social science

Please indulge my shameless self promotion, but his particular piece of academic hucksterism happens to dovetail well the mission of the blog. The inaugural edition of the Journal of Integrated Social Science, of which I am the Political Science editor and co-blogger Bryan Rasmussen is the Humanities editor, has just been published. In particular, I draw your attention to the editorial introduction which lays out the aims of the journal. Here’s an excerpt that captures the mission of the journal:

Today we find that scholars are becoming very specialized in one particular field of study thereby often under-emphasizing how their area of expertise relates to other fields of study. Having experts on given topics is, without doubt, absolutely essential in order to advance our understanding of human functioning. It is with this in mind that we are hereby launching the new Journal of Integrated Social Sciences (JISS) – a renewed collaborative effort, following the spirit of the intellectual pioneers from the 1860s, to bring together the rich and diverse set of disciplines through the new technology now available to us in the 21st century.

I encourage those of you with an interest in integrative, cross-disciplinary inquiry to submit their work and take advantage of a unique platform to engage in a broader scholarly conversations that those to which we are accustomed.

Charles Kurzman’s recent essay in the Chronicle Review, “Social Science on Trial: Reading Weber in Tehran” (http://chronicle.com/article/Social-Science-on-Trial-in/48949/), seems to confirm much of what we already suspect about non-Western fundamentalist regimes. Namely, that religious government and civil society are incompatible. Saeed Hajjarian, political scientist and “leading strategist in the Iranian reform movement,” was coerced in a recent show trial to “admit” that key principles of Max Weber’s theory of government were not applicable to modern Iran. Kurzman links this recent episode to a longer history of Iranian “crackdowns” on social science for its influence on the reform movement and for its role in secularizing government and social life in Iran, where social science is increasingly the study of choice among university students: “In 1976 there were about 27,000 social-science students in Iran; now there are more than half a million.”

This episode re-stages the contest between religion and social science, especially in non-Western contexts where “social science,” the language of reformist anti-fundamentalists and proponents of a free public sphere, stands in stark contrast to “religion.” Social science and “the West” are intimately linked. Studying Weber—studying society—as Iranian authorities correctly point out, plugs one into the secular equation that recalculates “religion-as-faith” (non-rational, metaphysical) to “religion-as-ideology” (false consciousness, discourse). It’s this recalculation that is widely accepted as the hallmark of secularization, and justification for the relegation of faith to the private sphere, where it is decreasingly a part of public life and politics (a phenomenon well underway in Iran, according to Kurzman: “private expressions of religiosity have begun to replace official events like state-run Friday prayers, where attendance has declined by a third since the 1979 revolution”).

Kurzman, a sociologist, concludes that “The Iranian government’s goal, it seems, is to undermine not only the institutions of civil society, but the very idea of it.” Of course this is true, but there’s a larger issue here than simply the persecution of science by religion. Even from Iranian social scientists and reformers, there is dissent from the necessary equation of civil society with the principles of social scientific rationality. Kurzman notes that upon Jurgen Habermas’s visit to Iran, students took a critical view, asking: “Must a society rid itself of religiosity…in order to develop a ‘rational’ public discourse? Are Western notions of religious tolerance unique to Christianity? Can traditional Islamic institutions, such as study circles and charitable foundations, contribute to the formation of a robust public sphere?” These are deeply felt concerns about the compatibility of religion with Enlightenment democratic values. They express the worry that the study of society in a conceptual language not native undermines religion with a theory of the “public sphere” bound to conception of “reason” that cannot brook faith or other “non-rational” modes of being in the world. For non-fundamentalist critics, this conception of reason (and thus of civil society) is highly historically contextual to the West.

As the Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy has written in his essay “The Politics of Secularization and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance” (Alternatives 13: 2 [1988]: 177-94), that very idea of secularism is tied to a European genealogy of social science. Western secularism’s credo:

“One can have religion in one’s private life; one can be a good Hindu or a good Muslim within one’s home or at one’s place of worship. But when one enters public life, one is expected to leave one’s faith behind. … Implicit in this ideology is the belief that managing the public realm is a science which is essentially universal and that religion, to the extent it is opposed to the Baconian world-image, is an open or potential threat to any modern polity” (180).

Nandy, a fierce critic of both this Western concept of secularism and of religious zealotry, sees secularism as a hegemonic language, one also responsible for an “imperialisation” of scientific categories that have come to define, describe, and proscribe our lives (e.g., “IQ” for something like intelligence, “proletariat” for an oppressed people, “primitive” for oral culture, “development” for something like social change, and the like). This is a history of scientific language and classification that Ian Hacking describes as “making up people” (http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcbiopolitics2.htm) and that Michel Foucault has described as the roots of “biopolitics.”

