From Marxism through ‘the New Criticism’ to Academic Nonsense 7 (Column 184)

With God’s help

Well, now we have reached the end of the road. What does this whole journey, with its findings, mean for the humanities and social sciences in general? Are the cases we have seen merely weeds, esoteric wild growths? First of all—certainly yes. But as I said, one cannot ignore the fact that these growths sprout specifically in those very flowerbeds. In this column I want to clarify more fully what I mean by my recurring claims against the humanities and social sciences. Because of limited space and the breadth of the topic, I will have to speak in generalizations, but since in any case our concern here is with a picture painted in broad brushstrokes, there is nothing wrong with that. Of course there are always exceptional cases, and still the big picture has value, and I think what I will sketch here is not very far from the truth.

The experiment’s conclusions were too limited

Let us begin from the point of view of the three architects of the experiment. In previous columns we saw that the editors of the journals whose shame was laid bare were concerned mainly with the falsification of the authors’ names. The three architects of the experiment said about this, quite rightly, that the editors’ protests only strengthen the sense that something is deeply problematic. After all, whether the author appeared under his real name or not, the problem with the filtering mechanisms—and therefore with the content itself—remains. But a closer look at what those three say reveals that their criticisms too are worryingly narrow. They speak about the enlistment of research in the service of certain agendas and about the fashionable grievance that rules there. But these are only symptoms. There is something much broader and more fundamental here: the absence of standards, which makes everything possible. My claim is that these wild phenomena are an extreme expression of a broader and more fundamental problem.

For example, these fellows say (in that interview in Calcalist):

Grievance studies have corrupted the production of knowledge in their fields of research. Flawed research practices are dripping heavily into other areas such as education, social work, media, psychology, and sociology, and they may continue to spread, undermining the legitimacy and reputation of universities and intensifying the culture war.

They complain mainly that everything centers on grievance, and that grievance has become the only criterion, and that this corrupts research practices in many fields and damages the reputation of universities. But the more fundamental problem is that agenda replaces standards of quality, and for that purpose it makes no difference whether the agenda is grievance or not. If one operates to promote agendas, then even when one is not aggrieved—that is, even when one is ostensibly doing worthy work—there are no standards for academic quality. My claim is that the fundamental problem is not grievance and the specific agenda that is currently considered politically proper, but the very involvement of an agenda, whatever it may be. Even if the criterion were the author’s happiness and his pointing to the goodness and wondrousness of the world, we would face exactly the same problem.

On research and public commentary

In previous columns I discussed the distinction between research and public commentary, and I wrote that in the postmodern era, and in the crazy fields at the core of the nonsense we described, the difference between these two long ago sank into oblivion. The purpose of research in these wings of the academy is mainly the promotion of values and agendas, not the description and explanation of reality. In this connection it is worth noting that, speaking innocently, our three mischievous friends reveal that they too do not challenge this intellectual infrastructure in those fields. They complain that:

…academic research, which purported to be the place where people debate human rights and negotiate over the society we want to be, has become a narrow-minded and conformist place in which there is room only for very particular opinions.

Is academic research really supposed to be ‘the place where people debate human rights and negotiate over the society we want to be’? Absolutely not. For that there is public commentary and politics. Academic research is supposed to deal with facts, not values and agendas, however good they may be. It is supposed to describe and explain, not to express positions of any kind. Debate over values is not supposed to be conducted in academia, and when that begins to happen it is a tried-and-true recipe for corruption (a daily occurrence here). The problem is not narrow-mindedness but the very fact that horizons are at all relevant in research and academic writing. Hence the problem is not only the result—namely the corruption and the biases that follow—but the very engagement with values and ideologies itself.

On justiciability: the road to political correctness

Expressing a position on values or ideology is not a justiciable claim. How am I supposed to judge a person who supports the value of equality, or opposes it? Whether I agree with that or not, that claim is not justiciable. As a reviewer, am I supposed to reject the article, even if it is well written, because I have a right-wing ideology? If I have a left-wing ideology, should I accept it even if it is poor? How is one supposed to judge academically an article that argues for some value or ideology? What are supposed to be the criteria for such a judgment? An academic article can define and describe what equality is and examine and explain its implications, or contrast it with a conception of freedom (economic liberalism) and examine the consequences of each such conception. It can deal with the doctrines of various thinkers and with their assumptions. It can also criticize them, but not because they are immoral or do not fit an agenda. The judgment and decision as to what is preferable it must leave to the readers. That does not lie within the academic domain, and it must not be there.

