How many PhDs can name their five favourite philosophers?

Reading cavalier statements by the likes of N. D. Tyson, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking, promoted by their PR teams as the prophesies of objective truth, makes my blood boil. Well, in the first instance. Then I come to my senses and remember that there is definitely a practical need in unquestioning foot soldiers in science, people who will do their allocated job without asking big questions, and just keep refining and confirming the established bias until it's time to move on to the new paradigm. In sciences too, it takes every kind.

On that note, however, I am positively convinced, that scientists should by no means be awarded a PhD, Doctor Philosophiae, degree, unless they complete a foundation course in, at least, epistemology and prove beyond any doubt that they understand how the process of knowledge manufacturing works. If they refuse, they should graduate with a Doctor in (Specific Field) accolades.

Can social sciences contribute to the betterment of the humankind?

Based on the humankind's experience so far, it is highly doubtful that more social engineering, even of a more enlightened kind, would ever make much difference in how human societies work.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Human group dynamic inevitably produces hierarchies, warring cliques, and waste. Simply improving living conditions does not result in better human beings, simply in more comfortable and more energy-intensive environments to produce hierarchies, cliques, and waste. Like Dostoyevsky once asked to the effect of  "what do you do once everyone's fed?" Real change starts only within.

Seeng both sides: combining social and psychological approaches in understanding the human condition

From my experience, it appears that only those who have looked  into both the social and the psychological, achieve any kind of meaningful understanding of how society and humans work. When the scientist's blind spot includes an entire dimension of the human condition, all their work will amount to an exercise in futility. In (the more familiar to me) case of anthropologists, often deliberately ignoring the psychological aspects of observed practices (e.g., in  Rabinow's Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco) results in culturalist reductionism, where perhaps the most important aspect of a ritual is omitted. 

This understanding, however, is hard to win allies for. I remember Scott Lash, who himself studied both sociology and psychology, warning me that I would hardly come across academics even aware of the issue, let alone interested in any aspects or implications of it. Looking on both sides of the dark veil separating social and psychological facts, creates a transformational experience, a true Zen moment, a temporary dissolution of the object/subject separation, whose memory, however, lasts and influences all your perceptions for the rest of your lifetime. That is why, I would never be truthful, should I have to stick to only one part of the proverbial elephant. The blindfold may have been off for just a moment, but after that there's no way back. 

Ideal types: psychology vs. social sciences

All social theory is Invisible Pink Unicorns, because none of those ideal types actually exist. However, they help think about those invisible things, social facts, that often are more important than the visible and the obvious. Human psychology too can be understood in a similar way, by way of ideal types and theories (their veracity is gauged by their therapeutic effect). It's just as huge universe as the social one. However, even a better way to understand inner worlds is empirical, by directing your investigative gaze from the outside to the inside. There are many methods of doing that, definitely more surefire and empirical than many methodologies from social sciences at that. Kind of like Weberian Verstehen, only directed inwards.

Human universals and cultural differences

The challenge is to realise that human universals and cultural differences coexist, they are just two extrema of the same continuum. Anthropology focuses too much on cultural differences, hence the perennial malaise of culturalism.

How can we gain that kind of understanding? By gaining self-knowledge first, deconstructing the invisible omniscient "objective" scientific observer empirically, beyond intellectual declarations. How can you talk about others, if you really don't know your self?

By self-knowledge I mean going beyond the obvious and observable. And that takes stepping outside the conventional Cartesian mode of scientific cognition, which by our times has largely exhausted its potential in social sciences. (The Post-Modernist crisis sort of points towards that critically but offers no way out).

Relying solely on the observable and measurable in understanding inner worlds is really bad 1950s behaviourism. I call its latter-day manifestations in social sciences "crypto-positivism". We've luckily come a long way from that when talking about social facts, but it will take a bit of a revolution to acknowledge and quit it when talking about inner worlds.

"If it walks, talks and looks like a duck, don't get too excited, it can very well be a duck simulachra."  Jean Baurdillard (apocryphal) 

What is identity?

... an illusionary habit of an unawakened mind and reaffirmed by a collective belief in its reality, somewhere between the minimum group paradigm and the mirror stage..

Reproducing the hierarchy

The only advantage that ruling elite haves is their training in a misplaced sense of entitlement that they later project onto the Great Unwashed to legitimise their power.

 

If you are born into the right family, you're trained to behave like a alpha, or fake it. That alone upholds the order. And that's how we end up ruled by clueless clowns who know how to look powerful and important.

Understanding mental illness

The biggest fallacy in understanding mental illness is ascribing its causes to one factor or locus. The psychological, the physiological and the social do not exist separately, that separation is a mental abstraction. Hence, any treatment should deal with all the aspects. Talking therapy + lifestyle changes + breathing techniques to re-balance your glandular system.

Ritual as a participatory affair

Victor Turner in his Forest of Symbols (1967) suggested to interpret ritual on three levels. Firstly, the exegetical level: "how they explain it", in other words, how the "locals". The there's the operational meaning: "what we can see", the minutiae of the observable "bells and whistles" that most anthropologists record in their ethnographies. And finally, there is the positional level: "how we, the educated, explain it", i.e., how the meaning of the ritual fits into the overall structure of the society. This last privileges understanding can only be achieved by  anthropologists trained in the high art of seeing structure, agency, liminality, and such in daily events. 

