Thursday, January 25, 2007
From Technopoly by Neil Postman:
p. 152 Freud, Marx, Weber, Jung, Mead not doing science. What these people were doing--and what STanley Milgram was doing is documenting behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture. Their work is a form of storytelling. Science itself is of course a form of storytelling too, but its assumptions and procedures are so different from those of social research that it is extremely misleading to give same name to each. In fact, stories of social researchers are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature, that is to say both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms--draw appeal from power of language, depth of explanation, relevance of examples and credibility of their themes
nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about interpretations, no critical tests to confirm or falsify them, no natural laws from which derived. Bound by time, by situation and cultural prejudices of researcher.
both novelist and social researcher construct stories by use of archetypes and metaphors--Mead and Samoa girls, Skinner.
Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again. Science, social research ask different questions, follow different procedures, give different meanins to truth. Social scientists not squemish about imputing to their "discoveries"and rigor of their procedures power to directions in how we ought rightly to behave. Why so often on TV, self-help shelves, not because want to tell us how humans sometimes behave,but how we should behave. We welcome them gladly because we need so desperately to find some source outside frail and shaky judgments to authorize our moral decisions and behaviors.
p. 152 Freud, Marx, Weber, Jung, Mead not doing science. What these people were doing--and what STanley Milgram was doing is documenting behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture. Their work is a form of storytelling. Science itself is of course a form of storytelling too, but its assumptions and procedures are so different from those of social research that it is extremely misleading to give same name to each. In fact, stories of social researchers are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature, that is to say both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms--draw appeal from power of language, depth of explanation, relevance of examples and credibility of their themes
nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about interpretations, no critical tests to confirm or falsify them, no natural laws from which derived. Bound by time, by situation and cultural prejudices of researcher.
both novelist and social researcher construct stories by use of archetypes and metaphors--Mead and Samoa girls, Skinner.
Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again. Science, social research ask different questions, follow different procedures, give different meanins to truth. Social scientists not squemish about imputing to their "discoveries"and rigor of their procedures power to directions in how we ought rightly to behave. Why so often on TV, self-help shelves, not because want to tell us how humans sometimes behave,but how we should behave. We welcome them gladly because we need so desperately to find some source outside frail and shaky judgments to authorize our moral decisions and behaviors.
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