June 14, 2014, by Brigitte Nerlich
Making sense in science and in public
Over the last few weeks some of my colleagues within the Institute for Science and Society and the Making Science Public programme (and beyond) have probably got pretty annoyed with me, as I have become a bit argumentative in a debate about science and politics and the line between sense and nonsense. In the following I want to provide some reasons for why this happened and why I think talking about these things is so important.
Getting hot under the collar
In my early academic life I read works by Saussure, the father modern linguistics (a lot), Barthes, Ricoeur, Foucault, Bourdieu, Lévi-Strauss and other French thinkers in the fields of linguistics, literary studies, sociology, semiotics, anthropology and so on. I also dipped, much less enthusiastically, into Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, Irigaray and other prominent post-structuralist and post-modern philosophers. Some of the fashionable stuff (or as some would call it ‘nonsense‘) I read at the time was useful, as it unsettled established thinking about science, language, society and politics. However, some of it got me hot under the collar as it seemed to use a lot of words to say very little. I then I came to England, had a brush with analytic philosophy, realised that many of these French emperors of the post-modern kind had no clothes on and I cooled off.
Over the last decade I have engaged with science and society issues, beavering away in my little corner where I look at linguistic (metaphorical) and cultural framings of scientific controversies. I enjoy that. I also interact with a lot of natural scientists and enjoy that too. Once in a while a re-encounter Foucault or Bourdieu, but that’s fine. These people can provide useful thinking tools, in moderation. During that decade I also tried to immerse myself in Science and Technology Studies. As in my previous life, I realised that some of what I read was useful in unsettling established thinking about science, society and politics, but that some of it might also need to be put under a more critical spotlight. This time round this was not because of a brush with analytical philosophy but because of a brush with natural science.
When natural scientists come into contact with STS scholars and discussions of the social or political shaping of science and technology, many remember the Sokal affair of the 1990s, where a physics professor wrote a hoax article in the style of post-modernism for a special issue to which many eminent STS scholars contributed. It was entitled: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity“. For STS people this affair is done and dusted, but for some scientists it is not quite settled yet, as some of what they see, hear or read in and around STS reminds them of this affair.
In the context of various blog discussions following the Circling the Square conference somebody mentioned Karen Barad’s work which I had not encountered before, although it seems to overlap to some extent with work by STS scholars such as Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Andrew Pickering, and Evelyn Fox Keller. Barad’s work makes claims about science, society and politics and plays with language. So I thought I ought to engage with it and try to understand it. As Barad uses quantum physics in her work, a colleague and physicist, Philip Moriarty also tried to understand it.
Interpretation difficulties
Phil tried to interpret some of Barad’s texts, but failed. To give an example: “At least for me it is the incredible satisfaction of taking insights from feminist theory, on the one hand, and insights from physics, on the other, and reading them through one another in building agential realism. And from there going back and seeing if agential realism can solve certain kinds of fundamental problems in quantum physics.” The problem for him as a natural scientist is that claims are being made about science which don’t really hold up to closer scrutiny.
I myself tried to understand a rather Sokalesque text published in 2010, but also failed. Here is an extract: “Multiply heterogeneous iterations all: past, present, and future, not in a relation of linear unfolding, but threaded through one another in a nonlinear enfolding of spacetimemattering, a topology that defies any suggestion of a smooth continuous manifold. Time is out of joint. Dispersed. Diffracted. Time is diffracted through itself. It is not only the nature of time in its disjointedness that is at stake, but also disjointedness itself. Indeed, the nature of ‘dis’ and ‘jointedness’, of discontinuity and continuity, of difference and entanglement, and their im/possible interrelation ships are at issue.” The problem for me is that I can read this as post-Derridaian, post-Niels-Bohrian poetry, but I can not make sense of it as a social scientist. There might be an important message in this text but the words didn’t lead me to it. To use some long words myself: hermeneutics nil; hermeticism one.
Anyway, when reading such passages (which may be ‘fringe’ but not so fringe), Phil and I got a bit hot under the collar. Why? Why did this matter so much to us?
