Here is an excerpt from an article by Bruce Heiden concerning Political Science: "What is political science? One fundamental axiom of a discipline called “political science” must be that politics is amenable to scientific investigation in the first place. So is it? Although we modern folk are accustomed to thinking that anything can be made the object of a science—and that whatever cannot (like the unicorn) is just not anything at all—the proposition that politics affords suitable material for science is quite problematic. In the natural sciences data about the impersonal properties of existing things is gathered by observation, inferences are made about general characteristics, and these generalizations, framed as hypotheses, are tested in turn by further observation under controlled conditions. For politics to be the object of a science it would have to be based on this sort of data and yield testable general conclusions. Political scientists do collect and investigate something they call data; but is this data actually evidence of politics? I would argue that it is not, and that politics produces no data of the sort required. What then is politics? The phenomenon of politics, as we know it from daily life and the study of history, could be generally described as the activity of governing a legally constituted community such as a town, nation, empire, or federation. Now this activity of governing, whether it be performed by a single autocrat or a large population of citizens, fundamentally consists of decisions to take actions in the future that aim at results even further in the future. Political decisions therefore concern imaginary projections, like goals, plans, and expectations of what others may plan and do. For this reason, in political deliberations there are no facts that conclusively matter; what matters are fantasies, and unlike facts fantasies are of essence provisional, vague, easily modified, and even open to self-contradiction. Political deliberations are not even determined by the facts of already established conditions; on the contrary, the very purpose of politics is to change conditions, for example by increasing a community’s wealth or military power, or by resolving its internecine rivalries and redressing perceived injustices. Facts are to politics what marble is to sculpture. Mineralogy offers a science of marble, but not a science of sculpture, and anyone who looked to mineralogy for a science of sculpture would know less about sculpture than the least informed art-lover."
Posted on: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 21:15:44 +0000