American Journal of Sociology

          The second sociological journal to which Hickey sent his paper is the American Journal of Sociology, (AJS) which was edited at the time by a Mr. Edward O. Laumann at the University of Chicago.  The journal acknowledged receipt of Hickey's paper on 19 October 1979, and on 21 November 1979 Hickey received a rejection letter from the editor together with statements of reasons for rejection written by two referees. 
          These criticisms were even more Romantic than those from Sociological Methods and Research.  The first referee rejected Land's opportunity-structure concept saying it is a clumsy abstraction that is too vague to illuminate anything about social change that is not obvious.  And then obviousness notwithstanding he says in the next paragraph that he is simply not convinced about anything reported in the paper, and that the outcome is bizarre. He demanded substantively informed investigations that specify “concrete behavioral mechanisms.”  This is an argot for a Romantic sociology that is a social psychology.  He also claimed that there is a "burgeoning" literature reporting analyses of the various influences of trends in factors and speculated about factors that he thinks may be useful for modeling, but he offered no citations.  Hickey replied that the critic should do his own modeling and should not attempt to make Hickey or any other author his research assistant as a condition for publication.
            Laumann’s second referee dismissed Hickey's interpretation of the per capita rates as theoretical hocus-.  Hickey's used of per capita rates of voluntary associational behavior relative to institutional groups to reflect degrees of consensus about the respective institutional cultural values.  He believes that there may be an analogy between his treatment of cultural values and Nobel laureate economist Paul Samuelson's treatment of economic values in the latter's doctrine of revealed preference set forth in "A Note on the Pure Theory of Consumer's Behavior" (1938) and in "Consumption Theory in Terms of Revealed Preference" (1948).  Both papers are reprinted in The Collected Papers of Paul A. Samuelson (1966, Vol. 1).  Samuelson rejected the Austrian school’s Romantic concept of utility as an introspectively known psychological experience of economic value, and instead describes consumer demand in terms of observed market behavior revealing consumer preference patterns.  And just as a commodity's per unit price measures economic value in the publicly observable market transaction even though the price does not characterize the economic value except in association with the identified group product, so too the per capita rate measures institutional value in the publicly observable group associational behavior even though the per capita rate does not characterize the social value except in association with the identified group.  Another analogy that is more familiar is a political election outcome: a landslide election outcome is a measure of a high degree of political consensus, even though the election returns do not characterize the mandate that the winning candidate brings to public office. This critic also attacked Hickey's use of his discovery system, and he said that the computer program cannot replace the complexity of a scientist's intuition.  Another Luddite sociologist! Hickey replied that the manner in which a theory is created is irrelevant to its empirical validity, and referenced the early Pragmatist philosopher, William James, who tersely said of worthy scientific theories: "By their fruits ye shall know them, and not by their roots.”
          Hickey submitted his rebuttals to Laumann, and on 30 July 1980 he received another rejection letter with a brief criticism from a third referee enclosed.  The third critic identified as an internal reviewer, indicated that he had read the criticisms written by the two other referees and the rebuttals submitted by Hickey.  In his own criticism this third critic very briefly summarized the other referees' objections, and then maintained that Hickey does not understand the fundamental objection to the paper: the need for specific mechanisms.
          The Chicago University web site identifies Laumann as a 1964 Ph.D. sociology graduate of Harvard University, which at the time was under the influence of Parsonian Romanticism. Laumann is no less a Romantic than his selected referees, and Hickey believes was probably one of them.  In his Sexual Organization of the City (2004) based on a local Chicago survey, and in his Sex, Love, and Health in America (2001), Social Organization of Sexuality (1994), and Sex in America (1994) all based on a larger national survey, Laumann seeks interpretative understanding of his survey respondents’ sexual attitudes and behaviors.  His romantic approach is most explicitly set forth in the chapter titled “Normative Orientations toward Sexuality” in his Social Organization of Sexuality.  Laumann’s chairmanship of the Chicago University’s Sociology Department was preceded by that of William F. Ogburn, who was a Positivist.  During Ogburn’s tenure there were vigorous methodological debates in the university’s sociology department.  Ogburn rejected the Romantic concept of sociology, and maintained that any discipline that does not imitate the methods of the physical sciences is not truly a science.  He advocated quantitative analysis in social science, demanded that the language of sociological explanation refer only to observables features of human behavior, and rejected the Romantics’ reference to subjective experience.  The Romantics won in these methodology debates, and Laumann’s views are on the winning side.  He became chairman of the department and editor of the journal.  His selection of referees and rejection of Hickey’s paper Hsuggests he is no more sympathetic to contemporary Pragmatism than to Positivism.

