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NotNutsReally -> RE: BDSM & the Ph.D. AHHHHHHHHH (12/23/2007 5:48:21 PM)
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quote:
I believe that many of us that go for advanced degrees do so to contribute to the larger knowledge base. Part of attaining any advanced degree requires a knowledge of the literature in your chosen field. Who has contributed what and how was this accomplished? Paradigm shifts take years to evolve and are necessarily fueled by the accumulated contributions of many. For example, many advances in medicine throughout history have been rooted in the work of scientists doing basic research, not the clinicians that administer them. Not only the social sciences, but msot research endeavors are funded by government or state agencies. Also, the results from experiments in the natural sciences also have implications for social policy. For example, for the last 7 years I have studied how drugs of abuse (morphine) effect the progression of AIDS in the brain. There are many things to be learned from this line of inquiry....long-term effects of morphine on a body that is altered by a disease state, how the brain deals with viral invasion, etc. The social policy imlications are "should we as a society provide AIDS treatment drugs, which cost many thousands of dollars per person annually, to addicts that do not receive treatment if we find that continued use of such drugs exascerbates the course of the disease, and increses the costs of treatment of these patients?" Of course that is a generalization, I just used it to put forth a point. Politics exists in the academic power structure, in the decisions made regarding grant funding, etc. They're unavoidable.
I think you are mistaken here. Firstly the paradigm shift material is rooted largely in Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution. In that book he is dealing with the natural sciences (especially evolutionary biology if I remember right). Not to say that the same structures don't apply to the social sciences they do. However in the context of your PhoenixRed you clearly accept the positivist notion of science, that is to say a contently progressing and growing body of knowledge. Putting the philosophy of epistemology aside for a moment, then positivism works just fine because what Aristotle observed hasn't changed from what Newton observed which hasn't changed from what Einstein observed, which hasn't changed from what you are observing. Unfortunately the social science don't have that kind of stability, body of knowledge changes on both ends of the spectrum. Both the units of observation change (society) and the interpretations of the behavior of the unit of observation change depending on the cultural context of the observer. Therefor, since the social sciences suffer from change in both the observed and the observer I find it difficult to accept the positivist notion of a continually growing body of knowledge that leads us to a greater understanding of the social world.
As far as the state is concerned...
Of course the government funds all sorts of scientific endeavors. But there is something unnerving about the social science endeavor IF we accept positivism. The reason we want to increase our knowledge of the natural world is so that we can have greater control over our environment. The natural scientists achieve this by creating predictive theories. Theories are acceptable when they accurately predict the behavior of the subject under study, be them planets, plants or particles. If we apply the same logic to the social sciences this pursuit becomes rather unsettling. For real world consequences of state funded social science research look up the history of Modernization Theory.
P.S. you make some other good points but I thought this one was most stimulating.
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