DOING SOCIAL SCIENCE IN A HUMANISTIC MANNER 387WHAT IS AT STAKE? KNOWLEDGE MAKING AND POLITICS
Most researchers in an interpretive vein do not argue for replacing quantitative-positivist methods
wholesale. Such a universalizing move would contradict a central interpretive philosophical tenet:
Good contextualists that we are, we mostly argue in favor of letting the research question drive the
choice of methods, itself an implicit argument (and sometimes made explicitly) that positivist-in-
formed methods are good for some questions, interpretive-informed methods, for others.^12
Although interpretive philosophies contest its claims for universal generalizability, positivism
itself is not the enemy. Personally, we are happier living in a world run according to positivist
presuppositions than we imagine ourselves being in one ruled by metaphysical explanations:
happier to live under the concept of social and political “equality” borrowed from positivism’s
notion of universal laws and its implications for class, race-ethnic, gender, religious, and other
equalities, in a world run by “the laws of men” (and women) and bureaucratized decision making
rather than by the whims of monarchs and popes, and in a post-metaphysics world of biological
science rather than one of witchcraft, cupping, and superstition. The late sociologist Richard
Harvey Brown made the point quite forcefully:
Thus, however brilliantly positivism and foundationalism have been criticized by academ-
ics, they remain powerful supports for institutions and practices that few of us are willing to
abandon: academic freedom, professional judgment, civil liberties, and due process of law.... As a child of liberalism and the Enlightenment, [methodologically positivist] social sci-
ence has been a major ideological force in the victory of civility over violence, reason and
evidence over passion and prejudice, clear communication over cloudy commitment. Thus,
we should not dismiss positivist social science too blithely, nor imagine with Richard Rorty
that all one needs is a more congenial vocabulary. Instead, if we are to make critical social
theory consequential in the public and political arenas, we must consider its ramifications
outside the halls of academe. Social inquiry has been more than a conversation in a
philosopher’s salon; it also helps turn the wheels of state. (1992, 220–21, citing Peters 1990)
However, although we are sympathetic to Brown’s argument that positivism-informed methods
have, historically, been a force used to emancipate humankind in the various ways he discusses, it
is also clear to us that this is not always the case. Indeed, the historical scale may have tipped: No
researcher of the twenty-first century can afford to be sanguine about the uses to which social
science may be put or to ignore the very real ways in which one understanding among the social
sciences of what it means to do science has drowned out all others over the last several decades;
and this has had a very real cost. The “scientization” of social knowledge has largely meant its
mathematization (on this process, see Foucault 1971; Luke 2004). Together with its routinization
in institutions of higher education, this scientizing has established quantitative, “objective,” hu-
manly neutralized forms of knowledge as “authoritative knowledge” (Jordan 1992; Suchman and
Jordan 1988), at the expense of most forms of local knowledge (Yanow 2004).
A passage from Galileo suggests one way to understand this mathematization:
Philosophy is written in this grand book the universe, which stands continually open to our
gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language
and to read the alphabet in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathemat-
ics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is
humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in
a dark labyrinth. (quoted in Sobel 1999, 16; emphasis added)