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 Overreliance on Social Science for Proof
J.R. Seeley
"The best I've ever seen by way of a statement of caution about social science is by a Jack Seeley, who is a sociologist. (Actually a co-founder of York University) I've included a brief excerpt from one of his papers where he cautioned I think in plain language that I've never seen a rebuttal of, how misleading social science can be and he ends up with an inflammatory comment that it's a bit better than propaganda but not by much. I think it's important for all of us to tuck that in the back of our minds."
...whatever else the social scientist does, he redefines and thereby, and insofar, alters the society. Indeed, insofar as he does function as a social scientist, he does nothing else: even when he seems to function otherwise, when he “merely” records the going definitions of his society, he has altered the general level of self-consciousness in reference to the definition, he has brought it into or to the threshold of critical awareness, and thereby altered it functionally about as radically as it can be altered. So the social scientist is, in the very performance of his scientific role, a social actor, a crucial actor, a mover and shaker, parallel in function to any formally designated politician, and probably eventually more powerful. Who was it said, “Let me write the songs of a nation...?” In our day, he should have said, “Let me write its definitions...” for the right to define is the right to make and unmake, create or destroy.
Even when this inescapable entanglement in action is recognized, a second effort is made to save some special, extraordinary and in some sense superior status or standpoint for the social scientist. It is held, briefly, that he is under the discipline of his data (and his method) and that these drive him to a position very little dependent on his personal predilections and preferences. It is usually allowed that “interest” may well direct inquiry up to the point where an object of attention is selected, but that beyond that point the scientific process somehow takes over and controls outcome.
Even if the claim were conceded, it would be almost infinitely damaging to the asserted role of the social scientist, for the right to attend to this and not that is the right to direct attention hither and not thither (that is, to adjudicate on the basis of personal sensibilities and preferences). Suppose a judge declared a free power to direct attention upon whatever in the evidence interested him; it is a near equivalent to a proclamation that he will decide the outcome in terms of his private program.
But the claim cannot be allowed; the scientific process does not somehow take over once the object is focused under the eyepiece. For there is still the selection of the light in which the object is to be viewed, the context in which it is to be seen (actually put) and the setting of canons for discrimination between true and false, or more or less plausible propositions.
I am not saying that "reality" constrains the social scientist in no way at all; but I am saying that the constraint is not much (if at all) tighter than the corresponding reality lays upon the artist, say a portraitist or painter. There is in each case a literal infinity of non-false representations that can be made. Which will be made in actuality is as poetic in motive and political in effect as any other essentially expressive action. For that is what it is: a ritualized acting out of an internal choice or necessity, in which the ritual in some sense orders and hence renders comprehensible, while in another sense it frees and hence allows the largest latitude for the personal. (I shall not document these statements here, but it should be obvious that one may, for instance, “account for” delinquency, say, in countless ways: as an expression of the delinquent’s wish, or character or need; as a consequence of his parents’ acts or unconscious motivations or those of their parents; as a result of differential association or communication; as a function of the slum or the economic system or advertising or the police system or the rating and dating scheme; as a result of want of care on the part of folks stolen from or beaten up -- the victim makes the crime! -- or the presence of alleys or want of light at the site; as an artifact of unreasonable laws... and so, literally, ad infinitum. The putting of all these true propositions together in one book -- as in most texts on the subject -- does not alter the status of the whole over that of the parts, for the ratio of one to infinity is the same as the ratio of ten to infinity. It should be obvious too that what is selected for exposition out of this interminable tangle is free neither of personal motive nor political consequence: indeed, it arises almost altogether out of the first and eventuates almost altogether in the second. (The word “almost” is meant to cover the barring of patently false propositions, which is indeed one of the virtues of social science over less scrupulous propaganda).
Excerpted from Personal Science by John R. Seeley, Professor of Sociology, York University, Toronto, Canada. Presented at the American Orthopsychiatric Association, Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, March 21-24, 1962. Published in The Urban Condition: People and Policy in the Metropolis, Basic Books, 1963, and The Americanization of the Unconscious, International Science Press, 1967.
"Not in any important point of comparison is there any resemblance between the natural and the social sciences. I can but summarize briefly."
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