Another Enlightening Trip into Theory Issues

Problem: what’s a cause?

Despite probably sounding like I am veering into banal high school philosophy here, it’s an honest question. The search for causal factors in social science is rarely questioned. Working assumptions in much research are that we will hypothesize a relationship (informed by some kind of theory) then use statistical techniques to evaluate a sample and determine whether we can prove our initial hypotheses for the entire population under consideration.

Sorry, not prove — that’s fairly well explained in methods courses, that we can’t “prove” anything. We can be 95%, 99% sure, 99.99% sure, and so forth. (By the way, 95% is the usual standard for us. Higher standards aren’t necessary since lives rarely hang in the balance in this line of work.) Despite the repeated statements about the standard scientific idea that we can only disprove hypotheses, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of doubt about causes.

The tricky thing about causes is that they generally have causes themselves. I don’t mean to get into any kind of metaphysical “first cause” argument here, because that’s not the issue. The problem is that the social world is very complicated, and causes impact upon other causes in a terribly convoluted string of events which can be traced back potentially forever.

I don’t think this comes across very well in sociology courses, or else it is not something that many people are interested in talking about. And so, we seem to push the problem of regress out of our heads, forgetting our own mantras of unprovability. Is the problem solved by practicalities such as running out of resources to trace lines back? Perhaps, but this doesn’t seem to be a very satisfying answer.

Isms

Are empiricism and positivism “isms” in the sense that “feminism”, “Marxism”, and so forth are? I would wager that many social scientists do not think so. Indeed, science itself is usually held to be not just different, but superior — in a league of its own — compared to other theories or ways of thinking.

In the opening lecture of a sociology class today, the professor made it known that he was “not politically correct”, a self-label that usually throws up warning signs for me. He proceeded to describe his distrust of “isms”, while admonishing us to be empirical and to “let the data speak for itself.” I was struck by the way that he seemed to believe that feminists and Marxists were “warping” the data, or discarding it when it did not fit with their world view. This may be true in some cases, but positivistic science is a theory base like any other, and personal subjective views still come into it.

To sum: I don’t believe that data will usually “speak for itself.” Neither do I believe in so-called “torturing the data” in order to make it confess what we want to hear. The problem is that sociology can fall into the trap of assuming that the truth is out there, somewhere — if only we can find it. This seems to me a dangerous position, especially given our dismal success at incremental, additive theory.

The rest of the introduction was mostly weak intimidation about how difficult the course would be and how graduate school would be hard, and so forth. Well, in that, he might have been right. If graduate school is made up of aggressively single-minded sociology professors unwilling to consider their own biases, then yes, perhaps I will indeed not do very well there.

Life Chances

The follies of “equalism” summed up succinctly for those who aren’t interested in detailed sociological descriptions.

marriedtothesea.com

Sex at the Margins: Border Thinking with Laura Agustín

I have discovered that Laura Agustín, a writer whose works I became somewhat familar with in my studies at Leeds dealing with sex work, has a blog — which I highly recommend. Agustín’s work (again, the part I’m familiar with) deals with migrancy and sorts out a lot of the myths associated with the “human trafficking” panics. In her own words,

Migrants are commonly seen as both unwanted intruders and powerless victims, but my own ideas work to break down this duality and think about power in different ways.

When it comes to sex work, arguments about trafficking are particularly troublesome, in my experience, because they tend to drift into the belief that all sex work is nonconsensual. Soon, I’m going to post a (relatively) short paper here on the issue that I wrote in Leeds, which is more generally about radical feminist opposition to sex work but does delve into concerns over trafficking. If these kinds of issues interest you, please check out Agustín’s blog.