Social science as political knowledge
A brief reflection on the role of social science in a democratic society prompted by Jeffrey Friedman's last book
Camille Pissarro, The Boulevard Montmartre at Night (1897). Image courtesy of the National Gallery, London.
I had the good fortune of recently encountering the late Jeffrey Friedman’s work, in particular his fascinating book Power Without Knowledge. Friedman was a political theorist with an interest in the relationship between knowledge and politics. The book represents Friedman mammoth and valiant effort to advance the field of political epistemology, through a normative and empirical critique of technocracy. Without getting into all the intricacies of the argument, Friedman’s main point is quite simple – technocratic knowledge fails because technocrats can never have certainty over the current and future actions of the social actors they aim to regulate, or whose behavior they aim to influence.
The basic argument thus speaks to the problem of the opaqueness of the social world, in terms of the facts of that world and the motivations that drive social actors within it. Clearly, in emphasizing the epistemic limits of technocracy, Friedman also hints at the epistemic limits of social science as well. While social scientific knowledge is not technocratic by definition, there are clear overlaps with the aims of technocratic knowledge about relevant facts and causal structures in the social world and locating points of collective intervention which might modify these (especially when those facts and causal structures speak to realities that are harmful or unjust).
The book’s connection with the theme of social science is indirect. It appears primarily in the chapter on the debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey with regard to the role of knowledge in democratic politics. Again, the intricacies of this debate cannot be rehashed here, and I found Friedman’s discussion very illuminating. In brief, Lippmann identifies a key problem of democracy, given that policy should in principle be based on sound knowledge of social realities and social problems, as well as correct judgments over the best means to address those problems, by a broad public. If the public cannot be trusted to possess that depth of knowledge (because members of the public do not have direct experience of those social realities, are provided with faulty interpretations of social realities, or fall victim to deliberate efforts of misinformation), the risk is that democratic politics is taken over by experts (or populists who claim to know better), i.e. those whom Friedman calls epistocrats. Epistocracy, however, is not democracy.
By embedding this problem in a key question in democratic theory, Friedman offers the perspective of political epistemology as a means of addressing the normative and empirical problems that result from these limitations. In effect, the argument is that all knowledge of the social world – its relevant facts, its problems, and the policy means of addressing those – is political knowledge. This includes the knowledge of social epistocrats: journalists, economists, government bureaucrats, social scientists, politicians, and all others who claim to possess certain knowledge of social realities and social problems, and (potentially) the policies required to address them.
In his considerations of the problem of social reality, Alfred Schutz raises the problem of what we would today call social or political epistemology in an explicit way. To highlight three key statements developed in the essays published in Vol. I of Schutz’s Collected Papers:
The social world is experienced by the individual as opaque, as a world of objects that are not directly given to him but that are constituted by him through his acts of interpretation.
The opaqueness of the social world is due to the fact that it is constituted by the experiences of other individuals, which are inaccessible to me.
The intransparency of the social world is due to the fact that the motives and intentions of other individuals are always hidden from me.
For Friedman, there is something about modern society, whose technical and institutional complexities make impossible in providing a grand view, or in ensuring that everyone possesses an adequate understanding of the relevant facts of the social world, or the current causes and future consequences of certain forms of human behavior. Think of the recent issues with artificial intelligence (AI). The complexities of AI technology seem too daunting even for experts to grapple with. The argument often made is that the development of AI technology must be limited or contained before it is made available for widespread use. The consequence might be great societal harm. (The genie seems to already be out of the bottle on that one.) The extinction of humanity has also been mentioned as a possible consequence.
