I propose that we drop the term “social science” and replace it with “cultural analysis.”
The basic questions in cultural analysis are:
- what problems does a cultural trait solve?
- what problems does a cultural trait create?
The basic paradigm is that cultural traits evolve to solve problems, including problems that are caused by other cultural traits. For example, in warfare, we develop weapons to solve the problems created by other weapons.
Cultural traits are broadly of two types. Informal traits are traits that people follow by imitation and tradition. Formal traits are traits that are codified (often in writing) or embodied in physical tools.
We think of scientific persuasion as consisting of deductive proofs and decisive experiments. Whether or not scientific persuasion actually proceeds this way, cultural analysis does not. Persuasion in cultural analysis requires assembling intuition, historical narrative, formal empirical work, and logic. There is too much causal density to provide definitive answers to the basic questions.
> We think of scientific persuasion as consisting of deductive proofs and decisive experiments. Whether or not scientific persuasion actually proceeds this way, cultural analysis does not.
We also think of science as peer reviewed journal papers. So does social science. So does computer science.
We think of epidemiological studies as a key scientific research tool in medicine. The same techniques are pervasive in the social sciences including economics.
I appreciate and commend the effort to hold the social sciences to a more objective standard but renaming a well established label is well… unscientific in my view. Kling is promoting the George Lakoff view that metaphors are key to the way the mind works and that the root/original meaning of words forever color the semantics.
Pinker and others and explained and experimentally shown that once a word becomes a natural part of our vocabulary it takes up its own unique mental slot independent of other words with identical pronunciation and independent of the root meaning.
We don’t think of Microsoft as software for microprocessors but as the name of a specific company. The label “social science” has a well defined slot in our collective understanding of the universe of disciplines. I don’t think the benefits of renaming “social science” outweighs the costs; quite the oppposite.
The basic questions in cultural analysis are:
what problems does a cultural trait solve?
what problems does a cultural trait create?
I am sure what you goal is here but building off the past few days of the problems of youths and college campuses:
For all the problems of youths today, why don’t accept some good points of youth trends? Crime, teen pregnancy, and and high graduation are at all time highs or lows and the youths today are better behaved than ever before.
Living in California during the gang war height and Rodney King riots (way worse than our protest/riots today btw), nobody was predicting that crime rates would consistently the next 27 years. And yet very few pundits both left & right bring this reality up.
Prof. Arnold, I don’t think the name change would help much. Nor am I convinced that the perspective you suggest would help–and it might make things worse.
Here are a number of disjointed points, in no particular order.
1. As I understand her work Deirdre McCloskey has addressed the term “science” in the English language and the connotations and baggage the word has. Unfortunately, we are stuck with that baggage at the moment.
2. An overly narrow focus on culture is a big mistake, because it is difficult to get people to agree on what culture is. The notion of culture is *protean*. Methinks I’m using this word right. Different scholars use it differently and soon diverge wildly. People don’t agree on what culture is, nor on where it comes from, nor on how to change it or how easily it can be changed.
3. There needs to be emphasis on “What people do” and not simply “What they say” or “what they think about and talk about and say they will probably do or want to do.” Economists could discuss this in terms of “Revealed Preference.” A good place to start is the list of “Human Universals” that Steven Pinker placed as an appendix in _The blank slate_. It’s usually credited to Donald E. Brown. Wikipedia has details.
4. Much social science is impoverished unless it is linked to history, which many people consider part of the Humanities. Certainly there are fields like clinical psychology that can get by without history, but a lot of social science involves describing societies and how they change.
(I am reminded of Joseph Schumpeter’s aperçu that the poverty of some economic theory can be demonstrated by the notion that taxes are what we pay for services. My hunch is that Schumpeter would say that Mancur Olson’s notion of the “stationary bandit” is closer to reality.)
5. There are tensions between Analysis, Description, and Prediction, and these are loosely linked to the differences between Induction and Deduction. A big challenge is defining the unit of analysis. A weakness of some social science is that it became an erudite and pleasant exercise in Descriptive Interpretation, bringing us such essays as Clifford Geertz’ essay on “The Balinese Cockfight.” Very interesting, but is it useful?
