NORMATIVE BLINDERS TO EMPIRICAL REALITIES

Several years ago I sent a paper to what eventually turned out to be several philosophy journals for review. It discussed the treatment of determinism in the social sciences, specifically that ideas viewed as deterministic are frequently rejected because common assumptions underlying the social sciences hold that determinism is morally wrong. The paper was sent straight back in each case with a comment roughly saying the same thing:

“Surely scholars of the social sciences are not being so foolish. You cannot decide factual questions on normative grounds.”

In other words, how we feel about whether the universe is or is not deterministic has absolutely no bearing on whether it is deterministic or not. It would be utterly misguided to reject factual arguments on normative grounds.

Much of the difficulty in convincing these philosophers that social scientists commonly hold certain views was due to the difficulty of demonstrating well established and thus unspoken assumptions in a group. Group assumptions and norms are sufficiently taken for granted that they often do not need to be made explicit. However, when research breaks these taboos implicit norms become explicit. In the social sciences this is particularly evident with research viewed as either environmentally or biologically deterministic.  

For example, referring to the Morton-Gould affair John Horgan (2011, citations below) writes:

Biological determinism is a blight on science. It implies that the way things are is the way they must be. We have less choice in how we live our lives than we think we do. This position is wrong, both empirically and morally. 

Regardless of the truth of the empirical evidence, Horgan explicitly rejects an argument on moral grounds (Horgan gives no empirical grounds for his position).  

 There is also a blanket rejection of research viewed as environmental/geographic determinism. For example, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel is likewise rejected not on empirical but on moral grounds:

Diamond pushes further the moral relativism underlying his Pulitzer Prize winning text….In a chilling display of the dark expediency of an interpretation that privileges geographical determinism over the idea of human beings as responsible and accountable agents of our own actions. (Hall 2003, 135)

Diamond’s empirical argument is similarly chastised by another scholar as a “pernicious book” that except for the popular attention it has received “would not ordinarily merit scholarly discussion” (Sluyter 2003, 813). Diamond’s (deterministic) “junk science” is seen as so morally dangerous that it “demands vigorous intellectual damage control” (Sluyter 2003, 813).

This last statement uses extraordinary language for a scholarly journal – to demand that factual academic arguments should be deliberately curtailed based on moral sentiment.

I believe the quotes above accurately capture the zeitgeist concerning ideas viewed as deterministic in the social sciences. Theories and empirical evidence concerning biological or geographic influence on society have largely been shunned, viewed as taboo, and even ridiculed or subjected to “vigorous intellectual damage control.” Evolutionary psychology and works such as that by Diamond or Jeffrey Sachs and similar areas of study have met with extraordinary resistance. Their success is due to overwhelming empirical evidence that supports them rather than support from within the social sciences.

A FEW ADDITIONAL RELEVANT QUOTES 

ON BIOLOGICAL INFLUENCE

“During most of the twentieth century ‘determinism’ was a term of abuse, and genetic determinism was the worst kind of term” (Ridley 2003, 98). 

‘To acknowledge [a perceived deterministic] human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged… Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think’ (Pinker 2002, viii).

Peter Grosvenor observes that “progressive” or “left” intellectuals interpret “deterministic” evolutionary psychology “as part of the broader assault on collectivism and on the prospects for more cooperative and egalitarian social models” (Grosvenor 2002, 436) and view determinism “as a flawed scientific rationalization of prevailing [unethical] social hierarchies.” (Grosvenor 2002, 438)

The eminent primatologist Sarah Hrdy even questions “whether sociobiology should be taught at the high-school level…Unless a student has a moral framework already in place, we could be producing social monsters by teaching this.” (quoted in Barash, 2006, B13).

“[50 years ago] the thought that evolutionary biology might be relevant to judgments about behavior was not just wrong, it was unclean.” (Michael Ruse, 2011)

Ruse also writes that evolutionary ethics “has moved from being a taboo subject” to gaining some support. Note the moral aspect of being taboo and then the immediate response by David Barash:

“It may be, as Michael Ruse has just cogently written, that ‘evolutionary ethics’ is (are?) experiencing something of a renaissance. But I hope not.

To my mind, efforts to derive ethics from evolution are not only misguided, but have already done considerable harm: witness the less-than-admirable history of social Darwinism and its use to buttress not just laissez-faire capitalism but also colonialism, racism, war and genocide.”

Like Pinker’s observes above, views seen as deterministic are not just shunned as immoral by some, but often in extreme terms.

