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Social Science and the Sources of Policy: 1951–1970
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2022
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“… [T]here is no necessary conflict among these three desires of the American social scientist: to be a scientist like physical and biological scientists, to provide useful technical services, and to be significant at the level of policy. The chapters of this symposium are intended to illustrate their compatibility.”
This statement indicates a major theme of The Policy Sciences – a volume that marked, as of 1951, the aspirations of a group of leading American social scientists for the policy applications of their disciplines. The harmony of goals that it suggests is no longer evident today.
The possible incompatibilities among the goals of pure science, applied science, and policy can be seen by examining The Policy Sciences in two decades' perspective. They are of three major kinds:
1. To provide intelligent advice on practical problems, the social science disciplines need to include systematic valuative discourse in a way that natural science does not.
2. Applied social science (like applied science generally) differs from pure natural science in stressing valuative dependent variables that may not be closely related to the conceptual schemes of pure science, and independent variables related to alternative choices open to the actor.
3. Different roles and channels of influence are appropriate for pure and applied science; and for applied social science in democratic regimes, participation and consent on the part of those influenced are of vital significance.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1970
Footnotes
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Paper prepared for Roundtable on “The Policy Science, in Retrospect and Prospect,” at meeting of the American Political Science Association, Los Angeles, September, 1970.
References
1 Hilgard, Ernest R., in Lerner, Daniel and Lasswell, Harold D., eds., The Policy Sciences (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1951), p. 43.Google Scholar
2 Ibid., ix; see also Hilgard, 43. This and subsequent references to The Policy Sciences will be given simply by listing the author's name and the page.
3 George V. Wolfe wrote in a review, “Not one of the contributors … explicitly deals with the crucial question of any ‘policy sciences,’ … that is, with the problem of values.” See Western Political Quarterly. 5 #2 (June, 1952), 320.
4 Especially Chs. 2–5, 7–12.
5 Whitaker, Ch. 15.
6 Merton and Lerner, 294.
7 Merton, 292.
8 Lasswell, 5; Merton, 302.
9 These categories are distinguished in Easton, David, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley, 1965), Chs. 11–13.Google Scholar See also Etzkowltz, Henry, “Institution Formation Sociology,” Am. Sociologist, 5 #2 (May, 1970), 120–124.Google Scholar
10 Lasswell, 3.
11 Lasswell, 106, does contemplate “conditions under which the United States will undertake to organize the world by conquest.”
12 Lerner, 285ff. The utility of sociology to business has also been documented in Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Sewell, William H., and Wilensky, Harold L., eds., The Uses of Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1967).Google Scholar
13 See Merton, 298–300. Whether there should also be consultation of those affected by the policies formed is a question we shall consider below.
14 Merton, 300–301.
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29 The concern of political science with matters of valuation was viewed by one author of The Policy Sciences as separating it from the natural-science model: Hilgard, 40.
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35 An effort in this direction by a natural scientist, which unfortunately lacks the organized support of an academic discipline, is Feinberg, Gerald, The Prometheus Project (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968).Google Scholar The political situation of natural scientists, as affected by the Oppenheimer case, is discussed in Feld, Bernard T., “Only on Tap,” The Progressive, 34 #5 (May, 1970), 44–46.Google Scholar
36 This twofold distinction is made, for example, in Lazarsfeld, Sewell, and Wilensky, eds., op. cit., pp. xxiv–xxvi.
37 See Silvert, Kalman H., “American Academic Ethics and Social Research Abroad,” in Horowitz, Irving L., ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1967), pp. 89–90.Google Scholar See also Merton, 303–306.
38 A classical statement of this problem was given in Robbins, Lionel, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London: Macmillan, 1937), pp. 140–141.Google Scholar See also Arrow, Kenneth J. and Scitovsky, Tibor, eds., Readings in Welfare Economics (Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1969).Google Scholar
39 M. Mead, 75. But terms of this sort relate to action in the same way as the “solubility” of chemical substances.
40 Variables “accessible to control” are mentioned in Gouldner, Alvin W., “Theoretical Requirements of the Applied Sciences,” Am. Sociol. Rev., 22 #1 (February, 1957), esp. 96–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A similar distinction is made in Glen G. Cain and Harold W. Watts, “Problems in Making Policy Inferences from the Coleman Report,” ibid., 35 #2 (April, 1970), 230; but James S. Coleman argues in reply that interrelation of variables requires inclusion of non-manipulable variables, in “Reply to Cain and Watts,” ibid., 244.
41 Lazarsfeld and Barton, 156. Predictions of inevitable change have of course been coupled with the Marxist doctrine of midwifery, and Lasswell (11–12) takes a similar approach to “the world revolution of our time.” The ethical logic of this view is criticized in Popper, Karl R., The Open Society and its Enemies (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), vol. 2, p. 205.Google Scholar See also Duncan, Otis Dudley, “Social Forecasting: The State of the Art,” The Public Interest, 17 (Fall, 1969), 88–118.Google Scholar
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47 Examples of changing feasibility are the possible introduction of new issues into a party system after the shock of depression or defeat in war; or the possibility of political change after the retirement of a major leader, or at the time of a party reorientation. A physical analogue is the presence of “seedable” clouds.
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54 The contingent character of forecasts is noted by Merton, 304; the incompleteness of the engineering analogy in Schultze, op. cit., p. 60.
55 Katona, 223ff.; Likert, 239; Hilgard, 23; Lasswell, 13.
56 See Braybrooke, David, Three Tests for Democracy: Personal Rights, Human Welfare, Collective Preference (New York: Random House, 1968).Google Scholar
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59 Lasswell, 10, 14.
60 See Hilgard, 41–42; Merton, 300; Behavioral and Social Sciences Committee of the National Academy of Sciences and the Social Science Research Council, The Behavioral and Social Sciences: Outlook and Needs (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969)Google Scholar, chs. 12, 13.
61 On the desirability of outside analysis as a supplement to government in-house analysis, see Schultze, op. cit., pp. 91–92. On the “fusion of the roles of the acting and knowing subject,” see Kecskemeti, Paul, “The Policy Sciences: Aspiration and Outlook,” World Politics, 4 #4 (July, 1952), 535 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on an “enlightenment model” that sees the sociologist as “part of the social process,” see Janowitz, Morris, “Sociological Models and Social Policy,” Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphil., 55 #3 (August, 1969), 311.Google Scholar
62 See Riecken, Henry W., “Social Sciences and Social Problems,” Social Science Information, 8 #1 (February, 1969), 114–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
63 See Smith, Bruce L. R., The RAND Corporation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1966).CrossRefGoogle Scholar An interdisciplinary study recently carried out at RAND, aimed at effective self-government in the Philippines, is Averch, H. A., Denton, F. H., and Koehler, J. E., A Crisis of Ambiguity: Political and Economic Development in the Philippines (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
64 See Shils, Edward A., “Social Inquiry and the Autonomy of the Individual,” in Lerner, Daniel, ed., The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences (New York: Meridian Books, 1959).Google Scholar
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66 Horowitz, ed., op. cit.; Rainwater, Lee and Yancey, William L., The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Shipler, David K., “City Held Unable to Halt Housing Decay by Subsidy,” New York Times, Feb. 28, 1970, pp. 1, 14.Google Scholar
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