number of limited wars that will be fought by, say, the end of the current millennium. Social scientists predicted, correctly, that the peace settlements following World War I would create instability. During World War II we predicted that racial desegregation would have a generally benign impact on American society. Perhaps our greatest success in the realm of social engineering was the desegregation of the American military, a process strongly urged by social scientists despite the widespread belief, both within and without the military, that it would weaken America's warmaking capability. A few years ago a number of us predicted the recent resurgence of capital punishment in the United States, and we also had a few things to say about the prospects of reducing violence through this means. I do not claim that we can predict everything with complete accuracy, but I do claim that our ability to make predictions is at least as impressive as that of the vulcanologists working a few years ago in the vicinity of Mount St. Helen's, and more recently in Colombia (Marlowe, 1993). Decision theory, learning theory, the stable population model: These scientific devices, and their ability to anticipate the future, are comparable to much of what is found in the mighty arsenals of the natural sciences.
A few social science success stories have been so impressive and are now so completely taken for granted that they seem to be imbued in the very nature of things and we no longer receive due credit for them. Take, for instance, the matter of human mortality. Available data on the death rates of, say, 150 or more years ago suggest that these rates were highly unstable and unpredictable: They could readily vary from 30 per thousand annually to perhaps 200 per thousand annually during famines, plagues, and wars, and these variations were often not anticipated. Nowadays we can say with nearly complete certainty that the death rate of the United States throughout the 'nineties will be very close to 9.5 or 10 per thousand annually, as it has been for several decades. One of the reasons why I cherish this particular example is that it is arguable that, during the nineteenth century, large reductions in mortality as well as the stabilization of death rates were brought about not primarily by advances in the medical sciences but rather by improvements in transportation, communication, environmental sanitation, and public education (McKeown, 1988); that is, by inventions that took place in the realm of human ecology, broadly defined, and that were dependent on social diffusion. In brief, these changes were the work of people who could well be called applied social scientists.
For those contemporaries who have the courage to practice applied sociology (Whyte, 1986), the ability to predict and explain social phenomena becomes crucial: Enough mistakes, and one's job disappears.
As Seymour M. Lipset correctly points out (1979:5-7), we have had some notorious failures of prediction--for instance, our failure to anticipate the "stagflation" of the 'seventies, or our failure to predict changes in human fertility. In 1992 he added to his list the highly debatable allegation (Lenski, Lenski, and Nolan, 1991:261) that social scientists failed to anticipate the disintegration of various communist regimes. But for every demonstrable failure there are several impressive successes, and we can even provide instances in which prototypical social scientists such as the authors of The Federalist Papers have designed and correctly predicted the future behavior of elaborate social systems (Bellah et al., 1985:254-55; Diggins, 1990). If social scientists were more concerned about winning for themselves the prestige of the natural sciences (or, better yet, the prestige of the Founding Fathers), instead of slinking off to the English department for this afternoon's pomo brownbag, they would probably have many more opportunities, eventually, for designing and testing social systems or large elements of them. A few of our colleagues in West Germany (Rehberg, 1985; Stehr, 1986; Tenbruck, 1984) seem to believe that our past successes have produced the sort of anti-sociology backlash that gives some of us a sense of being in the doldrums, but I predict that we will rise above this petty affliction with minimal effort.4 I believe that what Tenbruck is saying about the social sciences is largely the sort of thing that economists might say about TV sets (Cook and Campbell, 1979:313): If manufacturers sold lots of TV sets last year, they will not do so well this year because they have satisfied the high levels of demand that existed last year.
This year's low returns, in other words, may be an indication of last year's successes--or the last century's successes, to return to the mortality example cited above. And even regarding prediction, social scientists had as many successes last year as did vulcanologists, seismologists, or meteorologists--few of whom find themselves in the doldrums.
(1.2) Molecular mysteries and habits of the quark
Another inappropriate but highly predictable twist taken by the antipositivist argument (Alexander, 1988:80) is that a science of social behavior is impossible because men and women behave more subtly than do molecules. Molecules, says one of Winkler's interviewees, do not lie. While I know little about the veracity of assorted chemical compounds (except for tea leaves and sheep entrails), I do know that anybody who studies molecules is impressed by the fact that, as one scientist phrased it, nature is more subtle by many times than the puny ability of the human mind to comprehend it. And this generalization applies to physics just as clearly as it applies to the biological and social sciences, despite Dawkins' untenable claim (1986:2) that physics studies "simple things." Any good physicist--say, a specialist in quantum dynamics--knows that her field is infinitely complex (von Baeyer, 1992), and if you try to tell such a colleague that the infinite complexities of your life are greater than the infinite complexities of hers, she is likely to conclude that you are mentally deranged.
As for biology, there are viruses that seem to have read every textbook ever published on molecular biology and a small set of manuscripts not yet published, submitted, or conceived. When Dawkins writes about his own field, which is biology, he speaks compellingly: Biology, especially at the level of molecular genetics, evolutionary theory, and their interrelationships, is a science of complexity. One cannot find anything in Habits of the Heart that makes its subject matter more complex than that of The Blind Watchmaker.5
To those who point out that there is nothing in the universe more complex than the human heart and the human mind, one can only reply that the complexity of human heads, hearts, hands, and health is to a large but indeterminate degree a matter of molecular biology.
In short, the world is very impressive; human thought, as I shall suggest in Chapter 2, is not much more impressive than computer thought. Nature presents infinite complexity in all its dimensions. The subtlety of nature tends to flamboozle all scientists, not just social scientists, and we do not find here any unique disqualification of the social sciences--even the great Michel Foucault, as we shall see, was mistaken on this question.
Winkler recounts Renato Rosaldo's experiences among the Ilongots, apparently trying to show that Rosaldo's emotional make-up contributes to the quality of his scholarly work. Her presentation in this case undercuts the anti-science stance, because one cannot see the alleged relationship between Rosaldo's sad experience of losing his wife and his excellent hypothesis that exchange theory may help us to explain (and "postdict," if not predict) head-hunting among the Ilongots. This is a typical social science hypothesis and it is testable regardless of whether one is capable, in Rosaldo's words, of getting "close to the emotional force involved." The emotions of the subjects are likely to be irrelevant to the explanatory tasks of the scientist. As Marvin Harris argues (1979:333-36), it does not matter what was going through the minds of the victims of Aztec sacrifice as these unfortunates were being dragged up the temple steps to the slaughter. (Harris, to be sure, overstates the case: Would that we could have interviewed some of the potential victims!) I believe that we could readily assemble a panel of anthropologists who could outline a procedure that would enable us to decide whether Rosaldo's hypothesis fits reality. In selecting this panel, we would be wise not to pay any special attention to the emotional make-up of its members. Selection by expertise rather than emotion or other irrelevancies is the hallmark of science and one of the major reasons why it progresses--at least in the sense that it can make decisions about hypotheses. And this, of course, is a good definition of scientific progress.
Rosaldo reminds me of George Bush: He has strong feelings, but once he has called this to our attention a few times it tends to lose its force, and its relevance.
It is puzzling to me that Rosaldo somehow has come to be associated with the antipositivist critique, because his writings on the topic insist that social scientists continue pursuing scientific knowledge according to the standard positivist maxims. He tells us (1986), for instance, that Le Roy Ladurie's studies of fourteenth-century French village life may have been impaired by the fact that the major source of data was the "inquisition register" of Bishop Fournier; many of the respondents may have slanted their answers out of fear for their lives and/or salvation. Fournier, it appears, was no Torquemada--but he wasn't Charles Booth or George Gallup either. Rosaldo makes similar claims about the classic studies of the Nuer by Evans-Pritchard, who worked under the auspices not of the heavenly powers but rather the earthly powers of the majestic Government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1986:88).
The cardinal rule of positivism, of course, is that we must strive for objectivity. Rosaldo is merely insisting that we abide by this maxim.
In any case, it may well be that an anthropologist whose personal experiences and emotions are comparable to those of Rosaldo is more likely to arrive at a particular hypothesis, and it is for this reason that we should not act as if the emotionality of science were somehow incompatible with insight and objectivity. The scientist who discovered a volcano on one of Jupiter's moons a few years ago speaks as if her emotional constitution--at least her persistence in poring over data--had a lot to do with the discovery, and I believe her argument is at least as compelling as that of Rosaldo. In Watson's The Double Helix (1968), one discerns the strong emotions involved in the competitive search for DNA. Guillemin and Schally, who received the Nobel prize for their work on the ways in which the brain controls the endocrine system, were swept along (or perhaps impeded) by intense emotions (Meites, 1977). Again, Koestler (1964:101-267) shows that emotional experiences, dreams, accidents, coincidences, serendipity, and the like have always been at the center of scientific procedure and progress, and I believe that social scientists know this as well as anybody. In Hammond's view (1964:3), the best sociologists have a "feel" for the tactics and strategy of science, and Becker claims (1987:25-26) that neither natural scientists nor social scientists work with total impersonality and objectivity. Again, Sica's (1988) insistence that social scientists place too much emphasis on human rationality is undercut by these sorts of considerations.
