'Neither here nor there'
“Indeterminacy” contributes to the need for a provisional understanding. Plus, a preview on estimating mass casualty in Gaza.
“Indeterminacy” is one of the social science concepts about which I’ve thinking a great deal lately. In my inaugural blog post, I talked about the importance of a provisional understanding to a social science perspective. I gave the example of the provisional state of our scientific knowledge of the COVID vaccine. Does the vaccine prevent transmission? “The data we have now indicates it does.” [emphasis added]. As it turns out, the vaccine did not completely prevent either infection or transmission. It did make symptoms less threatening, because the bodies of the vaccinated were fighting virus, thus also producing less virus to pass on to others. Did the scientists “change their minds” because their earlier political position proved untenable? No. They collected and analyzed more and newer data. The pandemic was a moving target. The virus is an evolving one.
But indeterminacy is another contributor to the need for a provisional understanding. It recounts the sense that we have precisely described the conditions as we understand them at a point in time, but still can’t predict how they will break. Prediction is what makes science useful, turning it into technology. It’s what made a vaccine, or gives us lithium batteries for all our beautiful products, like those that carry my words to you. Prediction is a bit more difficult in the social sciences for several reasons, including that our subjects are human beings with quite well–developed wills for behaving less predictably than atoms or paramecia. Atoms and paramecia do not object to the concepts we impose upon them. Sociologists must sidle up alongside our subjects and ask “What is going on here?” Indeterminacy is partly the result of that, as I shall describe.
Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology
When I was in grad school, I struggled to comprehend phenomenological sociology. I understood the individual words, but when strung together in those particular ways, they daunted me. Of course, many of you who’ve taken introductory sociology classes would be familiar with “breaching experiments,” a technique of Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, which flows from this sociological perspective. To students, I describe a sociological “perspective” as “clubs” in which sociologists with similar kinds of explanations like to hang out. But speaking of students, it’s having, or should I say loving to teach social theory for the first time, and having to cover this topic in a survey course, that I really understood the perspective for the first time.
Here, again is how I describe to students the challenge of precision and prediction in sociology as a science distinct from others. Human beings already must have a working knowledge of their social worlds in order to navigate their days. One does not, I intone, approach a crosswalk at a major thoroughfare and say, “Is it safe to cross the street? Allow me to take a survey.” No, we rely on cues in our environment and our interpretations of the intentions of others to make that determination.
The conclusion “it’s neither here nor there,” the title of this post, comes from my dad, who is not a college–educated man. It describes his intuitive understanding of indeterminacy in the social world.
However, a sociologist may be charged with making a determination about the perceived safety of an intersection, or a city full of intersections, based on any one of a number of research methods. This determination is not made pragmatically, but in aggregate, with conditions. A sociologist cannot make a determination about individual circumstances, but only about likelihoods. Herein also lies the rub: our results are received differently. If our findings confirm “common sense,” people ask why public entities have spent hard–earned public money confirming “what everyone already knows.” Debunking poses its own challenges, as Joel Best describes in this wonderful interview about “Halloween sadism.” (Please accept my apologies in advance for the poor production values. I promise the content is worthwhile.)
The example of “radical flank effects”
However, we cannot speak with such confidence every topic. One phrase that sticks with me from my graduate study of social movements is that “radical flank effects are indeterminate.” I’ve had to raise this with students in my social movements class this past spring semester. Essentially, the influence of the “radical flank” or wing of any social movement can “break either way.” It can pull the social movement in its radical direction, or fail to do so. The flank can then break away forming some other effort, or pursue another issue entirely. It seems that the radical flank of the GOP has pulled the rest of the party further right. Likewise some of the Green New Deal has found its way into the Inflation Reduction Act, at least begrudgingly accepted by some of the most fossil–fuel invested of the Democratic Party. (Let’s name Manchin and Sinema here.) So radical flank effects are indeterminate.
Debunking the notion of scholars as “experts”
Students as “our first public” share the public perception of scholars as “experts.” I try to emphasize that while that is the legal right we earn with the Ph.D.—the ability to be called as an expert witness on a topic on which we’ve done peer–reviewed research—knowledge is actually the property of the scholarly community. It’s held collectively in interaction through conferences and journals. Moreover, in the conduct of research, we pulse between knowing and not knowing. Learning something with confidence raises still other questions, either for the scholar or the community in which s/he is embedded. Thus knowledge is dynamic. What we know now is that vaccines give neither 100% immunity nor stop transmission entirely. We also are beginning to learn that vaccination remains the most prudent course for avoiding the worst effects, including “long COVID,” about which we do not yet understand enough. I should add here that I’ve always understood that public health is a field I’ve long held in conversations with students that has “deep affinities” with sociology, chiefly seeing health in aggregate, in populations, rather than as individuals. Indeed, Dr. Nirav Shah, former CDC chief for the State of Maine, where I live, and now number two at the US CDC, had stated, I believe in conversation with Sen. Angus King or on Maine Public Radio, that public health is biology plus sociology.
Philosophically speaking
In keeping with the idea that we humans intuit our social worlds short of a social scientific examination of them, I’d like to share a an Instagram post I made yesterday, which captures this philosophically.
What I know, is that I don’t know
And now I dance and I sing and I live full
I give it all to the call of the unknown
Aho…
We continually pulse between “knowing and unknowing” as a part of the research process and the journey of life. This particular pulsation, one of many in the Tantrik perspective is similar to the idea of “concealment and revelation,” two of the acts of the ultimate.
This movement in scholarship between knowing and unknowing for me has deep roots in human intuition, that of our social world which we must navigate for our quotidian lives. In the pulsation, we find “the pleasure of finding things out,” title a book by the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman.
I’m working on this for you
Yesterday, I also I teased on Instagram a post about mass casualties in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
I had become aware of the Lancet piece through the Instagram account of Susan Abdulhawa.
She’s been posting scenes of the devastation in Gaza, based on two trips she’s made there since October 7.
While I thoroughly agree with the politics her posts suggest, and appreciate the firsthand qualitative views she provides on the devastation, “it gives me no pleasure” to offer in a forthcoming post a perspective on her math. In this post I expect to do the following.
Introduce the public health perspective for counting “excess deaths” as debated during the Iraq war, which I used in my classes on death and dying, research methods, and the sociology of war and peace.
Describe the limitations of a Lancet estimate originating in a “letter” posted online rather than a peer–reviewed monograph.
Explore the political implications for delegitimizing the movement for a free Palestine by promoting an overestimate.
I think we've all known for many, many months that the death toll in Gaza was a lot higher than what was being reported. Why did we think that? Well, it's because the death toll in Gaza has been sort of hovering at around 35 to now 38, 39,000 for maybe five months, like five months, four months, a long time, which is about half of this assault, half of this genocide.
And so I think a lot of us were rightly thinking there's no way that it's this low if the bombs continue to fall, if the food aid continues to be stymied and those trying to deliver it systemically murdered. And now The Lancet has a study out and they are an independent science journal, which is like very interesting that, you know, they would put this out, but it's important. That basically estimates and puts the death toll in Gaza at 186,000 people.
That is five times the number that has been reported by the Gaza Health Ministry, which is obviously run by Hamas, which is why they're under counting the number. Anyway, Lancet is probably run by Hamas. One of them, they're all run by Hamas[…]
From The Bitchuation Room: The New Corporate Ripoff with John Iadarola & David Dayen (Ep 239), Jul 9, 2024
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So “buckle up, Buttercup,” for a deep dive I want to make on this.
