Sociology and science

I have an uncanny ability to offend those who I shouldn't be offending, with bad jokes. In a recent post I put in a Tom Lehrer video where he mocks sociology. Having had philosophy mocked by my friends and contacts over the years (you study what? Your navel?), I guess I am a bit inured to such things. But I forgot that in this case there is a double whammy: philosophers have spent a lot of time mocking sociology, especially in the context of science. So below the fold, I put a comment made by respected sociologist of science, Eli Gerson, which he put in the comments of that post, and which deserves to be raised in profile.

Before that, however, let me position my view. I was taught a kind of disembodied philosophy of science. Science was something done by pure minds that made Theory. There was a mythology that science was independent of mere social concerns like the current political or economic conditions in general and as they applied to the particular school, museum, or research collaboration. How that myth arose it itself an interesting story, but it was always under challenge by people like Koyre, Merton, and later, Kuhn. And it was brought home to me forcefully when I read David Hull's Science as a Process that Eli references below.

There is a movement that looks at the social processes of science as if that were all there is to science, and that therefore one can ignore the ideas as constructs of that social process - neither I nor Eli I think would want to argue for that (Eli has always discussed the ideas as well) - but ideas are at least the outcome of the social nature of science. What more they are, well, that's what the philosophy is about, isn't it?

So I apologise to sociologists of science, as I would to historians of science in the same conditions, and in to particular Eli, and thank him for his moderating contribution. I promise never to mock sociology again.

From Eli Gerson:

John's posting of Lehrer's song (one of the less successful efforts in a long career devoted to ignorant, bigoted, unfunny cheap shots from the secondary school playground) sent me back to my notebook from 1989. This was under the heading "Sociology and philosophy of science"; I haven't edited it except to fill out the references.

In the years just after World War II, both sociology and philosophy of science endured an unfortunate period of concern with highly restricted and reductionist approaches to method. In this view, the scope of research and issues of quality were framed as questions of adequate hypothesis testing. The approach was as strong or stronger in philosophy as it was in sociology, and sociological teaching of the time relied explicitly on this reductionist philosophy of science as a justification for this usage. The works of philosophers such as Hempel (1965) became standard fare in courses on theory and methodological foundations.

There can hardly be any doubt that the consequences of this approach was unfortunate for both fields. But in recent years, both philosophy of science and sociology (and many other disciplines as well) have seen a broad movement to restore much of the variety in acceptable approaches to method which was lost during the earlier period. One result has been a proliferation of methodological debates and schools of thought in sociology, often tied to the schools organized around different theoretical positions. Another result has been that sociologists have largely come to ignore philosophy of science as a source of ideas in framing and solving methodological problems, even as they routinely rely on political philosophy, moral philosophy and epistemology as sources of inspiration for theoretical positions. This is not to say that sociological concern with methods has declined in recent years; if anything, it has increased (e.g., Strauss, 1987; Lieberson, 1985). But we have learned to rely on statistics and other disciplines, not philosophy, for new and improved methods. We do this even for approaches which are basically qualitative. It is remarkable-- and encouraging-- when an important and exciting book on qualitative research method draws its primary inspiration from the work of electronics engineers (Ragin, 1988).

My thesis here is that we are missing a bet by ignoring current work in philosophy of science as a source of methodological support. In the last two decades, philosophy of science has changed and developed in many important ways. In part, these changes reflect the exhaustion and failure of logical empircism (e.g., Suppes, 1977). In part, they reflect broader changes in research style which have occurred in many disciplines. And in part, they reflect the response of philosophers to work in the history and sociology of science, which has provided a challenge to traditional philosophical conceptions of the research process. But in any case, research in philosophy of science has become much more accessible and much more pertinent to sociologists in recent years. Indeed, a few philosophers on the cutting edge of their discipline can even be found doing fieldwork, on the supposition that the logic of inquiry has something to do with the organization of research practice (e.g., Griesemer and Wade, 1988; Hull, 1988).

The proliferation of alternative approaches to method which grew out of the opening of the discipline in the 1970's and 1980's has left us with a difficulty. The rejection of a restricted and reductionist formalism based on an exclusive concern with hypothesis testing has often led to approaches which ignore the problems of technical rigor entirely. It is one thing to insist that there is more in nature than any single formalism can encompass. It is another thing altogether to conclude that logical consistency and reproducibility of results are irrelevant to the conduct of good sociology. It is one thing to insist that the experience of every individual, group and society is unique and valuable in its own right. It is another thing altogether to conclude that the history of the next person or group is irrelevant to the solution of one's own problems. It is one thing to recognize that the conventions of sociologists do not have any intrinsic privilege in interpreting experience. It is another thing altogether to conclude that any interpretation is as good as any other for sociological purposes. It is one thing to celebrate freedom. It is another altogether to eliminate due process in order to achieve it. None of these conclusions is technically or morally valid; instead, they simply move the discipline toward a kind of romantic elitism, much like that of e.e. cummings (1954):

While you and I have lips and voices which are for kissing and to sing with,

Who cares if some one-eyed son-of-a-bitch invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

The problem with this approach (its sheer selfishness and irresponsibility aside), is that it makes concern with method and rigor a kind of nastiness; the current buzzword is "harsh". But this position leaves us with no way of understanding, accommodating, or aiding those who do not have lips and voices and partners to kiss and sing with. Worse: precisely to the extent that it becomes conventional, it silences the voices and destroys the partnerships of those who do. This is a morally and intellectually defective stance: the Hobbesian state of nature is not an adequate replacement for defective institutions. We should be forming methods for posing and answering questions in effective ways. We should also be reforming and recreating methods which allow us to address the problems which the discipline has always addressed and never solved. In short, we need more rigor, not less; better instrumentation, not none; reform and revolution, not whim. I don't think that this means that a methodologist must necessarily be a son-of-a-bitch; but if it does, well, arf.

cummings, e.e. 1954. Poems, 1923 - 1954. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

Griesemer, J. R., and M. J. Wade. 1988. "Laboratory models, causal explanation and group selection".Biology & Philosophy 3: 67-96.

Hempel, C. G. 1965. Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays. New York: Free Press.

Hull, D. L. 1988. Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lieberson, S. 1985. Making it Count. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ragin, C. 1988. The Comparative Method. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Strauss, A.L. 1987. Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Suppe, F. 1977. "The search for philosophic understanding of scientific theories". Pp. 3-241 in F. Suppe (Ed.), The Structure of Scientific Theories. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.