| Title | : | Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior (A Bradford Book) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0262134691 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780262134699 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 144 |
| Publication | : | First published September 1, 2006 |
Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior (A Bradford Book) Reviews
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During the period known as The Dark Ages, the progress of Western civilization virtually stopped. The knowledge gained by scholars of the classical age was lost and for nearly 600 years "there were no significant breakthroughs in art, science, philosophy, or literature". For those six centuries, life was governed by superstition and fear fueled by ignorance. In the introduction to this book, philosopher Lee C. McIntyre raises the questions of what it would feel like to live in a "dark age" and whether we would even realize that we were living in a dark age. The answer, he suggests, is that it would feel just like our lives do today, because we are living in a dark age whether most of us know it or not.
The re-discovery of the writings of Aristotle and other Classical thinkers in the Renaissance sparked the end of the dark ages in the humanities. Progress in the natural sciences, McIntyre points out, met violent opposition from the Catholic Church but was triumphant a few centuries later, although anti-evolutionists and global warming denialists continue to wage their battle against the natural sciences. The social sciences, however, still have not emerged at all from the Dark Ages in his view.
The result of this continuing Dark Age of the social sciences is that we are as ignorant today of the causes of human behavior as people centuries ago were of the causes of such natural phenomena as disease, famine, and eclipses. We have progressed no further in our understanding of what causes war, crime, and poverty — and of how to end them — than had our ancestors. What we need, McIntyre says, is another scientific revolution. We need the courage to apply a more rigorous methodology to the study of human behavior and to go where the empirical evidence leads us, even if it threatens our cherished beliefs about human autonomy, race, class, and gender.
McIntyre lists the most common objections to the social sciences as true science. He then quite effectively exposes each as false. Academic philosophers might find both his list of objections and his refutations too cursory but this book is intended for a lay audience and he has offered a fuller version of these arguments in his earlier published work, including his academic book Laws and Explanation in the Social Sciences (Westview Press, 1996).
A major thrust of McIntyre's argument is that the physical sciences once had to overcome the same kinds of methodological and societal barriers that face the social sciences today. Both physics and astronomy had to free themselves of a disciplinary mind-set that eschewed empirical testing and sought truth through sheer intellectual speculation. The authority of Aristotle, Scripture, and Church doctrine blocked the way towards genuine advances. McIntyre devotes half a chapter to an account of Galileo’s battle for the heliocentric model of the universe as an illustration of how the natural sciences prevailed over the kinds of biases and methodological weaknesses that still plague the social sciences today. McIntyre argues that the social sciences can achieve the same kind of triumph if social scientist will only show the courage and commitment to scientific method that Galileo did.
In McIntyre's view, what is missing in today's social sciences is the scientific attitude -- the willingness to accept what the evidence shows even if it clashes with precious religious or political ideologies. Ideally, social scientists should have "a propensity for being surprised by what they find and the courage to investigate where they think the results might tell them something they don't really want to know." As his exemplar of such courage, he cites criminologist Gary Kleck's work on gun control. "Kleck's work is inspiring," he writes. "Here's a liberal Democrat who's not bringing politics into the work. He's convinced that this is an empirical field, that he should gather data without knowing in advance how it's going to turn out, and he ends up with some startling findings."
Related to this lack of courage, he asserts, is the failure of the social sciences to adopt the self-critical empiricist methodology that has propelled the physical and biological sciences to greatness. He recounts the example of the “cold fusion” fiasco of 1989 as an example of how the validity of scientific knowledge is preserved by the constant vigilance of researchers who seek the empirical falsification of proposed hypotheses. Unfortunately, he asserts, such attempts at falsification are rarely made in the social sciences.
While I agree with the principles he asserts, I find that like most philosophers of science he is lacking in knowledge or understanding of the real practical workings of the social sciences. Kleck's work, for instance, may diverge from his prior beliefs (neither McIntyre nor I know what his prior beliefs were) but his findings are consistent with widely held and well financed ideology. It is true that Kleck's work has been attacked by many who are ideologically opposed to his findings but it has also been criticized for its grave methodological weaknesses and for promoting conclusions that run contrary to evidence from methodologically superior sources. McIntyre shows a similar unfamiliarity with the issues or the evidence when he discusses Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, another book attacked on ideological grounds but also quite validly condemned for bad science behind many of its assertions. For instance, Kleck's estimate of the number of times each year that someone shoots a criminal in self defense exceeds the total number of gunshot injuries annually. Both Kleck's work and, even moreso, The Bell Curve would have served better as examples of the ideologically driven social science McIntyre rightly condemns.
