--- David Hobby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > O.K., let's try a different tack. How do people in > > your field decide who is "right"? How do they test > theories? > What are their standards of evidence? > Feel free to disabuse me of this, but my opinion is > that it is mostly a matter of how articulately one > argues, and > what the existing big names in the field think. Can > you point > me to papers with clearly testable theories, > subjected to > objective methods of verification?
Well, mainly we argue about it. Politics is hard, and math is not the only path to truth. The people who fetishize mathematical analysis are doing a great deal of harm to political science, in my opinion. But take a look at any of the classics in the field - _The Clash of Civilizations_ is a famous modern one. In that one, Sam tested his predictions against a historical case (the situation in Yugoslavia) and made some predictions. Both came off fairly well. Did he convince everyone? No. It's _politics_. Of course it's politicized. That's what we do. > > Not at Nitze. The _current_ Dean of Nitze is > Eliot > > Cohen, one of the best political scientists in the > > world. Being Dean of Nitze is a very big deal - > in > > the same league of prestige as being head of the > > But this is my point! It is prestigious to be an > administrator, rather than a scholar. This implies > to me that > the whole field is shallow, so that the only way to > "recognize" > quality research is by popular acclaim. > In REAL fields of academia, most of the smart > people > shun administrative work, doing it when necessary as > an onerous > chore. No, my point was that to get to _be_ Dean of Nitze you have to have done real academic work of serious impact. Sam Huntington everyone knows. Graham Allison invented the modern theory of institutional decision making in _Essence of Decision_. > Here's a test: Can someone who is an outsider to > the field > have their contributions recognized? I'm thinking > of someone like > Ramanujan, brilliant but not an academic. (See this > link for details: > http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Ramanujan.html) > Or > Einstein. If he had worked in International > Relations, would he > have gotten a job better than the patent office? Well, they could have in the old days. Not now. But that's equally true in the hard sciences. There aren't any Swiss patent clerks out there any more. But Stanley Hoffmann, for example, is a lawyer by academic training - he doesn't have a degree in the field. And there is no one more respected than him. > And prestige? What good is that? > > ---David Hobby > Ph.D., UC Berkeley, 1983 Well, I wrote my senior thesis, and will write my PhD dissertation, in answer to that question :-) But what it really is is a shorthand way of saying how respected your work is in the field. I would point out that your arguments are far _more_ applicable to history or English than they are to political science, which at least tries really hard to adopt the standards of the hard sciences (sometimes too hard!). Does your criticism extend to them as well? In other words, are you saying nothing is academic except a science? Or is it just political science that you object to? ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
