<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Two quick comments on Bill's most recent post. First, Bill states:<br><div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; ">Actually, the message says nothing about answers, because its about methods.</span></blockquote></div><div><br></div><div>Of course it is. My point was that even the illustration doesn't answer a causal question; it answers an evaluative question. To me this says, quite simply, that Bill's proposed interpretive research method is a proposal for doing normative evaluations ("how rational is/was this action?") instead of producing causal explanations ("why did this action occur?").</div><div><br></div><div>Second, Bill claims:</div><div><br></div><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; ">One of Polanyi’s most significant contributions to the understanding of social science methodology is his demonstration of the delusional character of that distinction in both the natural and the social sciences.<span> </span>The notion that explanation is "value neutral" is an instance of social scientists misunderstanding what they actually do in social science.<span> <br></span><br>Personally, I think it’s a bad idea to perpetuate this=2 0self-delusion by teaching it to grad students.<span> </span>No social science explanation is possible, much less complete, without numerous evaluations at every step in the process. Might as well do it openly.</span></blockquote></div><div><br></div><div>I reiterate my claim that there is a great deal of difference between the observation that the concepts that we work with in the sciences have value-commitments embedded in them (of course they do, neither of us deny that), and the assertion that this presents some sort of problem for the fact/value distinction. I think this latter assertion is an instance of misunderstanding what "value neutral" means when it comes to explanations. Leaning on Weber as a place to start, I have teased this argument out at somewhat greater length elsewhere (actually, one web-accessible version of it is here: <a href="http://www.jpox.eu/component/streams/view,content/cid,192/)">http://www.jpox.eu/component/streams/view,content/cid,192/)</a>, but in a nutshell: the difference between a value-claim and a explanatory claim is that a value-claim simply states a moral position and then codes the world according to it, whereas an explanatory claim takes that position and tried to use it to generate some facts about the world -- facts that observers not sharing that value-commitment could still appreciate, because they would be able to see the logic of how the world looks when viewed through that value-commitment. This is not to say that explanatory claims are "falsifiable" or any of that other Popperian nonsense; rather, it is only to make the point that there is a logical difference between stating a value-commitment and using that value-commitment to produce facts out of empirical data and observation.</div><div><br></div><div>I'd also like to tease apart two senses of the term "evaluation": normative value-commitments, and practically competent discretion. I defy anyone to locate a social-scientific (or natural-scientific!) concept that isn't "evaluative" in the first sense; in that way I think that Bill is correct, even though I disagree with the conclusions he draws from this. But from my perspective, the most relevant "numerous evaluations at every step in the process" of doing social-scientific research are issues of technical competence; what we train students to do is to be able to utilize their professional sensibilities in ways that carry them past the necessary ambiguities of real-world research problems and puzzles and data. The world is not self-interpreting; we have to make sense of it. The fact that the dominant method of sense-making in the contemporary social sciences revolves around shoving observations and instances into little discrete boxes called "variables" and then devising more and more technically sophisticated ways of testing for systematic associations between those little boxes is testimony to the conceptual poverty of our line of work. Researchers always make practical evaluations when going from one step in a research project to the next -- they have to, since methodological rules and methodical procedures are always in some way insufficient to guide actual empirical work (and this is a general feature of formal rules and procedures, not a failing of social science methodologists; Wittgenstein figured that out decades ago, but news of this seems to be taking its own sweet time to percolate through the social sciences) -- and the fact that these days many if not most most social scientists are only taught to make statistical-comparative variable-based evaluations is a travesty.</div><div><br></div><div>End of sermon :-) and end of my comments on this listserv for a while -- I have some book chapters to write!</div><div><br></div><div>PTJ</div><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>===</div><div>Patrick Thaddeus Jackson</div><div>Director, General Education Program, American University</div><div>Editor-in-Chief, Journal of International Relations and Development</div><div><a href="http://profptj.blogspot.com">http://profptj.blogspot.com</a> | <a href="http://www.kittenboo.com">http://www.kittenboo.com</a></div><div>calendar: <a href="http://ical.mac.com/onyxdr/Patrick">http://ical.mac.com/onyxdr/Patrick</a></div></div></div></div></div></div></span></div></span> </div><br></body></html>