This might be the result of a Scandinavian (possibly harmful?) naivité about such issues, possibly brought on by a very homogenous ethnic makeup.¹ It may also be the result of a society that has been able to advance beyond a harmful focus on race. I saw an example of the opposite up close when living in Malaysia, a thoroughly race-focused country where race and religion ar important for official categorization of people. It is the story of a massive affirmative action programme that has spiralled totally out of control and become the basis for widespread discrimination in society.

I may be wrong, but my impression as an outsider is still that focus on the concept of race appears to bring more harm than good. The problem in the US is as I understand it that large groups have low income, low social mobility, language problems, high unemployment et cetera, not that the members of these groups have a different skin tone. Language holds power, and official contributions to keeping racial divisions an active part of the language may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Am I just an naively idealistic Scandinavian with an unrealistic view of the world?

1. The CIA World Factbook lists the 2007 estimate as: Norwegian 94.4% (includes Sami, about 60,000), other European 3.6%, other 2%

This radio program about research in social science really interested me. It features interesting topics and interviews with leading social scientists and thinkers. Political science seems to have a pretty good presence among them. I’ve listened to the broadcasts for the past three weeks – of particular interest in those were a discussion with Michail Rykin on Russian democracy and the rehabilitation of Stalin, with Anthony Giddens on the politics of climate change and with Kevin Doogan on “New Capitalism”. A pretty impressive lineup.

As a program from perhaps the most established public broacasting institution in the world, we expect the technical quality and the host to be of top notch quality, and they are. There isn’t anything to put my finger on there. The host, Laurie Taylor, isn’t a scientist himself, but he seems to have enough insight paired with being a good radio host. It all makes for interesting radio.

The professional radio format is however also the program’s biggest weakness. It isn’t made for political science nerds like me, but for a general audience. Because of this, interesting topics are compressed into smaller sound bytes than I’d like to see. For the most part they’re not deep, lengthy analyses, but quick interviews and science teasers. For example I was very frustrated when the extremely interesting insights by Michail Rykin were cut short after just 10 minutes. I’m used to people getting to speak for one or two times 45 minutes. Still, I’m really happy I got to hear it, and it spurred my interest into looking up those perspectives on my own.

One last little annoyance also needs to be mentioned. For some reason, the podcast feed seems to include only the last program at any given time, unlike most podcasts that include a backlog of several episodes. If you wait for more than a week between updating your podcasts that means you’ll lose an episode. Luckily it’s possible to get old episodes from the website, but it’s a bit annoying that they’re not in the podcast stream itself.

The blog Anne is a Man also has reviewed this podcast.

This all points to a more basic issue: Is there only one correct, philosophically defensible way to do social science? Some scholars believe that only an approach aimed at causal explanation is valid. B&K take the opposite side but adhere to an equivalent exclusiveness. The implication of their position seems quite clear: only one kind of social science will pass muster.

If I interpret LFC correctly, we both agree that both major philosophical ideas of social science has their merit and have contributed to social science as a whole. His post made me interested in reading the entire piece, which in a way surprised me and made me think even if I for the most part disagree with it.

On page 25, Bevir and Kedar state their mission as:

Before we turn to Sartori and Collier, however, we wish to reiterate that our critique of them is a philosophical one. Our critique attempts to unearth the philosophical assumptions in their methodology, showing them to be naturalistic and hence, given the foregoing arguments, inappropriate for political analysis. We seek thereby to shift the debate from the practical advantages of methodological strategies to their underlying philosophical assumptions. Given our philosophical agenda, there is no need for us to examine the soundness or quality of the substantive outcomes of Collier and Sartori’s approaches to concept formation. Rather, our critical task will have been fulfilled once we manage to demonstrate that those scholars’ methodologies are marked by a discredited naturalism.

They appear to be going on a crusade against current qualitative methodology on the grounds that it has accepted too much of the philosophy of science of naturalism and has thus undermined its own philosophical foundation. In their view, this makes current social science irrelevant.

In my opinion – and this is in large part what makes social science interesting – the acceptance of naturalist methodology, if not a strict naturalist philosophy of science, is a pragmatic way of accepting something less than complete knowledge as something that might still be useful. For me, the essence of social science is the ability to combine philosophical ideals and humanist concepts of understanding and intentionality with naturalistic conceptions of empiricism and causation to create better, if not complete, understanding of phenomena.

It appears to me that it is such perversions of the search for ultimate enlightenment that Bevir and Kedar are crusading against. And this is where I think they are moving beyond the realm of social science altogether.

The line they try to draw between themselves and the ‘naturalists’ (which is really more of a great gulf than a line) depends in larte part on the latter’s inattentiveness to the “holistic nature of meaning”. This concept – rather elusively defined in their article – appears to imply that intentionality is the only relevant aspect of human action, that study of outcomes is unimportant for understanding. They are opposed to social scientists reducing “meaning” to a variable in a larger picture. In their words (p. 30):

This atomization of concepts forecloses the possibility of holistic explanations that would open out on to the whole web of beliefs of social actors. Here too we thus find the naturalist elision of meaningfulness.

…and thus we get to their conclusion, and the essence of their work. I’m not familiar enough with Sartori and Collier to assess whether or not their analysis of these two authors make sense, so I stick with the general conclusions:

We began this essay by showing that there has arisen a widespread agreement (among philosophers if not in the unreflective practice of many social scientists) that anti-naturalist premises are the most appropriate for social science, where anti-naturalism highlights the meaningful and contingent nature of social life, the situatedness of the scholar, and so the dialogical nature of social science.

It still appears to me like what they are trying to do is discard social science as a whole, which is pragmatic by nature, and return to the realm of philosophy.

Still, their thoughts are interesting to read and discuss. I thank LFC for giving me (yet another) interesting few hours of distraction from my thesis work that will surely make me a better and more reflected social scientist, but not necessarily one with good grades to show for it.