SOCIAL SCIENCE, SCIENTISM, AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY (original) (raw)

The Impossible Dream: Scientism as Strategy for Containing Distrust of Social Science at the U.S. National Science Foundation, 1945-1980

International Journal for History, Culture, and Modernity , 2019

Distrust of the social sciences has deep roots in American politics, science , and culture. This article examines how distrust became a serious issue in the nuclear age by focusing on the U.S. National Science Foundation's involvement with the social sciences from 1945 to 1980. I propose, first, that in this context distrust of NSF's social science activities came in two forms, which rested on two different sources of doubt. Epistemological Distrust stemmed from doubts about the scientific status of the social sciences. Social Distrust involved worries about the social relevance and policy uses of the social sciences. Second, I propose that efforts to address and contain these two types of distrust played a major role in NSF's elaboration of a view of the social sciences and corresponding strategy for funding them that I will refer to as Scientism, which assumed a unified scientific framework that took an idealized conception of the natural sciences as the gold standard.

Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War

Journal of American History, 2013

This book reinterprets the rise of the natural and social sciences as sources of political authority in modern America. Andrew Jewett demonstrates the remarkable persistence of a belief that the scientific enterprise carried with it a set of ethical values capable of grounding a democratic culture-a political function widely assigned to religion. The book traces the shifting formulations of this belief from the creation of the research universities in the Civil War era to the early Cold War years. It examines hundreds of leading scholars who viewed science not merely as a source of technical knowledge, but also as a resource for fostering cultural change. This vision generated surprisingly nuanced portraits of science in the years before the military-industrial complex and has much to teach us today about the relationship between science and democracy.

Political Science and the Post-Modern Critique of Scientism and Domination

The Review of Politics, 1975

It is by now a commonplace among American political scientists that the philosophical grounding of political inquiry is in dire need of critical reflection and serious repair, if not radical reconstruction. The sources of this widespread recognition are no doubt diverse, but not the least resides in the impact of the key ideas of Thomas Kuhn's celebrated work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For, although Kuhn's work was narrowly interpreted by Almond, Truman, and other key figures in the behavioral elite corps to conform to their image of science (basically a naive positivist image), the very breadth and subtlety of Kuhn's work, his commitment to formulating his conception of science from the history of science as practiced, and his ultimate antagonism to that tradition of the philosophy of science (logical positivism/empiricism) which behavioralists have embraced ensured that a lively and contentious debate would ensue.

Science and Democracy Reconsidered

Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

To what extent is the normative commitment of STS to the democratization of science a product of the democratic contexts where it is most often produced? STS scholars have historically offered a powerful critical lens through which to understand the social construction of science, and seminal contributions in this area have outlined ways in which citizens have improved both the conduct of science and its outcomes. Yet, with few exceptions, it remains that most STS scholarship has eschewed study of more problematic cases of public engagement of science in rich, supposedly mature Western democracies, as well as examination of science-making in poorer, sometimes non-democratic contexts. How might research on problematic cases and dissimilar political contexts traditionally neglected by STS scholars push the field forward in new ways? This paper responds to themes that came out of papers from two Eastern Sociological Society Presidential Panels on Science and Technology Studies in an Er...

The scientific dimensions of social knowledge and their distant echoes in 20th-century American philosophy of science

The widespread impression that recent philosophy of science has pioneered exploration of the ''social dimensions of scientific knowledge'' is shown to be in error, partly due to a lack of appreciation of historical precedent, and partly due to a misunderstanding of how the social sciences and philosophy have been intertwined over the last century. This paper argues that the referents of ''democracy'' are an important key in the American context, and that orthodoxies in the philosophy of science tend to be molded by the actual regimes of science organization within which they are embedded. These theses are illustrated by consideration of three representative philosophers of science: