Making Social Science Matter

Why social inquiry fails and how it can

succeed again
Bent Flyvbjerg
Translated by Steven Sampson
publi shed by the press syndicate of the uni versi ty of cambri dge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
cambridge uni versi ty press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK www.cup.ac.uk
40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 100114211, USA www.cup.org
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcon 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Bent Flyvbjerg 2001
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2001
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
Typeset in Plantin 10/12 pt [vn]
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress cataloging in publication data
Flyvbjerg, Bent
Making social science matter: why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed
again / by Bent Flyvbjerg; translated by Steven Sampson.
p. cm.
Includes index.
isbn 0 521 77268 0 (hardback) 0 521 77568 x (paperback)
1. Social sciencesPhilosophy. I. Title.
H61.F6144 2001
300'.1dc21 00023608
isbn 0 521 77268 0 hardback
isbn 0 521 77568 x paperback
Contents
Acknowledgments page ix
1 The Science Wars: a way out 1
Part one: Why social science has failed as science
2 Rationality, body, and intuition in human learning 9
3 Is theory possible in social science? 25
4 Context counts 38
Part two: How social science can matter again
5 Values in social and political inquiry 53
6 The power of example 66
7 The signiWcance of conXict and power to social science 88
8 Empowering Aristotle 110
9 Methodological guidelines for a reformed social science 129
10 Examples and illustrations: narratives of value and power 141
11 Social science that matters 166
Notes 169
Index 201
vii
1 The Science Wars: a way out
Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth. Aristotle
Physics envy and pre-Kantian shamans
When the May 1996 issue of the journal Social Text appeared, an issue
devoted to the understanding of Science Wars, the editors became
targets in these wars in ways they had not imagined. The issue included
a bogus article by New York University mathematical physicist Alan
Sokal, who feigned an earnest reXection on the political and philosophical
implications of recent physics research for cultural studies.
1
Sokal re-
vealed the hoax himself, and it immediately became a hotly debated issue
inacademic and popular media around the world.
2
The appearance of the
article was not only taken as a sign of shoddy scholarship by the Social
Text editors but as an expose of cultural studies and social science in
general. For instance, Nobel prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg
used the hoax to identify what he calls a fundamental opposition
between natural and social scientists, especially regarding what Weinberg
sees as dangerous anti-rationalism and relativism in social science and
cultural studies.
3
Those on the other side of the wars countered by
criticizing Sokal and calling Weinberg and like-minded natural scientists
pre-Kantian shaman[s] repeating the mantras of particle physicists,
with their reductionist view of science.
4
The year before Sokals hoax, the wars had raged over the scientiWc
status of a high-proWle US National Opinion Research Center study,
which had been launched as a deWnitive survey of sexual practices in
the United States.
5
Here, too, doubts were raised not only about the
status of scholarship of the study in question, but of sociology and social
science as such. The study had received the doubtful honor of becoming
the topic of an editorial in The Economist under the heading 74.6% of
Sociology is Bunk.
6
In The New York Review of Books, Harvard biologist
and statistician R. C. Lewontin criticized the researchers behind the
1
study for believing what people said when Wlling in the survey question-
naires on which the study builds. It is frightening, Lewontin wrote, to
think that social science is in the hands of professionals who are so deaf to
human nuance that they believe that people do not lie to themselves [and
to others] about the most freighted aspects of their own lives.
7
Lewontin
concluded his review by warning social scientists that in pretending to
a kind of knowledge that it cannot achieve, social science can only
engender the scorn of natural scientists.
8
Other social science critics
participating in the debate talked of dumbed-down sociology and
social scientists physics envy.
9
The authors of the NORC study re-
sponded in kind by calling Lewontins review professionally incompe-
tent and motivated by an evident animus against the social sciences in
general.
10
The authors also observed that the notion that an economist
or a sociologist should review work in population genetics, one of
Lewontins Welds of competence, would properly be greeted with de-
rision.
11
While one might well agree with the latter point, the authors
use of name-calling instead of substantive arguments in their attempt to
refute Lewontins criticism, leaves us wondering, not about the validity of
this criticism, but about what it is regarding natural and social science
that makes it fairly common practice for natural scientists to reviewsocial
science, whereas the opposite is less common.
Good or bad?
However entertaining for bystanders, the mudslinging of the Science
Wars is unproductive. The Wars undoubtedly serve political and ideo-
logical purposes in the competition for research funds and in deWning
what Charles Lindblomand Michel Foucault have called societys truth
politics.
12
Judged by intellectual standards, however, the Science Wars
are misguided. In this book, I will present a way out of the Wars by
developing a conception of social science based on a contemporary
interpretationof the Aristotelianconcept of phronesis, variously translated
as prudence or practical wisdom. In Aristotles words phronesis is a true
state, reasoned, and capable of action with regard to things that are good
or bad for man.
13
Phronesis goes beyondboth analytical, scientiWc knowl-
edge (episteme) and technical knowledge or know-how (techne) and in-
volves judgments and decisions made in the manner of a virtuoso social
and political actor. I will argue that phronesis is commonly involved in
social practice, and that therefore attempts to reduce social science and
theory either to episteme or techne, or to comprehend themin those terms,
are misguided.
