Dear Forum,
In my first post this month I said that the "hard" disciplines like physics,
chemistry, materials science and mathematics have nothing to say about
subjectivity and don't even try. But now I want to point out that the
disciplines of psychology, sociology, and anthropology do. In fact these
social sciences, as the name suggests, have one foot in the humanities and
the other in science.
When I was in college I took one psychology course (101 naturally!) as a
freshman and then blew off the social sciences for the rest of my college
years. I had (and still have, though it's tempered over time) a strong
contempt for the social sciences because they do justice to neither science
nor the humanities. I remember thinking they had a lot of nerve calling
psychology a science.
In Lila, Pirsig discusses at length similar problems plaguing anthropology,
and I think he is spot on. It seems clear to me now that social sciences
were invented in the wake of the enormous successes in physics and
chemistry. The idea was to borrow the techniques and methods so successful
there and apply them to puzzles about humanity. The techniques fail, but not
so miserably that people abandon them. That's why we still have the social
sciences. But any fruit they manage to bare is rotten at its core. Pirsig is
the first to fully articulate to me why the methods don't work: the social
sciences are trying to employ techniques that work wonders in the inorganic
level to explain human behavior in the social level, a huge gap that spans
two levels of reality; no wonder it doesn't work.
But the aura of science is irrisistible. In college I took a 400 level
history course that was a study of world history (mostly western
civilization), but it had the peculiar title "Planetary History". It was a
small class having all history majors except me, taught by an aging prof who
liked tweed. Anyway he had us write a term paper on any subject we wanted
about world history. I wrote mine about objective ways to study trends in
history borrowing from scientific methods (with lots of graphs and junk),
and, as best as I can remember, some ideas from a philosophy of science
course I was also taking. Well he ate it up. He wrote all over the cover
page about how he had been trying to develop ideas like these and he asked
permission to make a copy. And he mentioned it in class to my embarrassment
and delight. Here was a historian completely smitten with the idea that
history could be studied and presented objectively. It's easy to understand
his reaction now given Pirsig's insights but at the time I was a bit
flabbergasted.
And what was my excuse for perpetrating subject/object ideas in wrong
places? I was young (and smitten too).
Regards,
Glennn
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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