I think the advocates of Naturalistic Inquiry (see Lincoln and Guba) would say that you aren’t talking about all of science, but of just the “positivistic paradigm” of science, whereas there is another paradigm called “naturalistic” or “constructivist” that does science differently.
I don’t buy the whole Naturalistic program, but they raise some useful points. One of them is that the experiments you suggest require you to impose upon the object of your study an ontology along with the value system associated with it. When studying complex and ill-defined systems, such as psychological or social systems, this may suppress or disrupt the very phenomena that matter, and we never the wiser.
A naturalistic approach to science may tactically employ the kind of experiments you suggest, but proceeds with a great deal of caution about potential variables and hypotheses. “Hunter” and “gatherer” are socially overloaded terms with many implications and connections to other aspects of human life. It may be a big spaghetti mess to disentangle the issues. Inquiry proceeds in an exploratory fashion to tease out potential factors.
On other hand, it may not be a big mess! But the naturalistic bias is toward assuming complexity and subtlety and looking closely at the role of a priori assumptions in the choices of words, variables, and instrumentation that may lead to false results. It’s sort of post-modernism applied to scientific method.
Again, I’m not a partisan of Naturalistic Inquiry. I just find it intriguing, and I have an allergic reaction to oversimplification (having been fooled so often by my own simplifications).
I think the advocates of Naturalistic Inquiry (see Lincoln and Guba) would say that you aren’t talking about all of science, but of just the “positivistic paradigm” of science, whereas there is another paradigm called “naturalistic” or “constructivist” that does science differently.
I don’t buy the whole Naturalistic program, but they raise some useful points. One of them is that the experiments you suggest require you to impose upon the object of your study an ontology along with the value system associated with it. When studying complex and ill-defined systems, such as psychological or social systems, this may suppress or disrupt the very phenomena that matter, and we never the wiser.
A naturalistic approach to science may tactically employ the kind of experiments you suggest, but proceeds with a great deal of caution about potential variables and hypotheses. “Hunter” and “gatherer” are socially overloaded terms with many implications and connections to other aspects of human life. It may be a big spaghetti mess to disentangle the issues. Inquiry proceeds in an exploratory fashion to tease out potential factors.
On other hand, it may not be a big mess! But the naturalistic bias is toward assuming complexity and subtlety and looking closely at the role of a priori assumptions in the choices of words, variables, and instrumentation that may lead to false results. It’s sort of post-modernism applied to scientific method.
Again, I’m not a partisan of Naturalistic Inquiry. I just find it intriguing, and I have an allergic reaction to oversimplification (having been fooled so often by my own simplifications).