What's the point of it all?

I have been prompted in the last few days to think about the dreaded question of "What's it all about anyway, when you get right down to it? What's the point?". I'm not talking about the meaning of life (which I have figured out already) but social science, and especially political science. The issues that I have been focusing on are the idea of 'cumulation' and the implications of a constructionist position for the aim of social scientific research. If that sounds ambitious, I am thinking about it in quite basic and unsystematic terms.

Constructionism includes the idea that social phenomena have no existence apart from what they mean to people. So, if everybody stops thinking about and talking about and acting as if a particular university exists, then it does not. Also, if the idea of a university is not part of the total social cluster of ideas, then it is not possible (or rather, highly unlikely) that anyone would start to think, talk, and act as if there was a university. Finally, what it is that a university means, the entirety of the actions and ideas that are associated with a university, is not unitary. By this I mean that you could have a society in which university is something slightly different from another society. This is in fact the case in the world - being at a liberal arts college in Massachusetts is a very different proposition from being at a massive regional normal university in China. So, does it make sense to aim at making general propositions about, say, the effect of having a university degree? Economists do this all the time (I imagine). If by general proposition, I mean a proposition that applies just as much in 11th century Bologna as it does in 21st century Washington DC, then it is clearly preposterous to say that it is a worthwhile enterprise. There is a clear analogy to international political phenomena, as war today involving European powers is different enough from war in mediaeval Africa for us to say that propositions about the causes, consequences, and practice of war must be bounded at least partly by the spatio-temporal context.

If this is so obvious, why would anyone think otherwise? The model of the natural or physical sciences is a powerful lure. One of the things that it is said that the physical sciences have is 'cumulative' knowledge. I am not sure what this means. If it means that later scholars use previous scholars' work in their own work, then anyone has that. If it means that scholars do not challenge earlier scholars' work, then this is patently false as scientific breakthroughs can take the form of discovering that the previous ideas were all wrong. A very convincing account of why there is this high-consensus, rapid-discovery science in the natural sciences is Randall Collins' 1994 article (“Why the social sciences won’t become high-consensus, rapid-discovery science.” Sociological Forum 9, no. 2: 155-177) where he attributes these features of the natural sciences to the appropriation of research technologies. This makes natural science look useful to outsiders (because of spin-off technology, like the internet) and directs attention away from continually revisiting and challenging the work of previous scholars. All of this is unrelated to epistemological validity, i.e. is physics more right than sociology, which I would say is a different question. So, my contention is that cumulation is not a goal that I would sacrifice very much to attain.

But cumulation is not the only thing that 'naturalists' (those wanting social science to be like natural science) want. They also want prediction. Much of the prestige and the justification for believing the natural sciences to have it right comes from being able to say stuff like, "I swing this ball on a rope here at 0.02 millifrutors and the magnesium hydrosulfate will turn green in 3.4 seconds" and then it does, again and again. Social scientists could do this sort of thing as well, like the prediction that 200 or whatever million Americans will get up tomorrow morning and go to work, many of them driving on the right-hand side of the road to get there. For some reason (and I think this reason is actually much more important than other people think it is) this is not impressive to anyone. Polisci also does other types of prediction; see Abramowitz, Alan I. 2008. It’s About Time: Forecasting the 2008 Presidential Election with the Time-for-Change Model. International Journal of Forecasting 24 209-217. This is very limited compared to what the natscis are able to demonstrate in laboratory or experimental settings, but it is not impossible in principle to use social scientific theory to predict human behavior. Again, I'm not sure that this kind of prediction is all that, or even largely what, we as social scientists should be doing.

So, why is constructionism such a threat to naturalism? Partly because many of the phenomena that political scientists study change out of all recognition. The state at all did not exist prior to about the 14th-15th centuries and the 18th century european state is so massively different now that any propositions about the causes or effects of political units of that type are unlikely to apply to anything now or in the future. It is not just acceptable that we can say that there are a set of starting conditions and whenever these starting conditions obtain, their effects also obtain. This happens in natural science, even in cases like geology or evolutionary biology they are working with similar types of evidence as social scientists, but the difference is that there are recurring starting conditions. In social science, if constructionism has any force, sets of starting conditions are only similar within tightly bounded social contexts (which are themselves bounded in space and time). This is why much of social science cannot have the same properties as natural science.

What does this mean for how we use social scientific research? I don't know, but I'm thinking about it.

Supporting what I've thought for some time

Interesting article in the Washington Post the other day. The bit that stands out for me:

People who startle easily in response to threatening images or loud sounds seem to have a biological predisposition to adopt conservative political positions on many hot-button issues, according to unusual new research published yesterday.

The finding suggests that people who are particularly sensitive to signals of visual or auditory threats also tend to adopt a more defensive stance on political issues, such as immigration, gun control, defense spending and patriotism. People who are less sensitive to potential threats, by contrast, seem predisposed to hold more liberal positions on those issues.
.....

The study, published in the journal Science, recruited 46 white partisan Republicans and Democrats in Nebraska. The volunteers were quizzed on their views on a variety of topics -- including the war in Iraq, same-sex marriage, pacifism and the importance of school prayer. All the questions were designed to test how strongly people needed to guard against various internal and external threats. None focused on economic issues.

Read the whole thing to get further details on the argument. In a nutshell the researchers are saying there may be biological traits to being a conservative or a liberal. While I have some reservations with that assertion (from my knowledge of political preference, a person's parents are the best predictors of their voting behavior - which strikes me as much as a nurture as a nature argument). Plus, there might be some questions about the methodology used (e.g. sample size).

Nonetheless, it does appear to me that support for policies such as wire-tapping and torture - while often being dressed-up and reported as hard-nosed and tough - actually usually smack of cowardice. As I put it in a comments section about torture a long time ago (when I was obviously very worked up about it):

What really gets my back up [about the torture issue] though, is how the whole issue is framed to begin with. Somehow making the moral argument is characterised as a kind of weak, flabby, naive, and all-round “liberal” point of view. It’s not the hard-nosed stance of Bush and co. and wingnuts consider it indicative of how some people (i.e. the right) are more willing to make “tough” decisions than others. This is total BS.

How does you condoning the torture of another person so that you can marginally increase your own chances of survival make you tough? It strikes me as the essence of cowardice. Being tough means standing up for the principles you believe in, even if it increases the risks of your own demise. I live in DC and know that if anywhere has a chance of getting hit it’s here. Big deal. I’ll take my chances. I certainly am not so craven and terrified that I am willing to compromise pretty much all of my principles (habeus corpus, torture etc.) just so the big nasty Osama bin-monster-under-the-bed won’t get me.

Being tough means standing up for your principles and accepting that living in a free society carries risks. And the test of this toughness comes at times of danger.

Whatever supporters of torture may think they are, tough they ain’t.

Cowardly and pathetic might be better adjectives.

It's nice to see a little evidence backing up my rant.