Science, Politics, and Swift Boats • P. T. Jackson • Page 4
al. 1994: 9). The systematic application of the right set of methodological precepts
should yield “context-independent theories” (Flyvbjerg 2001: 26) and a firm foundation
for practical action.
Unfortunately, this Enlightenment dream of a presuppositionless social science
that can aspire to transcendental truth is philosophically unsustainable. The collapse of
logical positivism as an account of the sciences has left researchers to confront the
irreducibly perspectival character of the knowledge that they produce. Researchers must
take account of the theory-dependence of observation: the way that our very experience
of the world is inescapably mediated by the conceptual and linguistic apparatus that we
bring to bear when producing knowledge of the world. Various efforts to solve this
problem and restore some measure of classical objectivity to scientific knowledge,
whether by post-positivists (Lakatos 1978b; Popper 1979), critical realists (Searle 1995;
Bhaskar 1998), or partisans of “communicative action” (Habermas 1975; 1990), have not
succeeded and are not likely to do so for reasons I will briefly discuss below. Instead of
continuing to try to escape the problem, we have to re-envision social science as an
irreducibly partial and perspectival endeavor, and give up that Enlightenment dream.
At the same time, acknowledging and even celebrating this partiality does not
mean abandoning the distinction between science and politics, or reducing scientific
studies of contentious issues to nothing but strategic interventions into an ongoing
public debate (contra Schram and Daniels 1998). Dobbs is right to stress the
independence of his investigation from the specific claims made by either presidential
campaign or by the SBVT group. This independence does not guarantee anything like a
Convention