Hoaxes, errors and obscurantism
In the process of trying to get to grips with these texts and my feelings, I was alerted to another ‘hoax’ paper published in 2013. This post-Sokal hoax paper was written by a scientist in order to expose shortcomings in the scientific peer review process, in particular with regard to wild-west open access journals. “The goal was to create a credible but mundane scientific paper, one with such grave errors that a competent peer reviewer should easily identify it as flawed and unpublishable.” The paper’s acceptance by many journals showed that bad papers get into the system. It should be stressed that these papers are ‘bad’ in the sense of ‘full of errors’. This means that, in this instance reviewers COULD have checked the paper thoroughly and could have found the errors, but they didn’t. By contrast, reviewers confronted with Sokalesque articles of the type cited above can not adopt such a procedure. This means it is not easy to distinguish a hoax from a genuine article, whatever that might mean. So how do reviewers (and readers in general) judge the scholarly merit of such articles? And why are there such differences in judgement about their value?
Why is this important?
When I looked into the 2013 science hoax affair, it became clear to me why I was so getting so exercised. First and foremost it’s about upholding intellectual, scholarly, or if you like, scientific standards of some sort. Second, this is about scientific responsibility and of academic honesty. And third, this might be about still quite significant differences in scientific culture or cultures of scientific research that need to be acknowledged and discussed before they can be overcome.
I believe that only when we at least vaguely share some standards of scholarship can we collectively build a body of knowledge that does not disappear into quicksand. This would also be a body of knowledge that, if inspected by our pay-masters, the tax-paying public(s) (and that includes people like Phil and myself), would, in principle, be readable, and would, in principle, with a bit of effort, make sense. If texts that mix natural and social science, (admittedly in very creative, imaginative and thought-provoking ways) fail to make sense to both a natural and a social scientist, then there is something wrong.
I don’t want to say that everything published in fields that flourish in the vicinity of post-modernism borders on the nonsensical (or that STS should be equated with postmodernism!). However, one should have the courage to shout ‘nonsense’ when one sees it and be allowed, even encouraged, to do so. If we don’t do that, how can we distinguish between (natural and social) scientific knowledge and fairy-tales? This is especially important in a context where the natural and social sciences are increasingly asked to become more open, transparent and public.
Hard questions
How can we maintain public trust in the (natural and social) sciences under these conditions? How can we hope to establish a dialogue between social and the natural scientists if there are no shared standards and values of evidence and of how to assess scholarly and scientific merit? And, most importantly, how can natural and social scientists jointly address urgent questions about science and politics, science and policy, science and regulation, science advice and so on in such a situation?
When writing this post, I came across an article by Harry Collins which has just been published in Social Studies of Science entitled ‘Rejecting knowledge claims inside and outside science’. The abstract says: “Citizens, policy-makers and scientists all face the problem of assessing maverick scientific claims. Via a case study, I show the different resources available to experts and non-experts when they make these judgements and reflect upon what this means for technological decision-making in the public domain.”
I want to ask: Could a similar article be written about assessing maverick social scientific claims, and what resources would be available to experts and non-experts to make judgements on such claims? How can we decide which knowledge claims to reject or support? Answers to such questions are important if we want to make science (in) public.
And finally: if we hold others to account, we have to hold ourselves to account too.
Image: Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach – postmodern design, photo by Hans Peter Schaefer (Wikipedia)
Nice post. As you may be aware, I fully agree with you about having the courage to shout ‘nonsense’ !
I’m not sure I agree about STS people regarding this as done and dusted. You wrote a post about the science wars recently, and we had a seminar about it last week from Steve Fuller. Personally I wish we could forget about it and move on to an era of science peace where physical and social scientists have an improved appreciation of each others fields.
The ‘done and dusted’ comment was made to me in some of the (on my side a bit argumentative) emails I have recently exchanged with colleagues. I think we can only reach a period of ‘science peace’ if we are honest with each other and try to come to some understanding about what good science is both in the natural and social sciences….
Paul,
As ever, Brigitte hits the nail on the head in her response to you. I’d just like to “second” her position on this. Physical and social scientists need to agree that:
(i) there are objective physical phenomena that can be described by universal laws, and
(ii) although culture and politics play an important role in determining how scientific results and evidence are interpreted by society at large, this does not fundamentally undermine the scientific method.