American Sociological Review

          The third academic sociological journal to which Hickey sent his paper was American Sociological Review, (ASR) the journal of the American Sociological Association (ASA), which was edited by a Mr. William H. Form at the University of Illinois, Urbana.            Form acknowledged receipt of Hickey’s paper on 13 March 1981.  On 10 April Hickey received a rejection letter signed by Form with two referee criticisms enclosed. The first referee criticism was typical of the others.           He focused on the idea of theory, which he distinguishes from the idea of model.  He purports that Hickey's model needs a theory underlying the causal assertions embodied in the equations, and says that while Hickey's model satisfies statistical criteria, it does not make substantive sense.  All this is from the Romantic argot.  He said that Hickey had distorted the methodological views of Kenneth Land, which are set forth in Land's "Formal Theory" in Sociological Methodology: 1971, a book bearing an imprimatur identifying it as an official publication of the American Sociological Association.  In this paper Land distinguishes theories from models, and proposes relating them with a logical schema advanced for the natural sciences by the Logical Positivist philosopher Carl Hempel. This philosophical eclecticism by Land is possible, because both Romantics and Positivists distinguish theory and observation language semantically, even though they reverse the role of semantics: the Positivists such as Hempel believe that theory is meaningless unless it is logically related to observation language, while the Romantics such as this critic believe that empirical models are meaningless unless they are related to mentalistic theory. He also says that the equations are puzzling, that demographers will be amazed, and that criminologists will be surprised.  These objections are not only irrelevant but also dubious; for example examination of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Statistics reveals that the factors in Hickey's equation would not be surprising to the criminologist.  More importantly making familiarity a criterion for scientific criticism results in stagnation, and sociology has been stagnated by its Romantic philosophy of science for decades.
          The second referee selected by Form wrote an arrogantly dismissive critique consisting of only six sentences, a cynical caricature of criticism.  He wrote that the metatheoretical considerations in the paper do not motivate the actual analyses effectively, that little useful theory is involved, that the particular analyses are similarly little motivated, and that none of them reflect the usually long traditions of research attempting to explain the variables involved.  He also calls the paper an empiricist venture that is utterly ineffectively related to the empirical traditions involved in explaining the equations.  He then attempts criticism about correlations and trends that reveals his inexperience with data analysis, and he concludes that these correlations should not without much more thought be made a basis for causal inference.  Ironically these reasons for rejection actually would be reasons for acceptance in a mature and productive scientific profession.  Deviation from tradition is never a reason for rejection of a paper, and the critic’s description of Hickey’s paper as an empiricist venture reveals that irrelevant criteria are actually operative, because science is fundamentally nothing other than an empiricist venture.  Hickey calls this phobic anti-empiricism the “sociologists’ disease”. Furthermore the critic’s demanding much more thought is irresponsibly uninformative.
          In view of such rejection Hickey is not surprised to have discovered later that Form has his own alternative approach to the subject of Hickey’s paper, which involves no modeling.  Form described his own approach in his “Institutional Analysis: An Organizational Approach” (1990), which he also summarized later in his autobiography, Work and Academic Politics. His organizational approach was his style of sociology long before he received Hickey’s submission.  In the 1990 article Form references his earlier Industry, Labor and Community (1960) as an illustration of his organizational approach, and it is also recognizably similar to that found in the last chapters, “Industry and the Community” and “Industry and Society” in his Industrial Sociology (1951). “Institutional Analysis: An Organizational Approach” is not a report of new empirical findings but rather is a proposal, which to date has not advanced beyond the status of a programmatic agenda.  Form defines an institution as a number of interacting organizations (complexes) whose boundaries are measured by the extent of their contacts.  He says that norms, rules, regulations, and laws are regularities that emerge from these interactions, and that institutional analysis explains how these regularities emerge, function, and change.  Therefore he says his organizational approach to institutional analysis requires that norms, values, ends, and related concepts should not be used as independent variables in institutional analysis, that he is reversing the traditional approach, and that his procedure avoids a circularity where they are asserted to exist and then used to explain behavior. Form’s rejection of circularity suggests that he had no exposure to simultaneous-equation models.  Form uses the term independent variables, but he does not propose any modeling, much less actually do it.  And he offers no empirical basis for his excluding institutional values from the role of independent variables.