On the other hand, when we evaluate the contribution of emotion to the sciences, we must remember that powerful emotions underlie the astronomy of Ptolemy, the biology of Lysenko, and the psychogenetics of Arthur Jensen. Science is the process of getting experts to agree about things regardless of their strongest emotions. The emotions that lead us to pursue the beauties of Jupiter's moons do not dictate a strong emphasis on emic explanation, and they do not dictate an abandonment of the central thoughtways of science. Incidentally, it is contradictory to argue, as do some of Winkler's interviewees, that a social science is impossible because the scientist is part of his subject and that the social sciences suffer because so many of us remain emotionally detached from the subject. It is interesting that Barzun (1964:87) considers detachment to be the most civilized aspect of science, an extraordinary accomplishment for the "restless rampaging beast" that spends most of its time trying to whip nature into shape.
Finally, Winkler's article wrongly asserts an ineluctable tension between science and interpretation, implying that scholars who opt for interpretation must necessarily declare war on science. On the contrary, it is entirely possible to study interpretation, the meanings of symbols and of human experience generally, from a scientific standpoint. There is, for instance, a highly developed positivist psychology of human perception and cognition. When scholars begin speaking about interpretive styles of investigation, however, we often encounter a distressing tendency that is dangerously exacerbated by the Winklerian world-view: The problem is that interpretations--either those of the observer or the observed--are taken as the ultimate reality. But social scientists who contribute to the debunking function, who (with Collins, 1984) take the null hypothesis seriously, have reason to believe that most interpretations, most of the time, are wrong. It is arguable, in fact, that this assertion is the central premise of all the sciences, applying therefore even to the finest etic interpretations. And if we cannot muck through with the best, what, pray tell, do we make of the rest?
Mortimer Adler (1985: Chapter 1) maintains that the separation of consciousness from its objects, the separation of "individualist" and "holistic" perspectives (James, 1984), is a serious philosophical error, and Marvin Harris has argued in several works (1979; Harris and Ross, 1987) that if we rely heavily on our own untested interpretations of social behavior or (worse yet) on the interpretations provided by "knowledgeable" interviewees, we will inevitably go astray. Harris (1979:246-53) shows that if we accept emic explanations of the significance of sacred cows, we are assured of learning next to nothing about the social and ecological dynamics of this custom. Similarly, if we rely on a cross-section of Gallup Poll interviewees for insight into the structure and functioning of American society, we will learn almost nothing about the social science principles that informed the authors of The Federalist Papers, about whether or not America has a ruling class, about the alleged indispensability of "waste" and "waste-makers" to the American economy, or about the extraordinary features of Southern slavery discerned by Fogel and Engerman (1974). Just ask your relatives, friends, and neighbors about the origins and functions of the incest taboo, comparing their replies against what anthropologists have theorized about this topic, and you will see my point. Or, in a more contemporary example, find a dean of faculty, ask him whether sex discrimination in faculty salaries exists at your institution, and compare his reply against the sort of reality discernable by an appropriate regression equation. I do not accuse the dean of malfeasance: As I implied above, if social scientists can do things without conscious awareness or intent, so can everybody else. The dean may simply not know what is going on.
It may or may not be true that "if everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody." I am strongly convinced, however, that if every interpretation is taken to be real, then nothing is real.6 And if everyman's interpretation is capable of informing me, and I do my best to assimilate everyman's interpretation, then my own interpretation must be unassailable and I have achieved the superiority of the town gossip. Immediately, then, we are at the fringes of the politics of solipsism, and the consensus-creating practices of science become a mere imposition, an intrusion into the do-it-yourself reality of each of us. Obnoxious little books like Harry Browne's How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (1973) become our scriptures, and our great commandment, standing alone as an icon of cultural illiteracy, is "Know thyself--and nothing more." Tune in on Browne's discussion of the merits of tax evasion, and compare his view of taxpayers with that suggested below in Section (6).
Some years ago I believed, with Theodore Roszak (1969), that anti-science is an inexorable feature of the "counterculture." Nowadays it occurs to me that anti-science may be the philosophical foundation of the "me generation," and I do my best to suppress the fear that the me generation is merely the latest manifestation of the counterculture.
Science, on the contrary, is integrative, regarding intellectual property as communal in its creation and ownership. It insists upon cooperation. It insists that similarities among things--and among people--are more important than differences. It insists that ego-tripping give way to humility and to an attitude of reverence toward nature. It insists upon its own intermingling with the many non-scientific thoughtways that strengthen it and are strengthened by it. It is ironical that if we aging scientists ever try to bring back the idealism that lived so briefly in our students of the 'sixties, we shall probably have to do so in the name of science. The most promising young radicals I ever knew referred to themselves as the HEADS--they were Human Ecology And Demography Students, they didn't smoke all that much, and they were the wave of the future. And although I do not believe that mathematical competency automatically makes one scientific, I can only hope that Barzun (1964:30) is correct in the claim that "the statistical outlook prevails and establishes an equality that dwarfs the individual." Back in the 'sixties I tried to impress this argument on the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but at the time it appeared that they were too individualistic to accept it, not yet having discovered the likes of Althusser and Poulantzas (James, 1984:79-145). As we shall see in the next chapter, however, an intellectual discipline such as statistics is probably not loaded with the ideological biases that are often fashionably claimed nowadays for such disciplines.
(1.3) Rosaldo revisited: How would the catcher in the rye have felt?
I believe that there are fruitful possibilities ... for sociological theorists to shift their reflexive analytical focus from metatheoretical foundational concerns to practical-moral ones.
--Steven Seidman (1991:142), citing Renato Rosaldo (1989).
I'm very happy for Rosaldo.
I'm delighted that it is possible for an American anthropologist to live to full adulthood, to become a prominent scholar, to marry, have children, travel across the world many times--and never encounter the "rage in grief" until the awful day when his wife, a beloved friend and colleague, falls over a precipice to her death. I was born in 1938, and I was filled with grief and rage by the time I was three years old. By the spring of 1942--those sad, unforgettable days--I knew that an incomprehensible catastrophe had occurred at a place with a beautiful and mysterious name, Pearl Harbor; I knew that my grandfather, who early one winter morning had given me the exotic, surrealistic experience of walking across Santa Monica Boulevard for the first time, was dead; I knew that my parents were breaking up, that my mother was losing her father and her husband at the same time. And I had my counterpart of Rosaldo's headhunting: I knew that the world is flat, that bullets travel infinitely in a straight line parallel to the flat earth, that machine guns never run out of bullets, and that therefore all I had to do, to be safe, was to acquire such a weapon, press the trigger, and spin round and round. I also knew that I had acquired a "twenty-five dollar United States war bomb" from a very motherly woman named Kate Smith, and that if my machine gun did not work--no problem: My very small pilot would throw open the canopy of his very small airplane, raise my very small twenty-five dollar United States war bomb, and drop it directly on General Tojo.
Which brings me to my current theoretical problem, the AIDS epidemic. I want to know how to model this epidemic: Is some sort of mathematical function appropriate (Brookmeyer, 1991), should I try to develop a simulation (Whicker and Sigelman, 1991: Chapter 6), or should I try to find more data, say, on sexual conduct comparable to the data provided by the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) or the General Social Survey (GSS)? Should I use all these approaches at once, and triangulate among them? Am I missing the legs of a larger triangle? In any case, my own endless experience of the rage in grief and (why not?) the grief in rage--and here I must allude to Holden Caulfield, the dialectical opposite of Toe Joe the Ogre--will further my understanding of the AIDS epidemic to precisely the same degree that Rosaldo's "use of personal experience" has furthered my comprehension of headhunting.
One final thought: In the age of AIDS, those who believe in giving full play to their passions should contact the contemporary counterpart of Kate Smith, and get some investments in place.