Environmental/Geographic Determinism

   Mark Bassin observes ‘Of all the various chapters in the development of modern geography, none has been more disparaged, indeed vilified than the discipline’s relatively brief engagement with the doctrine of environmental or geographical determinism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ (Bassin 1992, 3).  

Robert Kaplan can quite comfortably write  ‘And of all the unsavory truths in which [international relations] realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography.’ (Kaplan, 2009, 97).

Similar moral stances are evident in the wording (“shame”, “shameful”, “sin”) of overviews of geography and geographic/environmental determinism. These are “treated as part of geography’s distant and shameful past” (Frenkel 1992, 144), “remembered with shame” (Godlewska, 1993, 550) and equated with “Original Sin” (Buttimer 1990, 16).

Even from the detached worldview of analytic philosophy we may find moral beliefs influencing the study of factual questions - It is extraordinary that the state of modern philosophy can still allow Jeremy Koons to observe that:

many philosophers seem to reject it [hard determinism] not because of its philosophical implausibility, but because they fear the consequences of its being true.” (Koons 2002, 81).

If even philosophers allow their normative views to influence their understanding of factual questions, then what hope do social scientists have for understanding factual questions?

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(Often, e.g. see Grosvenor, it may seem that rejections to determinism are from the "left". However, the "right" also often rejcts determinism on moral grounds. More on this in a future post.)

  

WORKS CITED

Barash, David P. 2006. The social responsibility in teaching sociobiology. The Chronicle of Higher Education 53(13): B13.

Barash, David P. “Evolutionary Ethics and Other Oxymorons.” July 30^th 2011 post on “Brainstorm,” (a Chronicle of Higher Education blog). Link

Bassin, Mark. 1992. Geographical determinism in Fin-de-siècle Marxism: Georgii Plekhanov and the environmental basis of Russian history. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82(1): 3-22.

Buttimer, Anne. 1990. Geography, humanism, and global concern. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80(1): 1-33.

Frenkel, Stephen. 1992. Geography, empire, and environmental determinism. Geographical Review 82(2): 143-153.

Godlewska, Anne. 1993. Review of Déterminisme et géographie: Hérodote, Strabon, Albert le Grand et Sebastien Münster by Jean Bergevin. Isis 84(3): 550-551.

Grosvenor, Peter C. 2002. Evolutionary psychology and the intellectual left. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45 (3): 433–48.

Hall, Anthony. 2003. The American Empire and the Fourth World. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Horgan, John. “Defending Stephen Jay Gould’s Crusade against Biological Determinism.” June 24, 2011. “Cross-Check” Scientific American blog. Link

Kaplan, Robert. D. 2009. The Revenge of Geography. Foreign Policy. 172: 96-105.

Koons, Jeremy Randel. 2002. Is hard determinism a form of compatibilism? The Philosophical Forum 33(1):81-99.

Pinker, Steven. 2002. The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. New York: Viking.

Ridley, Matt. (2003) 2004. The agile gene: How nature turns on nurture. New York: Harper Perennial.

Ruse, Michael. “The Marc Hauser Dilemma” July 28th^th 2011 post on “Brainstorm,” (a Chronicle of Higher Education blog). Link

Sluyter, Andrew. 2003. Neo-environmental determinism, intellectual damage control, and nature/society science. Antipode 35(4): 813-817.

Whose flag is this? Geography question of the day

ARE THE SOCIAL SCIENCES USEFUL?

In 2002 Stanford and NYU political scientist Russell Hardin published an article that asked a number of questions about political science, including whether the fact that much of its academic work may seem obscure and irrelevant to the public is a problem, in PS: Political Science and Politics (Whither Political Science?).

Hardin wrote that an economic consensus had occurred on important policy issues and asked

“Has the less apparently relevant work of modern economics contributed to that concurrence? A similar question would be worth tackling not only in economics but in many other disciplines. The huge number of people working on economics and economic problems suggests that most of them cannot be doing anything that rises to the level of public awareness, so few of them can have had much direct effect on public debates or policies. That might be too quick and dismissive a claim, however, because someone such as Larry Summers, whose economic advice was centrally important for several years during the Clint administration, could not likely have achieved his own understanding without the large enterprise of academic, research institute, industrial and governmental research on economic issues. It is not trivially easy and maybe not analytically possible to ferret out the connections between the thousands of journal articles over the past 50 years and the counsel that a Summers has had to offer. Yet it would be absurdly presumptuous to dismiss the relevance of all that work, as abstract or minutely focused as much of it was. Somehow, the enterprise of economic science has been fundamentally important." (Hardin 2002, 183).