          In his autobiography Form wrote that unlike his predecessor editors he read every manuscript submitted to the ASR, and wrote his own internal review for every submission.  After viewing Form’s work style Hickey believes that upon reading Hickey’s submission Form found the paper’s alternative technical approach unappealing if not actually threatening to his own discursive organizational approach, because Hickey has found no evidence that Form possesses the technical skills for competing with the modeling and simulation approach in Hickey’s paper.  In retrospect it is not surprising to Hickey that Form rejected the paper.
          Hickey submitted his rebuttals to Form on 6 May 1981. In his reply Hickey referred Form to an elementary textbook in econometrics, and also enclosed a brief annotated bibliography of the relevant philosophy of science literature for the edification of Form and his selected critics.  Hickey promptly received a drop-dead letter in reply, in which Form told Hickey that apparently Hickey does not understand the folkways of his profession, that it is not normative for an article to be resubmitted once it is rejected, and that if this were not the practice, Form would spend his life re-reviewing the same manuscript.  Ironically even in 1981 this was probably true of Hickey’s paper even disregarding Form’s advanced age (he was born in 1917).  Even today the typical Ph.D. sociologist lacks the technical education for performing the construction and simulation techniques used by Hickey in his first-degree higher-order difference-equation empirical model much less use artificial intelligence.

Comments  

          These seven Sturm und Drang-style criticisms consistently reveal the domination of the German Romantic philosophy of science in American academic sociology making it more of a humanities literature than an empirical science.  Is this consequential?  The practice of an anachronistic philosophy of science yields a retarded science, and academic sociology is a backward science in extremis, if it can even be called a science instead of a humanities literature.  In "Sociology's Long Decade in the Wilderness" the New York Times (28 May 1989) reports that universities such as the University of Rochester in New York and Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, have disbanded their sociology departments, and that the National Science Foundation has drastically cut back funding for sociological research.  A graphic display in the article indicates that since the mid-1970's the number of bachelors degrees awarded with majors in sociology has declined by nearly eighty percent, the number of sociology masters degrees by sixty percent, and the number of sociology doctorate degrees by forty percent.  Demand for Ph.D. degrees is influenced by many factors not specific to sociology, such as cyclical and secular changes in economic conditions, and changes in population size and demographic profile.   But the effects of these and other extraneous factors can be filtered by relating the number of sociology doctorates to the number of doctorates in other fields.  Data for earned doctorates in various sciences are available from the United States Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement.   Time series plots of the percent of earned doctorates in sociology both relative to the number of earned doctorates in economics and relative to the number of earned doctorates in physics corroborate the reported decline of academic sociology, and validate the accuracy of Mr. Joseph Berger's reporting for the New York Times.
          Berger's article also quotes a Mr. Stephen Buff, identified in the article as the assistant executive director of the American Sociological Association, as saying that sociology suffers from not being well defined in the public mind, and that sociology is confused either with social work or with socialism.  But contrary to Mr. Buff's explanation public opinion is not operative in these decisions made against academic sociology.  Decisions to enroll or not to enroll in graduate schools of sociology are made by students with undergraduate majors in sociology; decisions to support or close sociology graduate schools are made by knowledgeable university administrators; and the funding decisions of the National Science Foundation are made by staff members who are among the best informed in the nation.  The cause of these unfavorable decisions originates within academic sociology; it does not lie with an ignorant general public.  The article also quotes a more realistic opinion by a professor Egon Mayer, a Brooklyn College sociologist, who said that sociologists are still teaching the same sort of thing that they taught in the 1960's and 1970's, but are not as convinced now that it is worth teaching, and are not quite sure what it should be replaced with.  In Hickey's view sociologists will never know what is worth teaching, until they discard their Romantic dogmatism and adopt the contemporary Pragmatist philosophy of science.
          These reports are not encouraging to any young man or woman with the option of graduate-level studies in pursuit of a career in academic sociology.  As a Ph.D. graduate in sociology he (or she, of course) would find that there is little demand for what he has to teach, and may expect that he might have to pursue another occupation to earn a living.  And were he lucky enough to find employment on the faculty of a university that still has a sociology department, but formulated a view that is contrary to the dominant Romanticism, he would find that he cannot get published in the academic literature.  His submitted paper would be rejected for reasons that are a caricature of empirical criticism by an editor who cannot distinguish contrary evidence from the contrary opinions expressed by his selected referees.  And were the submitting sociologist so audacious as to presume to submit rebuttals to the comments of the pontificating referees, he may find himself reading a drop-dead letter from the editor saying that apparently he does not understand the folkways of the profession, that it is not normative for an article to be resubmitted once it is rejected, and that if this were not the practice the editor would spend his life time re-reviewing the same manuscript.
