Looking out over the ideological battlefield, one of the banners we see the right carrying is the one of "hard" or "real" science, as opposed to politicized science, junk science and "soft" science. This is encouraging, but when we look closer we see that there's much ideological opportunism involved. The right often uses science not to tell them what to think, but to help them win ideological battles, and improve morale among their troops. When science goes against them, or threatens to undermine morale, it is abandoned.

This makes it difficult to think straight about good and bad science. What is there to say about someone who sees postmodernism and climate science as different heads on the same troll? Or are skeptical of the ability of academics to understand society, but think they, as untrained amateurs with nothing but ideological tracts to guide them, have that ability themselves?

So it's refreshing to read Stanislav Andreski's 1972 book Social Sciences as Sorcery, which says everything worth saying about bad social science, but without the ideological opportunism, and with something added: ideas about what good social science should be like.

Andreski's idea is that thinking is like helium: unless scientists are held down to earth by chains, they'll fly off into their own jargon-riddled fantasy worlds. People do not want to think clearly and restrict themselves to reality, they want prestige, and admiration, and confirmation of their prejudices, and to experience mystical awe. The "hard" sciences are chained to earth by objective criteria for a good theory. If a physicist has an idea about how subatomic particles interact, they can make exact predictions, then run tests, and accurately measure the results. If an engineer thinks of a better way to construct a bridge, they can test that idea with models, and the final proof will be the bridge itself, which stands or falls independently of the engineer's wishes.

The social sciences are not blessed with these chains, so there's often little to hold their thinkers down on the ground. Mutual admiration creates feedback loops and fads, prestige takes precedense over truth, jargon and obscurity becomes both a way of protecting your profession from outsiders and of rephrasing old and simple ideas so that they seem original and clever. (But then a good theory may be difficult to understand as well. Andreski suggests a test: if you're able to understand a book on advanced physics, but unable to understand a work of sociology, it's probably the sociologist's fault. If you understand neither, the fault may well be yours.)

The job is more difficult too. Social reality is (usually) much more complex than physical reality, and unlike dead matter people care about and listen to what you say about them. When a physical scientist finds evidence for a theory, that theory will probably remain correct in the future. But a theory about social reality can change that reality, or make your subject angry at you for saying something they don't want to hear. No physicist ever got in trouble with the public for denigrating the gluon. A system of rewards and punishments is thus set in place which rewards clouded thinking and obedience to fads and financial backers, and punishes independence and clarity.

It doesn't have to be this way. And this is where the value of Social Sciences as Sorcery shows itself. Andreski is himself a sociologist. He's not some opportunist who wants to tear social science down to the level of the amateurs so that everyone can pretend to be a social scientist. He wants to improve it, so that it becomes a valuable source of insight about people and society. Imagine: If the problem with the field of social science is that it rewards mediocricity, what would happen if it were to reward brilliance? Remove the jargon, introduce clarity and logic, see what happens.

This would still not raise social science to the level of physical science. It will never be able to predict the future, or quantify every social relationship. But perhaps it doesn't need to in order to be valuable. Society is difficult to measure, but theories about it can still be judged against available evidence, if done carefully, by people who do not merely see what they wish to see. In fact, Andreski believes that quantification and obsession with scientific-sounding methods is one of the problems of the social sciences, because it is an attempt to mimic the appearance of science without the essence. The confusing "mathematical" formulas in the works of Levi-Strauss do not make his anthropology a science more than advanced mathematics could have rescued Aristotelean physics. So numbers aren't enough, and a lack of exact numbers doesn't make a theory worthless.

Take the question of which factors contribute to war in a region, and which to peace. The relevant factors are hard to quantify, but it is still possible to formulate a theory with abstract words, ("democracy increases the likelihood of peace"), and evaluate it against historical evidence. It hardly gives us the law of gravity, and there's subjectivity involved in testing such a theory, but don't tell me this makes any such observation worthless. It just means we must be careful. The same goes for any other attempt to describe the nature of societies and social relations, or psychology, or economics.

