A clash of cultures: skulls of buffalo shot by U.S. government hunters, 1880’s   

                                 (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

 

Chapter 2.  (continued) 

In response to the criticisms of the “unscientific” nature of their discipline, some social scientists have tried hard to be more rigorous in their work. However, many have admitted Searle is at least partly right. For example, studies done in Anthropology are usually difficult to replicate for an array of reasons. Thus, replicating of research in social science is almost never possible. 

 

Here let’s recall that, in order to qualify as “scientific”, a model or theory must be testable in the material world, and the tests must be replicable. If the tests can’t be replicated, the theory is not Science. Tell me how you test your theory. Then, I can check it by doing those tests myself. Easy to do in Physics and Chemistry where materials and pieces of apparatus are standardized. Very difficult most of the time in Sociology and Anthropology.

 

Many factors make social science’s studies hard to replicate.

 

First, background conditions of studies in social science often can’t be reset. Socially relevant facts keep changing. For example, how could a tribe return to living as fishers if the species they once caught off their coasts are gone?

 

In social science, we also accept implicitly that, even when conditions in the world can be “reset”, no custom should ever be forced on a tribe. For example, trying to get a tribe to go back to living naked once they have chosen to wear clothes would be unethical. Tribes in the Amazon, once they join a society where clothes are worn, don’t want to live naked anymore. Cultural anthropologists would not try to make these people go back to living naked, as they had been living just a few years before. The anthropologists’ own moral code tells them that trying to “guide” changes in a tribe’s way of life to aid research – or for any other purpose – is wrong. Social scientists are ethically bound to observe societies as the people in them live, but never to interfere in their changes.    

 

In addition, a researcher’s own biases influence what she looks for and how she sees it. These biases are impossible to avoid, no matter how carefully the studies are designed. People of the Amazon see trails of peccary or cayman in crushed grasses. But Western anthropologists see details they have been programmed to notice (e.g. flowers, insects). An anthropologist living with an Amazon tribe needs years of training before she can learn to skilfully track peccaries.  

  

Finally, a social scientist’s watching a tribe of people also changes what is being watched, namely the morés of those people. For example, an anthropologist in the field usually can’t work without shoes. Often in only weeks, the folk she’s living with and studying, if they have been living barefoot, start to want shoes.  

 

For all of these reasons then, social scientists admit they often must settle for what is really a single occurrence of the social phenomenon they wish to study. One that can’t be replicated. But no generalizations can be drawn from a single, unrepeatable instance of anything. That’s a direct contradiction of what the word “generalize” means.

 

These difficulties with social science research put us in a logical quandary.

 

Societies vary widely in their beliefs and morés, and those morés keep changing even while scientists are studying them. There are many human tribes to study, and each contains many customs that are changing all the time. Social scientists will never adequately document all the societies of the world as they are now.

 

Thus, we’ll never arrive at any useful conclusions in social science unless we can first propose larger, more generic theories of how human societies work. (The main aim of this book is to arrive at that more generic model of social systems and how they work. But first we'll explain why we need that model so.)

 

In fact, most social scientists see that kind of plan as being immoral from its outset because it amounts to Europeans imposing their ways on other cultures. In the meantime, critics of social science say such a grand theory can’t be formulated. They insist that social science is too vague, from its terms on up, to ever enable its practitioners to create a general theory of how societies work.

 

If such a theory ever were articulated, it would give direction and focus to all social science work. Under it, social scientists could propose and test specific hypotheses. But until social science has a comprehensive theory to guide its research, it will remain what Ernest Rutherford, the great physicist, dismissively called “stamp collecting”: people recording data but making no attempt to explain them.