The fact that ideological and evaluative positions are expressed in these fields seems self-evident even to the three critics, as it does to many others. What troubles them is only what those positions are and whether there is diversity among the positions expressed there. What troubles them is the takeover by the ideology of grievance and the narrowness of outlook in a place where several ideologies are supposed to confront one another. But, as noted, if you accept that an academic article may express ideological positions, I do not see how one can object to judging the article according to value conceptions (for example, that those who advocate grievance will accept only grievance articles). And if academic research is a tool for promoting ideological and political agendas, it is hardly surprising that journals and editors also use their platforms for that same purpose. So what is all the outrage about?!

Moreover, it is precisely the academic pretension that creates the problem here. After all, there can be no academic platform without some standards and criteria. And if the content is evaluative, then naturally the standards too will deal with values. From there the road is short to the ‘right’ values that justify publication and to values that do not. The smuggling of agendas into academic research—which, as noted, the three critics themselves also share—necessarily brings political correctness upon us, that is, a situation in which political correctness is the criterion that replaces academic quality.

Against this background it is worth noting that the ‘research’ pieces of nonsense described in the previous columns, beyond being nonsense and beyond pointing only in the politically correct direction, are all saturated with value judgments. Even if they were not nonsense, and even if they argued for positions that were not politically correct, they still should have no place in an academic journal. An academic article that calls for binding a population of privileged students in chains in classrooms in order to put them through a corrective experience suffers from a grave flaw—but not only because of the content of its infantile call (which was where their criticism focused), but mainly because of the very fact that it calls for something. An academic article is not supposed to express its opinion about what ought to be done with this or that population. Nor is it supposed to express a position on the question whether some act constitutes sexual harassment or not. At most it can describe that there is a population that feels harassed by one act or another, or describe the consequences of such an act (for those are facts, not opinions). Defining it as sexual harassment is a value claim. Academic research can ask which acts would prevent this and what their consequences would be, since those are factual questions. Whether to do it or not is not the researcher’s concern.

It seems to me that this is an expression of the penetration of the postmodern-deconstructionist cast of mind into the core of research in the normal domains of the social sciences and humanities. But note that here we are no longer speaking only about the esoteric wild weeds described in the previous columns (the ‘critical’ fields). Therefore I claim that these wild phenomena are an expression of problematic features that exist in broad parts of these fields and not only in the bizarre provinces. The nonsense phenomenon merely brings to the surface real and essential problems that exist there in a broader and more fundamental way. In a place where there are no clear standards such as those in the natural sciences, the move toward evaluative criteria is almost inevitable, until the matter becomes such a basic conception that it is no longer even legitimate to argue about it. I again refer readers to my article on Academic Research and the Prohibition on Physical Contact, where you will see that this conception is found among researchers who belong entirely to the normal mainstream and not only in the bizarre fringes. It is also worth seeing the responses to my article that were published in the following issue of the Shabbat supplement, almost all of which lined up behind the approach that mixes personal positions with impartial research and sees the study of Jewish thought as an existential value for the student, rather than mere information or skill (that was the main focus of the polemic there). Note that the discussion there has no connection to current affairs or to political correctness, but only to the very distinction between research and agenda.

Indeed, the problem of failing to separate positions from facts can be seen in essays and articles in the humanities and social sciences that have nothing at all to do with grievance studies and the ‘critical’ fields, and also nothing to do with political correctness. Entirely normal articles in fields such as Jewish thought, law, education, psychology, and onward into other areas of the humanities and social sciences, also suffer from the problems exposed here, except that there they are harder to notice. Sometimes claims are raised against them of agenda-driven bias, but as I said, in my eyes that is not the main problem. The problem is not the bias, but that they are not supposed to deal with agendas at all, regardless of whether those agendas are acceptable or not, and whether there is balance or the articles are biased.

On non-justiciable facts: back to ‘nonsense studies’

It is important for me to emphasize that I write all this as someone who does not regard values as mere conventions. I am not a pluralist, and in my view there definitely are correct values and values that are not. Moreover, I also think that there are articles that advocate values and ideologies and are of excellent quality (to my taste). My claim is not that an article that advocates some ideology or value is necessarily of poor quality. What I am arguing against here is its classification as an academic or scientific article. Such inquiry, however good, true, and important it may be, belongs categorically to public commentary or to original philosophical writing, not to academic research in the humanities and social sciences. Therefore it is important to distinguish between the claim that values have validity, or the claim that an article that expresses an evaluative position is of high quality, and the claim that such engagement is justiciable and that this quality is academic. The use of the authority of professional expertise to advance ideological claims—that is precisely the nonsense I am talking about, even if excellent arguments are made for the point.

