Dear American Anthropological Association:
According to recent reports, you are considering dropping the term “science” from your long-range planning document. You propose replacing it with the phrase “public understanding,” and also including a long litany of the variety of things that fit under this umbrella:
This includes, but is not limited to, archaeological, biological, social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, visual, and linguistic anthropological research. The Association also commits itself to further the professional interests of anthropologists, including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge, expertise, and interpretation.
All that really changes here is the term “science,” since this kind of diversity was and is already characteristic of the discipline of anthropology; the change is therefore symbolic, as you note. But it’s a powerful symbol, perhaps even more powerful than you realize. I’m not an anthropologist and so I don’t really have a dog in this fight, except for the broader philosophical and cultural issue of what “science” means. But since that’s largely an issue of “public understanding” — or, better, “public misunderstanding” — I would really urge you to think very carefully about this move.
See, in abandoning the term “science” you are, in effect, ceding the rhetorical ground commanded by one of the most potent terms in modern intellectual culture and society at large — and you’re ceding it to a very narrowly neopositivist construal of the term and practice of “science.” As soon as you say “I’m not doing science” in this environment, you set yourself up to be critiqued as subjectivist, relativist, fuzzy, woolly-headed, arbitrary, and a bunch of other dismissive caricatures culiminating in what the president of the Society for Anthropological Sciences called “the rejection of rational argument and thought,” akin to creationism and due to a postmodern attack on the authority of science. So from a purely public relations standpoint, this doesn’t sound like a wise move.
The more important issue, however, is that in simply rejecting the term “science” you reaffirm the very boundary that critics like this insist on maintaining. If I have a narrow understanding of science that restricts that term to practices involving hypothesis-testing, cross-case generalizations, and a rooting of knowledge in an external material reality to which knowledge-claims approximate, I have that understanding not because it’s a personal preference about how to do my work, but because I think that such procedures are somehow uniquely warranted and rooted in the pursuit of Truth or, at the very least, validity. Procedures and techniques are thus inseparable from epistemic goals, and if I reject one I am taken to be rejecting the other. So rejecting the testing of general empirical hypotheses against data about the material world looks like an abandonment of the whole enterprise of producing knowledge that is in some sense valid, and that’s what the critics see as being signaled in the loss of the word “science.” By not confronting this head-on, you are in effect letting the critics have the word “science” as a magical talisman that they can conjure with in debates and discussion — not to mention in the competition for grant funding and publication.
And much like the Democratic Party, which last time I looked still have a majority in both houses of Congress and could make a concerted effort to actually pass something instead of rolling over and playing dead, you have some pretty firm ground on which to stand in refuting the nonsense that the critics are spewing. “Science” is simply not equal to its neopositivist construal; philosophers of science are quite divided about how to define science, and indeed most of them gave up the effort to produce sharp demarcation criteria between science and non-science decades ago. Instead, they are interested in the variety of ways that valid knowledge-claims about the world are produced, ways that are all “scientific” inasmuch as they are a) systematic in that they feature a logical relationship between premises and conclusions, b) public in that they are susceptible to challenge and critique by members of the relevant community of judgment, and c) worldly in the sense of being related to and about the world and the things in it rather than pointing beyond the world towards some transcendent question of the world’s value or purpose. That’s about all one can say about “science” that is generally the case, I would wager. Science isn’t art and it isn’t politics and it isn’t engineering and it isn’t normative critique, although it can inform all of those in various ways; the important thing remains the goal of the exercise, and science is about making systematic, public, worldly knowledge-claims that are in some sense valid, whereas these other vocations are about pursuing different goals. (At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I would suggest my recent book
My point is that you have an excellent warrant for expanding the definition of science rather than abandoning it, and in particular abandoning it to a very narrow definition that equates science with disciplines like biology and practices like archaeology — not that these aren’t scientific, far from it, but there is no reason that the study of cultural practices can’t be just as scientific, albeit in a distinct way. And who wouldn’t want to construct systematic, public, worldly knowledge-claims about human cultural practices as a or perhaps the major component of their professional practice in studying humanity? Seriously, what’s the alternative: abandoning these goals in favor of just advocating on behalf of native peoples? Following Paul Gauguin and painting idiosyncratic pictures of native life? Writing speculative fiction about imagined societies? Go that way and you abandon the epistemic authority of your own research, which strikes me as both short-sighted and unnecessary. I think that if you poll most of your members you’ll find that they agree that they are trying to produce knowledge-claims that are in some sense valid, which means: broadly scientific. Not narrowly scientific, not inextricably linked with hypothesis-testing and broad generalization and determining materiality, but broadly scientific in a way that is easily supported by even a casual perusal of philosophical debates about science over the past few centuries.
