Kieran Healy

Drezner Aghast (Movie at 11)

Dan Drezner is shocked, shocked that a mere sociologist should display clearer reasoning than a political scientist. Despite being a proud member of the social science field voted most likely to be cannibalized by Rational Choice Theory, Dan’s rationality threw him at the final fence on the God quiz.

Dan explains the source of his horror in passing, to those few of you who don’t care about interdisciplinary attitudes in the social sciences:

disciplines resembling the natural or physical sciences [have] greater status than those disciplines that more resemble the humanities. Political science usually does better than sociology on that scale.

Here’s my compressed two cents on that hardy perennial, “Are the social sciences scientific?” A few Sociologists, some Political Scientists and many Economists are prone to thinking that they are doing something akin to Physics when they show up for work in the mornings. I don’t know of any who actually wear lab coats (not that many Physicists do, either) but you get the feeling a few of them might if they felt they could get away with it. As it happens, there is a sense in which some social scientists—especially the Economists, again—really are following in the footsteps of the natural sciences, it’s just not in the way they imagine.

If I had to draw an analogy between natural and social science, and sociology specifically, I’d say we’re most like meteorology or climatology. Like them, we deal in large-scale, long-lived complex systems with many parts. Social systems are harder to deal with than the weather, because some of the parts have their own ideas about what they want to have happen. We’re pretty good at stuff at either end of the scale: we understand many long- or very long-range patterns fairly well, and we also know a lot about micro-level interactions in controlled contexts. The middle-range is much messier (and accurate forecasting is probably impossible) largely because of the nature of the beast under study. Unfortunately this is also the bit that people are most interested in getting knowledge about. But even there we have a lot of useful concepts, methods and models that can be applied in a wide variety of contexts, though you need to be careful.

In general, the thing to bear in mind is that even natural science isn’t like the standard picture of what natural science is like. If you see what I mean.

Kieran,

Proud to report that I took no direct hits or bullet bites, and I guess I’m what you could call a fledgling political scientist.

Then again, in general I prefer to call myself a (fledgling) political theorist or philosopher much more than a political “scientist” (blech!). IMHO, those rat choice people should really get over themselves, or do some serious thinking about the philosophy of the social sciences—any discipline in which the subjects can redefine themselves in response to the discipline’s findings CANNOT be a “natural” science, dammit.

(and yes, here, as ever, I find that my undergrad training in analytic philosophy as opposed to poli sci helped very much with the logic. Yay for being forced to prove modal logic theorems, even those that other people have already discovered…)

I read Machine Dreams, and was surprised by angry the tone of the book was. Mirowski struck me as a furious person, who basically wishes game theory would fall into the sea and get replaced with cybernetics and computer science. What makes this funny is that one of the hottest sub-sub-disciplines of computer science right now is adding microeconomics and game theory to the arsenal of models currently in use. For example, noncoperative game theory is a wonderful tool for modelling security systems, because you can directly model the assumption that the other side is acting in its own interest without building in overly restrictive assumptions about the behavior of the other party. So if the Nash equilibrium of your protocol is secure, then the system is secure.

There is a moral here, I’m sure. Perhaps it is that the true measure of a scientist is his or her willingness to let practicality trump principle—to cheerfully abandon long-held philosophical positions in order to make use of convenient new mathematical tools.

On rereading, I think that last paragraph is much more hostile than I meant—I come close to accusing Mirowski of not being a scientist, and that’s both inaccurate and unkind. MD is a good book, and I learned a lot from it.

I think the willingness to choose mathematical convenience over philosophical integrity is one of the reasons the sciences work as well as they do, which is ironic and funny. The despite the fact that the philosophical difference between ethology and information economics are pretty big, and yet for years ethologists and economists have busily appropriated each others’ models for search. Models of price-searching are used to build models of animal foraging, and vice-versa.