David K. Cohen

A very short book about the limits of professional social inquiry in policy making. The most important point in this book is that other forms of knowledge, especially knowledge produced in political interaction, are necessary complements to social science. The authors propose that the value of social science doesn't lie in objectivity but in the new concepts and new information which social inquiry can bring to public debate. They call for a better understanding of the purposes of social research among its practitioners. I liked their ideas but the book seems almost like an unfinished project because it's so short. More details would have improved their arguments a lot.… (més)

This is a short (100 pp.) book from 1979, largely given over to sketches of arguments and directions for further inquiry (mostly not undertaken in the ensuing years) about why the social sciences, and "professional social inquiry" more generally, have not been very directly useful for social problem solving. They suggest that this rests on a number of basic widespread mistakes about how social problems are solved. In particular, they allege, social scientists vastly under-rate the importance and competence of ordinary-life social knowledge, and, yet more consequentially, fail to see that social problems can be solved either by analyzing them in some discursive/analytic form, or by setting up patterns of social interaction where the participants' acts collectively solve the problem, though none of them need to grasp the solution or even realize that is what they are doing. Markets are of course one example of such "interactive problem solving", but they also, and quite correctly, emphasize others: democratic politics, bargaining processes, and the "republic of science". They emphasize that interactive problem-solving should not be seen as a poor substitute for formal problem solving, to be displaced in due time by scientifically-informed social engineering, but rather as inevitable, and indeed often superior.

The alternative, of analytically finding solutions to social problems, is basically impossible, because the problems are too complex, and even systematic investigation into them is not just prohibitively expensive, but so slow that the world has moved on before research findings can become very accurate or precise. (Obviously these obstacles can all be bigger or smaller in various cases, and I don't think they'd quibble if someone wanted to assert that very small, stable social problems could be successfully analyzed if enough resources were thrown at them.) Worse, the very definitions of "social problems" are themselves contested, and properly so. The authors' view is that while the natural sciences can (often) legitimately claim independent authority, for social scientists to aim at such authority is to set themselves a target they cannot possibly hit. Since they do aim at that target, however, social scientists and other "practitioners of professional social inquiry" systematically waste their efforts.

Given all this, fruitful roles for social analysts become things like advising individual participants in the interactions, or looking at the over-all performance of an interactive mechanism and searching for ways in which it might be improved. (They suggest that economists are better about this than other social scientists. Given the recent vogue among economists for replacing all kinds of institutions with arbitrary intellectual constructions, planned by analogy with the idealized markets of their Micro 1 textbooks, I suspect the authors might wish to revise and extend these remarks.) A further, if more diffusive, constructive role would be in hoping to shape the general framework within which participants in interactive problem-solving think about things; and of course the kind of detailed reportage which statistical bureaus engage in.

The name "Hayek" does not appear anywhere in this book.… (més)