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Originally Posted by ilduclo
yeah, Wolfe does a good history of the dispute. It's actually very well written. I think that his description of field work vs theoretical thought is very good in the article and is the basis for a lot of corrective work in social science as a whole.
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Social science, though. Social science is a broad and somewhat useless term in my opinion. If a single category encompasses everything from economics, political science and psychology (which is gebuinely not a social science, despite the way most undergraduate programs choose to categorize it) to geography, anthropology (also, in many cases, not an SS) and even educational science, it's a label of convenience and nothing more.
Linguistics is obviously very multi-faceted, and requires the inclusion of pursuits and studies from all all over the academic map, from literary and philosophical analysis to white-coat lab studies involving fMIR's and electrodes. But the brunt of contemporary research is being done in a "hard science," reductionist manner, like chemistry, physics, cognitive neuroscience, etc. Isolating and identifying units of measurement (the phenome, for instance), and then conducting longitudinal studies to map sounds and the capacity to create sounds in areas of the brain.
My gripe about prose writers venturing into the arena of science is that it often leads to a slanted representation of an issue. This is because subjectivity is the bread and butter of fiction and humanities writing, and many of these guys simply can't write about issue from an objective perspective. They can't resist peppering their writing with loaded phrases and adjectives galore.
Not saying it can't be done, or had never been done... and I'm not saying Tom Wolfe isn't an extrordinarily talented writer... I'm just saying he's not the guy I'm going to look to for pop editorials on scientific issues.