[C] [Wittrs] Political Science Needs Wittgensteinian Therapy
- From: Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, cv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:59:53 -0700 (PDT)
... one of the things that I find strikingly clear in my interactions and
dealings with political scientists, is that an immense segment of the social
network desperately needs both to learn Wittgenstein undergo Wittgensteinian
therapy. Let me address each of these separately.
No graduate student in any "social science" major, and especially "political
science," should be allowed to graduate unless and until they have been
instructed in the following two courses: (a) critical social science (or,
philosophy of social science); and (b) Wittgenstein and his relevance to
intellectual culture. If graduate students in political science were shown the
difficulties of what their "science" does, and were shown how to be insightful
with language and what it does, the way that political scientists would think
about ever subject would immediately change. It would be like the budding of a
new flower. Of course, one would hope that the name of the discipline would
change to "politicology."
On the second issue, I notice something suspicious about the network (at least
the judicial network). There is a grave need to discuss, in a
Wittgensteinian-therapeutic way, the games that political science plays with
the
ideas of "politics," "ideology," "legitimacy," "judicial votes" -- and also
with the scientific vocabulary that is borrowed to dress their reports and
revelations. And one of the strikings things that I see is that the lot of them
don't seem willing (or curious) to self-inspect these items.
It's almost like what they do is this. They borrow statistical modeling
techniques from other disciplines under warrant that this makes they more
"scientific" (or rigorous?) than, say, history (or philosophy, or law). They
then proceed from the assumptions that: (a) the ability to think about concepts
is a common-sense matter (translation: philosophy is a waste of time); (b) that
people who are good in math must be smarter than everyone else (what I call
"the
fallacy of the quantitative shaman"); (c) that "politics" is the operating
assumption of the human agency (Machiavellian); (d) that humans are like
animals
-- or worse, like the weather -- and behave according to stimuli and routine;
and (e) that their mission is to uncover the workings of the same using similar
means that one learns about medicine (empirical studies).
And so, denied the benefit of philosophic pontification or historical insight,
they go about reading journal studies, pretending the future of the discipline
gets brighter with more grant money and higher-end mathematical models. They
also desperately want to communicate to others that they have
an intellectual status (justified by their work product) that places them above
what the historians, philosophers and law professors do (and probably
sociologists).
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. This is probably one of the
most confused networks and is surely one lacking in serious insight or
intellectual depth. And the biggest problem is that they don't want to discuss
or examine it. They want simply to form a network that protects itself from
inspection through means of club norms and pleasantry, all of which cloaks (and
enforces) an aristocratic model or structure. I have never seen a group of
academics more sensitive to criticism than political scientists. The lawyers
and
the philosophers have "thick skin." They form themselves around the idea of
advocacy or debate or disputation (or whatever). But the political scientists
put themselves in a glass house. They not only are not curious to inspect their
house or their craft or how they regiment students -- they don't apparently
know
how.
Someone must come along and smash the facade of the network. Political science,
as we know it, needs destroyed. The elders and leaders should receive no
deference whatsoever. The hegemony of the club must broken up. And the first
step toward doing this is infiltrating Wittgensteinian ideas and sitting these
people down for daily doses of Wittgensteinian therapy.
Regards and thanks.
Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
Personal Website: http://seanwilson.org
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