evaluating the fundamental principles of social science

there are four main "camps" in social science, each with their own distinct approach to addressing issues: psychology, economics, geography/anthropology/sociology ("social science"), and political science. i will begin by summarizing what i believe the fundamental operations of each discipline to be, then discuss determinism/indeterminism and agency at some length (beware! -- some of my ideas are pretty unconventional), and conclude by demonstrating why the disciplines cannot be united and why it is better to leave them separately with their inherent flaws.


psychology: its premise is that an individual person can overcome psychological evidence at any given time (i.e., a psych study might demonstrate a .9 correlation between a person and an environmental context, but that means that 10% of the time a person will do something other than is predicted by the correlation and the reason for them doing so cannot be known), and that one can "manufacture" positive thinking to create a larger body of psychological evidence to support achieving their goals much like people "manufacture" their own luck -- positive thinking is a chain of gene-environment interactions (thus being both internal and external in what it constitutes) that occurs regardless of whether framed as part of the process of free will or having nothing to do with free will at all. however, psych cannot ever establish whether a person's seeming overcoming of psychological evidence is due to free will -- thus an extension of the mind-body problem -- or whether it is due to lack of complete accountability of all evidence involved pertaining to a given situation. psych basically establishes a range as a general guideline, but it also carries the disclaimer that anything is possible. psych ultimately can't decide how human behavior operates.

economics: its premise is based on assumptions of human behavior to create a view of economics with a liberal or conservative slant based on what people's end motives are, but there is still a range within which this can be functional over the short-term. over the long-term, economists don't have any legitimate projections. econ ultimately believes human behavior can be inferred to a certain degree from assumptions necessary for short-term projections and that econ, as the primary motive for human behavior (survival), is reflective of human behavior. so ultimately econ views psych through the lens of econ, but econ does not believe that econ controls psych, because if this were the case, then the system could be blamed for all of the injustice, but keeping econ and psych intertwined mostly relieves econ of this responsibility.

"social science" (geography/anthropology/sociology): its premise is that for large groups of people, their exertion of will, whether free or not, is already accounted for in the evidence of their behavior. so in the end, human behavior is a collective set of psychological evidence interactions, but unlike psych, which attempts to establish a range that covers almost all of people's possible behaviors and views outliers as being negligible for the purposes of psych as a discipline, social science views the range as encompassing 100% of human behaviors. since it is impossible to test these things because the "real world" does not exist in a laboratory environment or even a confined situational setting, social scientists instead study collective psychology indirectly via constructs like language, culture, etc. social science, in denying psych, also rejects the limitations of its range (as i mentioned earlier) and since econ has no long-term projections, social science operates thinking that ultimately anything is possible with human behavior, that there are no inherent genetic restrictions on how humans can interact to maintain a stable, sustainable political economy. as such, they focus instead on things like justice in all of its theoretical implications as the basis of defining society instead of what is the most just within a certain range. they also don't have a set way of getting from point a to point b, so instead they promote doing things they believe that are fair and just within what they are allowed to do in the present system, and ultimately they believe that these things will cause the present unjust system to collapse or that the system will collapse on its own eventually and be replaced by something that is more fair and just. social science ultimately believes that human behavior is malleable to the point that anything within reason (within their own assumptions about the flexibility of human behavior, which are usually very liberal) is possible, it's just a matter of time and resources that prevent change from being spontaneous.

