The Social Sciences’ ‘Physics Envy’ - NYTimes.com

The Social Sciences’ ‘Physics Envy’ - NYTimes.com:

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I appreciate the authors' take that social science should not try to emulate natural science, but I'm not sure that I agree with their account for why we need not have "physics envy".  They seem to say that social science is valuable through constructing theories or through analyzing data, but that these tasks need not have the typical natural science organization where theories are tested and then accepted or rejected.  Both theories and data, they say, can be valuable without the other.

This might be true.  But I think that there is a more fundamental reason that social scientists should abandon a natural science model: our objects of study are not the same kind of thing.  Astronomers and Geologists look at different aspects of the natural world, and so use different instruments. But they both look at the natural world and can share a similar way of going about their looking.  When social scientists try to look at the world in this way, they often site the murkiness that they see: so many variables, too many factors to consider, have to reduce the complexity of the social reality.  Sometimes they are tempted to tame the complexity by going into the laboratory.  But I'd argue that at that point, they're no longer really looking at the social world at all.

For me, the fundamental difference between the social and natural world is the presence of meaning in the former.  When a physicist examines how long it takes for a bullet to hit the earth after being shot at velocity v, the answer "is what it means".  That's it.  The natural world is an object to be scrutinized, and when we learn how it works, we've contributed knowledge to natural scientists.  The bullet doesn't have a racial, ethnic, gender identity.  The bullet has no experience or subjectivity.  The gun provides a pure force which causes movement in a straightforward way.  Things in the natural world exhibit behavior but not action.

When we talk about the social world, we talk about meaningful action.  People are not passive behave-ers, they actively create, invoke, reproduce meaning.  We need theories that capture the way this works and these should be overwhelmingly empirical.  If we try to study a people performing meaningful action as if they were molecules or atoms, we miss what is unique about the social world.  If we look for "causes" or "forces" that push people to behave in certain ways, we have already falsified a huge part of how society works.  Culture and Capitalism and Modernity and Gender and Race cannot be studied as forces which cause people to act as if they were the same kind of thing as gravity causing the apple to fall.

My sense is that this is how Latour and Science Studies looks at the practices of natural science.  What natural scientists are up to is creating something like "meaningful science".  Not every scientific experiment is equally meaningful.  You must be integrated into the scientific mode of understanding to appreciate just what the significance of this or that study is.  You have to learn to act and see like a scientist. The same, of course, is true of social science.  We also create meaning. But in that natural science is a realm of active meaning and social science is NOT a realm of passive behavior, perhaps it is they who should have social science envy.

Mitt Romney: It was Bush, not Obama, who averted second Depression - latimes.com

Mitt Romney: It was Bush, not Obama, who averted second Depression - latimes.com:

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so basically... Romney has decided that now that he's pretty solid for the nomination, he better start his transition to battling Obama.  All of a sudden he's talking support for TARP, creating Republican success story, against Obama, maybe annoying some Tea Party-ers, but leaning back toward the middle.  I see your game Mitt.  I see your game.

Thoughts on the Mike Daisey retraction

Only read if you've followed the retraction of Mike Daisey's story from This American Life.  If you listened to the original episode, I highly recommend the retraction episode that came out this week.  Here are my thoughts....

Mike Daisey's initial episode was very moving.  I sensed it was overly dramatic though.  Daisey is a very dramatic story teller.  That he allowed his story to pass as journalism is unfortunate and, in my mind, his biggest sin.  Clearly Daisey felt bad about this and it was the thing for which he apologized most profusely in the retraction episode. I appreciated that.  But Ira Glass wouldn't let it stop there.  He pushed Daisey to admit that it was a work of fiction.  Daisey didn't want to and Ira became increasingly frustrated.

Ira was interested in calling it "fiction" and Daisey a "liar" so that more of the blame was on Daisey and less on TAL.  While understandable, I don't think that's right.  Stories can have more relationships to reality than non-fiction and fiction.  

Daisey was right to insist that in the context of theater, there may be different conceptions of fact and fiction.  In creative work there is something called "historical fiction" which means that the historical time period is, in various ways, depicted truthfully but the story itself is invented.  Or the book Animal Farm... the specific story, of course, cannot be read as non-fiction.  Animals cannot talk or start a revolution.  On the other hand, taken as a metaphor there is a sense in which the novel is absolutely historically accurate. 

Honestly I felt like Ira was trying to smear Daisey.  When Daisey said that he thought they had different world views about the nature of fiction/non-fiction, Ira pressed and said that he thinks that his own view is the "normal" one.  It just seemed like he wanted Daisey to look like a crazy person who has no respect for the difference between pure imagination and concrete facts.

Daisey certainly lied about what kind of work he did, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the work itself was a lie.  That said, Daisey has to qualify his work differently regardless of where/how he releases it.  When you tell a story that is so close to the standards of journalism without meeting those standards, we have to question whether your intentions are to mislead listeners.  Which means that Daisey should have been extra forthcoming about how his story should be heard by listeners.  I hope this is the lesson he learned, because with the proper qualifications I still think the initial story has great value.  

A final point... TAL is not always journalistic.  David Sideris has told fables on the show which involve forest critters talking and acting like human beings.  I'm sure there are other examples of blatantly fictional stories that have aired.  The point is that Daisey's show needed more transparency.  Calling it "fiction" rather than "journalism" is just a different misrepresentation.