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.