And what makes this particularly urgent is that the neopositivist caricature of science is also very similar to the popular misunderstanding of “science,” which seems to hold that science requires numerical data, sweeping generalizations, and incontrovertible facts. (Good neopositivists don’t agree with this, of course, but when attacked many of them trot out old canards about the putatively unique relationship between their preferred procedures and the pursuit of Truth. Public debate makes us all lose our subtlety.) None of this is true, and all of it makes the epistemic authority of science questionable whenever any politician can come up with one practicing scientist willing to publicly doubt some set of research findings (e.g. global climate change), because the public’s confidence is then eroded inasmuch as it mistakenly thought that science was about unquestionable truths. This is bullshit, and the only way to combat it is to help to improve the public understanding of what “science” actually means and how diverse scientific practice is, and this in turn is helped if you keep the study of cultural practices inside of the big tent of science. Otherwise the tent gets small, and the people left to defend it are vulnerable to all sorts of political silliness.
And let’s be honest here: we all want to defend that tent and the broad notion of science. None of us would be happy going back to a world in which public truths were simply proclaimed and imposed rather than being critically constructed, something that we performatively reveal when we criticize some established bit of conventional wisdom as arbitrary and unjustified. Note that this doesn’t mean that we are all committed to the same set of procedures for establishing validity, nor does it mean that we will all one day agree on the same set of facts after we approximately-ideal-speech-situation ourselves into the Linguistically De-Transcendentalized Kingdom of Ends and are escorted to our place at the Kantian table by our maitre d’, Herr Doktor Professor Habermas. But the alternative is not a complete abandonment of the task of thinking, but a reworking of what it means to think scientifically such that it is neither narrowly neopositivist nor the key to a secularized Promised Land, but instead a set of practical procedures for dealing with the world. If anthropology takes its toys and goes home, the whole tent gets smaller, which none of us actually wants.
So please reconsider. What is called for at this juncture is attack, not defense; the definition of science needs to be pluralized, not abandoned to those who would restrict it even further. Otherwise we all lose, if not immediately, than over the next few years, as our culture and civilization continue to drown in the muck of reality TV, soundbite politics, and people just plain making shit up and imposing it by nothing but the authority of sheer naked force. Don’t believe me? Have you looked at the caricatures of other societies and cultures — and even of our own — that circulate in our politics and our school textbooks? You can’t fight that kind of ridiculousness without the power of “science.” Don’t give up the fight before you’ve even begun, and don’t leave the field of battle and make it that much harder for the rest of us.
What you've written here largely echoes a lot of my own thinking about science. This despite being what I think you'd describe as a neopositivist. In fact, I have been in the process of writing an essay along these lines, but aimed at explaining to my colleagues in the humanities (as well as those within the social sciences who self identify as “post-positivists”) what it is, exactly, that so-called “positivists” like me do, and why it is not, in fact, the case that our “heuristics” or “epistemologies” or “ontologies” or what have you cause our work to be somehow inherently racist, sexist, hetero-normative, colonialist, etc.
With that in mind, I would like to point out that this:
practices involving hypothesis-testing, cross-case generalizations
does not at all imply this:
a rooting of knowledge in an external material reality to which knowledge-claims approximate
But perhaps that is obvious.
