Some two years ago, I wrote an article for Doing Sociology, emphasising the need for a more rigorous critical lens in the praxis of social science research in India and how a more retrospective look is required in its method of doing research. I demonstrated how the social science research in India has succumbed to or has been ‘characterised by a banal reiteration of an already produced reiteration’ throughout its proliferation of academic outputs. This article, in that order, is intended to be an extension of that previous article. However, this article, as the title suggests is not meant to put forward a finalized rhetorical answer, instead it aims to propose a question that I think would be relevant for the same — do the disciplines of the social sciences really need semantic validation from the natural sciences in its etymological meaning so much that it must construct itself with the same structural logic that has been a characteristic of the later? In proposing the question, I intend to put forward two arguments in order to build up the same. While reading the article, however, the readers are asked not to perceive the article as a problematization of the social sciences, but rather as a praise of their profound significance and scope in understanding the complex layers of the social structures across their many dimensions, including political, economic, cultural or philosophical.
Generalisation and Falsifiability:
Bruno Latour, in ‘Science in Action’, shows that scientific authority itself is socially constructed through networks of practice. Hence, the relationship between the natural sciences and social studies is perhaps best conceived not as one of seeking validation but rather as of the yin-yang framework, where differing epistemologies operate in productive tension rather than succumbing to disciplinary subordination. Taking this into consideration, the present inquiry asks why the disciplines of social studies continue to seek semantic validation from the natural sciences.
Auguste Comte was quite judicious when he famously placed Sociology at the apex of the hierarchy of sciences and mandated that it is the most complex of all the sciences. Far from being merely complicated, the social world is layered by historical nuances, mediated through symbolic systems and perceived by reflexive patterns of the very subjects who take part in it. On analysing these layers and making them understandable to human cognition, Sociology, or the disciplines of social sciences in general, does what the natural sciences cannot do properly—namely, to interpret and explain the symbolically meaningful, historically contingent and the reflexive agencies of human social life that cannot be reduced to purely empirical or mechanistic laws. Hence, the disciplines of social studies pose themselves as compelling and self-illuminating disciplines of inquiry. Yet the persistent and pervasive urge to badge the disciplines of social studies as a ‘science’ in the etymological sense of the natural sciences portrays a sustained epistemic anxiety. Why must the former continue seeking repeated legitimacy from the semantic cachet of the natural sciences? Since the intellectual rigour of social studies conspicuously lies in their ability to navigate ambiguity and perpetual contradictions while at the same time questioning and reinterpreting forms of contextual specificity, the desire for validation from another disciplinary model risks leading to a haphazard understanding of the very subjects they are meant to study.
In the case of natural sciences, the forms of knowledge typically stabilise themselves around a dominant explanatory framework at a given spatial moment in history. For example, Aristotelian physics, which attempted to understand motion through teleological assumptions, was the dominant explanatory framework until Isaac Newton disproved these schemas with more mathematically formalised laws of motion and gravitation. Likewise, in their heyday, Newtonian physics seemed to pose a near-universal explanation of physical reality, until Albert Einstein exposed the drawbacks of Newtonian universality and gave an extension to it rather than simply discarding it, through his general theory of relativity. In the case of the natural sciences and following the theorisation of Karl Popper, although the dominant explanatory framework, as mentioned, is open to revision through falsification at a later stage, there typically exists a single prevailing framework at any given historical moment that reflects the scientific zeitgeist and organises explanations of the physical reality. However, the point here is not to say that the disciplines of social studies do not undergo falsification; sociological formulations, economic models, anthropological interpretations and philosophical thoughts all can face empirical challenge and hence be falsified. Previous formulations in the social studies get redundant with the advent of newer and fresher interpretations, following Popper’s dictum of falsification. Hence, the issue here is not the lack of falsifiability, but the instability of the subject matter itself. Social life reacts to being studied. Reflecting the ‘double hermeneutic’ conceptualisation by Anthony Giddens, it changes its dynamics with every study and remains historically fluid and ontologically heterogeneous. Alfred Schutz’s notion of phenomenological sociology further illustrates this point. The social world is produced and reproduced in everyday life through intersubjective perceptions, unlike the natural sciences. That is why, while in the case of natural sciences, an observation done in a small laboratory can demand universality across spaces, an ethnographic account of one tribe at a particular geographical location is never enough to be generalised across all social formations without bearing the burden of misinterpretation. Hence, even when social theories are falsifiable in principle, unlike a ‘natural science’, their evidentiary field remains saturated with context, interpretation, contingency and is liable to change with every possible study or moment in history.
