This is nice. The “Fruit in the Hand” part also seems to me to line up nicely with the claim that the social sciences deal with more complex questions—if we have more innate faculties for making predictions about social matters than about physical ones, then the questions we want to ask the social scientists start from a higher baseline than the questions we want to ask the physical scientists.
One type of traditional explanation that I’m not sure if you mentioned is the problem of reflexivity—theorizing about society creates a new object (the theory) that influences the society, while theorizing about the physical world doesn’t usually create a new object that itself influences the physical world. Especially in certain kinds of market and political interactions, where people are incentivized to frustrate predictions (or occasionally incentivized to realize them), these theories can influence things in harder-to-predict ways than in physical interactions, which usually don’t operate according to incentives at all, and thus not on incentives for frustrating or realizing predictions.
Thanks! Yeah! That’s just how we are thinking about it.
I like that observation, and it sounds just. Marxism, Keynesian economics, and various psychotherapeutic paradigms provide striking examples of theories that substantively influence the behavior they are meant to describe. And, as you say, the nature of their influence can be subtle and multifaceted—ranging from informing people’s expectations of others’ behavior and their own behavior to providing Schelling points for social coordination and introducing possible actions and strategies not previously salient or even imagined.
The best reference I know for a discussion of something like this is by the sociologist of science, Robert Merton in his 1948 “The Self-Fulling Prophecy.” In it, he considers mechanisms by which economic, psychological, and sociological theories become self-reinforcing or self-negating.
This is nice. The “Fruit in the Hand” part also seems to me to line up nicely with the claim that the social sciences deal with more complex questions—if we have more innate faculties for making predictions about social matters than about physical ones, then the questions we want to ask the social scientists start from a higher baseline than the questions we want to ask the physical scientists.
One type of traditional explanation that I’m not sure if you mentioned is the problem of reflexivity—theorizing about society creates a new object (the theory) that influences the society, while theorizing about the physical world doesn’t usually create a new object that itself influences the physical world. Especially in certain kinds of market and political interactions, where people are incentivized to frustrate predictions (or occasionally incentivized to realize them), these theories can influence things in harder-to-predict ways than in physical interactions, which usually don’t operate according to incentives at all, and thus not on incentives for frustrating or realizing predictions.
Thanks! Yeah! That’s just how we are thinking about it.
I like that observation, and it sounds just. Marxism, Keynesian economics, and various psychotherapeutic paradigms provide striking examples of theories that substantively influence the behavior they are meant to describe. And, as you say, the nature of their influence can be subtle and multifaceted—ranging from informing people’s expectations of others’ behavior and their own behavior to providing Schelling points for social coordination and introducing possible actions and strategies not previously salient or even imagined.
The best reference I know for a discussion of something like this is by the sociologist of science, Robert Merton in his 1948 “The Self-Fulling Prophecy.” In it, he considers mechanisms by which economic, psychological, and sociological theories become self-reinforcing or self-negating.