(2) The trouble with feminist theory
When Susan Bordo (1987:261) argues that Western intellectual history over the last several centuries has produced a "Cartesian masculinization of thought" and that this masculinization results from "the seventeenth-century flight from the feminine," she implies that there is something macho about the sciences, including the social sciences; presumably, there is something inherently feminine about an identifiable set of preceding centuries. Other advocates and exemplars of "feminist theory" develop the machismo argument more explicitly. Marlene Mackie (1988:1-2), for instance, claims that "... the linchpin of sexism in sociology is its methodology"--referring to those aspects of methodology that purport to be scientific. She laments "... the use of masculine research style ..." and refers (1988:4) to a "machismo element" in sociological research that leads to "exclusion of women through choice of research topics." She tells us (1988:11) that a content analysis of the research literature has revealed that male-authored articles are more likely than female-authored articles to be "masculine oriented"--specifically, 90 per cent versus 71 per cent. (Interestingly, this comparison suggests that fewer than a third of the female authors in sociology write something other than masculine-oriented work; it also leads us to question Mackie's "exclusion of women" remark.) Mackie (1988:12) then arrives at a recurrent claim of feminist theory: That although we often view gender as an important characteristic of individuals, we fail to recognize its significance as a "principle of organization"--a claim to which I shall return. Finally, Margaret Andersen (1987:247) tells us that "... critiques of the scientific method should be a primary concern in feminist revisions of social science courses," and Susan Weisskopf (1978:277) informs us that quantitatively oriented psychologists and sociologists have not succeeded in controlling research biases; instead, they have managed to "... lose touch with the individuals behind the statistics"--another theme that recurs often in works of feminist theory and in the antipositivist critique generally.
In trying to assess whatever support has been adduced for these arguments, I usually find many instances in which scientific method has strengthened the feminist perspective, rather than subverting it. Longino and Doell (1987:165,175), for instance, while focussing on "masculine bias" in the social sciences, point out that
What the study of contemporary hunting and gathering societies should teach us is that, short of stepping into a time machine, any speculation regarding the behavior and social organization of early humans remains just that. This leaves framework choice subject to influences such as the speculator's preconceived and culturally determined ideas of what human beings are. The distance between evidence and hypothesis ... remains an invitation to further theorizing or, as some would have it, storytelling.
Longino and Doell believe that masculine bias cavalierly fills this gap by telling the story of man the hunter and woman the gatherer. But the central tenet of scientific method is that one does not fill gaps with unsubstantiated guesses; rather, one follows the rules of scientific procedure in order to identify gaps in knowledge and arrive at an appropriate means of closing them. There is no evidence that the "masculine" style of scientific procedure has been remiss in these responsibilities (Lenski, Lenski, and Nolan, 1991:105). In fact, the sorts of scientific attitudes that feminist theory regards as male-oriented are probably associated with more than the usual degree of skepticism about scientific claims, including claims about the earliest sex roles. The many anthropologists and sociologists who laid to rest the various unilinear or parallelistic theories of social evolution were convinced that the earliest human origins, as Sumner once said, are lost in obscurity, and that dogmatic assertions about them therefore cannot be entertained. There is little enthusiasm, today, for Tylor's theory of the incest taboo, for his theory of racial differences, for Freud's theory of the parricidal crisis, or for the Morgan-Engels theory of the origins of the family and private property. Although these scholars told magnificent stories, they could not provide the sort of evidence that would lead us to accept their stories as scientific knowledge. And it is noteworthy, as Josephine Donovan (1985:73-76) points out, that Morgan and Engels did not consistently place the male of the species in the dominant position, in their stories.
On the question of the early evolution of sex roles, the best studies that I've encountered recently are summarized in Harris and Ross (1987). Harris is strongly committed to "the struggle for a science of culture"; yet, despite this male-oriented proclivity, the Harris-Ross volume provides great insight into the dynamics of excess female mortality (emphasizing female infanticide), the harsh treatment of women generally, the relationship between sex exploitation and class exploitation, and many other such topics. These studies also have the virtue of directly challenging Malthusian theory as it applies historically, and demographic transition theory as it applies to modern populations.
Another illustration of the ways in which science has contributed to feminist theory occurs in Donovan's book. When I came to the page where we learn that "... the witch craze developed in Europe and in New England at the same time as the Newtonian world view was gaining ascendency" (1985:29), I was tempted to write a paraphrase in which I would point out that witch crazes were disappearing at the same time as the Einsteinian world view was gaining ascendency. But before I could do so, I came across the following remarks in a later chapter of the same book (Donovan, 1985:180):
The Newtonian or scientific world view ... is rooted in the ... masculine psychology ... However, developments in twentieth-century science, such as Heisenberg's Principle ... and Einstein's ... Theories of Relativity ... have challenged the validity of the Newtonian paradigm. The new vision of the universe that is emerging is no longer of an Other that operates in predictable, mechanical fashion, but of a contextual network in which every discrete entity is defined relative to its environment and subject to the positional relativity of the observer.
This sort of concession undermines the anti-science arguments presented by Bordo, Mackie, Andersen, Weisskopf, and by Donovan in the earlier parts of her book. But even as a concession, this passage (and its larger context) leaves a lot to be desired: It does not explain what is masculine about Newton, why relativity is non-masculine, or whether it would be appropriate for us to credit twentieth-century physics with having given major impetus to the feminist movements of this century.
In a few recent works of feminist analysis, one notices an occasional indulgence in what Longino and Doell might call unsubstantiated storytelling. Andersen (1988:17-19), for instance, laments the fact that much of the recent literature on the status-attainment process in the United States involves surveys of men only, but when she castigates Christopher Jencks et al. (1979) on the basis that "... his national sample includes only men ...," we lose sight of the fact that Jencks and his eleven collaborators (including four women) used five national surveys and six special-purpose samples, and that some of these datasets did include information about women. It turns out, granted, that information on women was so limited that, as Jencks et al. say (1979:4-6), "... we reluctantly decided to restrict all our analyses to males ... Nonetheless, this limitation is both serious and regrettable, since sex is one of the most important single factors affecting earnings." This research team, then, had strong misgivings about the neglect of women in status-attainment research, and it is clear that they believed that the surveys available to them missed a lot.
I mention this example primarily because it illustrates the important distinction between theories and "orientations" (Merton, 1957:87-89): If it is true that the status-attainment literature has given little attention to women, this is a criticism of the orientations of researchers in this area, i.e., their ways of selecting problems for analysis, and not of their theoretical practices. Theories and orientations are largely independent of one another. For instance, one could make excellent contributions to conflict theory by developing comparative analyses of international relations, labor-management relations, and race relations, while rarely or never dealing with questions of gender or male-female interaction. And vice versa.
Nor can I agree with Andersen (1988:19) that matters have not improved, that "... in sociological work, gender is seldom considered to be a factor that influences social behavior." In order to substantiate this large thesis she would have to show, among many other things, that approximately 700 gender-related articles and books based on the GSS and published by 1986 (Smith and Fujimoto, 1986: mnemonic index, 50-51), and the many studies published since that time, had little relevance to social behavior. She would have to demonstrate the irrelevance of the U. S. Census, the Current Population Survey, the National Longitudinal Surveys of men, women, and youths, the NSFG, and many other such enterprises in which large quantities of gender-related data have been produced. And then she would have to extend the analysis from survey-based literature to the many other types of literature produced by social scientists. If she were to take these steps, I believe that she would have to abandon her argument, or at least a large part of it.
From time to time, Andersen seems to suggest that the essential problem is that we do not pay enough attention to the sex composition (the sex ratio) of social groups or organizations. But this situation arises from the fact that in order to calculate a sex ratio, one must be able to identify significant ways of grouping or aggregating the data. It is hard to do this with the General Social Survey. The GSS involves a sample of independent households, and there are relatively few ways of grouping data so as to make the sex ratio a meaningful measure. It is entirely possible, however, to use the sex variable from the American Council on Education's massive surveys of college faculty members as a basis for classifying institutions, departments, academic fields, etc., on their sex composition. Many scholars--even male-oriented scholars--have shown no reluctance to take advantage of this sort of opportunity. If it is important, as Mackie suggests in the citation above, that sex be conceptualized as a "principle of organization," this surely must refer to such practices as the use of the sex ratio as opposed to the simple sex classification of individuals. In the Harris-Ross work cited earlier, the sex ratio of children is the most important means of assessing the degree to which infanticide selects against females. If gender as a principle of organization is intended to have additional meanings, they should be stated.