If we can’t agree on (i) and (ii) then we have reached a major impasse…
Philip
Philip
I don’t think Brigitte has made the statements you list as (i) and (ii), so I assume you are expanding on her call to pay attention to quality control issues?
Brigitte
would you endorse the points made by Philip under (i) and (ii)?
Good question Reiner. As you point out, Phil hopes that we can all agree on two points: that “(i) there are objective physical phenomena that can be described by universal laws, and (ii) although culture and politics play an important role in determining how scientific results and evidence are interpreted by society at large, this does not fundamentally undermine the scientific method.” I think that hoping that natural and STSers agree on these points is probably not a realistic aim, as STS is, I believe, predicated on debating just these points. I want to ask a few questions instead and ask Phil and Reiner: Would you agree at least to some extent with people saying something like this: science consists of things we have proved to be wrong and things we have not yet proved to be wrong? Or indeed could one agree on the following definition of a scientific fact by Sheila Jasanoff (1999): “scientific ’facts’ are the product of social triangulation-a question of many, painstakingly cross-checked observations converging to the same, collectively endorsed, but always provisional endpoint.” And this social triangulation is of course carried out, in the main, through the (social) actions (observations, experiments, calculations, corrections…) by lots and lots of scientists but also other people… I think this provisionality of science is not the same as social construction or relativism …. ?? And of course some of these ‘facts’ are much less provisional than others!
Hi, Brigitte.
If STS/sociology researchers think that Point (i) I raised (i.e. “there are objective physical phenomena that can be described by universal laws”) is up for debate then we might as well admit defeat now and save both communities a lot of fractious debate!
Re. Jasanoff’s statement: “scientific ’facts’ are the product of social triangulation-a question of many, painstakingly cross-checked observations converging to the same, collectively endorsed, but always provisional endpoint”
I can’t agree with the “product of social triangulation” formulation here. The reasons those observations converge to the “same…endpoint” is because the methods used by scientists — when carried out correctly — circumvent/supersede the social mores.
Nonetheless, I’ll of course agree with Jasanoff that, yes, it’s always a provisional endpoint. But, as Sokal points out, so too is the statement “The sun will rise tomorrow”. And yet no-one seriously doesn’t believe that the sun won’t rise. The problem is that, as ATTP points out, there are fundamental principles in physics (e.g. first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy), second law of thermodynamics, conservation of momentum, principle of least action, inverse square laws for gravitational and electrostatic force, Maxwell’s equations etc…etc…) which are of the same effective “class” as the statement “the sun will rise tomorrow”: in principle they’re provisional, but in practice they’re not.
Philip
Hi, I tried to create what one might call a zone of proximal agreement, if you like. That’s why I said at the end that what I call ‘provisionalism’ as opposed to relativism is of course relative to some extent, that is to say, there are ‘endpoints’ that are just that ‘endpoints’, like ‘the sun will rise tomorrow’. And I charitably interpreted the ‘social’ in the Jasanoff quote as referring to the actual scientific labour that goes into establishing such ‘endpoints’. I am totally opposed to calling these endpoints products of (social) ‘convention’ for example. They are ‘endpoints’ in my view because they just are and of course even Martians or whoever else would get there in the end.
Of course a lot depends on the meaning of the two propositions Philip suggested. There may be agreement or disagreement, depending on what one understands them to be.
The first one,
(i) there are objective physical phenomena that can be described by universal laws
describes a possibility (*can* be described) which (I think) is uncontroversial.
It will become controversial if a stronger proposition is intended, like
(i-2) *most* phenomena follow universal laws, these laws must be discovered, and anything short if this is not science.
There might be a corollary:
(i-3) these laws are objective, i.e. everyone will sooner or later discover them
This version would be contested, for various reasons. One reason is the historians of science point that the notion of objectivity itself is an invention of the 19th century (see, e.g. the work by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston). For another reason, see below.
Let us turn to the second proposition:
(ii) although culture and politics play an important role in determining how scientific results and evidence are interpreted by society at large, this does not fundamentally undermine the scientific method.
