HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT POLITICS?

1. HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT POLITICS? Sources of knowledge about politics other than being “scientific” • Tradition and culture • Authority • Commonsense • Personal observation Problems with these “methods” • We are often wrong! (we dismiss low probability events, discounting the future, reading intention into everything and every outcome, correlation and missing variables; over emphasizing the last variable in a series of causes) • Overgeneralization • Selective interpretation • Disinformation is purposely created

2. WHAT IS SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH? Scientific Research: The systematic, controlled, empirical, and critical investigation of hypothetical propositions about the presumed relations among [various] phenomena The scientific method: The method of testing theories and hypotheses by applying certain rules of analysis to the observation and interpretation of reality under strictly delineated circumstances • The practical way we do this: • Choose topic • Formulate theory… See parsimony (Occam's razor) • Operationalizethe theory with testable hypotheses • Select the appropriate research techniques • Observe behavior or proxies of attitudes • Analyze data (and try to prove yourself wrong!) • Interpret the results with respect to the theory and change your mind if necessary

3. WHAT ATTRIBUTES DOES RESEARCH HAVE TO HAVE TO BE CONSIDERED SCIENTIFIC • We focus on aggregates, not individuals, to make statements about reality. • Probabilistic statements. We don't have to be right in every case to know something(necessary vs. sufficient cause) • Open to empirical verification. What direct/indirect evidence can we look at to understand Trump’s motivations/incentives to understand why he does what he does? • Research has to be logical, systematic, and controlled. • Research must be subject to falsifiability (Karl Popper) • Transmissible (other scholars must know your methods) • Replicable (Rogoff, austerity, and Excel)

4. SOCIAL SCIENECE AS A DISCPLINE AND INSTITUTION (A SET OF NORMS OR RULES THAT GUIDE BEHAVIOR IN PREDICABLE WAYS) • Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm • Universalism. Ideas are supposed to be independent of their author (blind review) • Communalism: Knowledge is supposed to belong to everyone and thus data is supposed to be open for replication • Honesty. Why must we cite so carefully? Why does journalism have a much looser standard? Why is the temptation to cheat so high? How do social scientists sometimes cheat? What happens if you cheat? • Professionalization (gatekeeping) What does this mean for limits on what ideas are expressed and which questions are pursued? Why does Kuhn believe that the professionalization is not a bad thing (what are its links to "revolutions")?

5. DEBATES ABOUT THE SCIENTIFCATION OF SOC SCI RESEARCH • The biggest concern: Relevancy. Are we too specialized, too “cutting edge,” and too quantitative to either understand in explain in understandable ways important issues? Think about a mosaic • How objective do we need to be in (1) what we study… (2) what we report… (3) in whether we let familiarity with the topic carry over into normative areas? • The liberal arts college professor critique: Are social scientists getting better at research or just going from one type of gatekeeping to the next? • Congressional funders and “real” scientists: Is human behavior is just too complex to predict? Is there something creepy about social science, since human agency is what makes us human? • Post-modern critique—You can’t be unbiased even if you adopt the scientific method… even the scientific method and its way of proving things is biased. Think about baseball as a completely constructed activity. • Anthropologists and Kuhn—When you come from a paradigm, you see what you want to see (old lady’s nose cancer, sea urchins cluster in the sun). Popper’s solution