Richard Feynman on social science.

Richard Feynman is famous for his ground-breaking work in quantum physics. I found an interview on youtube where he discusses social science very critically, calling it a pseudo-science. His basic argument is that social science has no tangible laws, no theorems like "hard science" does. There is no social science, not yet at least. Studying societies is far more complex and it's not as easy to be scientific with so many variables. He has a point. Here's the video, what do you think?




Technically, Feynman is right, but I wouldn't be completely dismissive about the field (that would be bad, having a sociology BA and all...). To me, social science is still in a very embryonic state, just as the hard sciences once were.

One good way to look at social science is that it is still developing into a science, just as the hard sciences had their alchemy which eventually evolved into chemistry, social science is evolving too. Feynman mentioned in the video that they have the scientific method down, but any discernible scientific laws are far from being realized. I would agree. We have a lot of data, a lot of information about social phenomena, but no tangible theorems (yet), at least not mainstream.

It's also really important to note that there is a necessary acknowledgment of hierarchy or holarchy in science. Biology is dependent on chemistry, which is dependent on physics for its principles. But a physicist can't say that biology isn't scientific, even though it is far less predictable. It's just more complex. A social science would be another big leap in complexity. That's what makes it so difficult. It also doesn't mean that social science can be reducible to physics, any more than biology can. The variables are far more complicated. We don't have instruments for observing social interaction the same way we can create microscopes and telescopes.

In my opinion, we might begin to have more tangible and observable, and thus scientific theories that apply to all human societies once we begin to converge our data. This would imply that sociologists, anthropologists, economics, psychologists, biologists, neurologists, archeologists, etc. work together.

This is getting easier to do, particularly in the internet age. Once we get our data together we can begin to discern patterns, and maybe work up some nice models that explain human societies scientifically. The 21st century is an exciting time to be a social scientist, because the fruit of decades of research may eventually start to reveal underlying principles in all human societies.

This also may call for us to acknowledge the idea that a society is a process, a flux. Or in other words, just as our awareness of biological evolution opened up new gateways of knowledge, our awareness of sociological evolution might reveal new principles about our very nature.

It's popular to place social science on the side lines, while hard-science attempts to describe human behavior exhaustively in biological and genetic terms. While it is revealing a lot about us, I think this approach will have limitations, because it doesn't take into account that we aren't reducible to 1) behavior 2) genetics and biology. There is a layer, a socio-cultural layer, that has its own properties and hopefully, we'll approach it more scientifically as time goes on.

Sociology as a public vocation.

I've been reading a really great essay from the Public Sphere Forum, discussing the importance of social scientists stepping out of the closed-loop of academia and more into open discussion. The modern fixation on closing off the university to become an intellectual safe house, or knowledge for the sake of itself, has come at a price. Although social scientists are useful informing government and corporate decisions, what ever happened to a public intellectual? Writers, speakers, debaters outside of the university? Or perhaps, we should begin to invite the local community in to listen. At any rate, here are some highlights. If you have some time, I recommend reading the whole article.

Public engagement was a strong feature of the social sciences from their birth. Could one imagine Hobbes, Locke or the Scottish moralists as mere academics? Weber, Durkheim, and the great Chicago School sociologists had university jobs but both public concerns and public audiences. Social scientists today contribute to public understanding of issues from social inequality to transformations of the family. They also inform public policy on problems from educational reform to economic productivity. But since World War II, dramatic growth in universities and research institutions not only created opportunities for social scientists, it contained much of their communication inside the academy. An ideology that opposed academic professionalism to public engagement and a prestige hierarchy that favored allegedly pure science over applied added to the tendency.

Public social science depends on addressing public issues and informing public understanding. Simply reaching a broader public is only part of the story. Certainly a social science turned in on itself fails to achieve much public significance. But more important than the desire to promulgate what social scientists know is the effort to bring knowledge to bear on pressing public issues.

But it is also true that many academic projects are driven by neither deep intellectual curiosity nor pressing public agendas, but simply by the internal arguments of academic subfields or theoretically aimless attempts at cumulative knowledge that mostly accumulate lines on CVs. To justify these by an ideology of pure science is disingenuous. To let these displace the attention of researchers from major public issues is to act with contempt towards the public that pays the bills.

More generally, the development of better theory or intellectual synthesis, better knowledge of the range of intellectual tools and perspectives developed by earlier social scientists, and better methods of research and analysis are all important. They strengthen the whole social science enterprise so that it can perform better in all ways, including when deployed to advance understanding of pressing public issues. The point is not that all social science should be harnessed to the immediate task of addressing public debates or public policy. Some division of labor is appropriate along with a diversity of tasks. But it is a crucial point that social science demonstrates its usefulness by informing public knowledge, not simply accumulating esoteric knowledge inside disciplines. The value and reward systems of social science accordingly need to encourage attention to improving understanding of the world around us.

Will we intellectual hermits come down from the mountain? Equivalent perhaps to the Bodhisattva vow, if I might make this analogy--we step down from our monasteries and actively engage, inform and learn from public involvement. It helps us in two ways: as citizens of a planetary civilization, our active involvement contributes to a mutual learning experience. As academics, we learn something new by working "in the field." The rest of the public also learns something new. They're informed by our more direct presence, encouraging them to reflect on the state of society, and in turn offering us valuable insight. We hermits could be wrong, or just plain non-integrated about our understanding.

One other point. We might do well to have a new space for collaborative investigation and public projects, because it will take away the narrow focus of competition between the school departments, opening them up to a larger picture in which they will all have to contribute to, together. Integrating the studies in a common, open space rather than fragmenting them. Here's to social science facing a major challenge in its evolution: open source sociology. Thanks for such an inspiring article!

Calls for a more public orientation to social science seek to reclaim an important dimension of the history of social science. While universities have roots in ancient philosophy and medieval monastic communities, the roots of the modern social sciences were laid outside academia or in new and reformed universities. John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, David Ricardo, Adolphe Quetelet, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer and Lester Frank Ward all made their contributions without university posts. The Scottish universities were more open than the English in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. And after the Humboltian reforms so were many of the German. In the United States too the social sciences began to gain academic footholds earlier in new universities like Johns Hopkins and especially Chicago than in older ones where classical curricula dominated through the late 19^th century.

Indeed, the social sciences came to the fore as part of a rebellion against exclusive study of the old disciplines. They grew along with science and technology because they were deemed forward-looking and important to ‘progress’, relevant to solving contemporary problems and furthering positive innovations. They grew along with broader enrollments as universities became less narrowly elite, expanding beyond the education of gentlemen and clergymen to training a range of professionals and members of the middle classes. The capacity of the social sciences to inform public discourse was vital to their growth.

“Public intellectual… That is to say, the individual still bold enough to put his mind and his knowledge to use in analyzing the world around us, in language that most of us can understand, and with an eye toward effecting practical improvements”.