One of secularism’s chief “conceits,” argues William Connolly in Why I Am not a Secularist (U Minnesota P, 1999), is that of a “single, authoritative basis of public reason and/or public ethics that governs all reasonable citizens regardless of ‘personal’ or ‘private’ faith.” It is a “conceit” because it is not a reality but a fiction that (supposedly) allows for the negotiation of competing understandings the world. But as critics of secularism point out, it can be a poor fiction: the idea that secularism allows for faith even in the private realm assumes that faith can be shed as we leave for the office or the market or the library, and that faith has nothing to offer public life other than bigotry and zealotry.

But as Connolly and Nandy both point out, “dogma” and zealotry result from attempts to occupy the center: they are the result of being relegated to the margins. For both critics, there are other ways of thinking about civic life than through the language of social science. Nandy, for instance, locates two meanings of secularism—the European one with which we’re all familiar, and another one, native to the Southeast Asian societies he studies, which contains an implicit notion of the necessity of accommodation, in public life, of diverse metaphysical understandings. In this view, science and religion co-exist because they both offer viable interpretations of the world (because science itself is a kind of metaphysics). For Connolly, this means “refashioning secularism” to “temper or disperse religious intolerance while honoring the desire of a variety of believers and nonbelievers to represent their faiths in public life.”

We see this competition for the center in Iran, and its “constipating” (Connolly) effects—that is, its tendency to force people and their passions into rigidly defined domains that disallow vital experience and expression. Moreover, we might rethink this particular contest in Iran not through the eyes of the secularist, but rather as expressing some other, deeper contest. The tempting secular conclusion to “social science on trial” would confirm that that civil society (and therefore the study of it) can’t function where religion is present, and vice versa. In this view, the popularity of social science in Iranian universities is a validation of the secular principles of scientific rationalism. It is a question of either/or—either secularism or religion. The same can be said about the government’s persecution of social scientists. Can we instead read the Iranian interest in social science as a reaction against religious fundamentalism? In other words, might the turn to social science in the context of Iran be understood as a polemic, an expression of discontent, rather than a de facto affirmation of Western secular values? If so, we might preserve the possibility that science and religion, far from having exclusive claims to a positive reality, are the languages by which we have come to understand the contest for the center of public life.

Tweeting sans Twitter ~Ludwig Wendzich on Flickr
Tweeting sans Twitter:: "Paper-PC=Twitter" by Ludwig Wendzich on Flickr

Back in April, we had a lively discussion here on Twitter and language.  I recently saw that the dictionary team at the Oxford University Press is on top of the sitch.  Here’s some of their observations::

“Since January OUP’s dictionary team has sorted through many random tweets.  Here are the basic numbers:

Total tweets = 1,496,981
Total sentences = 2,098,630
Total words = 22,431,033
Average words per tweet = 14.98
Average sentences per tweet = 1.40
Average words per sentence in Twitter= 10.69
Average words per sentence in general usage = 22.09”

Verbs in the gerund form are pretty popular, as well as informal slang like “OK” and “fuck.”  Most common word on Twitter & general English:: “the,” with #2 on Twitter being “I.”

The OED folks seem to just be reporting some of their analyses, which I have no problem with.  They’re not indicting anyone and even end the blurb with “Tweet on.”

Now, enter the shrill cassandras at HigherEdMorning who report on the above with a post, “The Hidden Problem with Twitter.” Talk about framing.  That title is priming the reader to be wary of Twitter, but there’s more.  The image used in the article decries the lament of every frustrated educator who has endured reading a crappy essay::

Image from "The Hidden Problem with Twitter" post
Image ~ "The Hidden Problem with Twitter" post

They report the OUP observations, but finalize their Twitterproblem trifecta with::

“So here’s the question: Is Twitter – along with instant messaging and texting – contributing to the destruction of language skills among college students?”

Twitterfail?  I actually have a big problem with this.  It’s taking observations and drawing inane conclusions that would pass muster in the most laxed ethnography course and would be a social science epic fail.

What gets really interesting is the discourse that follows in the comments.  I urge you to take a look {there were 69 as of 3:18a on 18 June}.  The interesting thing, to me, is how the social aspect of technological use creeps into the dialogue.

Baloo559 Says:

Twitter, instant messaging and texting ARE contributing to, let’s call it degraded language skills, by providing a set of forums in which these degraded skills are accepted and encouraged. I believe acceptance is primarily a function of the youth of the majority of contributors. They lack experience with more formal language and don’t seem to grasp the subtly and nuance that come with its complexity. Degradation is encouraged by the fact that even the best texting phones or IM clients are poor writing instruments. 12 keys are inadequate as are one eighth scale, not quite QWERTY keyboards. Further encouragement comes from the satisfaction developing personalities take in expressing themselves in creatively alternative manners, especially if it tends to confuse authority figures.”