          The effect of sociology's Romantic dogmatism is not limited to academia.  It includes the profession's demonstrated impotence to serve as a guide for the formulation of effective social policy.  The same New York Times article also cites disillusionment resulting from the failures of the Great Society programs of the 1960s', and reports that sociologists today find they have lost Federal funding, must scale down their projects, forsake new inquiries, and disguise their work as anything-but-sociology.  Similarly in his Limits of Social Policy (1988) Nathan Glazer, Harvard University professor of sociology and formerly an urban sociologist in the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency during the Administration of John F. Kennedy, writes that the optimistic vision of sociology guiding policy by use of its knowledge of the fine structure of society of how policy impinges on family, neighborhood, and community has faded considerably.  Glazer observes that in trying to deal with the breakdown of traditional structures, particularly the family, social policies have weakened them further and have made matters worse.  He cites as one noteworthy example the welfare system, which he says undergoes continual expansion and correction with input from social scientists, but which nonetheless damages the family, encourages family breakup, and encourages fathers to abandon children, even though many of the changes in the system were designed to overcome just these untoward effects.  He notes that these outcomes have occasioned the rejection of social engineering, which he describes as the capacity of human foresight using subtly graduated incentives and disincentives and sharply focused programs, to affect human behavior and to improve the human condition.  Glazer maintains that the most significant limitation of the effectiveness of the social policies formulated and implemented in the 1960's is lack of knowledge.
          However, sociology's failure in the crucible of real-world social policy is not due merely to a lack of knowledge that could be remedied by more research in conformity with the Romantic philosophy of science. Sociologists will never understand these symptoms of failure, until they recognize the pathogen infecting their professional culture: the Romantic dogmatism that operates in their criteria for scientific criticism and that imposes a priori restrictions on their theorizing.  As it happens the eighth chapter of Glazer's book  "'Superstitions' and Social Policy" could well be taken as an expose of sociologists' failure to recognize latent functions, and it amounts to a vindication of Merton's theorem of social engineering.  As long as academic sociologists accept only theories that reduce to a motivational social psychology, much less to Romantic theories that “make sense” in compliance with the verstehen criterion; as long as they reject Romantically inexplicable latent functions and suppress publication of empirically superior theories that seem surprising or bizarre relative to the sociologist's verstehen; and most importantly as long as contemporary Pragmatism remains a terra incognita to the sociologists - sociologists will continue to be incapable of contributing to effective social policy, much less establishing their profession as a well functioning and modern empirical science instead of a philosophically retrograde academic occupation.
          Twentieth-century physics too had its failures, but when physicists formulated the relativity and quantum theories to remedy these failures, they found that they had to unbundle the ontological commitments which they had conventionally bundled together with the empirical criteria for scientific criticism, and then they had to make a decision about which type of criteria would operate as rules of evidence.  Their acceptance of the startlingly counterintuitive but empirically superior relativity and quantum theories led them to discard all ontological criteria including but not limited to those which they recognized as held over from the Newtonian physics, even though the Newtonian ontology had come to define what constitutes causal explanation and what "makes sense" in physics.  Had the physicists dogmatically adhered to the old Newtonian ontology, neither relativity theory nor quantum theory could have been accepted.  Instead physicists accepted theories exclusively on the basis of their empirical test outcomes.  This is Pragmatism as it evolved in the practice of basic research in the Galileo-Einstein-Heisenberg tradition, and then as it was later articulated firstly by the physicists and then more systematically by the contemporary Pragmatist philosophers of science.  The optimism of the Great Society social programs to which Glazer referred, has long ago passed into history, even as sociologists continue to bundle their ontological commitments to Romanticism into their criteria for scientific criticism.   Glazer's use of the term optimism in his Limits of Social Policy is an understatement; today only a government of incorrigibly naive Candides would again entrust the philosophically naive sociologists with a guiding role in the formulation of social policy.   Before these Panglossian professors of sociology can restore their credibility with real-world social policy administrators, they must overcome their anachronistic Romanticism and accept the contemporary Pragmatism, which rejects a priori commitment to any ontology as a criterion for scientific criticism.

Pages [<< Previous 10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] 
NOTE: Pages do not corresponds with the actual pages from the book