6. This reminds me of a topic to be mentioned explicitly: Measurement and Quantification. Some branches of the social sciences are acutely focused on them, others not nearly so much. It often seems to me that the farther you get from measurement, quantification, and hard numbers, the farther you are getting from some useful and systematic core of the social sciences.
END ESSAY
Further reading (popped into my head while writing this).
Pinker, Steven. 2002. _The blank slate_.
Conquest, Robert. 2006. _Dragons of Expectation_. (nice chapters toward the end on the humanities).
Wilson, Edward O. 1998. _Consilience_. Especially his characterization of the social sciences, toward the middle of the book. Discussion of determining the unit of analysis, role of religion, are economics more like meteorologists or climatologists?
Sowell, Thomas. 2012. _Intellectuals and Society_. Nice distinction between “mundane facts” and “verbal virtuosity.”
ENDNOTE
(Endnote: Philip Carl Salzman makes this point regarding Geertz in his recent polemic “How ‘They’ hijacked anthropology.”
The paradigm you describe seems reminiscent of the neoevolutionism school of sociology, embodied by the likes of Leslie White and Gerhard Lenski. Contrary to what it’s name might suggest, it isn’t strictly concerned with sociobiology but also with ‘cultural Darwinism.’ I found this school to be one of the few areas in social science outside of economics that even aspire toward something scientific.
“Persuasion in cultural analysis requires assembling intuition, historical narrative, formal empirical work, and logic.”
Cultural analysis would appear indistinguishable from punditry then. At least as pundits would have you believe.
But nobody takes a pundit at their word. And when was the last time you read a persuasive article in a newspaper or magazine? The best we can hope for from them is to raise an interesting question.
It is even worse in academia where scholars hide behind jargon and shady data bases to avert meaningful scrutiny research devoted to topics of the utmost irrelevance. Sunbeams from cucumbers isn’t half as bad.
Meanwhile the credentialed classes are whining and moaning about the death of expertise and how the little people don’t bow and pay homage the way they should.
The social sciences have no good reputation to lose. Let them earn one for themselves.
And in the meantime, slash higher education spending and subsidies and eliminate college degree requirements for employment. If we can ban the box for felons, we ought to be able to do it for people who are not so foolish as to waste tens of thousands of dollars on worthless education credentials.
There are a lot of good arguments about limiting higher education needs but most people work in the private sector and there is nothing mandating numerous positions needing a degree.
That is true to an extent but my understanding is that there are several states whose licensure requirements include a degree and particularly in health fields. Most states require degrees and do not permit apprenticeships to satisfy licensing training requirements in occupations in which an apprenticeship would no doubt be the superior preparation: law, physical therapy, occupational therapy, counseling, etc. To sit for the CPA exam, for example, you need to have a BA if I understand correctly. It is true that the government is the worst offender. Social work, for example, requires a degree. Many states require a degree in education to sit for licensing exams and go so far as to bar Teach for America hires even though the latter have been demonstrated to produce better classroom outcomes. And the federal government is the worst offender in imposing education credit requirements to qualify for various positions despite the superior performance of substantive tests of knowledge in predicting job performance.
What you are describing is cultural anthropology, which has a rich universe of literature, ranging from the speculative to the quantitative. People in this thread have pointed to sociology, but anthropology is much more valuable to determine the genesis of cultural traits.
I agree with the spirit of RAD’s comment above.
IMO, rather than clear the decks and redefine established vocabulary, we should continue to build on the intellectual traditions of methodological individualism.
A state-of-the-art handbook is Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior, revised edition (Cambridge U. Press, 2015):
https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Social-Behavior-Bolts-Sciences/dp/1107416418
The chapters about ‘social norms’ (Ch. 21) and ‘collective belief formation’ (Ch. 22) are the most germane to cultural analysis.
To be clear: Many of your analyses of specific aspects of society—for example, the three axes model of contemporary politics—are examples of fresh, incisive social science. They achieve the twin explanatory ideals of fullness and parsimony. (They explain much with little.) They are falsifiable. (They can be checked against the facts.) But they don’t depend on overhauling social science.