|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Miles Jackson
|| These really aren't fair comparisons, are they? If you try to use
|| theoretical principles in physics to predict behavior of a particular
|| leaf falling on a particular fall day, your "hit rate" will be quite
|| low.
Exactly. The falling of a leaf is not a closed system, ergo cannot be predicted deterministically.
|| To say that probabilistic theories are too fuzzy, can't predict
|| specific events, etc, is beside the point.
I didn't say that. Social theories are not probabilistic, i.e. they are not mathematical. The only reason we have probabilistic theories is because of their prognostic value. Why would I say they don't have any?
|| scientific theory is just an
|| explanation: it explicates the relationship among variables, and the
|| explanation generates predictions that can be empirically verified.
To be politically useful a theory should make predictions so general that it is impossible to agree on an empirical verification procedure.
|| For instance, I'd ask NC this. Social psychologists for about 40
|| years have asserted that exposure to aggressive mass media content
|| provokes aggressive behavior in people. (...) In what sense is this not a well-verified
|| scientific theory?
||
That can't be answered with anything less than a book. You assume that behavioral psychology produces social theories. US academia have imposed on the world a totally unscientific method of extrapolating social theory from controlled empirical experiments, rather than from field data. An experiment performed on a closed, controlled system out of its social context cannot produce information of a scope that surpasses the bounds of the experiment. This unscientific method of extrapolation has a political slant: It produces techniques for social manipulation in the workplace, government institutions, etc., and conveniently empties social theory of any critical content.
Hakki