Stephen Turner

This comment discusses the suggestions made in Mahoney’s “Constructivist Set-Theoretic Analysis: An Alternative to Essentialist Social Science” (2023). Mahoney presents an approach to cases of intersectionality or confounding which produce causal results unlike those that result from traditional net effects causal modeling. He presents it as an alternative to “essentialism,” which he describes as a cognitive error. These alternatives have the same problems as those he attributes to net effects analysis, with one exception: the method does allow for the identification of subpopulations with different causal mechanisms producing different outcomes for this subpopulation.

The relationship between the social sciences and the cognitive sciences is underdeveloped and complicated, for reasons we will explain in this chapter, and the philosophical discussion of this relationship has the same properties. Many reasons for the lack of development relate to a traditional philosophical issue: explanation. The explanatory structure of cognitive science reasoning and argumentation is unusual and difcult to t into the traditional model of scientic explanation, though they do relate, in an odd way, to the traditional “reasons” explanations discussed in the philosophy of social science, through the notion of “folk psychology.” The cognitive science explanations themselves, as they relate to traditional “social science” topics, involve additional problems. They depend on a strategy of reducing complexity by beginning with those aspects of mind that can be most readily simplied, such as perception and body movements. Therefore, traditional social science topics, such as social interaction, which cannot be readily simplied, are something of an afterthought.

Social science has for the most part lost its ambition to be ‘science’, as shown in the recent change in the American Anthropological Association statement of purpose. The new term is expertise. The change points to something fundamental: social science methods are now largely stable; they have well-developed uses for public and policy audiences; because they are user-friendly they are unlikely to radically change, and new problems arise for them to be applied to. New concepts are developed, but they do not develop into ‘theories’ in a scientific sense. So what is expertise? It is something other than fact generation: it is the result of aggregating and assessing research in an area. Experts engage with one another, so there is a community of expertise. Yet there is also another sense of ‘scientific’: using the tools of natural science and extending them to the social. The current means of doing this for social science is through neuroscience. These methods could serve to filter and validate social science concepts.

One of Ian C. Jarvie’s most interesting contributions is his discussion of the thinking of Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi on the nature and workings of the scientific community and their relation to politics : 545–564, 2001). The self-image these thinkers contributed to still lingers, but their accounts capture a historical moment that has passed and was idealized even when they were written. In this chapter, I examine this tradition and identify the central themes which dominated this literature and ask the question of how this history is relevant today. The answer will perhaps be surprising: despite the fact that the Left of the past held positions that are the opposites of the positions of the present participatory Left, the considerations that motivated the older Left remain.

The blogosphere is loathed and feared by the press, expert-opinion makers, and representatives of authority generally. Part of this is based on a social theory: that there are implicit and explicit social controls governing professional journalists and experts that make them responsible to the facts. These controls don't exist for bloggers or the people who comment on blogs. But blog commentary is good at performing a kind of sociology of knowledge that situates speakers and motives, especially in cases of complex professional and administrative decision-making, as well as providing specific factual material that qualifies claims of experts and authorities. In many contexts the commentaries are examples of Habermasian demands for justification, to which there is a response. A major topic in women's health, and on the blogs, is the effects of hysterectomy, especially accompanied by oophorectomy, the removal of ovaries. Physicians make extreme claims on web pages about the lack of consequences, or their manageability through hormone therapy, which they claim is supported by research. Blog posters, and a blog opposed to hysterectomy generally, claim that there are numerous damaging effects, and deconstruct the claims of experts. Blog posters fill in the claims with personal experiences and analysis of the conduct of physicians and nurses, as well as the motives of women who deny symptoms. Physicians provide their own critique and analysis of the blogs, to which they attribute great influence. A later meta-analysis and new longitudinal research affirms the bloggers, and explains why much of the research cited by experts is wrong.

In the nineteenth century, there was substantial and sophisticated interest in neuroscience on the part of social theorists, including Comte and Spencer, and later Simon Patten and Charles Ellwood. This body of thinking faced a dead end: it could do little more than identify highly general mechanisms, and could not provide accounts of such questions as `why was there no proletarian revolution?' Psychologically dubious explanations, relying on neo-Kantian views of the mind, replaced them. With the rise of neuroscience, however, some of the problems of concern to earlier thinkers, such as imitation, have revived because of the discovery of neuronal mechanisms, or through fMRI studies. The article reviews the history and discusses the implications of current work for the reconsideration of traditional social theory concepts. It is suggested that certain kinds of bridging work with neuroscience would enable us to answer many questions in social theory that empirical sociology has failed to answer.

Experts and intellectuals in the social sciences have a long history of relating to the state and the public. These relations vary in kind from those based on technical knowledge applied to policy to cults to social scientists in organic relations to social movements to organized attempts to develop public policyguided by social science knowledge. The most successful early attempts were cameralism and official statistics, but intellectuals like John Stuart Mill also reached a wide public audience in the nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, social reformmovements claimed expert knowledge. As the social sciences entered the university, however, the forms of influence changed. Under the influence of the Rockefeller philanthropies, social science became more ‘realistic’ and the emphasis shifted to creating professions dependent on academic knowledge and certification. Think tanks and other forms of knowledge intervention developed which relied on academic social science. Public intellectuals, however, speaking not to professions or bureaucrats, remained important.

