Making the Moral Case for Social Sciences

Stemming the Tide

K. Spracklen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137577900
• eBook ISBN: 9781137577917
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Filosofía social

The social sciences have a legitimacy problem in the modern world. The natural sciences are viewed as 'proper science' by journalists and policy-makers because they discover 'truths', make money, and help governments solve problems. In turn, defenders of the social sciences borrow the language of instrumentality, profit and policy impact. Karl Spracklen, by contrast, makes the moral case for the social sciences, arguing that they are a necessary social good capable of fighting inequality and revealing the workings of hegemonic power.

1

The Attack on Social Sciences

Abstract: Spracklen traces the divide between the natural sciences and the social sciences and the recent growth of big science. The chapter explores the idea of ‘science’ (cautiously framed) from classical Greece to today. The chapter shows the dominance of STEM thinking and the attacks on the social sciences for not being ‘proper’ sciences that generate certain knowledge and economic growth. Despite suspicion about science in contemporary popular culture, the natural sciences retain a privileged place in the ways of thinking and ways of legitimizing knowledge and power in the modern world. STEM thinking makes as common-sense truth the contested claim that all human experience can be reduced to its economic value, and everything social can be reduced to the natural or discarded as false knowledge.

Spracklen, Karl. Making the Moral Case for Social Sciences: Stemming the Tide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137577917.0003.

In this chapter, I chart the historical rise of the divide between the natural sciences and the social sciences, and the recent growth of big science and policies promoting STEM subjects. The chapter is divided into three short sections and one final, longer section. The first section explores the idea of ‘science’ (cautiously framed) from classical Greece, through medieval scholasticism to the early modern period. The second section explores the idea of science in the Enlightenment and the construction of the public sphere, before charting the role of science (as we know it) in High Modernity. The third section will explore the divide of the sciences into the natural and the social in the past hundred and fifty years or so, and the subsequent de-valuing of the latter. The final section will describe the state of social sciences today, the dominance of STEM thinking and STEM policies and the attacks on the social sciences for not being ‘proper’ sciences that generate certain knowledge and economic growth. I will argue in this chapter that despite a certain suspicion about science in contemporary popular culture, and the denial of scientific knowledge on the fringes of far-right politics, the natural sciences retain a privileged place in the ways of thinking and ways of legitimizing knowledge and power in the modern world. STEM thinking makes as common-sense truth the contested claim that all human experience can be reduced to its economic value, and everything social can be reduced to the natural or discarded as false knowledge.

The idea of science: it all begins with the Greeks

All cultures and societies think about their place in the world and the stuff that makes up the world. With our ability to think critically and abstractly, humans have tried to make sense of themselves and their surroundings as soon as were able to speak and draw (Gamble, 2007; Renfrew, 2008). Humans seem to have an innate desire to find causal relationships and regularities in the world, because much of pre-modern life depended on it: for example, where to find food and water at a particular time of the year; being able to know the time of the year; or knowing what berries were safe to eat. In other words, we have always developed two things: an ontology or metaphysics of the stuff around us; and an epistemology that gives us the tools to know the things we need to know about that stuff. The basic epistemological trick of assuming everything has a cause helps us realize that rain water causes our local wells to fill, but simple assumptions about causality lead us to think other things might be at work in our metaphysics. That is, we often make causal agents that do not exist in the desire to know why things happen (Harari, 2015; Wiseman and Watt, 2004). The rise of beliefs in magic and gods is associated with that impulse to know. This belief in magic is still with us today whenever anyone picks their lucky numbers for the lottery, or sits in the same seat on the bus every time they get on it. Such beliefs may not trouble many of us. For others, they are a distraction from our attempt to construct and epistemology that allows us to find out what is really happening in the world around us. This epistemology is science, loosely defined. That is, science in this section is taken to mean the search for truths about the world and everything in it that relies only on natural causes.

