Intellectual Transfer Research Paper

2. Transfer Of Procedures

Whether the classics of modern social science owe their achievements to a spirit of nineteenth century humanism which pervaded them all (Nisbet 1967) or to their location between literary and scientific modes of perception (Lepenies 1988), the subsequent history of sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, and psychology is pervaded by the widespread if intermittent quest for methods and results whose rigor would be comparable to those of the natural sciences. This has entailed a readiness among social scientists to look beyond their own disciplinary boundaries not only for (philosophical) clarification of existing assumptions and procedures, but also for tools which would place social science knowledge on firmer foundations and generate a significant corpus of findings. Within sociology, anthropology and political science, functionalism, structuralism, systems theory, and rational choice theory, are only the most prominent results of intellectual transfer based upon this foundationalist impulse. Functionalism’s conception of society as an organic unity is rooted in conceptions of the organism drawn from biology; structuralism’s exploration of social codes and messages deploys methods first developed in linguistics; the systems theory of the later Talcott Parsons or Niklas Luhmann is unthinkable without the conceptual apparatus of cybernetics; rational choice theory applies individualist models of utility maximization drawn from economics to all domains of the social and political world; and within mainstream empirical social science the persistent classification and subclassification of social phenomena owes much to the taxonomic procedures of eighteenth century natural history (Foucault 1974). More recent moves to apply chaos theory to society have added a twist to this quest for foundationalist respectability. Here, theories of uncertainty and nonlinear dynamics appear to warrant claims that the natural and social worlds are both marked by the absence of law-like regularity.

Since the intellectual transfer of a formal apparatus entails an initial abstraction of its core components, their uprooting from their original home, and translation into an idiom recognizable to the social science discipline in which they are to operate, the blessings of these efforts have been mixed. All display a tension between the descriptive power of a rigorous theoretical apparatus and the need to adapt it to circumstance, most notably the absence of an isomorphism between the natural and social worlds. A number of consequences of this may be noted:

(a) Techniques and conceptual schemes imported into the social sciences from outside have produced genuine semantic innovation and enhanced the descriptive vocabularies of practicing social scientists.

(b) At the same time, it remains doubtful whether they have added significantly to collective social scientific knowledge of the sources of social order, social change, and human motivation that emerged in the late nineteenth century classics.

(c) While intellectual transfer of this type has increased the theoretical sophistication and rigor with which ‘results’ or ‘findings’ are presented, it has produced little if any innovation in empirical research techniques or methodologies.

(d) In cases of a more explicit embrace of natural science models social scientists’ understanding of natural science knowledge may be incomplete inaccurate, as witnessed by the ‘Sokal affair’ of 1998.

(e) The very success of well-defined approaches such as systems theory or rational choice theory—descriptive power, volume of findings, size of intellectual following—has produced paradigm multiplication— intellectual closure, the progressive internal differentiation of disciplines and disciplinary vocabularies—rather than disciplinary unity.

As a result of this last consequence, histories of disciplines such as sociology or anthropology are forced to combine an in-house relativism ecumenism with a vaguely felt evolutionism. Here, the more extensive the importation of natural scientific paradigms into social science disciplines, the less any of them taken as a single entity appears describable through Kuhn or Lakatos’ accounts of the development of natural science disciplines: scientific revolutions, or the growth of knowledge through criticism.

3. Transfer Of Substantive Insight

In contrast to the considerable development of formal techniques and conceptual vocabularies in the twentieth century, the history of substantive innovation in the social sciences is less impressive. Since the turn of the nineteenth century the anthropological claims which grounded the identities of the various disciplines or subdisciplines at their inception have proved remarkably robust. Within social science disciplines with more porous boundaries these models of humankind have continued to define the terms in which the nature of social being is debated and researched. The images of humans as producing animals, as the maximizers of utility, as altruists, as fabricators of a meaningful universe, still dominate mainstream social science at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Some notable additions, however, in which a ‘migration of insight’ has occurred, may be mentioned. Most marked are the claims of psychoanalysis concerning the basic structure of the psyche, which have exerted widespread influence on a range of disciplines, particularly sociology and anthropology. The work of the archaeologist Uexkull on the relationship between humans and the environment influenced the theory of social institutions developed by a whole generation of conservative German social scientists from the 1930s to the 1950s.