In many cases these claims are also given a factual grounding, which is itself a fallacy (the naturalistic one). The professional authority of the expert blurs the fact that he is stepping beyond the bounds of his expertise, and in many cases he himself is not aware of it. Experts in these fields make evaluative claims under a professional cloak without batting an eyelid. Attitudes toward homosexuality are an excellent example of this. In column 16 I pointed out that the determination whether it is a disease or not is a purely evaluative determination, and this does not prevent organizations of physicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists from proclaiming far and wide that this is a professional determination, and even from calling for the dismissal and revocation of the license of anyone who does not share that evaluative conception.

As an example, it is worth looking at my debate on this subject with Yoram Yovel, which was already mentioned in previous columns (see columns 25–26), where in his response to my remarks he himself admits it. Note that this is the field of psychiatry, which is very far from the paradigmatic nonsense fields (it contains elements that really are part of the natural sciences). He himself admitted that he had presented a value as a fact, and even added in justification that psychiatry is saturated with values and cannot be detached from them. Well, awareness of the matter and public acknowledgment of it are already a step in the right direction. Incidentally, as I wrote there, in my opinion he is very mistaken about this, and in principle it is entirely possible to build a neutral psychiatry.

Interim summary

The mixing of values and non-justiciable claims with justiciable factual claims is the root of the evil in these fields. And the scientific pretension that accompanies such blatantly non-scientific statements only makes it worse. This is part of what causes us to slide from a reasonable engagement with questions of society and spirit directly into the realms of postmodern nonsense. If one does not insist on proper justiciability and mixes facts with values and ideologies, there is almost no way to avoid that slide. Science requires criteria, and the natural criterion for judging value claims and non-justiciable factual claims is an evaluative criterion, which immediately leads to some kind of political correctness. And again, even if the direction of political correctness in some given case happens to find favor with me, it is still a problem. Evaluative ‘correctness,’ even if it exists (and, as noted, in my view it does), is not scientific, and it is not justiciable either.

The wild weeds described in previous columns belong to esoteric districts created at the final stage of the process described in the first columns as the final leap into the postmodern vacuum: the emptying out of substance and meaning. But as I have already remarked, most work in the humanities and social sciences is not like that. There is substance there and there is meaning, and sometimes there is also intellectual level. Even so, I claim that in a very large majority of cases this is non-scientific material, and in many cases it does not belong to the academic realm either (including that which is not scientific).

What leads researchers to mix worldviews and evaluative conceptions into the content of their studies and articles? Because the factual infrastructure and the ability to produce a general scientific theory in these fields are extremely thin. Here I come to the second side of my criticism of these fields: their non-scientific nature. The difference between the academic and the scientific—that is, between justiciability and falsifiability—is the basis for the discussion of the scientific status of the social sciences and humanities, and for the parallel discussion of their academic status. Here lies the core of my criticism of these fields, and I now have an opportunity to broaden the discussion somewhat on this matter (although it is not directly connected to this series), and to show what leads to the mixture described here between values and facts.

Justiciability and falsifiability

I have already distinguished in the past between sentences and claims. Aristotle held that claims are sentences that are judged in terms of truth or falsehood (that is, sentences that assert something). Usually, the judgment is made by comparing the content of the claim with the state of affairs in the world that it describes, that is, observation. Even so, it is important to understand that there are factual claims that are not justiciable and are also not falsifiable, such as the existence of God. This is a factual claim (because it says something about the world), and yet one cannot carry out the comparison in order to examine whether it is true or false. Therefore it is a non-justiciable claim. Even simple and ordinary claims can be like this. Thus David Hume showed that the principle of causality, which states that every event has a cause, cannot be confirmed observationally.

And what about moral and ideological claims? They too are not justiciable. These are not factual claims at all in the ordinary sense, and therefore we have nothing against which to compare them in order to reach a conclusion as to whether they are correct or not. I have already explained that I do not intend here to argue against the validity of values. I definitely advocate objective morality (in principle; there are questions for which there is no single correct answer), and even moral realism. Moreover, I have explained here that moral perception is based on a kind of observation, with the ‘eyes of the mind.’ Even so, it is still not correct to say that a moral claim is justiciable or scientific. The reason, as I explained in column 177 (and see also columns 155–160, which defined philosophy), is that observation with the ‘eyes of the mind’ is not scientific, and it is impossible to discuss it with scientific tools, and therefore it is not justiciable.[1] In the columns on philosophy I explained that this is precisely the definition of philosophy: the analysis and clarification of observations with the ‘eyes of the mind,’ as distinct from empirical science, both the natural sciences and the social sciences (and below I shall argue that in a certain sense the humanities as well).