Again, this should be uncontroversial if it means that the scientific method is not undermined by social interference, in other words that there is a scientific activity going on in laboratories and research groups and that this is separated from broader social interactions.
However, it would be controversial if this was meant to imply that research groups and labs were operating beyond *the social* (this is probably the root of our disagreement, as we have come across it several times). I think there is a misunderstanding: social does not mean *introducing bias*. It means that you can only do your work because you have been encultured into a scientific speciality which took a long time, during which you have learned specific conventions of how to do things, which questions to ask, how to solve them, how to judge work as good/bad, etc. What you call *the scientific method* is one of them: an understanding of how the process of research should work. A deeply social process which sometimes leads to shared results which we then call objective. We like to design the process in a way to exclude (or minimize) bias to reach objectivity (you may note the paradox involved here). we need to take great pains to establish the norm of disinterestedness, a norm whose significance you have rightly emphasized.
It is in this sense that objectivity is not found, but constructed. It is the result of a social and cognitive process, not its cause. (Note: this does not mean that anything goes, or that theories or claims can be constructed as one wishes).
Then there is the definitional issue of *the scientific method*. I will not expand on this but simply say that a large literature in the history and sociology of science shows that different research fields tend to have different understandings and conventions of what *the scientific method* means to them. But as I said above, on a superficial level everyone agrees. Open any Social Science research textbook and you will read about problems of validity and generalizability, of bias, ethics, and so on.
I think what Chris once said in another conversation is something we might want to think about because it makes sense at least to me: “This must be wrong (that objectivity exists as a result of social interaction). Surely the point (as in my example above) is that it exists outwith and despite social interaction.” I think the last part is a pretty good definition of objectivity or objectiveness (a word used in the 17th century). This does not mean however that scientific work is not social.
Reiner,
I have to say that your contributions to this discussions are not helping to convince me that the Sokal hoax is an unfair representation of Science and Technology Studies.
Do you have anything substantive on this comment? Seemed like a reasonable summary to me.
Also, the Sokal thing was in a critical theory journal, not STS.
Yes that’s right but it impacted STS quite a bit – see for example
http://sth.sagepub.com/content/35/3/435.extract
Actually, I think my response was pretty substantive. Maybe think about if for a minute. I’ll expand a little, though. Firstly, I don’t really understand Reiner’s comment (hence my response) and secondly, I don’t understand how anyone can debate the meaning behind Philip’s comment. It’s a straightforward point and if Reiner’s response is an indication that some in the social sciences do not agree with Philip’s points (i) and (ii), then there is – in my view – an impasse. Unfortunately, what I am beginning to conclude is that there are STS researchers who have an exceptionally poor understanding of the physical sciences. I’m more than willing to be convinced otherwise, but lengthy comments debating the meaning behind something fairly straightforward (and fundamental to the physical sciences), is not going to do so.
Warren at least one of the problems with Reiner’s exposition is that it doesn’t really help us to understand science and the nature of scientific knowledge in the real world. We could boil Reiner’s post down to a sort of mantra that he gave us on a previous thread (link below): “To repeat: all knowledge is part of a social process.” which is clearly a similarly unhelpful assertion.
https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2014/05/25/science-is-not-what-you-want-it-to-be/
There is a very interesting question to what extent our social structures influence the nature of the knowledge we acquire by scientific investigation. This simply can’t be assessed within a framework of broad academic generalities of Reiner’s sort. We surely have to consider real world examples if we want to understand how much socially-derived influences affect the fundamental nature (e.g. the objectivity) of scientific knowledge.
I gave an example on the thread linked above of the determination of protein structures by two fundamentally different methods each of which might be said to have their own “socially-derived influences” with respect to methodologies, where you do the experiments, the likely background of the practitioners and so on. However despite the fundamentally different physics, nuclear magnetic resonance and X-ray crystallography give essentially the same atomic resolution structures of proteins. Clearly this knowledge of protein structure in any given case is objective by any useful meaning of the word.
We simply can’t address this question without considering examples.
That’s a sort of hard-core Popperian view! I would say science/scientific knowledge is more like “things we have shown to be true beyond reasonable doubt and things about which we are unsure of to greater or lesser extents”. The latter is the arena of uncertainty that working scientists inhabit. We can incorporate the idea of provisionality too.