4. Interdisciplinarity

If one product of open disciplinary boundaries is a form of intellectual transfer based on a quest for certainty, foundation, and intellectual closure, then another is interdisciplinarity, the mutual influence of two or more disciplines. A major stimulus to this process has been a change in the status of natural science knowledge from being an explicit model or implicit standard for social scientific inquiry, to being a topic of it, subject to the same scrutiny as other realms of human action. This breaking out of the shadows of natural science has left the social science disciplines both on their own and with room to explore their relationship to humanities disciplines such as literary criticism. Three forms of interdisciplinarity may be distinguished:

(a) The combination—common throughout the history of the social sciences—of the major building blocks of two or more disciplines in order to throw light on a clearly defined element of the human condition. Examples of such an approach are the combination of literature and anthropology in Rene Girard’s account of violence; of sociology and economics in Talcott Parsons’ account of the nature of action; and of sociology and history in Barrington Moore and Skocpol’s accounts of democracy and revolution.

(b) The eclectic hybridizing of a variety of disciplinespecific conceptual devices and methods as part of an effort to generate a new field of inquiry. Notable examples are ‘area studies’ which developed in the 1950s and 1960s out of an effort to apply Western social science to Third World and developing societies, and the contemporary phenomenon of cultural studies, which has mushroomed in new universities throughout the Western world.

(c) The utilization of the results and findings of the different social science disciplines in order to develop a comprehensive anthropology (Gehlen 1988).

5. Mechanisms Of Transfer

The transfer of formal or systematic procedures into a social science discipline depends partly upon the degree of systematization already prevailing within it. Social science in France and Germany—where allembracing terms such as Wissenschaft know no English equivalent—developed at its inception a series of systematic, conceptually rigorous theories of social wholes. The relative immunity of these social sciences to pressure from natural science or the humanities may be attributed, ironically enough, to the fact that many of their founders were trained in jurisprudential modes of reasoning. It is arguable that by contrast, in the English-speaking world the division between the arts and natural sciences has made the social sciences more open, yet also more vulnerable to the rival claims of both a natural science model of good knowledge and a hermeneutic or culturalist inquiry based upon procedures drawn from literary criticism or, after World War II, semiotics. The coexistence of rational choice theory and postmodernism within the same departments of sociology is an index of this.

Yet social science in the English-speaking world is not wholly torn between the importation of scientistic models of explanation and the adoption of literary models of textualist interpretation, sharing much with the social science of the continental European tradition. That this is so owes much to the exile and migration of that tradition’s representatives and their presence within Anglo-Saxon higher educational institutions. If Anglo-Saxon sociology, political science, psychology, or anthropology have held their own as sui generis and self-confident disciplines, or if political sociology or economic anthropology have later produced systematic interdisciplinary inquiry, it is on the basis of the work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Schumpeter, Malinowski, Freud, and Levi-Strauss, much of it mediated by the European intellectual diaspora of the 1920s and 1930s (Anderson 1992). By the same token, the Anglo-Saxon world has become the protective home of a generic ‘European’ or ‘continental’ tradition of social science inquiry, based upon and promoting an intellectual transfer between national traditions which contrasts with the entrenchment and mutual suspicion frequently displayed by their native practitioners.

6. The Future Of Intellectual Transfer

In the 30 years following Lakatos and Musgrave’s (1970) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, the philosophy of the social sciences has lost much of its appeal to the social sciences themselves. The mirror in which reflection on the identity of the social sciences occurs is no longer that of the epistemological status of social scientific knowledge but, increasingly, that of the social responsibility of both natural and social scientific practitioners (Wallerstein 1996). Natural science models continue to prove attractive, but in doing so contribute only to the internal differentiation of disciplines. The more significant contemporary version of intellectual transfer for the foreseeable future will continue to be that which produces interdisciplinary departments of ‘X studies’ drawing on a variety of epistemological assumptions and asking few questions concerning the status of the knowledge produced therein. The reflexive apotheosis of this development is the emergence of departments of ‘interdisciplinary studies.’

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