Soziologie erkrankt an naiven Soziologen

Wilson schreibt:

Everyone knows that the social sciences are hypercomplex. They are inherently far more difficult than physics and chemistry, and as a result they, not physics and chemistry, should be called the hard sciences. They just seem easier, because we can talk with other human beings but not with photons, gluons, and sulfide radicals. Consequently, too many social-science textbooks are a scandal of banality. Such is the paradox of the social sciences. Familiarity bestows comfort, and comfort breeds carelessness and error. Most people believe they know how they themselves think, how others think too, and even how institutions evolve. But they are wrong. Their understanding is based on folk psychology, the grasp of human nature by common sense — defined (by Einstein) as everything learned to the age of eighteen — shot through with misconceptions, and only slightly advanced over ideas employed by the Greek philosophers. Advanced social theorists, including those who spin out sophisticated mathematical models, are equally happy with folk psychology. As a rule they ignore the findings of scientific psychology and biology. That is part of the reason, for example, why social scientists overestimated the strength of communist rule and underestimated the strength of ethnic hostility. They genuinely startled when the Soviet empire collapsed, popping the cap off the superpower pressure cooker, and were surprised again when one result of this release of energies was the breakout of ethnic strife and nationalistic wars in the spheres of diminished Russian influence. The theorist have consistently misjudged Muslim fundamentalism, which is religion inflamed by ethnicity. At home in America, they not only failed to foresee the collapse of the welfare state, but cannot agree on its causes. In short, social scientists as a whole have paid little attention of the foundations of human nature, and they have had almost not interest in its deep origin.1

Das Kernproblem der Soziologie ist nicht, dass sie nicht gut betrieben werden kann, also an und für sich Pseudowissenschaft ist. Vielmehr sind es die Soziologen, die Anspruch erheben Aussagen über das menschliche Zusammenleben machen zu können, aber sich nur mit der Interaktion, nicht aber mit den Beteiligten zu beschäftigen.

Die beste Testfrage, die ich kenne, um solche Luftpumpen zu entlarven, ist einfach den biologischen Grundlagen zu fragen, die für ihre angebliche Perspektive relevant ist. Einen Genderkonstruktivisten muss man nur nach der genauen Funktion von Vasopressin und Testosteron bei der Hirnentwicklung eines Embryos. In 99,9% der Fälle ist die Antwort mangelhaft bis ungenügend. Solche Menschen behaupten etwas über die Gehirnfunktionen, ohne sich auch nur ein kleines Bisschen mit den grundlegenden Wirkmechanismen auszukennen.

Bizarr, dass so etwas ein gewöhnliches Phänomen in der universitären Wissenschaft ist, der angeblichen Bildungselite.


  1. Edward O. Wilson (1998): Consilience. The Unity of Knowledge, New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc. S. 183/184. 

Leave a Reply

  • (will not be published)

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>