Physics envy and pre-Kantian shamans

When the May 1996 issue of the journal Social Text appeared, an issue devoted to the understanding of “Science Wars,” the editors became targets in these “wars” in ways they had not imagined. The issue included a bogus article by New York University mathematical physicist Alan Sokal, who feigned an earnest reflection on the political and philosophical implications of recent physics research for cultural studies. Sokal revealed the hoax himself, and it immediately became a hotly debated issue in academic and popular media around the world. The appearance of the article was not only taken as a sign of shoddy scholarship by the Social Text editors but as an exposé of cultural studies and social science in general. For instance, Nobel prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg used the hoax to identify what he calls a fundamental “opposition” between natural and social scientists, especially regarding what Weinberg sees as dangerous anti-rationalism and relativism in social science and cultural studies. Those on the other side of the “wars” countered by criticizing Sokal and calling Weinberg and like-minded natural scientists “pre-Kantian shaman[s]” repeating the “mantras of particle physicists,” with their “reductionist view of science.”

The year before Sokal's hoax, the “wars” had raged over the scientific status of a high-profile US National Opinion Research Center study, which had been launched as a “definitive survey” of sexual practices in the United States.

If we want to re-enchant and empower social science, and if we want to recover social science from its current role as loser in the Science Wars, then we need to do three things. First, we must drop the fruitless efforts to emulate natural science's success in producing cumulative and predictive theory; this approach simply does not work in social science. Second, we must take up problems that matter to the local, national, and global communities in which we live, and we must do it in ways that matter; we must focus on issues of values and power like great social scientists have advocated from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, we must effectively communicate the results of our research to fellow citizens. If we do this, we may successfully transform social science from what is fast becoming a sterile academic activity, which is undertaken mostly for its own sake and in increasing isolation from a society on which it has little effect and from which it gets little appreciation. We may transform social science to an activity done in public for the public, sometimes to clarify, sometimes to intervene, sometimes to generate new perspectives, and always to serve as eyes and ears in our ongoing efforts at understanding the present and deliberating about the future. We may, in short, arrive at a social science that matters.

In the previous chapter we saw that social and political thinking becomes problematic if it does not contain a well-developed conception of power. We also saw that for the public sphere to make a real contribution to democracy, one would have to link it to conflict, power, and partisanship. In forging this link, we will continue in the present chapter our focus on Michel Foucault's analysis of power as a means of developing a more adequate and contemporary conception of phronesis.

I wish to emphasize at the outset that the discussion of Foucault's work that follows cannot be seen as a universal explication of Foucault's method, but only as one pragmatic reading of it. I engage in Foucault's work in order to better understand the special problems presented by a specific area of research, that is, power in relation to phronesis; it is a strategy which is entirely in the Foucauldian spirit. As Paul Rabinow has observed, Foucault gave us tools to use not an agenda to follow.

Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Foucault

“[P]hilosophy begins with Aristotle,” Foucault says provocatively, not with Socrates and Plato as the canon has it. Foucault never speaks of any relationship between his own work and Aristotelian phronesis, however.

This chapter expands on Richard Bernstein's observation that no conception of phronesis can be adequate today unless it confronts the analysis of power. In addition it considers the question of why power is important to contemporary social science. The chapter achieves this by analyzing how Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas each deal with issues of power in their thinking. In the following chapter, we then tease out the implications of Foucault's power analytics for a phronesis–power approach to the study of social and political phenomena.

The works of Habermas and Foucault highlight an essential tension in thinking about power. This is the tension between consensus and conflict. With a point of departure in Kant, Habermas is the philosopher of Moralität (morality) based on consensus. Foucault, following Nietzsche, is the philosopher of wirkliche Historie (real history) told in terms of conflict and power. This chapter presents a comparative analysis of the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to the issue of power. We will ask whether solutions to problems of power are best understood in terms of consensus, or whether conflict is a more suitable frame of reference.

Something happened

One summer, something happened that would prove consequential to my professional trajectory in life. I was employed as a student intern with the newly established Regional Planning Authority with fibe County Council in Denmark. Parliament had just passed the first law on nationwide regional planning and the counties were in the process of preparing the first generation of regional plans. The atmosphere was one of novelty and aspiration. As a planner-to-be, I felt I was in the right place at the right time.

The central question of the regional planning exercise was the classic one of whether future development should be encouraged chiefly in the main urban centers or whether development should be decentralized and take place in smaller towns. My job was to carry out a survey of social, educational, and health services with the purpose of finding arguments for and against centralization and decentralization in these three sectors. One of the arguments I found was in a British study showing how young children's performance in school decreases with increasing distance between home and school. The study was presented in a well-known textbook with an instructive figure documenting the negative correlation between distance and learning. “Thus it would appear,” the authors concluded, “that there are good psychological as well as economic reasons for minimizing the school journeys of young children.”

What are the implications of the previous chapter's phenomenology of human learning for social science? This question will be the focus of this and the following chapter. In addressing the question, one confronts yet another, which is as old as the very concept of science itself, and which continually reappears in discussions of the scientific enterprise: can the study of humans and society be scientific in the same manner as the study of natural objects? Can we speak of a unified science, or should natural-science inquiry and social-science inquiry be viewed as two basically different activities?