political science: its premise is that economics is based on short-term projections that ultimately are sustainable as manifested through political systems; politics itself varies on a daily basis just like economics, but such events are more conducive to media scrutiny than academic understanding -- they are more like "current events" than "political processes". political science differs from social science in that it focuses solely on the political sphere and political manifestations in society, and thus views politics as the means and the ends. on the other hand, social science focuses on social relations and society. when done so with a political slant, social science places emphasis on society over politics, whereas with political science, by trusting economics as the backbone of society, it views politics as a vehicle through which change can be enacted over the limited range provided by economics, and the reasons for enacting change are not reduced to social, but rather political orientations/decisions of groups or individuals, of whom the reasons for their decision-making are not usually attributed to social reasons, but to underlying political philosophy. thus, political science only addresses the social indirectly as it manifests itself through the political, and rather than identify the practical reasons for the social causes as the basis for evaluating politics, it simply uses them for political purposes (manipulating elections, etc.), and when done so academically, filters them through the justification of political philosophy without regards for culture, etc. social science, by placing emphasis on society over politics, thus undermines the set ideas (usually middle-of-the-road) of politics for the long-term, and implicitly for the short-term (or explicitly, depending on the economic philosophy of the social scientist), conventional economics. by dissolving the acceptance of conventional economic thinking and thus the need for formal political systems and processes in their present state, social science believes that everything is political, but that it must be understood through a social lens first before we can conceive how to formally address political systems. as such, the political and social are intertwined, but the focus at each step (beginning, middle, and end) starts with the social as the fundamental basis for understanding, upon which the political is then either extracted or added. in short, social science believes if we address the social with the political always in the back of our minds, then the political will naturally fall into place. political science believes that the political is based on economics, so it doesn't care about the causes of social, but only about the manifestations of the social politically and economically where it can be addressed in those terms. furthermore, social science attempts a more holistic incorporation of political philosophy into every aspect of society (including formal political situations), whereas political science addresses it in a two-faced sort of manner: within the sphere of economics, and thus the general operation of society and culture, it deems political philosophy irrelevant (outside of formal law), but within strict, formal political situations, such as legislation, political philosophy is used as leverage to justify positions that it feigns to be purely justifiable in an abstract, philosophical sense, while the true motives are actually socially-based but are never formally addressed in those terms during the process.

now that i've explained the premises of the four main "camps" of social science, let's move on to the next phase: determinism/indeterminism and free will. before we can know whether or not free will exist, we must know if determinism is true. we'll never know whether things are determinist or not, but ultimately it doesn't really matter, because we'll never have enough evidence to determine what exactly will happen in the future. so there is a paradox here: if we are determinist, then we still have no idea how the future will be even though we believe it ("it" being everything) is destined to be a certain way beyond our control, but if we are indeterminist, then even though we believe everything to not be destined to be a certain way beyond our control, we believe we can control at least some aspects of the future via choice. so in being a determinist, you are saying we cannot control, or determine, the future in any way and we also cannot know its determination, but in being an indeterminist, you are saying we can control, or determine, the future in some way and therefore we can know the determination of what we can control. thus, an indeterminist believes he/she knows more about the way the future will be than an determinist, when one would intuitively think that a determinist would know more and an indeterminist would be completely in the dark about what the future holds. ultimately, in the course of daily living, three things occur regardless of whether one believes in determinism or indeterminism: 1) there is the feeling (whether it is an illusion or not) the we can control certain things to a certain degree and that there are things beyond our control, 2) the things beyond our control are very influential, and 3) the things beyond our control appear to be extremely whimsical (like the stock market) or extremely set in patterns (voter tendencies based on education, etc.). if you look at the plausibility of agency in 1-3, they exist whether or not one is a determinist or indeterminist, and as a result, a certain amount of change will occur, and no one knows what it will be. the only difference is that a lot of political radicals believe that agency is empowering, whereas i believe it is a concept that just exists, and whose ultimate inner workings can never be known because we don't know whether or not things are determinist, and even if it turns out that things are determinist, we still would not have enough evidence to predict things and people would still engage in behavior acting as though they were changing things because this was determinism's route -- channeling destiny through their actions. in short, agency is *just there*. a good analogy would be comparing people who believe agency is empowering to people who believe that we should love the world; the view opposite of this is that just like the world (i.e., "reality") is just out there, agency is just there. so, it is what it is -- a concept that makes sense within a certain framework, but whose purported powers (or at least, whose powers are open to a fair amount of misinterpretation and misuse) outside of this framework are unsubstantiated, i.e., it never tackles determinism or the free will problem head on and it does not establish a range for psychological evidence within which agency can occur (or which agency can occur outside of, in which case the establishment of the range is rendered irrelevant as the "social science" range exists without set boundaries). wikipedia explains the difference between agency and free will:

"Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world. It is normally contrasted to natural forces, which are causes involving only unthinking deterministic processes. In this respect, agency is subtly distinct from the concept of free will, the philosophical doctrine that our choices are not the product of causal chains, but are significantly free or undetermined. Human agency entails the uncontroversial, weaker claim that humans do in fact make decisions and enact them on the world. How humans come to make decisions, by free choice or other processes, is another issue."

