More on the Social Sciences

Over the past couple of weeks I have been reflecting substantially on my previous post about the social sciences being the center of knowledge production, and I'd like to expand on that some here today.

In discussions with friends, this map of academic citations has surfaced. I remember seeing this map when it was published in the NYTimes about a year-and-a-half ago, but I didn't make much of it at the time. Another year plus of college, and I'm now in a much better position to assess some of what this means.

The first thing you'll notice when viewing this depiction is that the social sciences are in the center and the hard sciences are around the outside. There are a few points of convergence such as economics, which rests as the outskirts of the social sciences near statistics. There are also some environmental fields such as biodiversity and ecology that rest somewhere between the circle of hard sciences and the inner circle of social sciences. Music lies in such an area as well.

As you inspect this intricate web in greater detail, however, you will notice that some of the traditional academic disciplines are conspicuously absent. Political Science and History, arguably the two most established social sciences, are the two that struck me at first. But then I noticed the unnamed cluster in the middle of the inner circle of social sciences, and this seems like a logical place for both history and political science. It is impossible for these disciplines to ignore any other discipline. History, of course, includes the histories of science, medicine, technology, and the environment, and Political Science must deal with all relevant political issues, which span a similar breadth of academic orientation. And there is no other unnamed group of dots in the map.

Regardless, of whether or not Political Science and History do occupy this central place, I'd like to offer a hypothetical extension of this diagram into a third dimension. In the social sciences, there are articles that are written at the level depicted in this diagram (what I'll call Level 1). These would be articles about topics in these disciplines, such as your basic historical, sociological, anthropological, etc. article. But there is a second level at which these disciplines take place - at the theoretical level. Scholars in the social sciences are consistently engaged in a debate about how best to do research in their field. I believe that ascending to this second level allows scholars to see with greater perspective what is going on in the other disciplines that perhaps they were not able to see before.

Yet at Level 2, there is less interaction between the disciplines, such that sociologists are concerned with how to do sociology, historians with how to do history, psychologists with how to do psychology, etc., etc., etc. How then, do we transcend this second level, and see the interactions of the social sciences on a theoretical level? I believe that there may be a singular answer, the pinnacle of the pyramid so to speak, and that this apogee may well be political philosophy. Political philosophy must combine economic theory, social theory, and historical theory (among many others) to offer a successful view of what holds society together.

Although this view may seem to offer little in the way of consolation for the sciences, I would argue otherwise. The sciences are the frontier of knowledge, extending outwards the base of our pyramid of knowledge. They are likewise the foundation, the established knowledge. Political philosophy is the speculative thinking, to speak in Hegelian terms, that which is a synthesis of our established knowledge in the hard sciences and our theoretical ideas in the social sciences.

I am certain that this thesis I have put forward about the shape and relation of our knowledge structures is controversial, and I welcome your input and ideas.

Why We Know Nothing

What do we know? This question, long addressed by philosophers, represents the penultimate question. The ultimate question being the search for new knowledge. It seems, however, that knowing what we know is the only way of knowing what we don't know. And so to know more must require some attempt to answer the question of what we know. But we are supposed to live in the Information Age, the Golden Age of technology and communication. There is no dearth of information in our time. The internet is a world of information at our fingertips. Yet in many respects although we live with more information than in any period in the history of man, we live with far less knowledge.

I'd like to start with a brief less in the history of American higher education. Following World War II and the passage of the GI Bill, hundreds of thousands of young adults to whom the world of higher education had previously been closed off suddenly gained access to further education. This required both an expansion of facilities (number and size) and faculty (teachers). This expansion continued even after the wave of World War II veterans made use of the GI Bill as their children (the now infamous Baby Boomer generation) passed through the higher education system in even greater numbers. A wave of academic literature was published while the Baby Boomers were in college because the number of professors required kept increasing. But this expansion was never going to last forever. In fact, it has just about stopped.

I was born late to two Baby Boomer parents who were a little on the late side of the Baby Boom generation which places me at just about the end of mini demographic hump. And after years of expanding due to increased demand, our higher education system is now going to have to contract. For the number of jobs there are, we have far too many people graduating with PhD's. Even many students earning a Bachelor's Degree won't need that degree for their jobs anymore. With economic downturn looking to be a more permanent state of affairs than at first imagined and college tuition fees skyrocketing, the passing of the demographic hump, and the realization that maybe a four year college degree isn't the most effective investment, colleges soon will be experiencing a decline in applications.

But our issue with knowledge is largely in part to the faulty system of knowledge production. With far more candidates for academic positions than there are spots to fill, competition has reached mind-boggling proportions. The brochures listing available professorial positions have decreased in size dramatically. No school wants to hire a professor who hasn't demonstrated an ability to be published for her brilliant research. But publishing requires adherence to strict disciplinary guidelines of methodology. The result is that getting published often requires extraordinarily narrow and deep research into a particular field. This in turn results in highly specialized individuals who can tell you about rural goat-herding populations in Bolivia, the mathematical equations to represent sub-atomic particles, or the use of internal rhyming in John Milton, but can't tell you about the significance of those ideas in a larger context. As academia gets to answering the smaller and smaller questions that haven't been answered, it gets further away from answer the bigger questions that require interdisciplinary synthesis.

Where, then, should we look for a solution to these problems? I believe that the social sciences offer a unique point of view in that they are by definition interdisciplinary. As scientific research, in particular, becomes increasingly specialized and scientists increasingly lack the necessary broad view of research across the various fields to create works of synthesis, the social sciences can step in to provide synthesis and relate this research to the social world of the ordinary citizen. As philosophy flounders under the burden of the analytic critique of belief in knowledge, the social sciences can create a new vision of what the world looks like. The social sciences look at the point of intersection between ideas and the material world. The social sciences work to explain cultural phenomena in a way that neither the hard sciences nor the humanities can do successfully - the hard sciences being too rational for the nuanced structure of the human mind and the humanities being not rational enough. The social sciences have yet to have their heyday. The glory has almost always been shared between the hard sciences and the humanities. Let us begin the era of the social sciences. Let us look at life, which is to say culture, and explain it, which is to say learn it, know it. It is with this great question that the social sciences are uniquely prepared to help us. Let us embrace them and become enlightened. Let us finish what the Enlightenment started, for it was in the Enlightenment that the social sciences first emerged as such. It is unfortunate that for so long, they have been unsuccessful (with notable exceptions such as various breakthroughs in economics and psychology) at endowing us with knowledge, but now is their time.