Hardin defends the vast amount of seemingly irrelevant or unproductive work in academia on the grounds that it does indeed inform policy in an important way, at least in the long run. The “thousands of journal articles over the past fifty years” were "fundamentally important” to modern economic policy decisions. It would be hard to choose a better example than this to illustrate the point of this blog. 

By 2008 the US economy was in a financial meltdown and the crisis in which we are still in began. It is widely attributed to the polices (with their intellectual roots in Milton Friedman) of Alan Greenspan along with Summers, who while at Harvard, the World Bank, and as Secretary of the Treasury of the United States was in the forefront of the academic argument for deregulation, in favor of ever more complicated derivatives, and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act.

In 2010, from among the 11,000 subscribers of the heterodox Real World Economics Review, 7,500 voters chose Summers as one of the top ten economists most responsible for the modern financial crisis, third behind Greenspan and barely behind Friedman himself. Although (purposefully) over-the-top, the economic website zero-hedge was able to ask “Is Larry Summers an Economic War Criminal?” (Zerohedge.com. Link).

Summers’ policies have been utterly disastrous for the US economy (more on the Economics page). If this is what, in the words of Hardin, “the large enterprise of academic, research institute, industrial and governmental research on economic issues” and “thousands of journal articles over the past 50 years” leads to, then the utility of the social sciences (at least economics in this case, but the problem is wider) must be questioned. 

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This webpage, then, asks the question: Are the social sciences useful?
  In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, economics as taught in most departments has been argued to be useless, or worse still, "dangerous to know", its theories leading to wrongheaded policies that caused the current economic crisis and continue to make it worse.
  Development aid and public policy initiatives are frequently shown to be ineffective, and like economics, often worse than doing nothing due to serious unintended consequences. Sociology, Political Science, Human Geography - all have been argued to be suffering from crises of progress, failing to provide useful policy advice, nor do they engage, inform and enrich the public (the common defense of the Liberal and Fine Arts). Political scientists failed to predict major events such as the fall of the Soviet Union and the Arab Spring. Architects and urban planners' policies  led to dysfunctional, antisocial, unhealthy, environmentally unfriendly and unsustainable built environments, especially in the United States, ("new urbanism" concepts that are reverting to traditional human friendly building forms were laid out, to a striking degree singlehandedly, by anti-academic Jane Jacobs).
  In the UK, for example, "Social scientists hoping to influence government policy are likely to find that their pearls of wisdom fall on deaf ears. An independent review of the state of social sciences finds that, while the volume and quality of UK research is second only to the US, the “real world” of government and wider society remain unconvinced of its value." ("Antisocial Science?" 2003).  
   This website seeks to consider this point of view. Are the social sciences in crisis? If so, can they be better? Can they help in the creation of a better society? What are the worst aspects of modern social science, and what are the best?
  At the moment the site is mainly focused on linking to other material. There are many excellent critiques of the social sciences, and I wanted to put them all on one site, as a resource, and to see what is common between them.
  Much of the site is focused on macroeconomics ( and development / international aid), and urbanism. These are two areas where mainstream academic approaches have not only shed little light, but have actively caused significant harm. Mainstream economics and the policies it has developed is directly responsible for the current financial crisis in the developed world. International aid has largely failed and frequently caused negative unintended consequences in the developing world. And academic influences on urban policy, especially in the United States, were a major cause in the decline of the quality of life in the United States. I also look at political science, sociology and other areas of the social sciences.
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The goal of this project is to document both successes and problems with the social sciences. The following sources highlight some problems in the various disciplines. They are listed first to support the contention that there is indeed a problem. Successes will be considered later. Also, these are mostly "big picture" critiques. Of course there are many more specific internal disputes within social science disciplines. Some of these will be considered in greater detail at a later date. I am mainly looking for more recent criticisms, although some older ones are included as well.
There are at least three classes of critiques of the social sciences: 

• As an endeavor at all
• In their current form
• Criticism within a particular discipline - one branch against another. 

Currently these are not distinguished clearly here. The focus of this website is primarily on the first two points. The third point is of course extensively covered within disciplines themselves. However, often critiques between opposing viewpoints within a discipline expose problems relevant to the first two points. 

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