How does one create knowledge and arrive at the truth? The positivist explores the natural world and establishes his or her findings based solely on what is measurable and observable, or what can be subjected to an experiment. Science has no business outside this strictly empirical domain. The post-positivist or post-behavioralist, taking his or her cues from Kuhn or Popper, does not entirely abandon scientific methodology but allows sufficient room for reflexivity. Finally, the interpretivist rejects positivism, preferring to understand the world better by immersing himself or herself within it.
The dominance and continued survival of the positivist paradigm continue to be intimately linked to the utility of its results. In a recent forum, one of the top figures in the country’s scientific community stressed the importance of using scientific means to minimize risk, uncertainty, speculation, and guesswork, particularly in government decision-making. “It is therefore quite important,” he argues, “that decisions are based on the most rigorous scientific analysis and risk assessment. We need to develop a society that views science as a way of thinking that develops skills in objective thinking. That is questioning, observing, formulating and testing explanations—rather than emotively reacting to new and different ideas and developments.”
This is by all means logical. Indeed, in crafting labor policy, it would be reasonable to look at the results of the quarterly Labor Force Survey, which covers 50,000 households. The Consumer Price Index is indispensable in fine-tuning monetary policy. This widely monitored index requires 400,000 price quotations on a monthly basis, with a market basket that is in turn based on the consumption patterns of 44,542 households. The sheer magnitude of these government surveys impresses upon us that government policy is on sure footing. These surveys even allow the government to dismiss the oftentimes contrary findings of private pollsters whose limited resources allow for much smaller sample sizes.
Not all pursuit of knowledge, however, is policy-driven. (As an aside, not all policymaking is based on evidence. Wage setting, for instance, is a political outcome of a tripartite process at the regional level, employment and inflation data notwithstanding. Monetary policy setting is fraught with limitations, because not all causes of inflation are captured by the central bank’s short-term forecasting model. A presidentially appointed Monetary Board makes the decision to hike, cut, or maintain policy interest rates, not an econometric equation.)
While it professes, sincerely in my view, to work for the best interests of the public, in particular the disadvantaged, the dominant approach tends to marginalize those who do not have access to the huge resources (financial, etc.) needed in the production of social scientific knowledge. The large scope and technical know-how needed to come up with such wide-ranging studies also means those who control the resources also have a hand in the priorities and even output of research.
Wider acceptance of interpretivism could lead to a more inclusive framework for the practice of the social sciences. Fay spells out clearly the role of this verstehen approach. Interpretivism must 1) look into and examine the motivations of society’s actors and 2) find out the underlying set of rules by which by which society operates, relating them to one another. Approaches such as ethnography, grounded theory, and the interview have the capacity to produce meanings and enrich human understanding beyond descriptive methodology. Resources should also be devoted to these approaches.
These methods are not entirely divorced from objective principles, if by objective we mean the means rather than the end. Fay points out that interpretivism also makes use of publicly available evidence.
To be sure, interpretivism has its own limitations (Fay) namely its inability to understand or explain unintended consequences, structural conflict, and historical change. It professes to facilitate human understanding but is not clear about the terms of communication. It tends to stick to the status quo.
The important thing, however, is for the social sciences to become truly meaningful. What story does the social scientist have to tell? Does it make plausible claims and convey meanings? Does it resonate with the audience and lead to some kind of transformation? We cannot begin to deal with these questions if the social sciences are confined to quantification, replication, and generalization.
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