Again, it helps to consider examples. Ruth Dixon on an earlier thread (link below) gave the example of the chemiosmotic theory relating to the mechanism by which free energy from oxidation of food (glucose) is harnessed to make ATP in mitochondria. Competing hypotheses in the 1950’s through the 60’s were (i) that the free energy was trapped in a chemical intermediate or (ii) that the free energy was trapped in a proton gradient across the inner mitochondrial membrane that was utilised to drive ATP synthesis.
https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2014/05/25/science-is-not-what-you-want-it-to-be/
Our knowledge that the chemiosmotic theory (proton gradient) is correct is now unequivocal by any real world meaning of the term. The structure of the ATP synthesis enzyme linked to the proton gradient is known (Nobel prize). The chemiosmotic theory is something that has been shown to be correct beyond reasonable doubt.
That’s just one example, but I think we can be much more upbeat about the nature of scientific knowledge. Science doesn’t progress simply by casting off things we know are wrong..it progresses by testing the implications of things we think might be correct until it becomes rather clear either that they are very likely correct, or else that something else must be correct because the implications of what we thought might be the case aren’t realized. Ultimately we achieve states of strong confidence about theories/hypotheses because their implications are realized within a web of subsequent analyses/experiments/observations. That doesn’t mean that the knowledge is necessarily complete; it means that it is likely to be true since it is well-supported by evidence.
Yes, I was being a bit overly Popperian there in trying to find a ‘middle way’, something that was actually a bit of a stupid thing to try do.
Reiner,
I think Philip’s point was that if we can’t agree on (i) and (ii) then we have reached a major impasses (FWIW, I agree with Philip on this). The more interesting question is then whether you (as an STS researcher) agree with points (i) and (ii). Do you agree with Philip’s points (i) and (ii)?
This is exactly it, ATTP. I was not suggesting that Brigitte had made those statements. Instead, I was attempting to highlight where the crux of the issue lies. If scientists and sociologists can’t agree on the answers to those questions then it really is a case of “never the twain shall meet”.
I believe the social sciences are a significant contribution to understanding complex issues. I have read, and continue to read the social sciences literature on climate-related topics. It provides a framework and a spectrum to think about ideas. Physicists, who in their simple-minded reductionism refuse to understand these forces are then subject to frustration and little else.
I fully agree. And I hope to have made some of these contributions myself 😉 I certainly don’t want to say that all social science is waffle and all physics is simple-minded reductionism. I have read some rather sophisticated social sciency comments coming from physicists or allied scientists quite recently and I read a lot of excellent social science every day. My post was provoked by some social scientists not wanting to be more open in acknowledging some nonsense within their midst.
Remarkably, you entirely miss the point of Brigitte’s exceptionally clear and well-written post — no mean feat.
This has got nothing to do with the “simple-minded reductionism” of physicists, as you rather unhelpfully put it. That’s a sweeping and entirely unwarranted generalisation. Quite a few of us “simple-minded reductionists” spend a great deal of time considering how scientific results are interpreted/massaged through the lens of the media, politics, and society in general.
The problem with Barad and similar writers is not the political/societal/cultural issues which surround science. It’s a question of pure nonsense being dressed up in obscure and impenetrable language as valid argument. As Brigitte says in her post. Very clearly indeed.
And I wouldn’t be so keen to dismiss that “simple-minded reductionism” so quickly. It’s what underpins your ability to communicate with me via the wonder of the interwebs, for one thing…
Yes it’s worth noting the difference between the Sokal “affair” (it was about obscurantism as Brigitte says) and the 2013 “science hoax affiar” (it was about “wild west open access journals” as Brigitte also says which is why I’ve quoted her phrase!).
I would quibble with you, Brigitte, when you say that the junk paper’s acceptance means that bad (i.e really bad!) papers “get into the system” (some do of course), since, from the point of view of science and scientists, the massive rump of appalling open access/predatory journals are pretty much invisible. No one notices them except for the individuals enticed to send stuff there (and the guys that make money the money). So appalling papers in 3d rate/predatory open access journals can barely be said to get into the system at all; they have zero influence on the progression of science.
