Some social scientists seem to have a hard time distinguishing between the social sciences and hard science. “First, social science is not a bizarre and failed version of science but the quintessential modern scientific effort, a cardinal expression of what the nineteenth century meant by human knowledge; it is thus a yardstick to investigate science as a whole,” University of Chicago historian Mauricio Tenorio Trillo writes in a paper. “Science, it has been assumed, has furnished us with universal, irremediable, objective, and unavoidable truths.”
“Consequently, science has no nation,” he explains. “Science is nonetheless a social practice, and as such it has a history that cannot be reduced to progressive innovation, which is not to argue that we can desert the scientific contour of our modern minds.”
“Despite today’s presumed post-condition, any criticism of science, if honest, necessarily implicates the critic in a collective mea culpa.” Dr. Tenorio came to UChi from the University of Texas at Austin and has also taught at Stanford.
Thus you have to multiply by three the number of universities where he spread these words of wisdom. “The strengths of qualitative work come from understanding how and why, not understanding how many, and improving this work should mean
improving the reliability of its answers to how and why questions,” UChis’s Mario Luis Small writes. “For qualitative researchers to attempt to make their work statistically representative is to engage in a losing race, one in which those who have large samples, by design, will always win.”
“It is the equivalent of evaluating success in one language on the basis of the grammar and vocabulary of another. In science, many tongues are better than one.” Dr. Small previously taught at both Princeton and Columbia.
Meanwhile, a recent refugee from academia is finding that the high sense of self-esteem that some of her former colleagues possess may be unwarranted. “Eventually, I stopped worrying about how academics at scholarly conferences would view my choices,” Alexandra M. Lord wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education. “And when a professor pompously told me that academic history was serious while public history was fund and ‘lite,’ I focused not on the implicit insult in her comment but rather on its absurdity.”
“After all, what kind of a scholar believes that historians at the Holocaust Museum are engaged in ‘fun’ history?” The acting historian for the U. S. Public Health Service, Lord taught at both Montana State and SUNY-New Paltz.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