Although feminist theory addresses itself primarily to methodological questions, it is interesting that the one style of theorizing that seems to call forth mandatory malediction is functionalism. When Andersen says (1988:20) that "the focus on norms, roles, and stability emphasizes the status quo ..." and that functionalist theory traps us into using these limiting concepts, one must ask, first, how was Mirra Komarovsky limited by her focus on roles and norms? Second, in what sense are researchers who focus, say, on sex ratios guilty of overemphasizing sex roles, given that these roles are not defined for aggregate data? (If a group or social category can have a sex role, this is a neologism that must be defined with care.) Regarding functionalism, Susan M. Okin (1979:95,240-41) makes a comparable error when she suggests that scholars still see women from a sort of Aristotelian functionalist perspective that insists on a place for everything and everything in its place, including women. The error arises from the fact that sociological functionalism is hardly more teleological than Darwinian functionalism--Darwin and Wallace, in fact, borrowed the central postulates of evolutionary theory from the great functionalists Malthus and Smith. Contemporary functionalism may give human intentionality a larger role than that implied by the Darwinian (or social Darwinian) view, but contemporary functionalism is prepared to take Shulamith Firestone very seriously when she suggests (Okin, 1979:295) that technology, for instance, is capable of liberating women from the "barbaric" character of pregnancy, for starters.
In brief, it is not at all clear what Stacey and Thorne (1985:309) have in mind when they argue that "... positivist knowledge serves the interests not only of dominant social classes ..., but also the interests of men ..." Various demons may rampage through our works, but they are not positivist demons. In the grandest traditions of androgynous sociology we positivists must insist upon both the allegedly masculine practices of abstract, etic, quantitative structuralism, and the presumably feminine practices of giving attention to "... individuals behind the statistics ...," emic exploration, intensive case studies, interpretationism, qualitative methods, and so forth. We also insist that the best sociology is done when these diverse perspectives are combined and made to work in a complementary way.
(3) Titles and tribulations
Throughout this book I illustrate the harmful consequences of abandoning the high standards of scientific inquiry. In recent months I have found that whenever I try to discuss openly my misgivings about feminist attitudes toward science, I encounter further illustrations. Something is very wrong when a highly productive and capable scholar tells me, in a personal letter, that "I had written a response to you but I didn't send it for publication, for two reasons: 1) I didn't think it my place to respond, 2) I thought [your] editor was the real culprit." There have been several letters and a few phone calls from colleagues who implicitly affirm the prescient words of Eri Atlov: "I do strongly agree with what you say, but I shall be scared to death to say so forthrightly." The sort of colleague who sends these messages reminds me of the "undisclosed source" whose words we read so often even (or perhaps especially) in the better newspapers. But those who are afraid to stand by their own ideas already have surrendered their constitutional rights, no matter how provocative their public expressions; like Emmanuel Goldstein of 1984, these quintessential voices must remain in hiding. And Thomas Jefferson would doubtless remind us that if these anonymous advocates of provocative notions cannot be challenged because they will not reveal themselves, then the marketplace of ideas is already suffering restraint of trade.
As I became more heavily involved in raising the questions of the preceding section, it occurred to me that an appropriate title for this book would be Androgynous Sociology: The Power and the Elegance. After all, the basic thesis of the book is that what we must do is to combine the best of the alleged masculine thoughtways with the best of the alleged feminine (or feminist) thoughtways. But reactions to this idea, from men, were almost always along the following lines: "I would be afraid to self-select a volume with that title for fear of what people might think." And from women, although I usually hear that there is something simplistic about the androgyny theme, these deficiencies are never specified.
And then there is a madman who wrote to a colleague of mine. He asked how "Herr Professor Faia" was doing, said that Stacey and Thorne are merely revealing the obvious when they write that positivist knowledge serves primarily the interests of men, affirmed that science does not attract women because it is "quantitative and logically rigorous," argued that presumably feminine (or feminist) thoughtways have no place in science, excoriated a "geek-branch feminist" for something, involving Mormonism, that I did not understand, and then wound it all up by telling us that he "got out" of sociology because it is "too quantitative and pays too little attention to individuals ..." An unforgivably careless reader, who feels a false affinity with an argument that repudiates his own nefarious analyses, virtually at every turn. Herr Professor Faia assumes that, by now, this gentleman-scholar has met the matriculation requirements of Eastern State, a Virginia institution of some repute.
Bologh (1990), Cancian (1990), and several other colleagues insist that I might modify my misgivings about feminist theory (Faia, 1990) if I were to read a book by Harding (1986). I have done so (not for the first time), and I therefore reconsider as follows:
i
Harding's indictment of science, its history and its contemporary forms, contains a lengthy bill of charges. She provides an early summation (1986:9): first, the epistemologies, metaphysics, ethics, and politics of mainstream science are androcentric and mutually supportive in their androcentrism; second, modern science serves "regressive social tendencies"; third, scientific applications, technologies, ways of creating meaning, and modes of defining problems and designing experiments are sexist, racist, classist, and culturally coercive. "... I do not wish to be understood," says Harding (1986:10), "as recommending that we throw out the baby with the bathwater;" yet, as we get better acquainted with it, the baby appears to be badly in need of an exorcist.
Bologh, Cancian et al. are right: After a careful reading of Harding I have a far better grasp of feminist claims regarding the pervasive character of gender. For instance (Harding, 1986:17,57):
... as a symbol system, gender difference is the most ancient, most universal, and most powerful origin of many morally valued conceptualizations of everything else in the world around us. Cultures assign a gender to such nonhuman entities as hurricanes and mountains, ships and nations. ... Gender is a fundamental category within which meaning and value are assigned to everything in the world, a way of organizing human social relations ...
And this is only the first installment, the first dimension, of a detailed multidimensional definition that clarifies itself as one continues working through the book.
A second feature of gender traditions, in Harding's analysis (1986:20,123), is that they have led us to view the world with inescapable distortions, such as those arising from a tendency to see reality in binary form, to see things as dichotomies corresponding to the bisexual character of the human species. Scattered throughout the book is an argument on the desirability of breaking up the two-valued logic of machine vs. human, animal vs. human, mind vs. body, reason vs. emotion, objectivity vs. subjectivity, abstract vs. concrete, conceptualizer vs. executor. Harding has a powerful aptitude for the dialectical interlacing of these apparent oppositions and contradictions, as in her claim (1986:71) that there are few differences between research and engineering, or her claim that affirmative action programs are simultaneously reformist and revolutionary (1986:247). She tells us that a major objective of feminist theory is the development of "feminist standpoint epistemologies" (1986:24-9,142-62). We soon realize that these epistemologies, again highly complex and multidimensional, place a strong emphasis on the integration of opposites.7 They express hostility toward positivist empiricism (1986:33), and they make a strong commitment to postmodernism with its rejection of the notion of "one true story," an intellectual vice that is alleged to be the essence of science (1986:24-9,194).
One hopes that the feminist standpoint epistemologies, working (at times) within the hoary confines of the American university, will eventually challenge the mindlessness of the EGAD! system--Examinations, Grades, Accumulation (of credits, "contacts," etc.), Degrees.
In the realm of gender symbolism, Harding especially deplores the metaphorical association of woman with nature (1986:114-16) or with the earth; the latter association leads her to the conviction that the Copernican revolution, displacing the female earth with the male sun, was a world-historical degradation of womanhood (1986:85-92). Here, we begin to comprehend her expansive thesis about the dangers of metaphor (1986:113,116,237):
... feminist historians have focussed on ... rape and torture metaphors in the writings of ... Bacon and others (e.g., Machiavelli) enthusiastic about the new scientific method. ... understanding nature as a woman indifferent to or even welcoming rape was equally fundamental to the interpretations of these new conceptions of nature and inquiry. ... why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton's laws as 'Newton's rape manual' as it is to call them 'Newton's mechanics'? ... As nature came to seem more like a woman whom it is appropriate to rape and torture ..., did rape and torture come to seem a more natural relation of men to women?
On this argument, more anon.
