The calling of the human sciences

Abstract

Roger Smith's plea on behalf of the human sciences raises important and neglected questions about the basis of interdisciplinary work. Central here is the role played in human self-understanding by the history of human self-understanding. Smith's basic position is attractive, but his book might have drawn on a broader range of resources in order to back it up.     

Qualitative Leverage and the Epistemology of Expert Opinion

We discuss the motivation for integrating qualitative informationin statistical models of complex, partially observable causalmechanisms and suggest ways to minimize the dangers posed byBraumoeller and Kirpichevsky. We stress the importance of linkingour statistical estimators to underlying theories of the datagenerating process, qualitative or otherwise.     

Policy sciences and the market

The most recent response of our universities to the challenge presented by the urban crisis—the domestic problems that show their dramatic symptoms in our cities—has taken the form of new graduate programs in the policy sciences. They are widely diverse in course content, teaching methods, measures to assure experiential inputs and devices for survival in the standard discipline-oriented university climate, but all have the common purpose of improving the quality and enlarging the quantity of both public policy practitioners and analysts.These pioneering activities are growing in an atmosphere of intense intellectual debate and self-examination. How best to design and conduct them with respect to these input parameters, appropriate overall roles for universities in policy science training, the nature of more rational decisionmaking as a process, and the roles of policy science-trained analysts and practitioners in it and in promoting it, are all under lively examination and discussion.What has thus far received relatively little attention is the nature of the decision universe in which the products of these programs, the graduates, will need to perform if they are to have impact. In this paper that universe and the relationship of the university to it are characterized in simple market terms. Doing so suggests that the most pressing problems for policy science lie on the demand, not the supply, side of the market. It will take the best efforts of policy scientists to address them successfully.     

The Political Epistemology of Science-Based Policy-Making

Improving the use and impact of science-based policies and practices at the national and transnational level is important for enhancing the quality and legitimacy of democratic governance systems. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the major drivers behind strengthening the creation, application and mediation of scientific expertise for policy-making. Science-based policy-making can take different forms, such as evaluation of practices, implementation of independent or commissioned research, application of quantitative and qualitative analyses, or the development of statistical and environmental monitoring systems. However, scientific evidence is only one among several factors contributing to sound democratic decisions. Scientific expertise needs to be mediated through a complex process of social and political deliberation. The paper aims to identify the main policy challenges behind science advisory bodies and to set out an agenda for rebuilding public trust in science-based policy-making.     

A Pragmatist Critique of Liberal Epistemology

Abstract

This paper wrestles with the issue of the place of comprehensive beliefs within the public space. It tries to strike a middle path between the liberal ban on comprehensive beliefs and the anti-liberal claim that comprehensive beliefs should be given full pride of place in public deliberations. The article relies on arguments that are inspired by the pragmatist tradition. It starts locating the main cause of failures at articulating comprehensive beliefs and public reason in a central feature of liberal epistemology, namely the way it conceives public reason via a preliminary distinction between public and non-public beliefs. After criticizing this distinction, the article introduces a distinction between the normative practice of justification and the normative practice of adjudication as a more perspicuous way to establish the place that comprehensive beliefs should play within political forums. It then concludes showing that this approach provides a satisfying answer to the issue of the public role of comprehensive beliefs in a liberal democratic regime that is respectful of citizens’ thick identities while at the same time complying with the requirements of respect set by the liberal tradition.     

阿尔都塞认识论的特点

众所周知,阿尔都塞是法国著名的结构主义马克思主义者,他提出了著名的认识论的断裂说,认为青年马克思的著作是意识形态性质的,而成长时期的《资本论》和成熟时期的《评瓦格纳<政治经济学教科书>》、《哥达纲领批判》中的思想是科学,这两者泾渭分明,它们之间存在一个明显的断裂。阿尔都塞的断裂论体现出其相应的认识论特点,这就是认识过程的反经验主义倾向与实践观上的唯理论倾向。     

A milestone in the policy sciences

Conclusion What stands in the way of inquiry to help communities clarify and secure theircommon interests? The problem is not the theories and procedures available,as many scholars presume. The framework presented in Jurisprudence for aFree Society is quite adequate even if it is provisional. The problem is professionalism(Torgerson, 1985), or more precisely, the decline of professionalismas it was understood in the Law, Science, and Policy seminar over severaldecades. As McDougal recalls in the Preface:A profession, we insisted, is best regarded as a group with both a specialskill and a sense of responsibility for the consequences upon the communityof the exercise of that skill. The special skill of the lawyer is in the managementof authority and control in the making of decisions, and the genuineprofessional must seek to synthesize all relevant knowledge and pro-cedures toward decisions that serve common interests' (p. xxiii; emphasisadded).The decline of professionalism is all around us. It reflects and reinforces thesame specializing and fragmenting factors that call into question the sustainabilityof late modem or post-modern society. The question for this generationof policy scientists is whether the policy sciences, subject to the samepressures as other skill groups, can maintain the professional standards exemplifiedby Lasswell and McDougal and stay the course they have set in Jurisprudencefor a Free Society.     

Epistemological practice and the social sciences

The object of this article is to examine the proposals for a new sociology of education set out in the work of M. F. D. Young. In particular it examines his discussion of 'knowledge', 'radicalism' and 'politics' and demonstrates that his project for a sociology of the politics of educational knowledge based on the 'phenomenological' sociology of Alfred Schutz is unsuccessful. It is argued that the 'radical' attack on the political character of contemporary education cannot be sustained. It is demonstrated that the concepts in the work of Freire, Illich, Schutz and others to which Young refers do not provide the guidelines for any theoretical advance in the sociology of education, and further, that this 'new' sociology can provide no rigorous theoretical basis for education policy formulation.     

Are the social sciences really inferior?

Fritz Machlup, at the time of his death in 1983, was emeritus professor of economics at Princeton University and professor of economics at New York University. A former president of the American Economic Association and the International Economic Association, his many influential publications included A History of Thought on Economic Integration, Methodology of Economics and Other Social Sciences,and The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States.This article, which was a favorite of Machlup’s, is reprinted from The Southern Economic Journalof January 1961, with the permission of that journal.     

A doctoral program in the policy sciences

The complex nature of policy problems requires innovative approaches to problem analysis and a new social science interdiscipline focused on policy processes. The Policy Science Program at SUNY Buffalo is designed to advance this field and to train hybrid Ph.D.'s as research-scientists/practitioners. These new policy science professionals will augment policymaking organizations as policy analysts, evaluation researchers, knowledge brokers, research feedback disseminators, process monitors, and consultants. Their training must include research methodology, analytic approaches, orienting conceptual schemes from systems theory, social sciences, and specific problem domains, and operating skills. The curriculum includes both academic and field-training aspects.Though the program is oriented toward the applied sciences, it is an attempt to mold a version of the new combination of revised social science paradigms and analytic approaches identified by Dror as the Policy Sciences.     

Against canons: Liberating the social sciences

She is author of The Origins American Social Science,a study of economics, sociology, political science, and history from their eighteenth-century roots to 1929.