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.