Friday, January 12, 2018

All Science Is Politically Influenced; Social Science Is More So

Are the natural sciences as ideologically driven as the social sciences? No, but the extent that the natural sciences are politicized is understated by almost everyone, including many scientists.
Sociologists of science depict the natural sciences as heavily political. See, for instance, Bruno Latour, Science in Action, and Leviathan and the Air-Pump by Shapin and Schaffer.
However, the premise of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Karl Popper in the Logic of Scientific Discovery is fundamentally right: Natural science does engage in falsification, and their tests are relatively value free, although I do not doubt that the direction in which they go and the subjects that they study are ideologically and governmentally influenced.
The social sciences are primarily ideological. They are not science. Economists are especially narcissistic in this regard. Microeconomic theory is value free, but the rest of economics is to a large degree ideological, especially in the fields of macroeconomics, labor economics, and monetary economics.
The other social sciences are often if not mostly ideological. 
The tax exemption that universities enjoy for social science and humanities instruction should be eliminated unless the same tax exemptions are given to Republican advocacy organizations. That universities are primarily political organizations is seen in the adoption by the humanities, which should be involved in the transmission of our great Western culture, of politicized, social science approaches.
The hard sciences have better justification for public funding, but if government money is to be used for science, Republicans are advised to ensure that Democrats, who dominate universities, are not using the funds for politicized science.  One way to do this is to focus on chemistry, mathematics, molecular biology, medicine, and physics, and to limit (or at least carefully balance) funding for geology, environmental studies, and environmental biology. 

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