By introducing phronesis into the discussion of what social science is
2 Making social science matter
and can be, we will see that Lewontin and others are right, albeit perhaps
not for the reasons they believe, when they say that social science has set
itself an impossible task when it attempts to emulate natural science and
produce explanatory and predictive, that is, epistemic, theory. We will
also see, however, that this conclusion does not imply the oft-seen image
of impotent social sciences versus potent natural sciences, which is at the
core of the Science Wars. This image derives fromthe fact that both types
of science tend to be compared in terms of their epistemic qualities. This
book will argue that such a comparison is misleading. The two types of
science have their respective strengths and weaknesses along fundamen-
tally diVerent dimensions, a point which Aristotle demonstrated but
which has since been forgotten. At present, social science is locked in a
Wght it cannot hope to win, because it has accepted terms that are
self-defeating. We will see that in their role as phronesis, the social sciences
are strongest where the natural sciences are weakest: just as the social
sciences have not contributed much to explanatory and predictive theory,
neither have the natural sciences contributed to the reXexive analysis and
discussion of values and interests, which is the prerequisite for an en-
lightened political, economic, and cultural development in any society,
and which is at the core of phronesis. This should also be the core of social
science if we want to transcend the current malaise of the Science Wars.
Virtue lost
Aristotle, the philosopher of phronesis par excellence, never elaborated his
conception of phronesis to include explicit considerations of power. Hans-
Georg Gadamers authoritative and contemporary conception of phron-
esis also overlooks issues of power.
14
Yet as Richard Bernstein points out,
if we are to think about what can be done to the problems and risks of our
time, we must advance from the original conception of phronesis to one
explicitly including power.
15
Unfortunately, Bernstein himself has not
integrated his work on phronesis with issues of power. Nor, to my knowl-
edge, has anyone else. I will argue that in modern society, conXict and
power are phenomena constitutive of social and political inquiry. And I
will develop the classic concept of phronesis to include issues of power.
Aristotle, in arguing that natural and social science are and should be
diVerent ventures, discusses the three intellectual virtues, episteme, techne,
and phronesis. Whereas episteme is found in the modern words epistemol-
ogy and epistemic, and techne in technology and technical, it is
indicative of the degree to which thinking in the social sciences has
allowed itself to be colonized by natural and technical science that we
today do not even have a word for the one intellectual virtue, phronesis,
3 The Science Wars: a way out
which Aristotle saw not only as the necessary basis for social and political
inquiry, but as the most important of the intellectual virtues. Phronesis is
most important because it is that activity by which instrumental rational-
ity is balanced by value-rationality, and because such balancing is crucial
to the sustained happiness of the citizens in any society, according to
Aristotle. In what follows we will redress the imbalance between the
intellectual virtues by submitting the concept of phronesis to a current
reinterpretationinterms of the needs of contemporary social science. The
goal is to help restore social science to its classical position as a practical,
intellectual activity aimed at clarifying the problems, risks, and possibili-
ties we face as humans and societies, and at contributing to social and
political praxis.
A brief overview
Based on a critique of cognitivism and naturalism, Part one of the book
shows why social science never has been, and probably never will be, able
to develop the type of explanatory and predictive theory that is the ideal
and hallmark of natural science. Chapter two demonstrates that context
and judgment are irreducibly central to understanding human action. On
this basis, following works by Hubert Dreyfus, Pierre Bourdieu, and
Harold GarWnkel, chapters three and four explore the question of
whether a theory of context and judgment is possible. The answer to this
question is negative and the conclusion is that social science emulation of
natural science is a cul-de-sac; mainstream social theory and social
science methodology stand in need of reorientation.
Part two is an attempt at such a reorientation based on phronesis.
Chapter Wve introduces Aristotles original thoughts on the subject and
explores the relationship between phronesis and social science. The fol-
lowing chapters then develop the concept of phronesis on three fronts to
make for a more contemporary interpretation. First, chapter six takes its
point of departure in Aristotles insight that case knowledge is crucial to
the practice of phronesis; on this basis the chapter clariWes the status and
uses of case studies in social science. Second, based on works by Michel
Foucault, Ju rgen Habermas, and Friedrich Nietzsche, chapters seven and
eight elaborate the classical conception of phronesis to include consider-
ations on power, thus expanding the classical concept from one of values
to one of values and power. Third, chapter nine further reWnes the
approach by developing a set of methodological guidelines for doing what
I call phronetic social science. Chapter ten contains illustrations and
examples of such an approach, while Chapter eleven sums up the per-
spective of the book.
4 Making social science matter
My aims with this book are simply to call attention to a central problemin
the social sciences and to outline a possible answer. I see the problem
the fact that the social sciences have not had the type of theoretical and
methodological success that the natural sciences have as fairly well
deWned and well documented. The answer, however, seems less clear,
and I do not think there is a single answer. My own attempt at an answer
phronetic social science should be considered only one attempt among
many possible. It should also be seen as only a Wrst step that will un-
doubtedly need further theoretical and methodological reWnement, just
as it will need to be developed through further practical employment in
social-science research.
16
Despite such qualiWcations, I hope the reader
will agree that given what is at stake social sciences that can hold their
own in the Science Wars, in the academic community, and in society at
large the attempt at reforming these sciences is worth making.
5 The Science Wars: a way out