Popular histories about the rise of science and scientific thinking nearly always begin with the Greeks of the Classical Age such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – or bring them onto the page at a critical moment when humans reject falsehoods and faith for reason (there are too many to cover comprehensively, but for recent best-selling science histories see Bynum, 2013; Weinberg, 2015). This is because the Greek philosophers were strongly influential on the rise of the Western epistemological tradition, and Western science is based on Western epistemology (Russell, 2013). And Western science is the default science of the modern, global world, even as we enter an age of post-colonialism. It was the Greeks who wrote things down that have stayed with us, translated into Latin and/or Arabic, then back to Latin and then into modern languages. This knowledge has always been used to denote elite belonging, from their own age through the hegemony of the Roman Empire, and down to the West today, where Ancient Greek and Latin language, culture and thinking remain central to what it means to be an elite Westerner (ibid.). Of course, there are other inspirational systems of thinking that have survived through the transmission of those texts, such as those associated with Islam, Hinduism and the differing Chinese schools (Goonatilake, 1998). All of these have had varying degrees of impact on the Western epistemological tradition, but the truth remains that those impacts have been a result of appropriations and instrumental necessity, rather than inter-cultural dialogue.

It is also true to say then that the dominant ideology of science, loosely defined, begins with the Greek philosophers (Braund, 1994; Fox, 2005; Lane, 2015; Rhodes, 2003; Russell, 2013). Collectively, they wanted to account for and make sense of everything, from the motions of the planets and the precession of the spheres, through the limits of the divine, the causes of life and growth, the inner workings of animal and human bodies, and the right ways in which societies should be formed. For some of them (Socrates and Plato), what we see in the world is an illusion, a reflection of a purer Form or Divine Creator, which might be accessible through intense study of geometry and mathematics. For others (Aristotle), our everyday sense can be trusted to show us how the world is, and we can build up our knowledge of it through observation and collation of facts and stories. Importantly for the story about the rise of science, the Greeks developed and used a system of logical thought, which helped them to create rules about what they considered to be a good scientific argument.

In the Socratic dialogues, Plato shows us how clever Socrates is in his debating style with those who question him. Inevitably, interlocutors such as Glaucon fail to find flaws in Socrates’s arguments, and they give ground to him. Socrates is our model and our method (Lane, 2015). He rejects rhetoric and fancy style. He shows us the steps he makes in his arguments, and the logical veracity that takes us from his premises to his conclusions. In Aristotle’s hands, the Socratic method is combined with empiricism (Salkever, 2014). And like many of his forebears, Aristotle is also interested in applying philosophy to a wide range of subjects. This means he thinks science, loosely defined, should be able to explain everything within the ambit of our reason. So he writes books that look to us like modern, natural science, on things we might call astronomy or biology, for example. But he also writes books on things we might now reject as being part of science: political ethics and literary criticism, for example. The Greeks, then, invent this thing loosely defined as science, but their science is philosophy, and philosophy encompasses everything we do in our universities now, not just natural sciences, but social sciences and humanities. For the Greeks, they are all subjects of interest for the one epistemological tradition.

The Greeks are important to us because the study of philosophy becomes a compulsory part of the education of an elite Greek in the period, and when the Romans adopted Greek practices (just before they conquered them completely) they adopted their liberal education. Philosophy then becomes part of the Roman Empire’s epistemological tradition, even if the more abstract philosophical problems are seen as less important to everyday elite Roman life than the art of rhetoric and practical engineering skills (Fox, 2005). All elite Roman men cultivate some knowledge of philosophy, and tell their children (mainly boys but sometimes girls) to be instructed in it. Some philosophical works are translated into Latin, others are copied in their original Greek and re-used. Not all Romans aspire to be known as great philosophers, such as the emperors Marcus Aurelius or Julian, but all elite men recognize philosophy’s centrality to their system of learning (Morford, 2002). So the people who resurrect the liberal arts as part of their neo-classical, elitist education in the West in early modernity also resurrect the idea that philosophy, science loosely defined, is part of their epistemological toolkit (Fox, 2005; Russell, 2013).

