[C] [Wittrs] Political Science Needs Wittgensteinian Therapy

... 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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