Between justiciability and falsifiability: what is science

I will now take one more step and present the difference between a justiciable claim and a claim that is empirically falsifiable. These are not synonymous terms. A specific factual claim is justiciable. An analysis of a specific case is also justiciable, since it deals with facts and they can be examined to see whether the description is true or not. But the conclusions of such an analysis are usually less justiciable, and they are a matter for common sense (whether the analysis is sensible or not). Falsifiability, however, is something much broader than justiciability, and it requires that there be a generalization in the background.

In most cases a fact is not scientifically interesting. Collecting facts that we have observed is storage, not scientific research. Scientific research also includes analysis and ultimately generalization. Generalization is the formulation of a law of nature, that is, a law that describes a pattern of behavior regarding a large set of cases or objects. Generalization at a higher level does this within a theoretical framework. A theoretical framework includes theoretical entities (which we do not know directly), such as a force field, force, potential, and even elementary particles, and principles and relations that exist among them. From this framework one can derive the cases from which we originally set out and from which we derived it, as well as predictions for future cases.

A generalization cannot be examined in the way one examines a fact, because it is not accessible to direct observation. A simple generalization is not accessible to direct observation because it concerns too large a number of facts, and it is impossible to observe all of them. A theoretical generalization is not accessible to direct observation also because it concerns theoretical entities that cannot be observed. Therefore scientific thought adopted another criterion in place of justiciability, namely corroboration and falsifiability.[2] A generalization or theory has certain predictions, and we turn to experiment in order to see whether they are corroborated (in which case this corroborates the theory) or not (in which case it refutes it). This is the substitute for justiciability in the scientific context. It should be understood that this is of course weaker than the criterion of justiciability, since there we confirm directly the fact under discussion. But, as noted, that is not scientifically interesting, because science tries to arrive at descriptions of general laws. Mere documentation of facts is not science in the full sense. Therefore scientific status is determined not by justiciability but by falsifiability and corroboration, that is, by the existence of predictions. A scientific theory is a generalization of observed facts into a law or theory that enables us to predict future events and behaviors. Without that there is no science.

It is important to understand that this is only a threshold requirement. The theory that if one drives a nail into a shoe it becomes stronger is, of course, open to corroboration and empirical refutation, but it is hard to regard that as science. It is not particularly interesting, and any layman understands it on his own. Science is supposed to deal with things that are non-trivial, interesting, and fruitful (that explain a variety of facts in different domains).

I can now summarize and say that a threshold condition for research to be capable of having academic value is justiciability. But that still does not make it science. In order for it to count as science, it must propose a general law or theoretical generalization that can be subjected to an empirical test of falsification. Justiciability is a condition for academic status, and falsifiability and corroboration are conditions for scientific status.

That is the principled groundwork. Let us now move on to the implications.

A look at the social sciences and humanities

We have seen that claims such as that one ought to be pluralistic, tolerant, capitalist, communist, anarchist, and the like are ideological claims, and therefore they are not justiciable. An academic article is supposed to be justiciable and therefore cannot argue for or against one of these conceptions, but at most describe them and their consequences. To be sure, some present these conceptions on a factual basis, and even make general claims. For example: communism/capitalism leads to a more flourishing economy. Assuming that we have measures of what a flourishing economy is (GDP?), which is far from clear, this is indeed a factual claim and even a general law, and ostensibly it is legitimate for an academic article to make it. Ostensibly this is even a scientific claim, since it is falsifiable.

But even if it is a fact, the matter is not so simple. First, we have seen that a fact is not necessarily justiciable. I will now add that a factual generalization is not always falsifiable. In order to conduct an experiment that would subject generalizations like the one above to empirical test, we would need to move a significant number of countries from one regime to another and see whether clear economic consequences result. That is science fiction, and it cannot be done. Beyond that, even if such cases do occur, no clear conclusions can be drawn from them. In such situations there are many additional parameters that influence the results, and therefore the path from the phenomena to the theory, and the possibility of subjecting the theory to empirical test, barely exist.

The problem can be defined as follows: unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences have no laboratory conditions. Because of the difficulties in creating scientific generalizations in these fields, and in creating sufficiently clean situations that make it possible to test them empirically, it is very easy to slide into the evaluative domain and into researchers’ mutual responses to one another (which will be discussed below), instead of relating to the facts and describing them. But that, of course, is not science.

At the margins of my discussion here I will only note that even if we had clear measures of good economic results, and even if we could create an experiment under laboratory conditions, in principle these conceptions still are not factual claims. One who advocates communism usually does not do so in order to improve economic results, but because in his view the value of equality is the important value. He will support communism even if it carries an economic price (at least up to a certain point). The same is true of one who advocates capitalism: that is not necessarily based on economic outcomes but on the value of freedom. Therefore even if the economic situation worsens (up to a certain point), he will continue to advocate it. If so, the discussion is not on the factual plane, and therefore these claims are inherently non-justiciable, and not only because of the difficulty of conducting laboratory experiments and the complexity of the situations.