But the Greek epistemological tradition survives not just because of the Renaissance and the rise of Western imperialism (and its effect on education and learning). It survives down to us because it is inherited, in highly contested and contextualized cases, in both Christianity and Islam. When Christianity grows to become the biggest and the official religion of the Roman Empire, its theologians adopt the critical skills of the classical liberal arts to their exegeses of the sacred texts. There are powerful voices that warn Christians to be wary of the scepticism and reason of the pagans, when faith alone should be above enough for a believer (McDonald, 1998). But Christian theology is suffused with philosophy from the neo-Platonism of Augustine down to the Aristotelian scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas. To understand theological arguments in early medieval Christianity, and to make them, one needs a thorough grounding in the Greek epistemological tradition. It is logic and metaphysics that allows the Christian to make sense of the created world and one’s place in it. This need for a philosophical education disappeared in parts of the West, but continued in a simplified form through what we think of as the Dark Ages in enough cathedral schools and monasteries to sustain a Christian elite literate in Latin. Later, scholars started to attract pupils willing to pay attention to them talk, and to learn from them, which led to the formation of the medieval universities in Europe. The Western epistemological tradition that emerges in its mature form in the work of Aquinas cannot be anything other than scientific, because it is based on the laws of argument taken from the science of the Greeks, that is, from philosophy (Russell, 2013). Despite the concerns raised by other theologians and Christians in the period, scholasticism shaped the way modern science, in its loose definition, is now understood. It constructed the idea of the dissertation and disputation, the idea of the lecture and the idea that students learn in universities from scholars on degree courses (Hannam, 2010).

Muslims came into contact with Greek philosophy and Romano-Greek teachers of philosophy when they conquered large parts of the eastern Roman Empire in the seventh century. In the inter-cultural dialogue that took place, many Romano-Greeks traditions were adopted by the Arab rulers, especially as conversions started to take place among the Greek population still living in cities such as Damascus and Alexandria (Gutas, 2012). Many books of Greek philosophy were translated into Arabic, and a school of Islamic philosophy emerged that used the Greek science to make sense of Islam and the rest of the world (ibid.). Used to justify Islam, Greek philosophy was tolerated, but it was then used to question the claims made in Islam, and ultimately the root of critical inquiry was not tolerated (Leaman, 2013). But the Greek epistemological tradition survived enough in Arabic texts so that when scholasticism was at its height in Europe, Western scholars started to search for Greek authors preserved in purer forms in Arabic than the Latin ones that had survived the fall of the western Roman Empire (Grant, 1996; Russell, 2013). This was helped by Christian expansionism in Spain, when Muslim libraries and their contents fell to the conquerors. So the Western epistemological tradition survived and prospered because of Christianity and Islam.

The so-called scientific revolution

The idea of the ‘scientific revolution’ is one that can be read almost as soon as the Royal Society starts to publish its proceedings in the seventeenth century (Shapin, 1996). Although they do not talk about science, those scholars who call themselves natural philosophers see that the way they do natural philosophy has changed beyond recognition from the medieval scholasticism that preceded it (Hall and Dunstan, 1954). The valorization of Isaac Newton begins in his own lifetime, and his revolutionary contribution to the Western epistemological tradition becomes a dominant fact of history soon after his death (Westfall, 1983). By the nineteenth century, when William Whewell coins the term science for the subject of critical, natural philosophy, the idea that science and its methods emerged fully formed in early modernity, from the darkness of the previous ages, is taken as so obvious as to be unquestioned (Lightman, 1997; Yeo, 1993). Popular histories of science say this, as do histories of science written by scientists, as do scholars as far apart as Hegel and Nietzsche (Russell, 2013). Even in the history of science or the sociology of knowledge in the twentieth century, the scientific revolution is a given fact (Kuhn, 1962; Shapin, 1996).

The story basically says that there was a revolution in thinking about how we come to knowledge about the world in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Instead of assuming the authority of the classical philosophers or theologians, philosophers had to find things out for themselves. That is, they needed to make observations about the things they saw. At the same time, they needed to develop theories to explain the world, often based on mathematics, from which one could construct general laws about things (Kuhn, 1962; Westfall, 1977). For some natural philosophers it was enough to theorize from observational evidence and logical principles. But others argued that natural philosophy had to be based on experiments, interventions into the world that could be controlled by the philosopher. Technological developments and the rise of capitalism created material and financial resources for solving problems. This was the age of Galileo using the telescope to discover the moons of Jupiter, or Newton bending light with prisms (Westfall, 1983). This was also the age of reformation, which has been identified by Weber and Lindberg as a key factor in the rise of scientific thinking (Lindberg, 2009; Weber, 2001). Protestantism rejected authority and privatized the search for God precisely at the same time as humanists were finding new classical texts, and philosophers were searching for knowledge about the world around us without being grounded in Aristotelianism (Russell, 2013).