Despite such a analytical finery, all the three levels remain belong to the same domain, of rationalising the visible to the naked eye. The observer remains confused as to what is actually happening with the participants. The participant observation thus remains an observation, the participation part meaning "standing nearby": just like Bakhtin's carnival, which when observed loses its meaning and becomes a mere spectator sport. Thing with rituals is that once you've "gone local", it changes your forever, so the "fourth wall" between the scientific observer and the observed object of study is broken down. The subject and the object merge and that's how the illusion of separation collapses and empirical wisdom is gained.

Quantitative mehods are a big fat lie

Quantitative methods are a lie. The devil is always in operationalisation, the stage where you decide how to turn observable world into numbers, which is always inevitably based on unselfconscious ideological choices, beliefs and affects. Besides, there's the sheer imbecility of trying to reduce the entire complexity of reality to a relation between two variables. Hence, all quant-based sciences are pseudo-sciences or simply mouthpieces of power dressed up as a science.

Social sciences and the culturalist bias

The assumption that enculturation rationally responds to/replicates social structure is itself a product of rationality and is thus only self-referential at best, and most of times very misguiding. It bypasses any awareness of psychological processes and how responses are produced and internalised. This lack of self-knowledge/reflexivity (from the famous "know thyself" maxim) is the main obstacle in the modernist scientific method, the blindfold that keeps the blind men from seeing the entire elephant.

One keep getting reminded of that beautiful Dostoevsky's question (to the effect of): "So what happens once we've fed everyone?" Is it going to be a better society once wealth is redistributed more evenly? Not that I'm against it, by the way. It's just that the effects will be mostly limited to welfare and economy, more purchase power and people engaging in ever new consumerist frenzies, inventing new hierarchies and guarding their wealth from outsiders. Same ole, same ole...

Whatever logical reasoning is brought froward to justify social policies, the underlying divide is always the pre-conscious choice of "the deserving vs. the undeserving". It rests upon denying humanity to other humans, stereotyped as an arbitrarily chosen group.  To do that, an easily recognisable attribute (race, gender, disability, religion, sexuality, employment status) is picked to turn into catchy replicable soundbites and headlines. Although superficially "rational", such catchy slogans appeal directly to pre-rational, non-verbal affects, usually something very powerful and negative like envy, fear of the Other, anger, neurotic frustration, etc. That way, such slogans provide a channel for pent-up, unprocessed affects to surface on the verbal level accessible to the "rational" mind (aka, the secondary thinking process). The link between the slogan and the affect stays very powerful, strengthened further by media exposure and confirmation bias.

In the parlance of Russian spin doctors, such couplings are called "schizo-blocks", false dilemmas cooked up with the help of focus groups and brain-storming sessions.

Cultural, post-colonial, gender, etc. Studies

Anyone can say anything as long as it's wrapped in appropriately appropriated terminology, mostly leftist, Liberal, feminist or any latest flavour of the day marketed to possible discontents to keep them on the leash. Since no evidence based on empirical data is required, anything one says is unfalsifiable, can't be proved either right, or wrong. Argument exhausts at 'I say A, you say B." Educated guess is king.

The secret of London life

In an urban cosmopolitan setting, commitment is to events, not to people. Atomised individuals busy with their Selves seek out activity partners for events that constitute each respective life. So it's not events but self-events, a strain of YouTube clips, chosen with an ever-increasing finesse, to compile into the full-feature film of one's life. It is one's self-events that one needs to lay allegiance to, in order to avoid disappointment and wasting time.

It might be right, it might be wrong in the bigger scheme of things, but it's the art d'existence in a world city.

The ultimate conspiracy theory

That people do not conspire is itself a conspiracy theory.

The compartmentalisation of science

Anthropology studies cultures without individuals. Psychology studies individuals without cultures. Sociology studies societies without cultures. Cultural Studies studies  cultures without societies. Economics studies economies without societies. Political Science studies states without societies.

Crypto-positivism and post-normal science

Anthropologist vs. native, that's the false dichotomy which will for ever keep Anthropology a colonial project. Overcoming such modernist dichotomies, however, takes a complete departure from what we have known as the scientific method knowledge production (e.g., Castaneda going shaman), which, in its turn, is impossible by way of that very method. In other words, the way we think needs to be revamped using the way of thinking we yet don't know. That's where it stops for the crypto-positivists amongst us...

Perhaps, I need to elucidate what I mean by crypto-positivism. It's the modus operandi of those who are dead-sure they are not positivists, but they actually are but just don't know it and can't help it because how on earth do examine critically your own critical thinking?

Economics...

...is a pseudo-science covered in cooked up numbers, shrouded in PowerPoint presentations and wrapped in unqualified prophesies.

Anthropology is...

...a half-art half-science that tries to account for Life and Everything, while constantly questioning itself.

Staistics is the language of power

On the limits of "rationality"

Every logical argument is by necessity reductive.