Your point about standards is an important one even if you were referring to a set of shared standards amongst natural and social scientists I think. In the natural sciences the standards relate ultimately to a presumption of “good faith” and a notion of quality, and this is why the 3d rate/predatory open access “system” is eminently ignorable from the point of view of science.
There’s no reason to expect, btw, that those that publish social science shouldn’t also internalise standards of good faith and quality with respect to their submitted manuscripts.
When reading about the 2013 case I got the impression that the paper got accepted even by non-wild-west-journals… but perhaps I got that wrong. Anyway, if science is, as we have heard a few times on this blog, self-correcting then, in the end this ‘bad’ article would have been flushed out. This could be a difference between some social and natural sciences, but not sure….Somebody told me that Jerome Bruner (somebody I admire and who also was a social constructivist of sorts) might once have said that lines of inquiry in social psychology end in satiation rather than refutation but I couldn’t find that quote so couldn’t use it.
That “sting” lacked a good control experiment: http://physicsfocus.org/philip-moriarty-open-access/
The motivation appears to have been an attempt to tar all open access journals with the same brush. There are some very dodgy open access journals out there but, as I describe in that blog post, there are also some extremely good open access journals.
Shub, what does the “forces” in your final sentence refer to? That sentence doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense since it’s not clear what previous noun (or nouns since “forces” is plural) your “forces” refer(s) to; none of them really makes sense.
Maybe an example of what you mean would help, e.g. an example of physicists displaying simple-minded reductionism and refusing to understand the “forces” you are referring to.
The idea of science being “self-correcting” is interesting, but I don’t think it really means what people often take it to mean. The reality is a little more akin to “the truth will out” (to use Reiner Grundemann’s phrase on a recent thread!).
So if something is bad and important then it is likely to be corrected. If something is bad and unimportant (or simply unimportant), both of which together (bad/unimportant) characterize the rump of appalling 3d rate/predatory open access journals, then it is simply ignored. So I would say the vast majority of bad papers aren’t “flushed out”; they simply aren’t noticed or if they’re noticed it’s taken for granted that they aren’t worth a second thought.
The question of whether it’s worth “flushing out” a bad paper is an interesting one. Sometimes encountering a bad paper in one’s research area provides a context for writing a paper addressing the problem as one sees it. Sometimes a paper is so bad one may think it’s not worth the bother. Shub up the thread mentioned “climate-related topics” and this provides a very interesting arena for “bad” papers since there is a steady dribble of anti-science stuff that dubious characters write in apparently in support of dodgy agendas (these often fail the “good-faith” standard of my previous post above). In the context of my previous paragraph these can be so obviously wrong that one would normally not bother to rebut them. An interesting manifestation of “citizen science” is the examples of rebuttals written in the scientific literature by non-scientists (of course we’re all scientists!), often bloggers and those that comment on blogs.
As usual one could give examples of all of the above…
Good point. I see what you mean!
I agree entirely. But it can sometimes take a very looooooong time: http://physicsfocus.org/philip-moriarty-peer-review-cyber-bullies/
…or, alternatively, a very short time indeed: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/lead-author-agrees-to-retract-controversial-stem-cell-paper.html
Similarly, it was good to see that arguably the worst example of image doctoring in nanoscience led to a very rapid retraction (due to pressure from blogs): http://retractionwatch.com/2013/08/16/nano-letters-retracts-chopstick-nanorod-paper-questioned-this-week-on-chemistry-blogs/
Note that if it had been left to conventional channels – i.e. letters to editors etc… – the strong likelihood is that the retraction of that Nano Lett paper would have taken many months at the very least, and most likely years.
Brigitte,
This is a very interesting post. I was thinking a little about the “calling out nonsense” aspect of what you were saying. It’s clearly important that fields are willing to “call out nonsense” (although, I would argue that those doing the calling have to be willing to consider their own nonsense) but it’s much harder than it may at first seem. Others (Philip and Chris) have already mentioned this, but I’ll add to what they’re saying. Technically, in the physical sciences if you show that something violates a fundamental law, then it’s wrong. However, many processes are very complicated and you may be convinced that you’ve found an error, but you still have to convince everyone else. So – as Philip mentions – it can take a while to convince the field that something is wrong. However, in the sciences this is possible to do because once you (and others) have investigated and published and convinced the rest of the field of an error, it’s accepted. Noone would ever say “maybe it violates conservation of energy, but I still like that theory”. Similarly – as others have already mentioned – if something is particularly bad, it just gets ignored.