Important here is to note that the above discussion is not a diminishment of the social sciences, but rather the opposite. Their relevance remains entirely germane precisely because they study and analyse a moving and self-interpreting reality. The recognition that all inquiries, including social and natural, are falsifiable does not annul the epistemological differences between them. The social sciences do not require the borrowed authority of the natural sciences to justify their intellectual legitimacy and methodological rigour; there is sufficient methodological and analytical ground within the disciplines of social studies itself that can justify their absolute legitimacy.
Citation Regimes and the Tacit Sidelining of Interpretive Voices:
In extension of the earlier concern regarding the epistemic anxiety of social studies towards attaining semantic validation, another important outcome of their perceived scientization is the gradual sidelining of experiential insights and interpretive opinions in its doing method. The methodological dittoing of the natural sciences poses a threat to its distinctive strength of being able to engage in a historically nuanced, epistemologically fluid and reflexive method of studying social reality. This tendency to appear ‘scientific’ in the architectural form determined by the natural sciences increasingly prioritises procedural formalism over an interpretive depth. In this sense, Max Weber’s conceptualisation of ‘verstehen’ and C. Wright Mills’ formulation of the ‘sociological imagination’ get readily confined within something called ‘rigid citation regimes’, so that it becomes administratively digestible, instead of being perceived and getting concretised as living methodological realities. This ‘citation regime’ has been the lingua franca of most academic research in social studies. Worth mentioning here is that I am well aware of the importance of citations, references and previous literature in establishing one’s own argument or carrying out research work per se, yet I am sceptical of over-reliance on them to do original research. Thus, innovative research remains confined within the cacophony of verbosity of citations. An original work of research need not always rely on being extensively loquacious and having lots of citations. As a simple example, John Nash’s doctoral thesis titled ‘Non-Cooperative Games’, where he introduced his Nash equilibrium, had only two citations and yet he is regarded as one of the mathematicians who revolutionised economics and game theory. Its authority rested on analytical originality rather than solely relying on citational density. This means citations are not the mandatory tools of validation if the subject matter remains innovative or fresh. This is quite a revealing phenomenon. Yet much of contemporary social research is characterised by a tacit expectation from the scholars to bombard their theses and articles with lots of references to demonstrate credibility. It’s as if only those references bring credibility to his research and not his original thought. For example, if an author wants to write about his experiences and observations of his own city or about the household he is living in, should he not be able to do so, with the same academic rigour and validation?
In conclusion, I believe that there must remain one such primary initial alternative to prove their arguments. For instance, autoethnography can be one such alternative, as it can capture the reflexive nature of social reality that standardised scientific models seldom tend to actualise. But I believe and observe the lack of academic importance towards it. Thereby, it should be a humble responsibility of all of us researchers in social studies to critically think about its praxis in current times and progressively try to come up with newer and fresher methods while doing research or writing. Then only, I believe, the academic disciplines of social studies can appeal to more people in general, become what it aims to be and achieve its true purpose. Moreover, if the disciplines of social studies continue to over-identify with the validational logics of the natural sciences, they risk reproducing the very one-dimensionality they uniquely aim to critique.
References:
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Polity Press.
Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press.
Mills, C. W. (2000). The sociological imagination. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1959)
Popper, K. (2002). The logic of scientific discovery. Routledge. (Original work published 1934)
Schutz, A. (1967). The phenomenology of the social world. Northwestern University Press. (Original work published in 1932)
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Niloy Pratim Kashyap is a PhD research scholar in the Department of Sociology at Gauhati University. He can be reached at prniloy63@gmail.com