(I also wonder if there are very many examples of social sciences that do not rely on cross-case generalizations. Surely even a word like “culture” is itself such a generalization. But I think I know what you mean here.)
I would also emphasize the “Good neopositivists don't agree with this” parenthetical, and say that moreover it doesn't really matter — except in a public relations kind of way — when they do. My experience is that it doesn't matter much whether one has never studied the philosophy of science, or is an avowed Comtean, Popperian, Kuhnian, or Lakatosian (and isn't it just a bit absurd that the last three of these are considered by anyone to be “positivists” of any kind, “neo” or otherwise?), the multiple regressions and analyses thereof end up looking awfully similar. Yes, it may be annoying that when backed into a corner they all may mutter something incoherent about objective reality and how if you don't believe in such a thing, why don't you try jumping out a third story window and seeing what happens. But a philosophy of science does not, in fact, even translate into a research program, let alone one that necessitates the reinforcement of some already existent social or political hierarchy.
(And yes, I do believe I am responding as much to recent posts by Laura as I am to you here…)
Matt, I largely concur. Three quick points, though:
1) you state:
“practices involving hypothesis-testing, cross-case generalizations
does not at all imply this:
a rooting of knowledge in an external material reality to which knowledge-claims approximate“
Here we disagree. I take great pains in my book to establish that one cannot give sense to the procedures of hypothesis-testing and cross-case generalization without a assumption of a mind-independent external reality to which knowledge more or less corresponds; this kind of ontological dualism is presupposed by all neopositivist procedures of knowledge-production; otherwise, the imperative to falsify hypothetical generaliaztions vanishes. But I would agree with you that this does not make neopositivist work inherently racist/neo-colonial/hetero-normative/etc.; these political usages are, to my mind, distinct from the epistemic procedures themselves. There might be progressive correlations, perhaps.
2) you state: “(I also wonder if there are very many examples of social sciences that do not rely on cross-case generalizations. Surely even a word like “culture” is itself such a generalization. But I think I know what you mean here.)”
Here I would suggest that there is a world of difference between an empirical generalization and an analytically general statement; the latter we can't do without, but the former only makes sense given eaither a) certain ontologically dualist assumptions or b) a set of social practices arranged so as to approximate a closed system in which constant conjunctions approximately obtain, e.g. a laboratory or a superhighway system or a Major League Baseball season. To use a general concept like “culture” doesn't imply anything in particular about whether empirical generalizations are on offer, I don't think.
3) philosophy of science may not translate directly into a research program — and it usually doesn't, since the substantive assumptions and theories of a given research domain aren't similar in content to the assumptions and theories made by philosophers of science about their domains — but I would suggest that it most certainly has implications for how research is designed and what its epistemic status is. it does matter whether one is a neopositiivst or a critical realist or an analyticist or a reflexivie theorist when studying, say, international development or conflict resolution or nuclear proliferation, not because these methodological and philosophicla orientations tell you precisely how to proceed, but because they affect the way that you design research on and in that domain. The fact that one can approach the same set of substantive issues with different methodological orientations doesn't mean that philosophy of science doesn't matter as much as it means that phiosophy of science doesn't exhaustively define a given research topic. Just because most electoral research is neopositivist doesn't mean that all electoral research needs to be neopositivist; just because most research on gender is reflexive doesn't mean that it all has to be (which is why feminism is a methodological orientation more than a set of substantive claims, in my view).
On Kuhn/Popper/Lakatos as “positivists” — don't get me started on that rant again ;)
Is science just a label for research?
You argue that science is not limited to positivists' definition of it, but then argue that the science wideners need all the allies they can get, including the discipline of Anthropology. In effect, you are saying that the constitution of science is the function of a power struggle for influence in academia and the larger instititutions that fund it. Very post-modern… esque
Is there a difference in stakes between different social science disciplines for the use of the term science? Is there a problem operating in an abstract philosophical space for considering these questions for anthropology, rather than in that abstract and the specifics of that discipline/subfield (as you do in your book)?
