Perhaps “social science” isn’t the correct term. I’m referring to the field in which concepts like gender identification, race identification, trigger warnings, bullying, rape culture, etc. are advanced.
All of the above seem to have been made popular in the last 5-10 years… I’m interested in comparable concepts that were introduced, say 20 or maybe 50 years ago.
I’m also interested in the type of people that study these things. I suspect that they are a more progressive rather than traditional lot and it seems that their influence is more than it otherwise should be.
A concept, like a theory, is useful if it explains facts to a person who is already in possession of the facts.
This is an important distinction: the concepts and theories are not themselves the facts. And vice versa: data does not explain itself, as much as we sometimes like to think that data is self-explanatory.
In the late 1950s and 1960s people began retheorizing race (in particular). They were not (for the most part) presenting new facts. It was not as if people in the 1940s were unaware that people were treated differently on the basis of race until factual studies pointed out to them a decade++ later. What was new was a different way of conceptualizing race and what these behaviors meant. Behaviors that had previously been regarded as natural and rational systemic responses to ongoing behavioral characteristics of the respective races began to be seen as the causes rather than the effects of the observed differences in behaviors.
Similarly, in the late 1960s, 70s, and 80s people began retheorizing gender, starting with feminist analysis of the relative social situations of the two sexes and then expanding, via gay and lesbian rights and related considerations, to move towards a more comprehensive retheorizing of gender. Again, it had more to do with rethinking how to understand the data that everyone already knew than it had to do with new data.
I’m generally in agreement with AHunter3. Fields such as astrophysics and geology advance as new facts are discovered and, generally, are not disputed. (There may be dispute about certain facts for a time, but a resolution is usually reached as more solid data becomes apparent.) Theories in these fields arise from the accepted body of fact.
In the social sciences, theories arise as ways to describe and push worldviews. There is generally not a factual framework that indisputably supports the theory, as there is in the hard sciences. For example, has there ever been a definition of “rape culture” that’s clear enough to meaningfully discuss whether it exists or not? Some skeptics might even suggest that terms like that are deliberately made ambiguous to prevent clear, factual and logic discussions of the topics involved.
Whether certain things constitute “advances” is thus a matter of opinion. I see things like this and this and I see movement in the wrong direction, not advancement. Others may disagree.
I’m with you. That’s why I wondered if 40-50 years ago the social scientists were discovering /pushing things that we all agree with and take for granted now.
Also wondering how to push back against these kinds of “advances”.
There’s a lot of ways; you can cut funding for universities, since that’s where almost all critical theory was developed and advanced, you can ridicule people who push these ideas, and you can fight them at every turn. One particularly powerful idea is to let the universities and academics push far-left theories among themselves, but deny them the ability to spread these beliefs among the general public. For example, there’s an enormous divide between the academic perception of art – piles of trash, crucifixes submerged in urine, and silent symphonies – and the public’s aesthetic preferences, which are basically fascist. Doing this for other fields – that is, letting social scientists go off on tangents about microinvalidations and implicit bias, while everyone else ignores them – is a very appealing method for stopping leftward drift.
In reality land, the actual trends in social sciences are about randomized control trials, neuroimaging, and econometrics. Thanks to advances in computing power, people are applying more and more scientific methodologies to a wider range of subjects.