Science or Sorcery?

Stanislav Andreski is no believer in what he calls "the principle that dog does not eat dog," the unwritten code that keeps members of the same profession from attacking each other in public even if attack is justified. A professor of sociology at England's Reading University, Andreski has just written a new book that is certain to enrage his colleagues. In Social Sciences as Sorcery (Andre Deutsch; London; -L-2.95), he accuses the world's rapidly increasing population of social scientists of writing more and more about less and less. Their work, he says, is boring, misleading, pseudoscientific and trivial, and amounts to little more than "ponderous restatements of the obvious" masked by a "smoke screen of jargon." In fact, Andreski suggests, little has been added to man's knowledge about himself since the death in 1903 of the English social philosopher Herbert Spencer.

Andreski does not linger long in generalities; he documents his charges and spares few of the luminaries of social science in the process. For instance, he finds the patriarch of modern sociology, Talcott Parsons, guilty of "monumental muddleheadedness" and of making "the simplest truth appear unfathomably obscure." What particularly riles Andreski about Parsons is his "voluntaristic theory of action," which in essence states that to understand behavior it is necessary to take into account men's wishes, beliefs, resources and decisions. This idea, writes Andreski, represents "an important step in the mental development of mankind, but it must have occurred some time during the Paleolithic Age, as Homer and the Biblical prophets knew all about it."

Critical Eye. Also taken roundly to task are such respected men as Paul Lazarsfeld (a co-author of Personal Influence) and his colleagues. "After wading through mounds of tables and formulae," Andreski complains, "we come to the general finding (expressed of course in the most abstruse manner possible) that people enjoy being in the centre of attention, or that they are influenced by those with whom they associate...which I can well believe, as my grandmother told me that many times when I was a child."

No one escapes Andreski's critical eye. He believes that experimental psychologists like Harvard's B.F. Skinner are seriously misinterpreting human nature: "When the psychologists refuse to study anything but the most mechanical forms of behaviour--often so mechanical that even rats have no chance to show their higher faculties--and then present their most trivial findings as the true picture of the human mind, they prompt people to regard themselves as automata, devoid of responsibility or worth, which can hardly remain without effect upon the tenor of social life." Freud, Adler and Jung? Although psychoanalysts "offer many fundamental insights into real-life situations" and cannot be accused of banality or irrelevance, Andreski says, they lack "a sense of proportion." Thus, he concludes, "we are left in the void between quantified trivialities and fascinating but entirely undisciplined flights of fantasy."

Andreski is most impatient with the "quantified trivialities," which are characteristic of the social sciences. He believes that the really significant traits of people can never be measured, and that most of what can be counted and tabulated--answers to the questionnaires so often distributed by sociologists, for instance--is inconsequential.

Some behavior experts use "pseudo-mathematical decorations" to make their work look scientific, Andreski says. In analyzing myths, for example, Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss portrays a fight between two animals by writing "jaguar = anteater (-1)." If that sign is interpreted in its mathematical sense, the sentence means that a jaguar equals one divided by an anteater--a conclusion that Andreski describes as "phantasmagoric." Yet such signs work like "hallucinogenic incantations, inducing fantasies that the mind has been expanded to computer-like dimensions."

Another symbol, the letter n, which is often borrowed from mathematical formulas by social scientists, is equally hallucinogenic. It stands for the word need. Thus Harvard Psychologist David McClelland, for one, writes n Ach when he wants only to convey a person's need to achieve great things, or n Aff to express the urge to affiliate with or belong to a group. Some of his colleagues, Andreski writes, must in turn be moved by n Bam, the need to bamboozle.

Though he specifically excludes the prominent men named in his book from conscious chicanery, he charges that many social scientists are often less devoted to truth than to money and academic status, both of which may be too readily available. In the social sciences, "utterly ignorant and barely literate individuals find it quite easy to become researchers and professors." To substantiate his charge of illiteracy, Andreski cites a vocabulary test on which English social science students scored lower than everyone else, including engineers and physicists.

Andreski is convinced that "much of what passes as scientific study of human behaviour boils down to sorcery," and suggests that the lay reader learn to differentiate between the mumbo jumbo and the occasional work that is valuable. How? By testing his brainpower on a few hard books like Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and J.H. Woodger's Biological Principles. If these volumes are comprehensible but the work of a particular social scientist seems obscure, "then you can justifiably suspect that it might all be nonsense."

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