For Schutz, social reality in general is an opaque reality. (In Structures of the Life-World, Schutz and Luckmann argue how knowledge of the social world changes in a complex society, so there is an allowance made for complexity.) In other words, not only is the knowledge of epistocrats marred by problems, but so is the knowledge of those who claim ultimate mastery over the realities of the social world – social scientists – hindered by epistemic limits. Schutz, of course, does not raise this problem to conclude that social scientific knowledge is therefore impossible. Phenomenology highlights the limits of the knowledge everyday actors have of the social world. But at the same time, it affirms the adequacy of the knowledge social actors routinely rely upon to act in the social world. Implicitly, this position offers a double critique: against the claims of absolute knowledge by social science, but also of the flaw of ascribing to social actors what are in essence intellectualist definitions of knowledge, i.e., knowledge as a system of truth statements that follows neatly the premises of formal logic.
Phenomenology highlights that actors of the social world both claim adequate possession of, as well as exhibit mastery of, knowledge required to dominate their immediate lifeworld (or what Schutz calls actors’ “primary zone of relevance”). This is the case even when such knowledge is not provided in the form of logical truth statements. While a grand view of the social world is impossible for any particular social actor, specific, adequate knowledge of relevant sectors of the social world is a common fact of social reality. On this point Schutz’s interpretation aligns closely with that of pragmatists like Dewey. The social world, and the actors who make it up, are not ignorant or “knowledge-less.” Rather, their reality is also dependent on interpretations and for the most part, those interpretations and actions appear to accomplish actors’ basic efforts to find their bearings in, and engage with, others.
Drawing from Lippmann and Dewey, however, Friedman raises an important point on the political nature of knowledge of the social world, especially that that lies beyond one’s primary zone of relevance. There is a “society” “out there” which possesses certain features and is characterized by certain patterns actors presume to be true. This knowledge is not natural or naive, but political in nature. It is so because it is a mediated knowledge – mediated by the interpetations of others. This is why an epistemology regarding such knowledge – a political epistemology – is seen by Friedman as a necessary intellectual project.
But can the same be said of social scientific knowledge? In what ways is it political? What I would argue is that where the knowledge produced by social scientists becomes political, is where their approach to the knowledge of the social actors themselves is critical. Unlike Friedman’s technocratic knowledge, social scientific knowledge is not only about collecting and interpreting facts of the social world. Following Schutz, it is also about engaging with the knowledge of the social world which social actors hold and presume in principle to be true. Here, Schutzian phenomenology pushes against the intellectualism that characterizes Friedman’s definition of knowledge as systems of predicates. Phenomenology’s greatest insight is to bring to light the pre-predicative grounds of knowledge. Most knowledge, and the most vital human knowledge, does not come in the form of propositions developed through a process of reasoned judgment. Instead, it is knowledge – especially with regard to the social world – that is embodied and tacit, present but un-explicated. It is, to use Husserl’s expression, a knowledge that is sedimented across the historical layers that make up social reality and in that way transcends what lies in the head of any individual actor or knower.
It would appear that bringing to awareness relations and distributions of knowledge that are present and active in the social world, relations and distributions that are socially consequential, but not always socially acknowledged, is one of social science’s tasks. This is a view of social scientific knowledge as political knowledge. This is knowledge that is a grounded but contentious interpretation of social reality. On the one hand, social science must bring to light the knowledge that is vital to the most routine activities of actors, but remains tacit, hidden and unacknowledged. On the other hand, it is only by doing so that social science can address that aspect of the interpretive opaqueness of the social world that is not due to the complexity of the object, but due to the distortions of social reality built into the presumptions of the interpretive schemes social actors rely on to judge it. This is especially the case when those distortions are the very cause of human suffering.
From a normative perspective, this would seem to me a good way to think of the purpose of social science in democratic society. Social reality is always more than what is observed of it (an “inexhaustible” realm, as Schutz put it), and the knowledge used to interpret social reality always carries more presuppositions than are acknowledged. The last corollary to this argument is that social scientific knowledge as political knowledge means that it is knowledge that is contentious, perspectival, and transitive. It addresses structures which, in scientific naturalist terms, are real. But it is also a form knowledge that, for the reason of being contentious, perspectival, and transitive, may very often fail.