The Illusion of Objective Knowledge Without The Possibility Of Seeing

Definition of phenomenon
1plural phenomena : an observable fact or event
2plural phenomena
a: an object or aspect known through the senses rather than by thought or intuition
b: a temporal or spatiotemporal object of sensory experience as distinguished from a noumenon
c: a fact or event of scientific interest susceptible to scientific description and explanation
3a: a rare or significant fact or event

b plural phenomenons : an exceptional, unusual, or abnormal person, thing, or occurrence

Merriam Webster online

Here is a passage from a book by two of the most widely respected of those who invented and defined evolutionary psychology,  Leda Cosmides and John Tooby

Not only have the social sciences been unusual in their self-conscious stance of intellectual autarky [I'd have just said, "independence" and saved you looking it up] but, significantly, they have also been relatively unsuccessful as sciences.  

I will break in here to note that this is entirely in line with my assertion that when you try to use the methods of science, proper, that are so successful in studying relatively simple phenomena in physics and chemistry to study far more complex and variable phenomena, their success is bound to weaken and eventually fail. I think that even in biology, where the physical systems are far more complex but not too complex - and only when the phenomena are really phenomena, having the most basic requirement of something to be a phenomenon, THE ABILITY TO OBSERVE IT DIRECTLY OR IN RELIABLE INDIRECT WAYS - scientific methods have much or some, though not always in every case, validity.  I think when you can't observe something those methods of science break down pretty fast.  Which would account for the "relatively unsuccessful"* social sciences, even when they assemble what they call "data" and process those with valid methods of mathematical analysis, giving it a heavy gloss coat of seeming science.  The reliability of the numberwork is directly related to the quality and completeness of the data they reference.   And honesty.  Whenever that data is in the form of humanreporting, as almost all of it is, you can't tell if you're  counting a lie as a truth, a false or mistaken answer as representing something real. There's no way to know that, so the enterprise of the social sciences is largely based on an unsound practice. 

I think that what is most telling about the histories of such overly complex attempts to construct sciences is the frequency of scientists seeing what they want to see, of imagining what they want to be there when they really can't see anything, up to and including generalized framings by which things are to be clarified.   That's one of the things about frames, they only contain what you can put in them. 

Although they were founded in the 18th and 19th centuries amid every expectation that they would soon produce intellectual discoveries, grand "laws," and validated theories to rival those of the rest of science,  such success has remained elusive.  The recent wave of antiscientific sentiment spreading through the social sciences draws much of its appeal from this endemic failure.  This disconnection from the rest of science has left a hole in the fabric of our organized knowledge of the world where the human sciences should be.  After more than a century, the social sciences are still adrift, with an enormous mass of half-digested observations, a not inconsiderable body of empirical generalizations, and a contradictory stew of ungrounded, middle-level theories expressed in a babel of incommensurate technical lexicons.  This is accompanied by a growing malaise, so that the single largest trend toward rejecting the scientific enterprise as it applies to humans.  

Well, yeah, after a couple of centuries of constructing imaginary cathedrals and cities only to see one after another of them come down, you kind of get the sense that you're barking up the wrong tree. 

We suggest that this lack of progress, this "failure to thrive," has been caused by the failure of the social sciences to explore or accept their logical connections to the rest of the body of science - that is, to casually locate their objects to study inside the larger network of scientific knowledge.  Instead of the scientific enterprise, what should be jettisoned is what we will call the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM);  The consensus view of the nature of social and cultural phenomena that has served for a century as the intellectual framework for the organization of psychology and the social sciences and the intellectual justification of their claims of autonomy from the rest of science.  Progress has been severely limited because the Standard Social Science Model mischaracterizes important avenues of causation, induces researchers to study complexly chaotic an unordered phenomena, and misdirects study away from areas where rich principled phenomena are to be found.  In place of the Standard Social Science Model, there is emerging a new framework that we will call the Integrated Causal Model. 

You might notice that after asserting the non-success of a widely adopted model in the social sciences that has failed - I agree it has failed -  Cosmides and Tooby, and the rest of the Sociobiology-Evolutionary Psychology crowd REPLACE IT WITH ANOTHER IMAGINARY FRAMING THAT IS FAR MORE COMPLEX AND ATTENUATED THAN THE ONE IT REPLACES.  

This alternative framework makes progress possible by accepting and exploiting the natural connections that exist among all the branches of science, using them to construct careful analyses of the causal interplay among all the factors that bear on a phenomenon.  In this alternative framework, nothing is autonomous and all of the components of the model must mesh. 

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby:  The Adapted Mind:  Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture 

Look at that last claim first, that "all of the components of the model must mesh" because I think it is the overarching motive of the entire enterprise of declaring Darwinism, natural selection, MUST BE TRUE, because without it the scientific study of the phenomenon of the evolution of species and the diversity of life on Earth, can't be pretended to have an overarching completeness, an overarching explanation for everything - it is the biological theory of everything, in this view of it which has become the standard model. 

I think the ability of those doing such science to declare that it "makes progress possible" is the typical folly of the social sciences and of natural selection.  I remember one of my teachers in college, when someone, me, complained that I couldn't make something work the way I'd wanted it to pointing out that no matter how much I wanted it, it was just too bad, it didn't work.  Goes for entire branches of knowledge, look at Ptolemaic cosmology or all of those assertions of the social sciences that litter the boneyard of discontinued science.  You would think that the scientific study of evolution, OF ALL BRANCHES OF KNOWLEDGE, which study about the biggest of all boneyards full of extinct species, would be ready to admit when an overreaching framing has failed.  But, no, they haven't learned that from their study. 

What I think is so telling about the desire of people like Cosmides and Tooby to use a crude and already outdated vintage of Darwinism to rescue the social sciences from the consequences of pretending you can study such occult and unobservable and massively complex "phenomena" such as human culture, human behavior - individually and, in its ultimately attenuated forms, socially and even to declare generalities over the entire species is that they take an alleged explanation for an effectively more enormous, more complex and more unobservable and opaque phenomenon, the evolution of all life on Earth, an explanation that incorporates all of the problems of the allegedly scientific study of behavior and society and minds and magnifies them by hundreds of millions of species over billions of years of which the most scant of traces of a vanishingly small number of effectively randomly preserved bits of often very low resolution artifacts are the only evidence.  And such "evidence" often cannot develop claims that are really "evident" never mind capable of constructing durable general principles.  

But a framing that has been the enforced, approved way to explain things about biological evolution.  I think it is in the political success of that enforced orthodoxy that made it irresistible for the social sciences to latch onto natural selection.  And it was a symbiotic relationship because evolutionary biologists latch onto the alleged findings of evolutionary psychology - such as Hamiltonian "altruism" - as evidence of natural selection.  I think all of it is an illusion. 

I think the claimed integration of knowledge in both of those academic endeavors, the the attempt to come to generalized understandings of them, theories of effectively everything about these extremely complex and largely unobervable entities - I'm not even sure evolution or "human behavior" meet the criteria to be legitimately called "phenomena" as big, varied and unobservable as those are - have the kind of orderly structure that is claimed about them.  I think that sense of structure is largely a self-fulfilling, desired illusion.  One which, through a combination of their shared desires, their ambitions for their professions and their ability to enforce a false consensus about it within their professions, is asserted to be what it isn't, reliably known or even reliably knowable.  

*  I would point out that their "relative unsuccess" is only relative to some of the least successful branches of real science, such as those which study very complex, very varied pheonemena.   Like human nutrition, the study of very varied diets on organisms of great complexity and not a little variety, changing over relatively long lifespans.  Think about that the next time the news has some claim of overturning some previous study in that area.