The scientific revolution, then, was said to have constructed modern science as it is known, both its practice, its method and its ethics. The science of this story is public, collaborative and experimental. It creates and tests hypotheses using a range of mathematical models and experimental procedures. Scientists publish their work and share their knowledge openly. Other scientists attempt to replicate the logic and the procedures to test if the findings and conclusions are correct. Scientific knowledge is cumulative, its ontology real and certain, because its epistemology is objective: science does tell us how things work.

There is no doubt that natural philosophy from the seventeenth century onwards constructs an impressive and useful body of knowledge. Universal laws such as that discovered by Boyle for the relationship between pressure and temperature of a contained gas prove themselves to be eminently useful for the burgeoning capitalist industries of the West. The appliance of such laws to the market-place allow individual engineers such as James Watt to transform society, and become incredibly wealthy (Dickinson, 2010). The rise of the West and the rise of the British Empire is strongly linked to the rise of modern science and its engineering applications (Lightman, 1997). Furthermore, the practice and ethics of natural philosophy contribute directly to the Enlightenment. Philosophers see their age as the modern age, the culmination of the rejection of medieval scholasticism and superstition and the embrace of reason. For the Enlightenment philosophers, Newtonianism provides proof for their attempts to transform society: feudalism, religion and vested interests have no place in the public sphere. As Habermas (1989) shows, the public sphere operates like the rooms of the Royal Society, or the coffee shops that were springing up in every major European city: men and women come together as equals in a communal enterprise to communicate and figure out problems.

In the last years of the twentieth century, historians of science started to unpick the traditional, epistemologically progressive but culturally elitist story of the scientific revolution. For some, the revolution happened over a longer period of time (Hall, 2014); for others the very idea of a revolution is misguided (Shapin, 1996). The changes in the Western epistemological tradition certainly happened. By the nineteenth century everybody knows what science is. But the passage from there to here is not as smooth as the story suggests. Newton, for instance, was not trying to remove God at all from philosophy; rather he was a committed believer who wrote extensively on biblical prophecies, and who also spent a large part of his life distracted by the irrational allures of alchemy (Mandelbrote, 1993). As far as this book is concerned, the other interesting thing about the philosophers associated with both the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment is their interest in the whole range of what the Greeks thought of as philosophy, or science, loosely defined. It is only a product of our divisions into our disciplines that we place Locke here, Hume and Kant there and Newton somewhere else. They all believed that they were engaged in the same sort of epistemological tradition, the one I have been calling the Western epistemological tradition, or science, loosely defined. Newton may have been obsessed with a few things such as optics and gravity that form the basis of modern physics, but many of the other big names of the period were involved in thinking about society and culture, the social sciences, as well as ethics, and how the heavens turn – as I discuss in more detail later on in this book. In the Enlightenment, this was even more obvious than in the seventeenth century. This was a time when Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin might plan radical political reform, while in France other radical philosophers discussed and wrote manifestos demanding liberty, equality and fraternity (Habermas, 1989). Kant applies his methods to thinking about the social, the ethical, the political and the natural. The subject of Enlightenment philosophy was, then, considerably wider than the science of Whewell, or the science of today.

The rise of natural science and social science

Natural science started to be seen as economically vital in the period of high modernity, the nineteenth century onwards, when physics and chemistry, in particular, were providing laws and processes and materials that shaped modern society’s switch to urbanization and the factory-production system. In Germany, the modern university system grew from the political recognition that industries needed recruits skilled in physics and chemistry (Scott, 2006). All over the West, scientific journals started to proliferate in number in the same period alongside scientific societies and associations. Universities on the German model, with PhD students and professors and their laboratories, emerged in major cities. Every Western powe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Attack on Social Sciences
• 2  The Weakness of the Defence
• 3  The Moral Case for the Social Sciences
• Conclusion
• References
• Index