Vicarious Existentialism
“They think, therefore I am.”
For a long time I was generally dismissive of the soft sciences like psychology and sociology. It all seemed touchy-feely and not very conclusive. When linguistics was my field of study, I began to get over the pure misgivings. The touchy-feely and inconclusiveness were just par for the course. But the academics ploughing those fields of study forever feel they have to defend their softness to their peers in the natural sciences, the wider world, and ultimately themselves.
The normal explanations had to do with analogies to fields like physics and chemistry. The defenders would point to contentious areas of those disciplines, show how the experimental data were complex and messy, and declare, “See? Our science is just like those guys’!” This habit, for me, amounted to “vicarious existentialism.” The reason for us to exist is because other sciences exist. Our field also has numbers and variables we can perform mathematical operations on. Therefore I am!
The case wasn’t all that convincing. The numbers were applied to objects that were abstract and hard to distinguish from the surrounding factors. You can describe a bit of matter as taking up space and having mass, but what is a language? What is a psyche? What is a mood or attitude? Are those things just the result of chemical processes acting on matter? Or are they just imaginary altogether, and any application of data to them just a way for researchers to fool themselves?
And yet, there’s probably something there, even if it’s hard to identify. Take psychology, for instance. The human brain is a physical object: provable and concrete. The human mind, on the other hand, is about as ephemeral as the human spirit and soul. The mind is imagined to reside in the brain, but it’s not all that clear. Knowing what we have learned about biology, our minds may be made up by the biochemistry of our brain, our nervous system, our endocrine system, or even the various thousands of species of bacteria, fungi, and viruses that populate our gut microbiomes.
Things get even harder to define when we’re examining human emotions and motivations, the existence of Free Will. Exploring how humans interact with each other using language adds another dimension of abstract complexity—even before we ask what language is meant to be: is it verbal, oral, haptic? Do we even know for ourselves that we aren’t communicating something in our each and every physical action? We certainly are capable of interpreting ideas from others’ movements.
The subject matter is hard enough to define clearly. Boiling down individual choices in abstract scenarios produces debatable results. That’s the type of experimentation that’s available, though. It’s better than nothing, but not nearly as straight-forward as simultaneously dropping a pea and a brick to see whether they fall at the same rate, as an exercise to measure gravity. The experiments done in the soft sciences to generate numerical data often seem far-fetched, but viewed from the inside of the fields, they are far better than no data at all. That way lies nothing more than pure guesswork, with the dominant understanding being passed down based on which individuals hold the most sway and influence.
The most recent example of soft-science research in the public eye was Jonathan Haidt’s case regarding the harms of technology and social media in human childhood development. Critics have pointed out how thin the research data are for drawing firm conclusions. But Haidt’s dilemma here is not unique. The data that are available are ambivalent and ambiguous. They are rarely clearly defined. And once you have them, the question of what is the cause and what is the effect is up for debate.
Even worse, once small experiments are conducted by ambitious academics, they are almost never reproduced to establish whether others can arrive at the same or similar conclusions. Few see career potential in performing the work that others have already been credited with for their originality and creativity in experiment design.
All that said, there is much in these fields that has expanded our general knowledge about how we and our fellows work, alone or in groups. Usually we see it when the research findings lead firms and entrepreneurs to apply this knowledge for market advantage. Knowledge that produces revenue and profit has proven itself to exist in the most practical way. Sometimes the soft sciences bring into existence hard cash, we might say, making us vicariously ever so slightly wealthier.
I'm off to Greenfield; my MIL fell this morning, cracking her other knee, and developing goose eggs on her head.
Last night Katie told me Janet had a cold during the quilt retreat, and didn't do well. So I'm not surprised this happened.
Clearly not as much grant money for the soft sciences as there are for hard sciences. In my field, we're not expected to bring in grant money.
it is true we deal with "latent" variables, which cannot be directly observed, like they can with the physical sciences. And ours operate in much wider environments, where other things can more easily influence outcomes and results. Gravity is as well, but to a much lesser amount, and it can be easily modeled.
Where I am most concerned is when politics enters academia. A recent study (in finance and economics) failed to replicate some widely accepted studies on diversity and firm performance. It's controversial, because DEI is in many ways a faith, not a science. And yet, none of us want to try to run studies on it because it labels us as cranks, goofballs, non-serious, having an axe to grind, etc. Economists, because they embrace that image, can do it....
Where the soft sciences shine is when they help explain why we see differences in people, why what works for A won't work for B.