[Note: From time to time, this blog issues a set of
postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous
postings. Of late, the blog has been
looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject. It’s time to post a series of such summary
accounts. The advantage of such
summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different
context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments. This and upcoming summary postings will be
preceded by this message.]
This blog has made a connection
between the natural rights view and scientific research with its methodology. It’s not that one engages in scientific
research naturally. It took humans a
long time to develop science. Humans are
naturally too emotional to readily engage in objectified studies about what they
find important. Even the notion of
advancing knowledge for its own sake would seem foreign to people until a few
hundred years ago. At its beginning, science
even got people in trouble in that it questioned their more natural tendency to
think religiously.
Probably the most celebrated case of this latter
development was the trouble that Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei had. He actually claimed that the earth was not
the center of the solar system; it, he claimed, revolves around the sun, not vice
versa. And how did he arrive at his
“speculation?” He used scientific methods
including utilizing his telescope. But
that view flew in the face of religious dogma prevalent in the Western world.
Up
to his time, knowledge or what was taken for knowledge, was primarily arrived at
through logic (e.g., the work of Greek philosophers) or inspiration (e.g., the work
of those who wrote the books of the Bible).
With the pioneers of science, observation became a third viable way. Its advent was not met with open arms by
those in power. But because of its
payoffs, science came to be seen not only as legitimate but essential.
But can science be deficient? A growing number of voices are beginning to question
its power especially when it comes to the study of human behavior. It seems that what is judged to be so
efficient in the study of the natural world is insufficient in studying
human endeavors. Investigating many
questions relating to humans in what they do and how they think and feel, science
proves to be short-sighted especially when it comes to complex social
arrangements.
In
political science, reductionism, narrowing a study to a limited set of factors
or variables, seems to miss the richness of how and why humans behave the way
they do in political and other related situations. The shortfall occurs when those ways of
thinking are applied to conditions that organizations exhibit.
This blogger has posted online an “appendix chapter”[1] that reviews these
shortcomings, but here he questions how scientific approaches affect other concerns.
That is, this problem does not only
affect the advancement of political knowledge.
It also affects those professional fields that depend on political and
the other social sciences as their personnel formulate policies and the implementations
of those policies.
An
example of this, one that had to do with national defense, was the inability of
Israeli intelligence to see the impending attacks that initiated the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Organizations tend these
days to rely on scientific, objectified protocols to help them determine policy,
while their environs do not lend themselves to the reductionist methods sciences
employ.
They
also fund scientific research to conduct organizational studies. This bias, when combined with other
institutional practices (e.g., group thinking or rational analyses of
cost/benefits), leads to the inability to recognize growing, “incubated”
problems. They exist within their organizations
according to research conducted by Sidney Dekker and Shawn Pruchnicki.[2]
These
problems fester, grow, and eventually burst upon the scene like the attacks on
Israel back in ’73. This is not a matter
of incompetent practices; those practices are responsible for organizations growing
and being successful. By so growing, these
organizations become complex entities, and establish the conditions that potentially
make the utilization of purely scientific research insufficient.
As
this blog has indicated repeatedly, science is powerful. Its ability to discover reality is without
equal. But in various ways it leads to
false security as this Israeli example illustrates. Through its reductionism it lacks richness. The study of humans, especially, calls for holistic
studies in which the richness of various environments or environmental elements
can be considered and analyzed in their wholeness. This often includes the emotional richness
studied subjects bring to situations but cannot be reduced to measurable sets
of finite variables.
This
writer, from his own experience, can add another telling example. He can remember, when he was quite young in
New York City, the neighborhood policeman walking his beat. This policeman, who was generally friendly,
would capture his admiration as the man in blue who could expertly swing his baton
or truncheon. Such cops are depicted in
old films, for example the film, Singin in the Rain.
Then
came the scientific-inspired systems theory to study large organizations – for
example, the New York City Police Department – and that “walking” cop
disappeared. And with his disappearance,
police departments, such as New York’s, lost a source of invaluable, holistic
information. This became serious in
large cities. While there is a good deal
of rhetoric bemoaning this loss, especially with cases such as the incident
with George Floyd, cost/benefit analyses prohibit that source's return.[3]
[1] URL site for this appendix is https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSjZxpifP42VVnhFduKujgUDPJMddmcsh1uRY9DvpNicdYUONOHx56r1jRg4lgxK3ckaiQMJc4Gno0J/pub .
[2] Sidney Dekker and Shawn Pruchnicki, Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 2013, accessed July 8, 2020, https://safetydifferently.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/SDDriftPaper.pdf , 1-11.
[3] Apparently, cops do walk where people congregate but not in neighborhoods. They are labor intensive and judged to being either inefficient or too costly.
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