So, in a sense, the physical sciences have an advantage over the social sciences in that it is possible to demonstrate unequivocally that an idea is wrong and once you’ve done so (which may take some time) it will be accepted by virtually everyone. I get the sense, though, that this isn’t always appreciated and that this may be behind some of the “conflict” between the social and physical sciences.
Yes, I agree! And I am certainly not saying that all output by all sciences should be judged in the same way. There are many different traditions of scholarship who have their own ways of making sense of what they do and how they progress. However these ways of judging and making sense should be open to public scrutiny and public criticism I think, otherwise they become too circular and inward-looking and perhaps sort of self-feeding? …Still a lot of thinking to do!
Yes, I agree and I think this is an important point. I would extend it a little and argue that any researcher should be be willing to explain their research (assumptions, methods, results) and also clarify any caveats and uncertainties and the significance of these. Similarly, though, those doing the listening shouldn’t think that the existence of caveats and uncertainties means that the research is flawed. It’s a standard part of doing research and understanding the significance of these is what’s important.
Yes, that is something that should be taught in every science lesson in school I think!
I just realised that the question underlying my long-winded post was probably something like: What does it mean to be wrong in the social sciences? And the second question would be: Or is that entirely the wrong question to ask? (And, of course there is nothing like ‘the’ social sciences!)
Maybe I can ask a slightly different – but related – question. In the physical science, it’s is possible to be wrong (or – at least – I would argue that this is true). Is there an equivalent in the social sciences?
And sometimes even the most genius of geniuses gets things wrong 😉 http://www.inquisitr.com/1295556/never-before-seen-letters-reveal-the-unthinkable-about-einstein/
There is another rather more satisfactory means of addressing obscurantism in any communication sphere (social sciences or otherwise) that doesn’t necessarily involve “calling out” nonsense.
This would be to set up a clarifying dialogue. So in relation to Karen Barad’s “difficult” work, it seems entirely appropriate to ask “can you give me an account of what you mean in simple terms, Karen, and what you consider it’s significance to be”. After all everything that is not religion or that lies towards the spiritual/religious end of philosophy that we communicate should be explainable in simple language. If the requestee is unable or unwilling to do this then at that point the “calling out” is appropriate since the communication truly is obscure if it’s unexplainable.
In the science spheres’ that I inhabit (molecular biology in the broadest sense) there isn’t anything that can only be communicated through obscure language. One would hope that this must be equally true in social science. Unfortunately there are certainly elements of physics that seem beyond simple explanation (e.g. string theory, but see Lee Smolin’s excellent account of this subject “The Trouble With Physics”!).
Anyway, requesting clarification is a very good “philosophy” to adopt even on blogs/message boards since the aim really should be to understand what others mean and for them to understand what you mean – by asking for clarification one can often come to a quick conclusion whether the respondee is arguing in good faith…
PS Brigitte If you are looking for more good holiday reading and haven’t read Smolin, it’s really good and there’s a Penguin paperback version.
Yes you are right, of course. I should have done that. Or I should have said that this is only an illustration for the difficulties some cross-disciplinary readers may face. By complete accident I was dusting some shelves in my room and rearranging some long forgotten books when I happened to come across a yellowed photocopy of an old edition of something called ‘Glyph 1’ edited by Samuel Weber and Henry Sussman, Baltimore London 1977. This was a reply by John Searle to an earlier piece by Jacques Derrida about John Austin and speech act theory and it’s called ‘Reiterating the differences’…in which Searle defends Austin against Derrida. To this Derrida then also replied and I think the two philosophers never really came to agree with each other, but at least there was a ‘dialogue’ spread over a year or so…
[…] that they are is not underpinned by any worthwhile knowledge might be justified, and I certainly share that fear to some extent. However, social scientists themselves are waking up to this issue and […]