The history of science shows these questions to be both difficult to answer and controversial. The controversy is due partly to the fact that besides having fundamental methodological consequences, these questions touch on sensitive factors such as the status of social science in relation to natural science, as well as what the philosopher Richard Bernstein calls, “Cartesian anxiety,” that is, the fear of ending in relativism and nihilism when one departs from the analytical–rational scientific tradition that has dominated Western science since Descartes.

The Dreyfus model and the work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu are a useful starting point for discussing the question of a unified science, and for grappling with the problem of relativism.

After having explored in the previous two chapters the importance of power to a contemporary interpretation of phronesis and to social science, let us now begin to sum up the argument of the book by bringing together more explicitly what it might mean today to practice social science as phronesis. We will do this, firstly, by developing a set of methodological guidelines for phronetic social science in this chapter, and, secondly, by giving illustrations and examples of phronetic research in chapter ten.

I would like to stress immediately that the methodological guidelines summarized below should not be seen as methodological imperatives; at most they are cautionary indicators of direction. Let me also mention that undoubtedly, there are ways of practicing phronetic social science other than those outlined here. The most important issue is not the individual methodology involved, even if methodological questions may have some significance. It is more important to get the result right, that is, arriving at a social science which effectively deals with public deliberation and praxis, rather than being stranded with a social science that vainly attempts to emulate natural science.

As mentioned earlier, few researchers seem to have reflected explicitly on the strengths and weaknesses of social science practiced as episteme, techne, and phronesis, respectively.

Value-rationality and instrumental rationality

Just as social science has not been able to contribute with Kuhnian normal science and predictive theory to scientific development, so natural science has had little to offer to the reflexive analysis of goals, values, and interests that is a precondition for an enlightened development in any society. However, where natural science is weak, social science is strong, and vice versa. For Aristotle, the most important task of social and political studies was to develop society's value-rationality vis-à-vis its scientific and technical rationality. Aristotle did not doubt that the first type of rationality was the most important and ought to influence the second. Since Aristotle's time, however, this view has receded into the background, especially after the Enlightenment and modernity installed instrumental rationality in a dominant position in both science and society. Social thinkers as diverse as Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas have pointed out that for more than two centuries value-rationality (Wertrationalitä) has increasingly given way to instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalitä). In the words of Richard Living-stone: “if you want a description of our age, here is one: the civilization of means without ends.” Today the Aristotelian question of balancing instrumental rationality with value-rationality is forcing its way back to the foreground.

Context is central to understanding what social science is and can be. This chapter asks, “What role does context play in human knowledge and skills?” Philosophy of science and epistemology typically pose questions such as: “What is knowledge?”; “What can we know?”; “Under what conditions can we know that we know?” Here we will approach the question of knowledge by asking the more dynamic question: “How do people acquire knowledge and skills?” It is by addressing this question that we begin to understand the problem of context.

The intention here is not to outline and analyze all possible ways in which people acquire knowledge and skills, nor shall we review the many schools and theories that exist in this area. Rather we will deal with a single phenomenology of human learning as formulated by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus. This particular phenomenology has been chosen because it is especially useful for understanding the linkage between knowledge and context, and because it directly addresses the question of whether knowledge about human activity can be context-independent. The answer to this latter question is decisive for an understanding and response to two fundamental epistemological questions in the study of human activity: “Are theory and epistemology possible in social science?” “Can social and political science be scientific in the same sense as is natural science?”

The deadly paradox of social theory

Hubert Dreyfus and Pierre Bourdieu argue that the study of individuals and society can never be “normal” in the Kuhnian sense because of the relationship between ideal scientific theory on the one hand and human activity on the other. The limitation on “normality,” according to Dreyfus and Bourdieu, lies not in the historically contingent definition of “man,” as Foucault asserts, but more generally, in problems with establishing theories about the social world which parallel natural-science theories; and more specifically, for social science in problems with explaining and predicting social activity using abstract, context-independent elements. Let us examine Dreyfus's and Bourdieu's argument from its foundation. The argument is clearer than other arguments about the status of the social sciences and it has wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of what these sciences can and cannot be.

Dreyfus's first step is to make clear what he understands by ideal “theory.” He goes back to Socrates, whom he regards as the founder of that unique intellectual activity called theorization. Ideal theory is viewed by Dreyfus as having six basic characteristics that can never be fully realized, but can be approached to varying degrees. Socrates introduced and argued for the first three of these when he said that a theory must be (1) explicit, (2) universal, and (3) abstract.

In a standard reference book such as the Dictionary of Sociology, the full citation regarding the term “case study” reads as follows:

This description is indicative of a general view of the case study, which, if not directly wrong, is so oversimplified as to be grossly misleading. It is correct that the case study is a “detailed examination of a single example,” but it is not true that a case study “cannot provide reliable information about the broader class.” While a case study can be used “in the preliminary stages of an investigation” to generate hypotheses, it is misleading to see the case study as a pilot method to be used only in preparing the real study's larger tests, systematic hypotheses testing, and theory building.

The problems of this view can be summarized in five misunderstandings or oversimplifications about the nature of the case study as a research method:

1. Misunderstanding 1. General, theoretical (context-independent) knowledge is more valuable than concrete, practical (context-dependent) knowledge.

2. […]