so it seems to me that all agency does is assign credit and responsibility among deterministic forces by denoting humans as the channel for change. as such, agency is just an epistemological indicator, as people do not transcend the genes-environment cycle, but they are the only interpreters of it. however, just because people are the only interpreters of change doesn't mean that they should ultimately be held accountable for it -- only a metaphysical break from the genes-environment cycle could be credited with possessing the capacity for enacting change that was not compelled by deterministic forces. so at present, the idea of agency simply "passes the buck" to people, who are a manifestation of gene-environment interactions, without proper justification since people are by no means more empowered to change things than the environment or genes are existing mutually exclusively. regarding the aforementioned four perspectives, only the idea of determinism/indeterminism and the range of psychological evidence (for psychology, the range has defined boundaries, but for "social science", it does not) ultimately are the currencies shared among them, it is just that they are channelled in different manifestations that appear to be incongruent. so, is there a solution? well, first of all, since there is no solution to determinism/indeterminism (i.e., the source of change), in order to bring the four perspectives to a level playing field we would have to reduce their manifestations to the basic idea of determinism/indeterminism. since this is not possible, the next best thing is to establish a psychological evidence range, and at present it is not possible because we cannot know the range for any given situation, and even if we did, it would just be a guideline for psych carries the disclaimer that anything is possible and "social science" would adjust the range to include all possible human behaviors. as such, since the psychological range cannot be established with 100% confidence, then social science is not bound by the range, and we are back to square one wherein each discipline operates by its own system of establishing and gauging the manifestations of determinism/indeterminism through behavior (and underlying causes of visible behavior, such as cognition). considering these ideas, is it still possible to pursue a new, united and universal approach to analyzing human behavior? what would this approach entail? the answer is that it would be impossible to collectively agree on one approach (this is assuming that someone/something had the power to force the disciplines to come to this meeting and that the representatives of the disciplines would be willing to cooperate -- this would amount to a worldwide academic summit of epic proportions never seen before), and because of this, each discipline would claim that its approach is best for its needs, i.e., the ends justify the means. as such, one is left to either accept each discipline's place in academia for what they are (personal opinions aside as to which disciplines are better than others), or one must basically believe that they are all basically worthless or even detrimental. the first is pretty much an educated view, the second one is just indifference and/or ignorance, and the third one is primitivism. with the educated view, even if one vehemently disagrees with one discipline as to how it handles the issue of determinism/indeterminism, if one understands the nature of the determinism/indeterminism issue and the inability to establish a psychological evidence range, thus allowing human behavior to be interpreted through different lenses, from different angles, and with different purposes in mind, then he/she will likely come to the conclusion that it makes sense why that discipline uses that approach and that attempting to force that discipline to change its approach immediately would be both unfeasible and undesirable. in an earlier blog entry ("why philosophy will never move forward until..."), i noted that it would take at least 50 years before some sort of realistic range could begin to be established, and this would be accomplished through cognitive science and computer simulations. however, given the infinite possibilities in the universe, i now realize that this estimate was only applicable to academics who were willing to submit to such an approach as a valid, or the prevailing paradigm of thought, for certainly anyone who opposed the conclusions this paradigm arrived at could easily attack the paradigm for not being all-encompassing and accurate in much the same way that even psych studies at present done in controlled settings do not yield perfect or near-perfect causality that one has come to expect from natural lab sciences. as such, it remains to be seen whether the power of cognitive science and computer science will ultimately be able to simulate things so as to be able to supersede the conventional social science approaches employed at present or whether they will simply be somewhat useful tools, effective enough to stake out their own claim at tackling issues addressed by social science but not being superior so as to displace other disciplines addressing those same issues with their own conventional approaches. one thing i would like to point out about that previous blog entry: i now do not believe that a consensus could be reached by gathering academics of different backgrounds attempting to approximate what the range could be at present because there is too much disagreement within each discipline about that, let alone across disciplines, and any form of agreement among academics of different backgrounds would pretty much amount to middle-of-the-road compromise similar to what is done in actual government and politics, which doesn't mean that what is agreed upon is necessarily the best representation of what is true, just what is convenient for people to believe based on their personal perspectives and agendas, and taken collectively, what best suits everyone politically-speaking. as such, i would rather have disagreement within and across academic disciplines and have the evidence eventually "speak for itself" and uncover what is true than have some sort of forced agreement that is done with political agendas as a primary motive.