Certainly there is a difference in stakes, I agree. And I don't pretend to know exactly what was going on in the AAA that prompted this move, although I can guess that it has to do with the long-standing rejection of “positivism” by large portions of that discipline, coupled with the philosophically problematic equation of “science” and that kind of “positivism.” So my comments here are precisely about using philosophy of science to question the philosophical coherence or sensibility of the move, so as to better disclose its cultural and political dimensions. And my interest is in what anthropology can do for me, for us, in helping to practically sustain a pluralist notion of science — which makes the post as a whole, I think, into a kind of epistemic cultural politics, and only secondarily a philosophy of science analysis. In that way, it's not that different from my book, which I don't think is philosophy of science as much as it is an intervention into IR debates and discussions, albeit an intervention that draws on philosophy of science.
Would there be a problem if science were equated with systematic, public, worldly research? In my ideal logical world, we would simply ditch the term “science” (as Larry Laudan suggests that philosophers of science do) and talk about warranted or valid knowledge-claims. But the cultural power of the term and the symbol “science” is too great, so we need to think with the resources available to us and broaden that notion instead of simply abandoning it. Call that postmodern if you must; it is a matter of indifference to me. But also recognize that the point here is not to relativize all empirical claims, but to highlight the specific epistemic standards and practices appropriate to different ways of knowing.
Norm Geras has an interesting take on this..https://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2010/12/science-of-anthropology.html
“But also recognize that the point here is not to relativize all empirical claims, but to highlight the specific epistemic standards and practices appropriate to different ways of knowing.”
Can you explain how those are different? I realize you want to avoid saying that empirical inquiry is arbitrary, but you are indeed saying that the manner of inquiry is relative to different ways of knowing.
“Relative” is not the same as “relativism.” The latter is an unsustainable global claim about the unwarrantability of all knowledge claims (and parenthetically, is a claim misleadingly attributed to pragmatists and other epistemic pluralists by their oponents, and is not actually a claim that such thinkers actually make); the former is about the simultaneous absence of a universal warrant for knowledge and the pluralistic presence of multiple ways of warranting. Empirical inquiry is, I would say, only “arbitrary” if the alternative is adherence to one unified logic of inquiry, but the trick here is that there is no such unified logic of inquiry — just various efforts to pretend that one or another particular practice is universal. Otherwise, in practice, empirical claims are warranted within their specific contexts of inquiry, and that's just fine.
Punchline: give up the silly and unsustainable idea of One True Way of producing knowledge, and the “problem” of relativism dis-solves itself. In this case, pluralize “science” such that it incorporates a perspectival construal of knowledge. No, once we do that we can't speak any longer of claims being simply and unequivocally true, but if we were philosopically honest with ourselves to begin with, we couldn't and shouldn't have done so in the first place. As Wittgenstein one quipped, a stop-sign works to the extent that it induces stopping; whether it's “truly” a stop-sign is kind of irrelevant and unanswerable. Ditto, I would say, our facts and theories and knowledge.
“And much like the Democratic Party, which last time I looked still have a majority in both houses of Congress and could make a concerted effort to actually pass something instead of rolling over and playing dead, you have some pretty firm ground on which to stand in refuting the nonsense that the critics are spewing.”
Great analogy. In both cases, a fundamental problem is one of self legitimation – the inability to tell our own story in a way that produces confident action.
This reminds me that Jack Balkin and his colleagues have been making a similar claim about progressives and conservatives and the law – that the great power of originalism is as a vehicle for producing bold, confident legal conservatives, and that progressives should stop focusing on how to convince judges or the public and put more energy into building a coherent narrative to unify and activate their own side.
I'd highly recommend reading Bruno Latour's short piece in Anthropology News in 1996 that makes a similar argument – it even has a similar title.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/an.1996.37.3.1.2/abstract
https://www.scribd.com/doc/36260699/Bruno-Latour-Not-the-Question
As he puts it: “To be or not to be scientific is not the question.”
Great minds, as they say, think alike ;) Thanks for the reference!