Chapter 2.                               Part B 

In the meantime, attacks aimed specifically at the social sciences are made by philosophers like John Searle. Taking still another tack, he argues that physical sciences can be rigorous, but social ones cannot. Social sciences have to talk about things that are too vaguely defined, and therefore, Searle claims, the conclusions that studies in the social sciences produce can’t lead to nomothetic, i.e. law-like, general conclusions at all. (3.). (He and several other critics of social science are well countered in Harold Kincaid’s book “Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences”.) (4.)

                                                              John Searle 

In response to these criticisms, some social scientists have striven to put more objectivity and empirical rigor into what they do. But they do admit that the studies done in their fields are often difficult to replicate because relevant background conditions to the phenomena being studied can’t be re-set. For example, how could we get a tribe to go back to living as fishers when the fish species they once lived off of are gone? Could we get a modern nation, or even a small sub-group in it, to live without their cell phones? 

Even a social scientist’s looking at a group of people changes those people. Some of the morés of the people being studied then get altered or cease to exist. Social scientists also admit that the models which guide their research can’t be expressed in neatly logical terms so the phenomena that the researchers describe are often not reducible to formulas. In addition, many of the ways in which a researcher's own biases may influence what she looks for and how she sees the data seem impossible to forestall, no matter how carefully the studies are designed. Finally, many human customs only make sense when they are viewed in the context in which the humans being studied normally live. Outside of their contexts, human actions often look pointless. In the Aztec's markets, which kiosks sold batteries? Before they went overseas, where did the Crusaders get their typhus shots? 

Thus, social scientists admit that they often must settle for a “single print” of any phenomenon that they wish to study. Societies vary so widely in their beliefs and morés and keep changing even as we look. There are a lot of prints to study and more coming all the time; we'll never catch up. And for that matter, how can any social scientist, who grew up largely inside of one culture, ever claim to look objectively at another culture?

Others in the social sciences have taken a more aggressive stance. They have argued that no science, not even Physics, is truly objective. Complex, culturally-acquired biases shape all human thinking, even, they say, the thinking of the physicists and chemists. 

Under this view, moral relativism is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from the whole body of social science research, or all research in all fields, for that matter. We can try to observe and study human societies and the belief systems that they instill in their members, but we can’t pretend to do such work "objectively". We come to it with eyes already looking to focus on the details that fit in with the models and values that we absorbed as children. Each researcher's model of what human society is - or could be, or should be - lies deeper than his/her ability to articulate thoughts in words or even simply to observe. Our bias can’t be suspended; it pre-ordains our ability to think at all.    

This is the stance called "social constructivism". In its view, you use thought-filters that you absorbed from your culture (parents, siblings, teachers, etc.), and with these tools, you string together sense data that you have been taught are the ones that "matter" until, moment by moment, you form a picture of "reality". But the whole of reality is much more detailed and complex than the set of sights and sounds that you are paying attention to. And others, especially others from other cultures, construct their own pictures of reality.  Some of those pictures will be radically different from yours, but still quite workable.

In support of this claim, social scientists point out that while careful descriptions of events in a given society are possible, and even generalizations about apparent connections between events in that society are possible, law-like statements about how moral codes and morés for all humans in all societies work continue to elude us. 

Some social scientists go so far as to claim that there aren’t any “facts” in any of our descriptions of the events of the past, or perhaps even of the events happening around us now, social or physical. There are only various “narratives” from various cultures and individuals, any one of them as valid as any other one. At the highest level of generality then – that is, on what morality is – many social scientists not only have had nothing to say; they insist that nothing "factual" - i.e. nothing  “objectively true” - can be said.

           

                                                       Marvin Harris 

This argument called the “Science Wars” continues to rage. We can’t go into even five percent of it here. But the point for us is that Yeats was right: the best really can lack conviction. They can read about "honor killings", and remark calmly, "Well, that's their culture." In fact, to many thinkers in the humanities and social sciences today, all convictions are temporary and local. (A more recent, sensible, and useful compromise position is taken by Marvin Harris in "Theories of Culture in Post-Modern Times".) (5.)