Harding argues that science selects the wrong problems, defining excessive population growth, for instance (1986:77), as merely a technological issue. With most of the anti-science scholars discussed in this chapter (e.g., Alexander, 1988:80), she makes the predictable claim that the physical sciences are "much less complex" than the social sciences (1986:44), and that the latter, because of their immense complexity, cannot aspire to high scientific standards. "I need hardly even mention the silliness ...," says Harding (1986:46), of assuming that the physical sciences provide a model for social-science explanation. Insofar as she does elaborate on this point, the limitations of the social sciences seem to have something to do with subjects' intentions and learned behaviors; mathematical formulations in the social realm, for instance, are impossible because of these human qualities (1986:52). Finally, within the social sciences there are at least five major sources of androcentrism (1986:85-92,114-16): first, neglect of emotion and irrationality; second, neglect of unofficial, private aspects of life; third--contradicting earlier claims about dichotomous thought--an overemphasis on male-female similarities rather than differences, especially with regard to the meanings of personal experience; fourth, a tendency to ignore sex--"... probably the single most significant variable in history" (1986:89)--as a factor in behavior; fifth, over-reliance on certain methods--e.g., quantification or the practice of having men study women--that may fail to elicit certain kinds of information.
ii
Harding's book is a most edifying exercise in the thoughtways of reform and revolution. I continue to have major problems, however, with her general hostility toward the social sciences. She believes that the social sciences fail inevitably because their topics are too complex. But her own argument fails primarily because the tasks of defining and measuring the relative complexity of the social and natural sciences are themselves highly complex, and we cannot carry them out. It is ironic that scholars who often do not trust measurement are so cavalier in making a claim that would require an intricate measurement process. Yet, advocates and exemplars of anti-science often make a tropistic rush toward questions that we cannot answer, toward concepts that we can hardly comprehend. In Harding's book, these errors abound.
At the moment, however, I should like to consider one of Harding's claims regarding the role of gender symbolism--the rape-of-nature theme--as a historical factor. Harding quotes from a speech by Richard Feynman on the occasion of his receiving the Nobel prize, in which he says that falling in love with the ideas of physics is "like falling in love with a woman," a woman for whom one's love is not diminished by the discovery that she is less than perfect, a woman whose aging, unfortunately, seems to have created insurmountable problems for Feynman although the implied cardiovascular limitations were doubtless his own. In any case, Harding regards Feynman's speech as a most nefarious act.
Harding's decision to associate Feynman's philosophy with the rape and torture themes of the several preceding pages reflects a failure to apply her own lessons: Feynman's ardor may involve the imagery of unveiling, unclothing, and penetration (1986:117), but he defines an expression of love that, although flawed, is the direct dialectical opposite of rape and torture. If it is plausible to say that Feynman advocates rape and torture, then it is equally plausible to say that devotees of fellation and cunnilingus advocate cannibalism. But a loving practice of fellation and a loving practice of cunnilingus, again, are the precise dialectical opposite of cannibalism.8 When these forms of lovemaking are conflated with cannibalism we are in the presence, at best, of sado-masochism; at worst, the madness of General Jack D. Ripper of Doctor Strangelove.
Feynman, in short, is the wrong illustration in a situation where right illustrations may be in short supply. Harding does not provide any convincing support for the rape-torture thesis. It is nothing more than a provocative hypothesis, for which relevant evidence is not yet forthcoming.
Working through the book, I developed further misgivings about many of Harding's arguments. Among other faults, these arguments tend to have one thing in common: They are short on evidence.
Item: Harding makes incredible over-generalizations. For instance (1986:21):
... science is used in the service of sexist, racist, homophobic, and classist social projects. Oppressive reproductive policies; white men's management of all women's domestic labor; the stigmatization of ... homosexuals; gender discrimination in workplaces--all these have been justified on the basis of sexist research and maintained through technologies, developed out of this research ...
Again it is the lack of evidence that is unsettling, along with the suspicion that if evidence were gathered it would not countervail against the more positive accomplishments of, say, the social sciences. How, for instance, can one fail to give major credit to the social sciences for the suppression of racism in the United States and elsewhere? We've come a long way since the early, racist anthropology of Edward B. Tylor (1898: Chapter III).
Item: Harding claims (1986:35-6) that science does not try to understand itself in a "naturalistic," self-reflexive way. But how can this thesis be sustained in a book that does not even mention Robert K. Merton, or research entities such as the Society for Social Studies of Science? Similarly, how is it possible to criticize contemporary scientists for an alleged over-indulgence in two-valued (Aristotelian) logic while ignoring the massive literature produced by the general semantics movement of the middle decades this century, a movement that surely had a large and inescapable impact on most contemporary scientists?
Item: Harding (1986:48-52) questions "pure mathematics," claiming that there is not sufficient reason to believe that mathematical expressions are value-free. She realizes, however, that the burden of proof is upon her, and her initial argument is that mathematics, alas, has the weakness of seeking internal proofs--"... no conceptual system," she says, "can provide the justificatory grounds for itself" (1986:49). She does not inform us, however, that there are strong traditions of "external," pragmatic testing in mathematics--e.g., Monte Carlo simulations of statistical models, or predicting the positions of planets in celestial mechanics. Regarding the first of these illustrations, it is possible to say that gambling ("double sixes," for example) did for mathematical statistics what warfare did for nuclear physics. In essence, then, Harding asks us to fault mathematics for having both internal and external "proofs."
Given her remarks about internal proofs, it is surprising that Harding (1986:50) makes the Marxist argument that geometry, for instance, is facilitated by systematic agriculture. Here, I see her point: Once we learn about the properties of lines, rectangles, etc., we may begin to value, say, territoriality, a general commitment to private property. But this argument is problematic because it begs the question. There must have been a powerful cultural drift toward systematic agriculture long before geometry appeared (Cohen, 1977), and therefore we must say to Harding precisely what Malinowski used to say to the Freudians: Your theories about the origins of human culture (e.g., the parricidal crisis as invoked among Freudians) assume that human culture is already highly developed prior to the time when your favorite culture-creating mechanisms come into operation. Agriculture formed our minds long before the invention of modern science.
We encounter further elaborations on the alleged poverty of deductive logic: The classic syllogism--"All men are mortal," etc.--goes wrong in Harding's view (1986:51) because of equivocation in the word "men." If one eliminates the equivocation by substituting the words "human being" for men, however, her argument collapses immediately. Harding moves on quickly, making the usual claim (1986:52) that mathematical formulations in the social realm are rendered impossible by irrationality, the presence of intentions, etc. But one who wishes to make this argument must present a convincing critique of the many quantitative studies of irrationality, intention, and the like found throughout the social science literature; Harding does not do so. In essence, she double-binds me: She gives me a fabulous set of metric tools, and then demands that I throw away my English-standard tools. I don't like this concept, and neither does my 'sixties-vintage truck.
Item: After becoming deeply involved, early on, in Harding's claims about what the male-dominated sciences have left out, we are given to understand (1986:60) that "... the public justification for women's colleges was that educated women could raise better sons." This is an insult to the Founding Sisters.
Item: Harding raises several questions such as these: First, "was it entirely a coincidence that sexology began to gain status as a science hot on the heels of the nineteenth-century women's movement and women's agitation to enter science?" (1986:80); second, "is it an accident that the novel ... emerges only in the modern world purportedly ruled by scientific rationality?" (1986:232); third--a question already discussed--does the attitude of science toward nature make rape and torture appear to be a more natural relation of men to women?9 What all such questions have in common is that we have not arrived at a way of answering them, and perhaps we never will. Postmodernism may encourage us to answer them as we wish, but to a social scientist these are not meaningful questions unless there is some way of defining them more clearly and ascertaining whether they might be approached, say, in ways implied by Harding. Incidentally, professors of medieval Spanish literature will be interested in the presumption that the novel emerged "only in the modern world."
Item: Harding (1986:114-15) finds fault with Copernicus for having replaced geocentrism (earth woman) with heliocentrism (sun man?). But Copernicus knew well that the heliocentric theory violated cultural traditions that tied together religion, the Ptolemaic view, metaphors of earth-as-mother, and other powerful imagery, and that he would therefore encounter serious danger if he were to break up this lovely logic-tight compartment by telling the inexorable "one true story" of the solar system. Yet, because of the compelling nature of the story itself, he, Galileo, and others persisted in acts of immense courage that tell us nothing about their attitude, or the attitude of science, toward women or womanhood. (Nowadays, of course, there are perhaps 1.3 true stories of the solar system.)
Item: Finally, I know of no evidence that Barbara McClintock's "feeling for the organism" (1986:122), along with many additional trappings of civilization, are not shared by other scientists of comparable excellence and stature. Renato Rosaldo, as we saw, has very strong feelings, but it is not at all clear how these feelings contribute to his anthropological research. Toward the end of her book, in fact, Harding (1986:182-85) makes a major concession, presenting a sort of Bridgman-Koestler-Kuhn argument (Koestler, 1964) about the strength of emotional and irrational elements in science. To me, this negates a large part of the preceding thesis, suggesting that many scientists--most of us, one hopes--share McClintock's admirable human qualities, along with the need for making sure that these qualities do not dominate our thinking.
iii
As we have seen, Harding (1986:50) supports the Marxist argument that plow agriculture facilitates geometry, and vice versa. This I buy; this I am prepared to sell. If you wish to understand the anteriority, constraint, and exteriority of mathematics--and to understand quantitative structuralism in sociology--seek out the appropriate machinery: plows, solar systems, engines, differential gears, airports, computers. Play with this machinery.