Qualitative research—case analysis

So what does one do? In many cases in these fields one turns to description and analysis of specific cases. A historian or political scientist examines a particular case or a particular chain of events, analyzes it, and tries to propose explanations for it. It is important to understand that such research has given up scientific status and settled for justiciability. We are not talking about general laws that give us predictions, but about a description of one or more particular cases and an attempt to explain them by one or another form of general common-sense principles. Assuming that this is a sufficiently interesting case and that the analysis is sufficiently complex and innovative, one can see academic value in it (though not scientific value).

We saw that scientific explanation is supposed to be given in terms of some general laws. How does one arrive at general laws in such complex domains? The generalizations made there are based on mere conjecture. For example, one takes a case in which there was a change in the socio-economic regime and there were such-and-such economic results, and analyzes it. But that is a description of a case, not a generalization that yields a general law. A description of a case is a fact, and as such it is certainly not scientific. Perhaps it has academic value, but that really is a more delicate question (depending on whether it is interesting, fruitful, and innovative). In the past[3] I have already pointed out that in recent years this has even become an academic ideology called ‘qualitative research.’ Traditional scientific research tries to reach generalizations from particular cases, but qualitative research sees the analysis of a specific case alone as a worthy academic (scientific?) substitute.

From here it is clear that the relevant and accepted criterion for most research in the humanities and social sciences is not falsifiability but justiciability. This replaces the criterion for scientific status, and therefore can be seen as a criterion for academic status. Such an article explains a case or cases that occurred, and draws conclusions that at best are correct regarding them. Of course it may also be correct regarding future cases, but if it is not borne out there, we will not necessarily reject that research. It does not purport to be general (because every situation has specific data unique to it). A law in political science or history does not pretend to claim that this is how things must happen in every future case, and therefore it is not a law of nature in the sense accepted in the natural sciences. I have more than once mentioned the predictions of experts in political science and politics, who, as Ben-Gurion said, are experts only in what has already happened and not in what will happen. This is the problem with relating to these fields as ‘science.’ Even when things of value and high level are produced there, it is still not science.

Incidentally, in this sense even an article of innovative Torah scholarship is justiciable. There is a difficulty, and one can examine whether the solution resolves it or not. This is similar to the explanation of a specific case in the social sciences. It is not the expression of a position that cannot be judged. In principle, one can even subject such things to a falsification test, if the idea in that resolution is corroborated by additional sources in the same commentator whose approach we proposed. In this sense a Torah article can be considered an article in the humanities and be justiciable and even scientific. I assume that this statement will outrage many of our cousins, the various scholars of the humanities.

A way out of the bind

One of the ways researchers in these fields turn their evaluative claims into justiciable ones is that instead of preaching pluralism, they claim that Maimonides was a pluralist, or that the sages of one school or another were pluralists. On the one hand, this is a claim that can be justiciable (for one can examine the texts and sources and see whether it is correct or not). On the other hand, they rely on the fact that religious Jews tend to do what Maimonides thought, and so at least de facto there is here an opinion piece that can also influence people.

It is important for me to note that this is not a criticism. From my point of view this is entirely legitimate, and it is certainly possible and proper to do this in an academic article, so long as the proofs from Maimonides are presented properly and honestly. The conclusions remain with the reader, and that is perfectly fine. There is no prohibition against the author of an academic article having an agenda, nor against his article having an influence on readers. The restrictions concern the content, not the aims and tendencies of the writer (I am not a Marxist. See the first column in the series). The criticism arises where the agenda drives the author out of his mind and lets the reins loose for arguments that do not really hold water. But that is simply work done improperly and dishonestly (like the wild weeds described in the previous columns), and therefore there is no essential criticism here.

The exceptions

Nothing I have said should be taken to mean that all of this is true of the humanities and social sciences across the board. There are of course cases in which quantitative and even scientific research is carried out in these fields as well. Sometimes the findings even stand up to falsification tests, and in certain cases mathematical tools or tools from the natural sciences are used. For example, there is a developing tendency in university psychology departments to move away from psychoanalysis, which at its core is nothing but modern magic (Popper already criticized it for its lack of scientific status), toward evidence-based research, that is, research supported by solid findings. Thus psychological research today is rushing in the direction of brain research, which provides more precise tools and here and there succeeds in predicting results and subjecting them to falsification tests. My friend Nadav Shnerb told me that at the Hebrew University they decided to move the psychology department from Mount Scopus (the humanities and social sciences) to Givat Ram (the wing devoted to the natural sciences and mathematics). For technical reasons this did not happen, but it hints at the direction I have described here.