So where do we find these valuable works of social science? I don't know, I know barely anything about sociology or anthropology, and whenever I've tried to learn something I've been scared away by the same problems Andreski points to, (as well as postmodernism, which he doesn't mention, perhaps it hadn't arrived yet - boy, must he have had some lousy 70's and 80's.) But I get the impression from this book that there really is a sane tradition in social science. There's Andreski himself, for one thing. This guy writes and thinks like George Orwell, and that alone makes me curious about what else he has written.

As for the effects of this book, it doesn't seem to have done much good. It appears to be one of those undetonated bombs in the library, books that have gone out of favor and are waiting to be rediscovered. Alan Sokal of the famous Social Text hoax mentions it, and there are some Amazon.com reviewers who fondly remember reading it in the 70's, but that's about it. The book is even out of print, you have to buy it used (or online). It is very well possible that Social Sciences as Sorcery marks the end of a rational tradition in sociology rather than a rebirth of it. But that is only a guess. Now that I know that there may be valuable works in this field, and that its practitioners aren't all ignorant jargonheads, I'll certainly go looking.

The real practitioners of this sorcery have gone over into business. Companies hire experts who study their customers to find out what they want and what they will pay for it, and then how to get them to do it. Marketing is just sociology/psychology/anthropology with a profit motive. They also have a reality-testing mechanism that you don't find in academia: if your product fails in the marketplace, you're out of a job.

I have a numbers-guy's superstitious dread of marketing sorcerers. Anything that is neither music nor math is a primal mystery to me. It only makes them more fearsome when they actually get results.

The industrial psychology bunch (all the "Seven Habits of Highly Successful Bankrupts," "The 0.5-Second Manager," "Business Secrets of Charles Ponzi," etc.), by contrast, are frauds through and through. They make their money by selling advice, much of it contradictory, and measure their success not by the success of their strategies but by their book sales and lecture fees. In that regard, they are applying the social sciences to commerce, but not in the way they represent themselves as practicing them. They are more akin to grifters and pool hustlers.

Looking out over the ideological battlefield, one of the banners we see the right carrying is the one of "hard" or "real" science, as opposed to politicized science, junk science and "soft" science.

This is an observation with which I agree.

The right often uses science not to tell them what to think, but to help them win ideological battles, and improve morale among their troops.

Here, however, I feel, your argument begins to lack cohesion. First you argue that the right are skeptical of the value of social science - which they in fact do not regard as science at all. Then you criticize the right for not using the same "science" which they don't believe in, "to tell them what to think". Why on earth does this suprise you?

When science goes against them, or threatens to undermine morale, it is abandoned.

The above is a serious contradiction: How can social science be abandoned by the right, when it was never adopted, believed in and trusted in the first place?

Nvan: Then you criticize the right for not using the same "science" which they don't believe in, "to tell them what to think".

You misunderstand me. Many on the right use science and oppose pseudo-science only when it serves ideology. Think of the eagerness to believe that human activity does not cause global warming, (that there are feasible alternatives does not explain the enthusiasm for believe them), or the way amateur sociology is acceptable when done by the right, (this or that phenomenon will destroy society!)

My point is that it is a mistake to think that ideological warriors on some blog or op-ed page are the solution to the problem of bad science.

You misunderstand me. Many on the right use science and oppose pseudo-science only when it serves ideology.

Sadly, being opportunistic and deliberately ignoring facts which somehow disturbs one's agenda seems to be a latent trait of homo sapiens, and as such, the practise will consequently be found in all political organizations - regardless of orientation.

Obviously, right wing nutcases like myself should be true to themselves (ourselves?) and very determined not to accept pseudo-science even when it may be beneficial to whatever cause in question. Besides that, I don't know what to say.

Nvan: the practise will consequently be found in all political organizations - regardless of orientation.

My point exactly.

OT, Oslo's just a city in Europe now.

http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=26&story_id=27280&name=Oslo+topples+Tokyo+as+world%27s+most+expensive+city

A European city, Oslo, has overtaken Tokyo as the most expensive city in the world while Frankfurt came in at the 12th spot on a ranking of the cost of living in more than 130 cities released this week....

NYC only came in 27th.

Kvar er høgremannen i samfunnsvitskapen?
http://www.dagogtid.no/nyhet.cfm?nyhetid=606

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