Characterizing science as a public good, as Steve Fuller notes, is a part of an ideological construal of science, linked to a particular portrayal of science in the postwar era that was designed to provide a rationale for the funding of pure or basic science. The image of science depended on the idea of scientists as autonomous truth-seekers. But the funding system, and other hierarchies, effectively eliminated this autonomy, and bound scientists tightly to a competitive system in which the opportunity to pursue ideas in science depended on peer approval in advance. Funding agencies then turned to assessments of impact. John Ziman had already recognized the effects of these changes in the nature of science, and characterized it as “reliable knowledge” produced on demand from funders. As the competition for funds increased, there were further changes in the nature of science itself toward “reliable enough” knowledge. This made science into a “good”. but a good in the sense of results produced for funders, a transformation that left the original epistemic aims of science behind.

The classic sociological formulation of the “norms of science” was given by Robert K. Merton, in an article originally published as “A Note on Science and Democracy” and reprinted as “Science and Democratic Social Structure” in his Social Theory and Social Structure and as “The Normative Structure of Science” in The Sociology of Science. The formulation is sometimes known by its initials, CUDOS, which stands for the four norms: communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. Merton's representation of the normative character of science has proved to be one of the most enduring of all sociological analyses. It has been discussed at length by both critics, who proposed the concept of counternorms, and sympathizers, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s became emblematic of the “Mertonian” approach to the social study of science. Nor has it remained static. “Replication” is sometimes called the fifth norm. John Ziman suggested that “originality” be added as a norm, and in many recent explanations of the acronym CUDOS the O is used for originality.

Edward Shils was a prominent American sociologist and social theorist who spent much of his career in Britain. He was the translator of Karl Mannheim and collaborator with Talcott Parsons. His own social theory concentrated on the relation of primary groups and intellectuals to the center of society, which he conceived of in terms of its charismatic character. Unlike Parsons, he was especially concerned with the conflicts between the social attachments of people, and especially with those involving the transcendental. These conflicts were the basis of his account of intellectuals and their response to their own society.

This comment on Frodeman and Briggle’s Socrates Tenured raises questions about the project of applying philosophy or philosophical skills to wicked problems such as terrorism. By definition, these problems cannot be solved by appeal to principles, but involve conflicting values and goals. The societal problems to which the book refers are of this kind. The argument of the book vacillates between recognizing this and asserting some sort of special disciplinary authority for philosophy in the face of these problems. Examples illustrate the dilemma.

Merton's two papers on the norms of science were written in a period of intense political activity in science, and responded to this context, using conceptual tools from classical sociology and Harvard thinking of the time. The basic reasoning was Weberian: science and politics each had a different ethos. One target was the Left view of science as a model for society. Another was the view of the American Left that complex societies required regulation, but that science should be free of control. Merton pictured science as already intensely policed, but threatened by the conflict between its special ethos and potential democratic demands, and requiring protection. This was a `liberal' argument, but Merton used the language of the Left to present it.

Hans Morgenthau was a founder of the modern discipline of International Relations, and his Politics among Nations was for decades the dominant textbook in the field. The character of his Realism has frequently been discussed in debates on methodology and the nature of theory in International Relations. Almost all of this discussion has mischaracterized his views. The clues given in his writings, as well as his biography, point directly to Max Weber’s methodological writings. Morgenthau, it is argued, was a sophisticated user of Weber’s views who self-consciously applied them in the sphere of International Relations in such a way that Realism provided an ideal-typical model of the rational and responsible statesman. This interpretation both explains Morgenthau’s views and shows them to be a serious, complex, and compelling response to the issues which have animated the controversies over International Relations theory after Waltz’s presentation of the methodological basis for his neo-Realism.

Sociology once debated ‘the social’ and did so with a public readership. Even as late as the Second World War, sociologists commanded a wide public on questions about the nature of society, altruism and the direction of social evolution. As a result of several waves of professionalization, however, these issues have vanished from academic sociology and from the public writings of sociologists. From the 1960s onwards sociologists instead wrote for the public by supporting social movements. Discussion within sociology became constrained both by ‘professional’ expectations and political taboos. Yet the original motivating concerns of sociology and its public, such as the compatibility of socialism and Darwinism, the nature of society, and the process of social evolution, did not cease to be of public interest. With sociologists showing little interest in satisfying the demand, it was met by non-sociologists, with the result that sociology lost both its intellectual public, as distinct from affinity groups, and its claim on these topics.

The question of the “validity” of the “sign-rule” has been a source of continuing disagreement among sociologists. Some of the confusion surrounding this question can be dispelled by focusing on the problem of providing satisfactory interpretations for calculi constructed to represent various commentators' versions of acceptable “sign-rule” arguments. It is shown that the formulae of a calculus constructed to represent standard sign rule arguments must be interpreted in terms of propositions asserting that rankings of objects in virtue of one property are identical to rankings in virtue of another property. A system constructed on the basis of “the assumption of high correlations” is shown to involve distinctions between the logical forms of the premises and the conclusions of key arguments. This sharply limits the deductive power of this system. A third system, constructed on the basis of the “causal modeling” view of the sign rule, is shown to require an interpretation which renders the procedure irrelevant to the construction and testing of general theories.