Best way to refute that isn’t to show that social sciences are objective, but to show the endemic lack of “objective hard science” in modern/western/academic science
Some good texts:
Aikenhead & Michell’s Bridging Cultures: Indigenous and Scientific Ways of Knowing Nature is a close examination of indigenous and european empiricisms. It strongly argues that indigenous knowledge systems are more empirical than academic ones.
A book that shows this to be true in practice is Sillitoe (ed.)'s Local Science Vs Global Science: Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge in International Development, which has contributions from around the world giving concrete examples of Europeans failing to be empirical in their investigations of other knowledge systems.
de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? contains a lot of examples of, even modern, scientists taking ideological presuppositions regarding animal intelligence as facts. Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures does similarly for fungi. Borg & Policante’s Mutant Ecologies: Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital takes a look at how deeply entwined biological sciences are with capitalist society and ideology.
Lewontin’s Biology as Ideology is a work by a practicing scientist criticising in more theoretical terms a lotta the above trends.
Not sure what’s meant by useless though; e.g. history is objectively useless for the production of surplus value, but new ways to blow people up is very good for such profitmaking. History is very useful for understanding how we got here, what solutions have been tried, how they went wrong, etc, missile engineering is useful for blowing up the fascists stopping us from changing things
Best way to refute that isn’t to show that social sciences are objective, but to show the endemic lack of “objective hard science” in modern/western/academic science
Some good texts:
Aikenhead & Michell’s Bridging Cultures: Indigenous and Scientific Ways of Knowing Nature is a close examination of indigenous and european empiricisms. It strongly argues that indigenous knowledge systems are more empirical than academic ones.
A book that shows this to be true in practice is Sillitoe (ed.)'s Local Science Vs Global Science: Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge in International Development, which has contributions from around the world giving concrete examples of Europeans failing to be empirical in their investigations of other knowledge systems.
de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? contains a lot of examples of, even modern, scientists taking ideological presuppositions regarding animal intelligence as facts. Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures does similarly for fungi. Borg & Policante’s Mutant Ecologies: Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital takes a look at how deeply entwined biological sciences are with capitalist society and ideology.
Lewontin’s Biology as Ideology is a work by a practicing scientist criticising in more theoretical terms a lotta the above trends.
Not sure what’s meant by useless though; e.g. history is objectively useless for the production of surplus value, but new ways to blow people up is very good for such profitmaking. History is very useful for understanding how we got here, what solutions have been tried, how they went wrong, etc, missile engineering is useful for blowing up the fascists stopping us from changing things