He is even further off-base in asserting that falsification is a rarely used approach in the social sciences. Certainly, if your idea of the social sciences includes the ilk of Sigmund Freud, Milton Friedman, then you are talking about social theories without science of any sort. There are, however, many social and behavioral scientists who do apply the classical method of testing hypotheses. Their work fills numerous scientific journals. And those journals are committed to the same critical approach that characterized the physical sciences in the "cold fusion" affair. I don't suggest that the social sciences have achieved that ideal state McIntyre describes, only that they are not so very far from it as he asserts.
Despite his strong commitment to ideology-free science, McIntyre makes his own ideological biases manifest when he wonders how a rational person can “believe in a concept so patently implausible as God”. I can't help but wonder whether he would be willing to set aside his prior opinions in examining any issue regarding religion -- he certainly has not done so in writing this book.
Regardless of these failings and his polemic style, McIntyre's book offers an optimistic view with some highly practical suggestions for applying scientific rigor to the understanding of some of the most fundamental problems facing us today. As he says in closing, "A science of human behavior can lead the way out of the current mess of unreason and tragedy that hangs over human affairs. The application of our highest form of reason, science, to the study of our social problems is our best hope for salvation. Even in a dark age, our reason can see us through. Our future may well be brighter that we have imagined it, for scientific inquiry is well equipped to answer the questions that have been put by human misery. The world awaits our response." -
An easy to read, socially relevant version of E.O. Wilson's 'Consilience', making the cases for the the social sciences need to be largely transformed more towards a serious 'harder' science, separating themselves from ideologies.
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absolutely ridiculous looney tunes
the guy is a fourth-rate philosopher who thinks ALL the soft sciences will one day magically be as solid as the hard sciences.
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Naturally Sam Harris gives it a glowing review, and it's strange how the same group of half a dozen skeptics all fawn over each others books, like it was some Scientology book review glee club.
"At a time when many social scientists have allowed themselves to be cowed by political and religious ideology, Dark Ages reminds us that we have a moral and intellectual obligation to seek the fullest possible understanding of the roots of human behavior. McIntyre has written a beautiful and timely ode to scientific rationality."
Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation
Gag me with a spoon!
Sam's infamous for his ridiculous blather, and he's rightly got tens of thousands of people with pitchforks after his seemingly endless dingbat pronouncements.
but 5 out of 4 scientists agree with Sam, especially if they are left-leaning libertarians who tell everyone they should gobble LSD and meditate with the Buddha...
Honestly, think about it for a whole 15 seconds, do you think psychology will be a Hard Science like Physics one day?
Personality Theory and Human Behavior
where you can predict it as easily as Newton's Laws?
It's puerile bullshit....
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Amazone
Very naive and disappointing, nothing new
The arguments for and against a science of human of behaviour are as old as the enlightenment. Auguste Comte was perhaps the first and most famous of the social scientists, whose early 19th Century theories of a social physics were remarkably similar to McIntyre's.
Despite this and a huge literature since, McIntyre ploughs on anyway, with writing that insinuates he has discovered this problem all by himself.
There are thousands of quantitative social scientists out there doing their best to apply rigorous scientific methods in the hope of finding general causal laws of human behaviour.
Anything approaching a general law is almost by definition a statement of the obvious. The problem is, of course, that humans do have agency, and they are complex.
These realities are inadvertently acknowledged by McIntyre when he urges us to learn from our mistakes and make the choice to pursue a science of human behaviour!!
His cherry picking of some pretty questionable social science (Kleck) and the reliability of some experimental research which has been reliably replicated - under experimental conditions, do nothing to convince the skeptical social scientist that McIntyre has stumbled upon any revelations at all.
It should also be remembered that one of the most potent critiques of Comte's project was that, even if it were possible, we should be pursuing any science of human behaviour that allows anyone to 'control' human behaviour.
This was also one of the nasty by-products of Herbert Spencer's project. Power and ideology count and context counts.