Not everyone is a naysayer::

Catherine Politi Says:

Did the abbreviated wording used in telegrams destroy the English language? I don’t think so. Neither will Twitter, or texting in general – as long as schools continue to stress good language skills in the classroom. As an English teacher and student of linguistics, I realize that English and all other living languages are constantly evolving, so Twitter and its “siblings” will affect English, but not to necessarily destroy or devalue it. As for spelling, well, English is a terrible model for spelling, so maybe these mediums will improve it!”

and this comment makes an interesting link to dictation::

Jill Lindsey Says:

I believe that Twitter, messaging and texting language is just like the dictation shorthand from the last century. My mother wrote in shorthand and it just looked like a bunch of symbols to me but she and others skilled in it decoded it with fluency. No one but Golden Agers know or use shorthand anymore, but now we text. It is simply a new shorthand for a new context in a new age. Formal language is constantly evolving too. Think of the transition from Olde English to American English. Change does not have to mean destruction of language- its just evolution. Just like shorthand was a symbol system for more formal language, so is texting- the meaning is conveyed through a symbol system and translated in our minds. Spelling is just agreed conventions- those have and will continue to change over time. The only problem of concern should be when the meaning one is trying to convey cannot be discerned by the reader. We have to have common understandings for any symbol system to work- formal or informal.”

Whenever I see criticisms of youth or youth culture, I tend to look for ad hominems and finger-waving.  Damn, fool kids.  The Cisco fatty meme brought out a bunch of such anger.  So, when it comes to Twitilliteracy, JRB offers his 2¢::

jrb@msu Says:

As long as texting is treated like vocal dialects, I have no objection. Cajun, Cockney, etc. are fine but rarely get transcribed unless the accent is essential to the story. Likewise telegrams – they serve a purpose but we don’t ever see “telegram text” in written stories or formal correspondence.

But when this sort of “abbrev-speak” traverses the chasm into formal writing I think we risk losing a substantial chunk of our discreet and collective cultures, so much of which are recorded as written words (not wrds). Just as learning a second languange [sic] enhances the developing brain, so does an understanding of the colorful and deeply descriptive nature of the written word.

SS I think you miss a key point with using text speak for formal communications – sometimes, like it or not, we _have_ to adhere to a minimal level of decorum, and frankly students who cannot adopt such probably have an issue with authority which suggests ther are not the best candidates for a good old fashioned college experience (where the instructor still wields authority) – perhaps they are better suited to informal cloud-based learning, just before they step out to that job at Burger Queen.

Bitter, much?  Clearly, this gets people into a lather, but what plays out is a culture war of sorts, where technology and the social collide with a normative vengeance.  What strikes me is a reduction of the “other” to a stereotype and having no interest in contextualizing what’s going on here with Twitter.  There are also a lot of assumptions about an ideal orthodoxy, in terms of psychological information processing, learning, and expression, let alone the hegemony of English usage online.  Going back to the OUP report, what about non-English tweets or tweets by non-native speakers?  So many questions, but I’m a social science geek.

So, is this no big thing?  While many think this is just a tempest in a teapot, I think these debates are just a tip of the iceberg in an increasingly globalized world.  I think Novia in the first pic. will do just fine despite Twitterish communication.  Oh, for all the n00bs, BFF 4 realz=Ben Folds Five.

Twitterversion::  #newblogpost #Twitter kllng English lang-still! SmOnePlsThinkoftheChildren‽ HighrEdMorn takes OxUnivPress stry&stirs pot. http://url.ie/1qqo  @Prof_K

Song:Battle of Who Could Care Less – Ben Folds Five

Video::

bff

Thanks to King Politics for introducing me to a great article by Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic on the dominance of rational choice theory in political science. The use of econometric modeling over historical or interpretive methods has come to dominate the discipline in the last two decades. So much so that renegade Political Scientists created a Perestroika movement aimed at introducing more methodological pluralism into the discipline.

At its core, this debate is more than an abstract methodological argument. It’s really about whether we can we study the social world the same way we study the natural world. Or as Cohn puts it:

Whether this is good for the discipline depends in part on whether rational choice scholarship really succeeds on its own terms–whether it really helps us understand the elements of political behavior it purports to explain. But beneath that question lurks a second issue more important to those of us outside the academy: whether political scientists have an obligation to do work that is not merely interesting as an intellectual enterprise but also helps us govern ourselves.

To what extend should we be concerned with applying empirical approaches to addressing normative questions? If rational choice/econometric modeling can help us address poverty or human rights abuses, then I’m all for it. The key flaw, it seems to me, with a rational approach is that it pursues universality. it wants to model and test behavioral and institutional outcomes on a large scale. To make the leap from research to practical application requires a “thick” understanding of particular contexts.

My sympathies in this regard lie with post-positivst approaches like Charles Ragin’s fuzzy-set work. I’m also a fan of Bent Flyvberg’s Making Social Science Matter. Both in their own way advocate for a greater emphasis on context in empirical work. I personally would love a greater emphasis in social science on trying to discover when and where things fail and w succeed rather than trying to make universal declarations about what works and what fails.