Markus Kreuzer writes:
I am organizing a panel at next year’s American Political Science Association meeting tentatively entitled “Varieties of Description.” The idea is to compare and contrast the ways in which different disciplines approach descriptive inferences, that how they go about collective data, how they validate descriptive inferences and what ontological assumptions they make. The panel tries to expand on the work by John Gerring and others that identify description as distinct elements to social analysis. The panel currently has contributors who analyze the structure of historical description as well as thick anthropological-like description. To round out the panel, I am interested in finding contributors who take a more quantitative approach to description. This could involve the use descriptive statistics or exploratory data analysis to describe how, when and where social phenomena unfold or who employ it to generate new theoretical insights. Or it could involve work on concept formation or typologizing.
I responded by pointing him to my paper with Basbøll in which we say that that storytelling, like exploratory data analysis more generally, can be seen as a form of model checking: an interesting story is one which acts as a counterexample to some model (explicit or implicit) of interest.
As we write in our article:
One might imagine a statistician criticizing storytellers for selection bias, for choosing the amusing, unexpected, and atypical rather than the run-of-the- mill boring reality that should form the basis for most of our social science. But then how can we also say the opposite that stories benefit from being anomalous? We reconcile this apparent contradiction by placing stories in a different class of evidence from anecdotal data as usually conceived. The purpose of a story is not to pile on evidence in support of one theory or another but rather to shine a spotlight on an anomaly—a problem with an existing model—and to stand as an immutable object that conveys the complexity of reality.
Anyway, if anyone is interested in participating in Kreuzer’s panel at next year’s APSA meeting, feel free to contact him directly.
I use both statistical and anecdotal evidence in arguments every day. The important thing is to be aware of how to use non-quantitative data. For example, it’s extremely helpful to understand the useful understanding of the “exception that proves the rule.” Something that’s famous for being exceptional — such as Beethoven being a deaf composer — tells you something about the average: few composers are deaf. In contrast, something that’s not famous for being exceptional — such as painter David Hockney having gone deaf — doesn’t tell you much about the average.
Interesting given arguments (OK again by Peirce) that what is anomalous (in a pragmatic sense) is not variety but commonness and here commonness is being pointed to by what is taken as a anomalous (in a literal sense).
Keith:
Okay, I’m hooked now, what should be the first of Pierce’s texts anyone should read?
Likely one of his texts that yet has been made public as long as they correctly figured out which version of it was the final one!
Serious, I don’t think there is a good first one to read.
(Fortunately I avoided that as David Savan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Savan gave a number of seminars and provided one to one tutoring to me.)
I would though suggest you first read The American Pragmatists by Cheryl Misak http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199231201.do
If you do, please let us know how you found it – good or bad.
Also, and this why I comment, I just found this from http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/academic/philosophy/history/20thcentury/9780199279982.do?sortby=bookTitleAscend&thumbby=10&thumbby_crawl=10&refType=1
“Pragmatism is the view that our philosophical concepts must be connected to our practices – philosophy must stay connected to first order inquiry, to real examples, to real-life expertise. The classical pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, put forward views of truth, rationality, and morality that they took to be connected to, and good for, our practices of inquiry and deliberation.
When Richard Rorty, the best-known contemporary pragmatist, looks at our practices, he finds that we don’t aim at truth or objectivity, but only at solidarity, or agreement within a community, or what our peers will let us get away with saying. There is, however, a revisionist movement amongst contemporary philosophers who are interested in pragmatism. When these new pragmatists examine our practices, they find that the trail of the human serpent is over everything, as James said, but this does not toss us into the sea of post-modern arbitrariness, where truth varies from person to person and culture to culture. The fact that our standards of objectivity come into being and evolve over time does not detract from their objectivity. As Peirce and Dewey stressed, we are always immersed in a context of inquiry, where the decision to be made is a decision about what to believe from here, not what to believe were we able to start from scratch – from certain infallible foundations.”
From that quote this why I read Peirce: “connected to, and good, our practices of inquiry and deliberation”
And this a great dismissal of both Lindley type axiom system subjective Bayes and non-informative priors: “we are always immersed in a context of inquiry, where the decision to be made is a decision about what to believe from here, not what to believe were we able to start from scratch – from certain infallible foundations.”
Daniel G,
If you’re interested in Peirce (yes, e before i), you might also be interested in Measuring and Reasoning, a recent (2014) book by morphometrician Fred Bookstein, who acknowledges being heavily influenced by Peirce.
Andrew: Your article with Basboll reminded me of J.Q. Wilson’s Bureaucracy. In the opening chapter of that book, Wilson presents three government organizations–the Germany army, Texas prisons, and the public school system in Atlanta–that operated with exceptional effectiveness. Wilson presents the cases as short narratives, really, to identify features that lead to bureaucratic success. These unusual cases of success then enable Wilson to explore why most public agencies perform poorly. So by telling and examining atypical stories, Wilson is able in turn to identify the sources of overly common bureaucratic dysfunction.
Anyway, it’s great to see this kind of research method being resurrected, discussed, and championed.
What is Wilson’s definition of “effectiveness”? (I’m wondering especially about the case of Texas Prisons).
Martha: For Texas prisons, it’s the level of orderliness. In comparison to other maximum-security facilities, the Texas prisons were clean, quiet, and devoid of violence. Prisoners ate well, attended classes regularly, and participated in skills and work programs. Other comparable institutions were overwhelmed by prisoner-on-prisoner and prisoner-on-guard violence, which made education and job-training programs unmanageable.
When it comes to concepts Goertz’s tome on social science concepts is my reference.