Peter Walters
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Thesis built atop a fallacious belief
It irritates me to no end when I read statements such as "During the Dark Ages, the progress of Western civilization virtually stopped. The knowledge gained by the scholars of the classical age was lost; for nearly 600 years, life was governed by superstitions and fears field by ignorance.", which appears in the cover blurb.
Yet, Lee McIntyre is a fellow in the history of science?
Yet he doesn't know that there were no Dark Ages, that that was just a phrase promulgated by Protestants attempting to denigrate anything done by the Catholic Church prior to the Reformation? Historians today do not look at the period as "dark" or as having little or no progress.
During that period historians document a sea of advances such as the rise of the Scholastics and the university system, the invention of eyeglasses, the clock, crop rotation, the horse shoe, the horse collar, to say nothing of the foundational aspects of the scientific method, physics, chemistry, and science in general.
Obviously, this seriously hampers taking the rest of the thesis presented by McIntyre seriously. If he can't get basic history right then perhaps his thesis is incorrect to boot.
The entire book is riddled with inaccuracies as to how science and reasoned thought progressed through the period from 400AD to 1400AD.
He seems, like many, to latch onto Galileo as if there was no science before him and yet if science was so disliked by the Church where is the evidence?
How do you explain the efforts of the various learned scholars at the various universities? The very ones that were proving Aristotle wrong and that were paving the way forward for science.
The thesis would have been stronger had he not lamely reached back into his flawed understanding of history but rather focused on the obvious and true issues some today have with science and the scientific method.
He should have focused on the obscurant and obstinate attempts to bastardize science today so as to defend his argument and drive an agenda for at least the attempt to see if a science of behaviour is even possible.
Thus, I have no qualms with his wondering if we can have a science of human behaviour, regardless of how much I believe such a thing is impossible.
It is best to explore new avenues. Even failures lead to interesting discoveries and we must never shut off an avenue of research.
Yet the entire book reads as if it was written as wishful thinking backed up by what he remembers of high school history and high school science. Science is predicated on being able to specify a hypothesis based on observable results and then have others verify your results and thus your hypothesis.
However, the very nature of social science is that the observer is intractably intertwined with the experiment, something true science works hard to utterly avoid. So, how do you ensure you remove the observer's impact from the behavioural study?
How can results based on the effectively random behaviour and self-interested performance of individuals and groups be properly defined so as to be reproducible, to say nothing of being able to create valid hypotheses from the observations?
And how does one separate out personality strengths wherein one or more individuals can lead an entire group astray courtesy of their charisma or other attributes while another group, without a similar charismatic leader, would not be led astray?
McIntyre touches upon this but he never really attempts to determine what is, in effect, a larger version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle but applied to individuals and groups of individuals. I have little doubt generalizations may be possible, as they have been for decades, but to actually presume that deep science can be applied via the scientific method without having the observers biases and tests totally botch the experiment itself is rather questionable.
A science of human behaviour requires a deeper examination of the the knowns and unknowns so as to properly define the necessary skepticism so that any results can be properly examined scientifically.
Without a deep rooted skepticism the attempt at a new science will fail and become nothing more than a series of observational vignettes, utterly useless in a true scientific sense.
It's a pity that McIntyre had to litter his dissertation with flawed history, but then the entire book probably would have been about 20 pages long and more suitable to publication at a conference or in a journal than as a book.
Eugen -
"{W}e have more to fear from ignorance than from knowledge, no matter how unsettling the results of our inquiry may be." - Lee McIntyre
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McIntyre calls for a revolution in the social sciences - it should be more like the physical sciences, with religious and political biases put aside for dispassionate research to discover the true answers to why people behave the way they do. An important argument, but McIntyre resorts to practically calling those who disagree names: "Are they afraid that a science of human behavior would somehow dehumanize us, and are they therefore motivated to find an argument against it?" Nyah, nyah, nyah. He is also somewhat repetitive. Despite these reservations, his case is persuasive, and the book is worth a read by anyone interested in the topic or working in the field of the social sciences.
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My professor wrote this book and had us read it for class. He basically says that if we could find a philosophy of human nature then we could stop things like war and rape because we could understand them
This was a fun read because I argued with him in the margins of the book ^_^ -
While he's right that we ought to use a scientific approach, he's a bit elitist about it, and completely discounts the humanities as a viable set of disciplines entirely.
