On Sunday in the op-ed pages of the New York Times Review section, which used to be called The Week in Review, two associate professors at the University of Rochester threw an epistemological grenade at their colleagues, accusing them of needless worship of hard sciences and their practitioners. Social scientists, including in their own field, they averred, don’t need to lard their hard-thought theories with data and empirical evidence in order to give them academic respectability. And to insist on such things is to succumb to ‘physics envy.’
Did I mention this was on Sunday?
Over at the Cosmic Variance blog super smart theoretical physicist Sean Carroll ripped into the essay by first agreeing that indeed social sciences differ from physics. The latter addresses fundamental questions which fortunately arise in studying elemental, which means simple, situations – such as how quarks stick together and what happens when atoms collide and why neutrinos cannot go faster than light and how fortunate it is that planets and the stars they orbit can be usefully regarded as be single points in space. Physics is not only reductive and is nearly always expressible in simple math – simple that is if you’ve trained hard to understand its symbols. And yes, social sciences are messier, which means more difficult, and their theories may not be so elegantly and rigorously testable with real world data. But that’s no reason to think empirical confirmation or testing of a social science theory ought not be a goal, or that data are irrelevant to a theory’s academic stature. And like that. Carroll is really reasonable about it, telling these authors how they might have made a very similar, narrower point legitimately. But he’s basically ticked off.
Did I mention that the offending article ran Sunday, April 1? Is it a deep April Fools joke and, if so, upon whom is the joke being played? Has Sean-Carroll-the-physicist been had?
I looked up the web pages of the authors at Rochester, Kevin A. Clarke and David M. Primo. There one reads that they wrote a whole book about the emptiness of social sciences’ emphasis on “model testing” and “the art of data analysis” for Oxford University Press. The have a chapter called “The Illogic of Theory Testing.” Say what? They mean it? The book’s cover is rectilinear in layout. Its title glows with rectitude: A Model Discipline: Political Science and the Logic of Representations.
Some possibilities arise. First, that Clarke and Primo not only exist and wrote this book even if web pages are ambiguous data at best. Further, it is imaginable that they composed the whole thing as an exceedingly elaborate prank along the lines of the famous Sokal hoax in which NYU physicist Alan Sokal sent a manuscript to a postmodern journal. The article, a pastiche of lefty-loony cant through and through, argued that gravity is a social construct. The journal published it. Great laughter and fury resulted. But to write a book all for a laugh? No. More likely, these two are not merely extant in the world, but serious, and if I read their book it would make good sense. Or not. Gad.
Another hypothesis: it’s the editors of the op-ed pages at the NYTimes who got this seemingly daft thesis and decided to run it on that most ambiguous of days for addressing earnest-sounding proclamations. They thought, perhaps they thought anyway, this thing looks a little fishy. Let’s run it on April 1! Nobody will be sure what it is!!! Hmm. Maybe.
Ah. Perhaps April First has its own volitional genie, fooling with us, like an impish tooth fairy slipping one lousy penny under the pillow as we dream, or one of those Thetan space alien creatures L. Ron Hubbard dreamt up (and who perhaps went to his deathbed laughing hysterically at the idea’s reception), or perhaps is the alter-ego of Maxwell’s demon, and maybe this spirit of japery once a year arranges events to baffle the more tightly-wrapped elements of humanity. I certainly fell for it.
– Charlie Petit
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