Take, for instance, loglinear analysis, a method that nowadays calls forth the vituperation once inspired by the statistic known as chi-square (Collins, 1984; Denzin, 1989:74). I would listen carefully to the various detractors--and to Harding--if they would take the following steps, and then provide a critique of loglinear methods:
(1) Gather together, and study for a summer or so, the best literature on the nature and uses of loglinear analysis. I strongly recommend Gilbert (1981). More recently, advances over Gilbert's work have shown, for instance, how to develop loglinear models that encompass the logic of multiple regression. This is not an instance of "fads and fashions," as suggested by Denzin, unless one shows that regression logic is no more important than my mothballed Nehru jacket.
(2) Using SAS, SPSS, or other appropriate programs, learn how to request and interpret loglinear output.
(3) Raise several theoretical questions that appear to be approachable by loglinear analysis, especially questions involving interaction effects. Work with qualitative variables, for it is thereby made clear that the qualitative-quantitative distinction vanishes within the socially constructed loglinear world. Several discussions of loglinear methods have used the Stouffer research on reference group theory. In my own work I have pursued an issue raised by a local politician who claims that she has been victimized many times by virtue of being black, by virtue of being a woman, and especially by virtue of being a black woman. This is an interactive hypothesis for which loglinear methods are well suited.
(4) After selecting a theory, don't obtain real data. Start with contrived data. Create many worlds, and make sure that in some of these worlds your theory seems to obtain, while in others it does not. Make sure that you have a hardware-software combination with a quick turnaround: You may have to do many experiments before you understand how the model reflects your various worlds, or what the model will tell you when a given hypothesis has a greater survival prospect than another. Compare loglinear models with simple crosstabulations, and find out what the latter cannot discern. Replicate, say, Gilbert's analyses, modify his data, and make the models behave predictably in supporting alternative hypotheses. In other words, rotate your crops.
After a season or two, reformulate your critique of quantification in the social sciences, and I'll send you, free of charge, a slightly seedy Nehru jacket.
Near the end of her book (1986:250-51) Harding tells us that science is a black box, and that we must beware the GIGO principle: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Where I live, GIGO now receives a novel and truly significant reinterpretation, one that identifies the real danger: Garbage In, Gospel Out.
(4) Solicitous gatekeepers, #1
This section illustrates what is likely to occur when we become cavalier about the rules of scientific procedure. The remainder of this book provides additional illustrations.
Date: 4 December 1992
To: Colleagues and bulletin-board forums
From: Michael A. Faia, Sociology, William & Mary
Bitnet: MAFAIA @ WMVM1
Re: ASA Footnotes and a new concept of censorship
Several weeks ago I sent the following letter to the editorial staff of Footnotes, a publication of the American Sociological Association. The letter is self-explanatory:
16 September 1992
Editorial Staff
Footnotes
1722 N St NW
Washington, DC 20036
Dear Colleagues:
As you know, I believe that my piece "On the Advice of Critics" should be printed in Footnotes as planned, even if Sandra Harding does not wish to reply.
When I talked to you on 1 July, you said that you would make a final appeal to Sandra, trying to elicit her participation. You seemed to think that my paper, at least, would appear in the September issue. Since it did not, I assume that it is delayed again. Given that we have a little time, I should like to add to my paper the following codicil:
While the preceding paper was under editorial consideration at Footnotes, it occurred to me that Harding and I could have a stimulating exchange regarding her writings on science. I suggested such an exchange in a letter to Footnotes on 6 April, conceding to Harding "the last word" on whatever disagreements might occur. I suggested that Footnotes could contact Harding with this proposal or, if preferable, that I could do so. On 15 April the managing editor of Footnotes wrote to me and Harding, saying that she would welcome a "point-counterpoint piece" from us. She set up a few "ground rules," one of which provided that I would send my paper to Harding by 5/20/92, and that both pieces would be submitted to Footnotes by 6/15/92. The editor said that she did not wish to "go back and forth and back and forth," which struck me as a good idea.
Therefore, on 1 May 1992 I sent the final draft of my paper both to Footnotes and to Harding. I pointed out again that "... I concede to Sandra the last word in Footnotes ...," trying to make clear that I had no desire to "... go back and forth and back and forth ..."
Footnotesscheduled the paper(s) for the August 1992 issue.
On 23 June I received a letter from Footnotes saying that Harding "... does NOT want to write something for FOOTNOTES and does not want your piece printed as a dialogue with her."
Clearly, we cannot allow a situation in which Harding exercises censorship over her critics.
Cordially, etc.
Addendum, 1 December 1992:
For more than two months I received no response to my letter or to my several subsequent phone calls. At last, on November 30, I received a clear decision: "On the Advice of Critics" will not be published by Footnotes, for reasons that have to do with "...the paper itself and the purposes of Footnotes ..."
Mainly, the purposes. "... We try to shy away from involved intellectual debates ...," say the Footnotes editors, because of space considerations. Such debates "... generate follow ups (which is a sign of success) ..." The editors (twice) "agreed to try" my paper, but over the last fourteen months, during which the paper has been under consideration at ASA, it must have degenerated, alas, into one side of an intellectual debate. Or, perhaps the taboo against intellectual debate did not exist fourteen months ago; if it did, it should have been articulated at that time and my paper should never have been scheduled for publication. Nor should I have received the ASA's letter of 18 March 1992, written weeks before I suggested a debate with Harding: "Because of the (embarrassing) proofreading last time," I was told, I should edit my paper down "... to the 1000-1200 words we can accept in an article." This was a non-sequitur, but it did not seem to rule out my paper on intellectual grounds.
To me, it is reassuring to know that although the editorial staff of Footnotes "... was under the impression ... that [Harding] had indicated interest in responding to you," it is now "... clear that [Harding's] desire to stay out for a point-counterpoint does not constitute censorship. You are free to publish any comments you wish ..."
Elsewhere.
Elsewhere: For most of my career I have understood that what was done in the United States to D. H. Lawrence and Lady Chatterley's Lover constituted censorship. I now realize that I was wrong: Those who wished to read Lawrence's chef-d'oeuvre were always free to have it published elsewhere, perhaps in Bolivia.
(5) Itching and scratching: a Lazarsfeldian digression through an SPSS hologram
In my experience, for every "quantiphrene" there is at least one advocate of a more or less exclusive use of qualitative methods. We can usually count on the latter to argue that the biggest problem with the former is a tendency to let the methodological tail wag the theoretical corpus--I hesitate to invoke the usual image. The truth is that one cannot see most theoretical problems clearly unless one has the appropriate quantitative models in mind, and one cannot get quantitative models in mind unless one understands the basic logic of theory. There is a beautiful example in Porter's history of statistics (1986:316). Porter says that analysis of variance, a statistical method developed primarily by Sir Ronald Fisher, could be regarded as "... a theory of heredity." In short, we're dealing with reciprocal causation between theory and method. It is for this reason that books like Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis, by John and Lyn Lofland, quickly run up against a dead end (1984:100):
It is sometimes useful and important to count how often a social unit ... occurs and to develop summarizing statistics in such forms as percentages and means. ... Even though they can be useful, such counting procedures are beyond the scope of this manual. There are many guides available ...; thus, to devote attention to them here would be redundant and would only blur our focus on qualitative analysis.
If counts are sometimes "useful and important," one wonders whether it is wise to ignore them on the arbitrary claim that devoting attention to them would be "redundant"--an extraordinary choice of terminology given the quantiphobic tendencies of this little manual. When the Loflands claim that quantitative procedures "... blur our focus on qualitative analysis" the reader is sorely tempted to point out that the authors could have avoided, through a simple statistical demonstration, the mistaken claim (1984:101) that a low correlation between two variables rules out any possibility of causation between them. A good statistician could readily demonstrate that the same conditions that give rise to "spurious relationships" may also give rise to spurious non-relationships.
In my courses on SPSS I use a simple program that shows how spurious non-relationships can be discerned through the use of partial tables, in a manner reminiscent of Lazarsfeld (1958). Notice that, as was true of many of Lazarsfeld's demonstrations, the variables used by this program are simple dichotomies. That is, they are the simplest sorts of qualitative variables, so that devoting attention to them should not be redundant.