There are cases in the social sciences where factual surveys are conducted that teach us about various phenomena, and these sometimes give us predictive tools. Thus, for example, not long ago I heard of a study that found that the percentage of divorce cases is higher among couples who have children. This is surprising and can certainly be regarded as an interesting factual finding (though statistical, of course). As for the explanations of these phenomena, the situation is generally far less convincing, but this is not the place for that. But these quantitative and ‘scientific’ cases are usually more surveys than studies, since they concern only the factual layer and not the explanations and theoretical generalizations (I already explained above that in most cases the collection of facts is not scientific research). In the context of the social sciences this ought to be done by a survey institute and not as academic research. The task of the researcher is to take the findings and explain them, and here the situation is usually much more complex.[4]

Level of interest: negating laws

Such studies are, of course, judged according to the level of interest they contain. One can choose any case and find rather banal findings in it. That may be justiciable, but it is not interesting. The level of interest is very important in judging any research in any field, and certainly in fields where there are no criteria of falsifiability. Of course the level of interest is itself a matter for dispute, and we do not necessarily have sharp criteria for determining it (this is true in mathematics or physics as well. A valid article will not always be published; it depends on whether there is interest in it. The criterion is not sharp and not always clear).

In light of this, perhaps the findings of a study of one case or a few cases in the social sciences can be seen as a kind of general law, and that depends on the interest it contains and on our starting point regarding such cases. Usually this will find expression in a negating law of nature. To illustrate this, I will bring an example from Jewish law. Many writers on legal rules cite a rule that Maimonides rules like the Jerusalem Talmud (for a survey see here). There is no doubt that this rule is not correct. In many places he rules like the Babylonian Talmud against the Jerusalem Talmud, and people have already noted this. But the claim that this is therefore an erroneous rule reflects a lack of understanding of the rule. Since among the other medieval authorities (Rishonim) it is taken for granted that one rules like the Babylonian Talmud against the Jerusalem Talmud, the rule regarding Maimonides means that there is no absolute rule that Jewish law follows the Babylonian Talmud, that is, that sometimes he rules like the Jerusalem Talmud. That is the correct interpretation of this rule, and therefore the exceptions should not trouble us, and there is no need to search for rules as to when it is so and when it is otherwise. This is a negating rule. This rule says that the opposite rule is not necessarily correct.[5] As is well known, Boethius’s square of opposition (which appears in Maimonides’ Milot HaHigayon) already shows that the reversal of a universal affirmative proposition is a particular negative proposition (the reversal of ‘All X are Y’ is: ‘Some X are not Y’). And if the first is a general law, there is no reason not to regard the second as a general law as well (a negating one).

A social-science study that analyzes particular cases is interesting if it finds there surprising things, that is, things that run contrary to what is commonly thought or what people tend to think. Such is the case in the examples I gave above, that children or living together before marriage increase the likelihood of divorce. These are negating rules, because they show us that the rule that having children lowers the likelihood of divorce is not correct. This rule can also give us predictions, though not about a specific case but about a group of cases. But again, this law deals only with the bare facts. The theoretical explanations, which are the lifeblood of science, usually do not really meet stringent scientific criteria, and in many cases they are speculative and vague and therefore do not really enable prediction.[6]

On mathematics and philosophy

Up to this point I have put the humanities and social sciences into one basket, but there is certainly room to distinguish between them, or at least between different parts of them. In the following sections I will speak in rough generalizations about a few fields, but I think the principles are correct in many cases.

In mathematics, for example, we are not dealing with the description of phenomena. Therefore the claims there are not scientific (they are not falsifiable), but they are certainly justiciable. What is justiciable is not the assumptions from which one begins, nor the theorems that are derived from them, but the validity of the inference. Interesting mathematics is judged through the fruitfulness of the assumptions and of the theorems derived from them. In any event, what is justiciable here is a conditional claim: if X (the assumptions), then Y (the theorem, the conclusion). And yet no one disputes that this is a respectable and worthy academic field, and certainly not a trivial one (this is of course once again reliance on an obvious and agreed-upon example, regardless of formulated criteria).

