For SJC 								Keith Douglas

What is a Science-Oriented Approach to Development?

Introduction
We are in Banania, a small country ruled by a junta favourably supported by the US government. TransnationalMiningCorps wants to build a mine in a local forest and provide employment to 5,000 local people. Farmers are concerned that runoff from the mine will kill their crops; environmentalists that the forest will be clear-cut and yet many locals want the jobs at the mine due to the country’s 25% unemployment rate. What do we do?

There are many approaches to development and other matters of pressing social concern. One is simply to ignore them, out of apathy or a desire that they would simply disappear. Those concerned with social justice, by contrast, have a world of other choices of approach. In this paper I defend a scientific approach to development by introducing and describing five key virtues of this approach. This paper is first in a series of four projected ones on science and technology policy by the present author. (It can be regarded as a summary of some work in the philosophy of science done by others and me.)

Before I begin, I would like to immediately forestall disagreement by mentioning that I am not opposed to what I call the “humanistic” approach to development (or any other social concern). It is my view that the scientific approach to social matters in fact complements such approaches nicely. I shall discuss this further as I proceed.

The five virtues I would like to discuss are the following:

(a)	Corrigibility
(b)	Exactness
(c)	Systematicity
(d)	Transphenomenalism
(e)	Sociotechnology

I shall discuss each of these in a section that follows.

Corrigibility
It is a truism that our hypotheses (educated guesses) about a social system and the people which compose it are just that – hypotheses – hence likely mistaken but also perfectible (slowly, and never completely) by further inquiry. Nevertheless, sometimes truisms are valuable, and the truism about corrigibility is built in to the scientific ethos – as has been forgotten by the World Bank (until recently) and other organizations.

Corrigibility is also connected to testability. If we adopt a viewpoint that is untestable, how are we are to correct it in the light of new evidence, revise it as new situations arise, discard it if is out and out wrong, and so on?

Corrigibility also stresses that different parts of a hypothesis can be corrected if it is stated in exact terms, which is my next point …

 Exactness
A hypothesis (or system of same – i.e. a theory) is exact if it has a precise mathematical form (stated in symbols or otherwise: we can sometimes state exact hypotheses in ordinary language). Exactness should not be confused with quantification; it is better to have a qualitative but truer hypothesis in many cases than a less true but quantitative one. Nonquantitative mathematics exists (for example: group theory, set theory, the Euclidean geometry some of us learned in high school), so we need not give up mathematics when we attempt to state a qualitative hypothesis. (Even such elementary mathematics as the theory of orders can be useful in understanding social situations.)

Exactness has many virtues. I shall discuss four.

(i)	By allowing our concepts to be clearly expressed, it permits us organizing them into systems (theories) with greater ease. This is a desirable goal if we want the benefits of logic: deducing consequences, checking for consistency, etc.
(ii)	Greater testability arises through exactness. Consider the two hypotheses from sociology: “Unemployment is related to criminality” versus the exact form 
C=a+bU, where C is the rate of criminality and U is the rate of unemployment. (Incidentally, this hypothesis is well enough confirmed for many societies to the point one can call it a “law statement”.) a and b here are called parameters, and are different for different societies and times. This is one place where the humanistic approach makes contact with the scientific one: local conditions determine the values of the parameters. Hence, local research can uncover them. 
(iii)	Continuing from the above: the parameters reflect what is unique and local to a given society. But the law statement is a (bounded) universal statement and thus connects to the universalistic aspect of scientific research. It is impossible in general to see this dual aspect to the fuzzy statements of the sort I discussed under (ii). Science is necessary because we cannot help but think in general terms; we are finite creatures and must organize our thoughts. But science is possible, because it makes use of specifics. (This way of putting things is paraphrased from Richard Lewontin, a geneticist.)
(iv)	Exactness also leads to depth – which is important because social matters are usually anything but superficial, and so our knowledge should reflect that. We start by simply “curve fitting” to obtain the values of the parameters. Later if we need more depth or are interested in it for its own sake, we can hypothesize further relations that determine the values of the parameters, and so on indefinitely. This leads back to point (i), systematicity, which I separated out into its own section.

Systematicity
Scientific research reminds us that the world is a system of systems of systems … and not just a heap of individuals or a solid block. This extends to the social world as well and hopefully our knowledge of it. My teacher, Mario Bunge (philosopher of science) has stressed this fact in what he calls the “BPEC schema” for understanding social facts. I shall illustrate how even such a simple occurrence as a marriage has these four components: biological, political, economic, and cultural. (Environmental factors fall under “biological” in this schema.)

B: marriages often enforce exclusivity of reproductive access, sharing of food resources and agreements to fulfill biological and psychological needs.
P: marriages create partnerships between families – or the reverse! – and hence change power relations in a society. Why else did royalty pay so much attention to who was marrying whom?
E: marriages also pool resources of production whether of capital, labour or whatever else.
C: marriages involve the cultural aspects of life, such as religious ceremonies and traditions, feasting, gift exchanges, etc.

But any social fact has many aspects that are not apparent to us, so this brings me to …

Transphenomenalism
This rather long word is coined to reflect the importance of going beyond our senses to the aspects of social events, processes, states that are not visible, audible, etc. These aspects we must conjecture about in order to understand, manipulate or prevent others from manipulating them. 

For example, what goes on inside people’s heads is a very important influence on social facts. Ideologies, religions, non-scientific viewpoints about society itself or individuals’ roles in it, fragments of scientific ideas, superstitions, etc. all affect how people act and react in groups and associations. Social facts proper also have many transphenomenal components. To return to my simple sociological example, C=a+bU (interpreted as I did above) contains two transphenomenal concepts: criminality rate and unemployment rate. The factors that determine the values of the parameters are even more unapparent to us. That is why there are as yet no well-established scientific hypotheses about them.

Because scientific research creates hypotheses that are deep and unobvious, “transphenomenalism” also leads us immediately back to my earlier point about testability. To coin a motto: “Audacious (but grounded and testable!) conjecturing, rigorous testing.” (I omit how one goes about testing hypotheses, since this would quadruple the length of the paper, at least.)

Once we know something about how a social fact operates to some degree, we can then intervene to modify it (e.g. attempt to reduce criminality) or prevent another from doing something to it, which brings me to our next point …

Sociotechnology
I understand technology in the broadest possible sense, to include any rational action informed by scientific research. Hence there are (or ought to be, at any rate) sociotechnologies. Examples might include management, normative economics, criminology, etc. Like natural technology (e.g. electrical engineering, some aspects of forestry and pharmaceutical research) sociotechnology differs from crafts in that it has roots in science, rather than ordinary knowledge. Like them as well, it is not always needed – but to find out when it is and isn’t needed is itself a matter of scientific (rather than technological) research, at least in part. (I suggest this to avoid dogmatic answers of either uncritical acceptance or rejection.)

Unlike basic science, technology is not morally neutral. This is because technology (by construction) involves plans to put artefacts (natural or social) into use and not merely an explanation or description of some aspect of the world. We should thus include in sociotechnologies – including various aspects of social planning – intended uses and impacts. This “puts our ethics on our sleeves” and thus opens the whole process up to rational criticism, debate and modification. In the next paper I shall discuss sociotechnology in greater detail and what roles it does and doesn’t have in social development and related concerns.