I shall reproduce the program below, because I believe that anybody who runs it will realize that (1) the Loflands are wrong, in the place cited above; (2) the easiest and clearest way to demonstrate either of the two types of spuriousness is to put together an appropriate statistical demonstration, as is done by this program; (3) the easiest and clearest way to resolve subtle theoretical issues--e.g., the place of reciprocal causation in functionalist inquiries (Faia, 1986)--is to create statistical models that replicate what the theories say. Finally, I believe that this program should be thought of as a tiny slice of film from a larger hologram that represents the social sciences generally, and that this tiny slice, as is true of holograms, contains essentially the entire picture.
DATA LIST FIXED FILE=INLINE RECORDS=1
/1
FREQ1 1-2
FREQ2 4-5
X 7-8
Y 10-11
Z 13
VARIABLE LABELS
X 'PROBLEM'/
Y 'ADAPT'/
Z 'LAG'
VALUE LABELS
X Y -1 'LOW' 1 'HIGH'/
Z 1 'X TO Y' 2 'Y TO X'
BEGIN DATA
90 75 1 1 1
10 15 1 1 2
30 15 1 -1 1
30 75 1 -1 2
30 15 -1 1 1
30 75 -1 1 2
10 75 -1 -1 1
90 15 -1 -1 2
END DATA
COMPUTE FREQ1=FREQ1+NORMAL(7)
WEIGHT BY FREQ1
CROSSTABS TABLES=Y BY X/Y BY X BY Z
OPTIONS 3 4
STATISTICS 1 2 3
COMPUTE FREQ2=FREQ2+NORMAL(7)
WEIGHT BY FREQ2
CROSSTABS TABLES=Y BY X/Y BY X BY Z
OPTIONS 3 4
STATISTICS 1 2 3
FINISH
This program produces six tables, the last three of which are shown in the appendix. The first table, using FREQ1, demonstrates a spurious relationship. This relationship disappears, in the classic Lazarsfeldian manner, when Z is held constant: There is no relationship in the two partial tables. The fourth table shows a spurious non-relationship: A relationship does appear, in the final two tables, when Z is held constant. The latter kind of spuriousness, contrary to popular opinion, is just as dangerous as the former. For instance, in a functionalist interpretation of a spurious non-relationship, one might argue that the non-relationship occurs because the tendency for X (a problem) to cause Y (an adaptation) is cancelled out by the tendency for the adaptation to reduce the severity of the problem. Think of this as an itching-scratching process: If itching causes scratching, and if scratching reduces itching (this can happen), then it is entirely possible that one will observe a spurious non-relationship between these two variables.
The itching-scratching example is a metaphor for a classic form of functionalist theory. If each of the N=334 social entities in the tables of the appendix were behaving according to the sine/cosine process given in Faia (1986: Chapter 6), and if those N entities were placed in the spurious non-relationship format in which no relationships appear, we would lose sight of the prospect that all values of X approaching 1 may be pushing Y values toward 1 (first partial table, lagged X to Y, wherein itching is now presumably activating a process of scratching), while all values of Y approaching 1 may soon begin pushing X values downward (second partial table, lagged Y to X, wherein scratching is now presumably reducing the amount of itching).
Ironically, the Loflands (1984:113) provide an excellent example of precisely this sort of process. In a brief discussion of functionalism, they develop the example of "deviant roles among policemen," pointing out that "... the performance of certain unpleasant tasks is necessary for the maintenance of the police department." As is often the case in functionalist explanations, "maintenance" is not clearly defined. However, it would be appropriate in my SPSS example to define the Y variable as "unpleasant tasks" (i.e., scratching) and the X variable as a problem (i.e., itching) involving maintenance of something within each of N=334 police departments: Arrest records, for instance, adequate to meet legal demands and requiring many person-hours of onerous labor. Within the framework of purely qualitative methods I do not see how the Loflands could have done anything more with this problem than what they did: They more or less defined the key variables. But social science theories involve a lot more than the mere definition of key variables.10
I maintain that, in demonstrating functionalist theory, no amount of verbal vigor would be as effective as the Lazarsfeldian tradition of playing with partial tables. What is required in this sort of didactic exercise is an appropriate combination of verbal and quantitative insight. When authors and publishers produce books and articles on (purely) qualitative sociology, when undergraduate courses are organized around these proliferating texts, when library references such as Sociological Abstracts classify and code many social science publications as exemplifying (purely) qualitative sociology, we are back to the old high-school bifurcation, the old tracking practices that separated those who wished to take qualitative analysis for their chemistry requirement from those who seemed qualified for the more rigorous and realistic approach. A widely used textbook suggests that quantitative and qualitative approaches to chemistry, ideally, should be "entwined" (Harris, 1987:xiii). Ditto for sociology.
(6) Transcending the transcendentalists
Seidman's [1991] criticisms are nothing compared to the active disregard by theorists in many other fields--literature, feminist studies, politics, anthropology, history, and more--who once looked first to sociology and now hardly notice us at all.
--Charles Lemert (1991:164)
This dreadful indifference has been breached in a recent article by Gross (1989), who demonstrates what he considers a proper use of sociological findings: The 1850 United States census can be used to help students understand the lifestyles of the transcendentalist writers of New England. Gross says (1989:504) that one of his major goals as a scholar and teacher is to help reconcile the "two-cultures" syndrome that separates students who excel in the natural sciences from those who excel in the humane disciplines. This is surely a worthy objective, but Gross (1989:512) quickly gets into trouble when he argues that
By placing the census back into history, my class was led to an important insight into quantitative analysis: numbers are never enough; they must always be restored to the context from which they emerged. Following that intellectual path, we went on to seek in Emerson's biography an understanding of how he and Lidian had fashioned their household over the years ...
The trouble arises because Gross does not make it clear that these same sentences can easily be stood on their head; in other words, he is describing an intellectual process that is capable of running in reverse.11 If Gross's remarks above make sense, then it also makes sense to say that
by placing biography back into demographic history, my class was led to an important insight into qualitative analysis: biographies--highly detailed case histories--are never enough; they must always be restored to the larger social context from which they emerged. Following that intellectual path, we went on to seek in the census tabulations an understanding of how Emerson and Lidian and other such families had fashioned their households over the years ...
Gross shows us, in brief, that census tables are subject to interpretation. But why not show us also how interpretations are subject to census tables? Reading about the Emersons and their domestic life, a clever sociologist would quickly arrive at the hypothesis suggested by Gross' Table 1 (1989:509): In the days of the transcendentalists a young man was expected to become head of a household, perhaps a very large household, but was rarely able to do so prior to reaching the age of about thirty or thirty-five. Similarly, anybody who reads the feminist literature of the early years of the twentieth century and discerns the close relationship between feminist issues and those of the temperance movement, would probably be delighted to discover a tattered census volume (Bureau of the Census, 1908) that fell into my hands a few years ago. This book contains a mammoth table, continuing for hundreds of pages, that permits the testing of a classic feminist-temperance interpretation: That whenever large numbers of divorces involve male dominance, it is also likely that large numbers of divorces will involve "drunkenness." The method of analysis would be correlational, while the inspiration might well have been biographical.
On the Emerson question: If you had one unit of time and energy for study, and devoted .5 to the 1850 census and .5 to Emerson's family, you would probably learn the equivalent of (.5)(.5)=.25, a reasonable proportion of what you need to know. If you devoted .1 to the one topic and .9 to the other, you would learn (.1)(.9)=.09, a far smaller proportion of what you need to know. (Waldo would love this formulation.)
In conclusion, I believe that sociology should continue to emphasize macrostructures, numbers, systematic measurement, quantitative models, empirical data, and carefully selected samples. But perhaps my view on these matters is perverted, and I must confess that in my "methods" classes and elsewhere I love to defend the following truth: For beauty, for clarity, for elegance, for immense power combined with subtle intricacy, there never was a sonnet written by Petrarch or Shakespeare or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, there never was a poem of any genre nor will there ever be a poem of any language, that will surpass the IRS 1040 Long Form. This glorious set of documents is the ultimate social science instrument: It is highly complex, with elaborate interrelationships among its many parts, and yet it is parsimonious; it is incredibly informative, yet without overtaxing the mental capabilities of intelligent respondents; it is verbally clean and sharp, and it is mathematically clean and sharp; in its careful construction, it embodies the insights and inspirations of a long series of scientific inquiries. It is a work of the social sciences, and it is a work of art.