Philosophy too can be divided into two subfields:

• The first is the study of philosophy, which deals with justiciable claims (though usually not scientific and not falsifiable) concerning the doctrines of various philosophers. Exactly as we saw above, these are claims that can be examined by studying the relevant sources, and therefore in principle they are justiciable. True, there are no predictions there that could be refuted in an experiment, of course. In this sense the study of philosophy is similar to what I described regarding the social sciences: justiciable but not scientific.
• But in academic journals of philosophy there is also room for a second kind of material: an article that presents a new philosophical argument, and not only one that studies existing arguments. A reasoned philosophical argument, which ostensibly belongs to the material under study and should not itself be considered academic research (just as a poem should not be published in an academic journal devoted to the study of poetry), nevertheless has a place there.

The reason is that it is justiciable in the same sense that mathematics is justiciable, that is, one can judge the validity of the inference.[7] This is a different kind of justiciability (not against facts but against the rules of logic and reason), but there is no reason to disqualify it, and therefore it certainly has a place on an academic platform.

An argument that advocates pluralism or some other value is not justiciable in itself. But an argument that derives that value from certain assumptions is justiciable, and therefore academic. And again, if the assumptions seem reasonable to the reader, he is of course invited to draw his own conclusions. This certainly does not disqualify the academic status of the article. Thus, for example, an article that brings proofs for the existence of God can be a philosophical article of academic value. It is not scientific (because it has no predictions that stand up to empirical examination), but it can be justiciable and therefore academic. See on this columns 155–160, which defined philosophy.

In the background there is also the question of interest, novelty, and fruitfulness. Not every inference in philosophy, just as not every inference in mathematics, is interesting or novel. Not every valid argument is of academic value, of course.

Poetics

This is the situation as well in the study of poetics (literature and poetry). One can speak of empirical scientific research of phenomena in these areas (the nature and characteristics of this or that kind of poetry), which is mainly descriptive and justiciable, and perhaps even scientific (falsifiable), but in most cases that is not what is done there. There too they deal with specific cases (a particular poem or a particular poet) and analyze them. The theoretical explanations in these fields have rather dubious standing, and certainly they do not give us predictions and do not stand the test of falsification. Even when they have value, at most they can be seen as branches of philosophy rather than of science, but in many cases this is done without the rigor of philosophical and mathematical argument, and therefore their academic value—and certainly their scientific value—is rather dubious in my eyes. Such an article has value as a work that is subject to the reader’s impression (in that sense the analysis resembles the poem itself). But from there to academic value is a long way.

And again, of course there are also good and valuable materials. I am pointing here to common situations that reflect problematic features of these fields.

History and political science

If we take political science, there too one can speak of claims and of justiciability of all these kinds. A claim in favor of one system of government or a warning against another system of government is not justiciable, because recommendations and values are not the business of academia. This can be part of a work of political philosophy (but not academic research in political philosophy). By contrast, an inference that derives such a conclusion from certain assumptions can be justiciable in the mathematical sense, although in my opinion it will usually belong to political philosophy (which, as I understand it, is part of the humanities, like all philosophy) and not to political science (which, as I understand it, is part of the social sciences). Arguments whose value lies in the validity of the inference, whatever field they concern, belong essentially to philosophy (which, as you may recall, was defined in the columns I devoted to it as systematic inquiry with the ‘eyes of the mind’).

In political science there ought to be research that brings new facts to our knowledge, or a systematic description of facts and their significance. Although such claims are usually not falsifiable (because of the complexity I described above), they are justiciable and can certainly have value. In many cases they will deal with specific cases as I described above, or lead us to general laws in the negating sense defined above (democracy does not always avoid wars; a king is not always a tyrannical dictator; and so on). But as I noted, the explanations given in political science often have dubious standing in my view. Certainly it is not correct to see them as science, but in many cases not even as well-grounded claims. They are mainly claims of common sense on the basis of the facts.

The situation in history, sociology, and anthropology is very similar. One may hesitate regarding broad portions of them whether they belong to the humanities or the social sciences, but I will not enter that here.

Summary: back to the nonsense phenomena

It is very easy to move from research that deserves to be considered academic (and, as noted, there is much of that) to a survey, or to the expression of an ideological position. We have seen that there is a non-scientific foundation beneath all the ‘sciences’ of the humanities and social sciences, and my claim is that this is why the more extreme wild phenomena described in the previous columns appear specifically there. My claim is that there is an inherently problematic dimension in these fields by virtue of their very nature: vagueness and lack of criteria, and of course also the absence of falsifiability. Therefore, although it is of course untrue that everything done in them is worthless, and although the extreme cases really do not represent all that goes on there, they are an extreme expression of this problematicness. It is no accident that a great deal of worthless material appears there, and even more problematic is the scientific pretension, which as I explained leads to a slide into positions and claims that are unreasoned and non-justiciable, and to the smuggling of values into research. If I summarize: the main claim is not against the field of content itself but against the attitude to it as a discipline and as science. Hence the phrase: ‘nonsense studies’ and not ‘nonsense fields’ or the like.