And one final thought: Given the sophisticated research that it makes possible, the IRS 1040 Long Form expresses our high estimation of the capabilities of the "object" of study and our sense that this particular respondent has a strong commitment to the social contract--if a social contract may be said to exist.
I recently had occasion to express openly my convictions and feelings about the IRS 1040 Long Form. The opportunity came during an academic seminar, a weekend retreat, that involved several colleagues charged with the task of developing an interdisciplinary graduate program in American Studies that will span American history, literature, and popular culture, along with several social science fields. As it turns out, all participants in this program have a lot to learn, especially from one another. To me, for instance, the history of "vernacular architecture" in the United States is a highly esoteric realm, one in which I will probably never feel at home, and one in which I may never have the temerity to undertake a research project. But I was nonetheless mildly shocked to discover that several of my humanities colleagues, when they first heard about the sort of interview that occurs in the NSFG, would react in a way that reminded me of Philip Roth's (1971) account of Richard Nixon's reaction upon learning about the sexual practices of homosexuals. My colleagues could not believe that social scientists would have the bad taste to ask highly detailed questions about the marital experiences, sexual behavior, and fertility histories of a cross-section of American young adult women. It was my feeling that this sort of culture shock must be overcome quickly in a cross-disciplinary program, if it is to succeed.
I should point out that the NSFG came up during a discussion of my introductory seminar on American Studies. The discussion followed a cocktail party, and my interpretations of the discussion may have been clouded by vernacular inebriation. However, it would be no more difficult for me, while sober, to explain sociology to my postmodernist colleagues than it would have been for Rosaldo (1989:3-4) to explain exchange theory to Ilongot headhunters. If only he had been willing to take the time.
(7) What do you presuppose, and when did you presuppose it? The Sisyphus of the social sciences
Jeffrey Alexander's Theoretical Logic in Sociology is a multi-volume opus in which, among other tasks, the author elaborates his reasons for believing that a major trouble with the social sciences is that they try too hard to emulate the natural sciences; the thesis is developed further in a recent work (Alexander, 1988). Alexander (1982:7-8) is afraid that if we follow the advice of Hans Zetterberg and attempt to set up systems of knowledge replete with axioms, deductions, and theorems, the results are likely to be embarrassing if not disastrous. He believes that the empirical and positivist emphases of contemporary sociology have destroyed any deep interest in theoretical matters of the most abstract nature; he cites (1982:11-12) Robert K. Merton's advocacy of theories of the middle range as a case in point. Although Alexander rejects "human studies" as an alternative to positivist social science (1982:15-18), he believes that we must move toward an "alternative conception of science" in which we recognize, with Alexandre Koyre, that "experimentation is a teleological process in which the goal is determined by theory" (1982:24). As an illustration of Koyre's thesis Alexander cites the case of Einstein and relativity, claiming that the famous Michelson-Morley experiments, contrary to conventional wisdom, were not a major source of inspiration for Einstein (1982:31). And even if social scientists were to clean up their act and begin practicing science a little more honestly (or with a little less self-delusion), they would not necessarily achieve any insight into the larger philosophical issues that interest Alexander.
In Alexander's view, only those scholars "who have thoroughly and explicitly broken from the positivist persuasion will even attempt an exercise in general theoretical logic" (1982:36)--this overstatement recalls Collins' claims (1984:330) about intolerant statisticians. And once having made the crucial break, Alexander's rehabilitated former positivists soon realize that questions of "action and order," which pertain primarily to the place of human agency and free will as causes of social phenomena, "... represent the true presuppositions of sociological debate; they establish a general framework that cannot be subsumed under other kinds of theoretical dispute and, at the same time, they manifest properties that decisively affect sociological thought at every level of the theoretical continuum" (1982:65). Having deepened our understanding of action and order, we shall come to a clearer appreciation of the "nonrational elements in science," realizing that "... science itself gives the lie to conceptions of action which presuppose instrumental rationality" (1982:75).
None of these arguments is new, and none is at all persuasive. In the contemporary social sciences one finds elaborate deductive models--for instance, stable population theory, learning theory, computer simulations of "world systems" or national economic systems or other complex elements of societies or human psyches--that make the Zetterberg approach appear primitive, anachronistic, and to be a mere historical relic.12 One can easily argue that Robert Merton has been the most important philosopher of science ever produced by American sociology, and that his contributions to "middle-range" theory have not detracted in any way from this accomplishment. When Alexander affirms, as he did at a 1986 symposium, that no significant difference exists between "disaster research" in the social sciences and Shakespearean studies as pursued by English departments, he reveals a surprisingly strong willingness to assimilate the otherwise disparaged modus operandi of human studies. When he cites Koyre's claims about the teleological character of scientific experimentation, he does not bring to our attention the many instances in which social scientists have abandoned major hypotheses on the basis of disconfirmatory evidence--Barber (1987) provides several such instances13--nor does he bother to tell us that we could probably rid ourselves of additional untenable notions if we were to emulate more often the natural scientist's routine practice of carrying out replications.
As I've mentioned, our recent repudiation of racism is a case in point, especially when one considers that what social scientists were saying about race, a century ago, would nowadays pass muster with a Kluxer.
On the matter of "general theoretical logic," Alexander does not produce a trace of evidence for his own presupposition that scholars of the "positivist persuasion" show little if any interest in general theoretical issues. My experience, on the contrary, has been that the best social science philosophers tend to be statisticians with a strong empirical and positivist bent and with a scientist's skepticism; Sir Ronald Fisher is my ideal type. Alexander never tries to persuade us of his claim that questions of action versus order are the central presuppositional issue, nor that one's manner of resolving this issue will "decisively affect sociological thought." Again, I have equally compelling evidence that one's beliefs about human agency have virtually nothing to do with one's performance as a social scientist, except in the sense that ridiculous, self-delusional beliefs may sometimes cause us to ignore reality while maintaining excellent intellectual interchanges with those similarly deluded. Finally, the rationality-versus-nonrationality issue, as I tried to show in my earlier discussion of Economic Man, is a red herring: The social sciences focus on both types of behavior and ideally show no favorites. Beyond that, if instrumental rationality emphasizes the means-ends nexus, and if (as is perfectly clear) the means-ends nexus is merely a special instance of the cause-effect nexus, then I must point out that I have learned far more about instrumental rationality from statisticians such as Sir Ronald Fisher, who clarify causal analysis, than from philosophers such as Jeffrey Alexander, who do not.
And one minor point: If Alexander really believes that "... science itself gives the lie ..." to instrumental rationality, then either (1) his claim about a social-science bias toward rationality goes up in a poof or (2) he has to argue that social scientists do not pay attention to their own findings. I lean slightly toward the first option.
Alexander's approach to the social sciences leads us dangerously astray, and I believe that it does so for a very simple reason: It almost never grapples with real, day-to-day, nitty-gritty problems of social science research and analysis. I don't have any objection to the idea that a small coterie of scholars might practice Alexandrian sociology, but it would be most unfortunate if they enticed the rest of us to follow their lead.
Take the case of sex preselection, the process in which parents try to control the sex of their offspring (Bennett, 1983). An ordinary social scientist struggling to understand the nature, determinants, and consequences of sex preselection is far more likely to learn something about presuppositions of a philosophical genre than is Jeff Alexander to learn anything about preselectivity of an infant's gender. We cannot understand the invention of sex preselection methods unless we first ask whether inventions occur more or less by accident or because "necessity is the mother of invention." We cannot understand the willingness of parents to use sex preselection unless we first understand the marketability of the methods, their efficacy, and their diffusion through society. We cannot understand the ways in which potential parents negotiate their preferences for boys or girls without first considering interpersonal power and other aspects of interaction of men and women in marriage (Charles, 1993). And these several questions of human agency are a mere exercise in sound and fury if sex-preselection methods, evaluated objectively, do not work, if they are too costly or cumbersome, or if they have damaging side effects. Finally, we cannot understand the demographic and social effects of sex preselection unless we first develop an appreciation of social structure, recognizing on the basis of etic exercises in social simulation that a society with a large excess of marriageable males (or females), yet valuing monogamy and the one-child family, has a large problem.
The problem, to be sure, has to do with "free will," involving in this instance whether or not we marry the person we prefer at a time we prefer. Whenever the marriage market is tight we experience, under an appropriate operational definition, less free will--it is a matter of degree. Alexander (1982:101), by contrast, tells us that Talcott Parsons once addressed