We have seen that most of the material studied in these fields is not accessible to direct observation and depends on analysis and assumptions. In this sense it is more akin to values than to facts. We saw above that even according to the conception (like mine) that there are evaluative facts, they are different from the facts of the natural sciences, since they are not open to simple empirical examination but only to the eyes of the mind (reasoned intuition: what is sensible and what is not). This is of course fertile ground for the development of charlatanism and fashions of political correctness. In many places you will not be able to make a conservative or right-wing statement in a journal or conference in law or in the social and political sciences, but not because there should be no room for evaluative statements (as indeed there should not be), but because there is no room for statements that are not politically correct.[8]

Therefore the second part of this column is, to some extent, an expansion of what we saw in its first part. At the beginning of the column we saw that the root of the problem in the humanities and social sciences is that values and agendas are admissible in these fields, that is, that they do not deal only with facts. Now we see that the deeper reason for this is that in these fields even the facts, and certainly the theories that explain them, cannot really be subjected to falsification tests and perhaps not even to judgment. In many cases it is a matter of common sense (or not), and every reader has his own common sense (or crooked sense). Therefore in many cases there are non-justiciable claims there, and of course you will scarcely find predictions there that can be subjected to empirical test. From here it is very easy to slide into the mixing of values into academic research in these fields (something many people see as self-evident and certainly legitimate; on the contrary, there are those who lament the absence of values and evaluative statements), and at the end of this slippery slope one reaches the realms of nonsense and gibberish, which are the border cases.

This explains why the wild margins, though they are certainly not an expression of the mainstream, arise specifically in these fields. Therefore I claim that these esoteric phenomena do say something about the normal materials in the humanities and social sciences as well. The extreme cases point to a trend that exists throughout the field, and they serve as a warning sign to all of us in our attitude toward these fields. An expert in international relations, gender studies, or politics does not deserve a status similar to that of an expert in medicine, physics, or even mathematics. Again, this is not an accusation. It is the nature of these fields, but it is very important to be aware of it. The accusation is against those who are not aware of this difference, and certainly against those who make cynical or innocent use of it and subordinate scientific research to evaluative and ideological ends.

[1] In column 177 I also argued that for this reason a community is required in order to sharpen moral insights (that is, this kind of observation is generally made collectively).

[2] I am describing here the accepted conceptions and refraining from hair-splitting over nuances.

[3] On ‘qualitative research,’ see columns 23 and 60. This is an ideology invented because of the difficulties described here.

[4] Another example: there are studies that show (and there are others that do not—nonsense studies, right?!) that among couples who live together before marriage, this actually increases the likelihood of divorce (secular readers, take note). Ostensibly, then, it is not advisable to live together before marriage. But not necessarily. Some will say that couples who live together without marriage attach less sanctity to the institution of marriage. Perhaps one can formulate it by saying that more permissive couples are less afraid of divorce and therefore do it more easily. In any event, this does not mean that living together as such contributes to the likelihood of divorce. And again, by the definition above, this is a survey rather than a study. The people who ought to do it are pollsters, not academic researchers, and therefore examples like these do not really change the overall picture.

[5] Along similar lines, there is Rabbi Eliezer’s rule (Pesachim 68b) that on a festival it is Either entirely for you or entirely for the Lord (either entirely for yourselves or entirely for God), which is a puzzling rule. Did Rabbi Eliezer not know what ought to be done on a festival? And in general, what kind of rule is this that leaves everything open? Clearly it comes to exclude the view of Rabbi Yehoshua there, who rules Half for you and half for the Lord (half for yourselves and half for God). Rabbi Eliezer’s claim is a negating rule: his claim is that Rabbi Yehoshua’s rule is not correct. In his view one must be consistent and do either all for God or all for yourselves. This does not come to say “do whatever you want” but to exclude Rabbi Yehoshua’s position.

[6] Psychological treatment, which is the practical product of research and could serve as a measure of the theory’s practical predictive power, despite being a field that enjoys a higher and more prestigious status than the rest of the humanities and social sciences, is, to my impression, not really a discipline. It is a collection of people who have different intuitions based on experience and study, but it is those intuitions that tell them what should be done in the case before them, not the ‘scientific’ findings and the disciplinary tools.

[7] As I explained in the columns on philosophy, in my opinion mathematics is the formal branch of philosophy.

[8] It seems to me that in many places there is a tendency to regard someone who raises such positions as an unintelligent person, and therefore many people feel that he is rejected and excluded for legitimate academic reasons. But that is an expression of the fact that values and ideology are an inseparable part of academic criteria.