Objectivity and the Politics of Disciplines

Abstract

This chapter assesses the bearing of bureaucratic cultures on science, then shows how inferential statistics became standard in medicine and psychology as a response to internal disciplinary weakness and external regulatory pressures. The massive effort to introduce quantitative criteria for public decisions in the 1960s and 1970s was not simply an unmediated response to a new political climate. It reflected also the overwhelming success of quantification in the social, behavioral, and medical sciences during the postwar period. This was not a chance confluence of independent lines of cultural and intellectual development, but in some way a single phenomenon. It is no accident that the move toward the almost universal quantification of social and applied disciplines was led by the United States, and succeeded most fully there. The push for rigor in the disciplines derived in part from the same distrust of unarticulated expert knowledge and the same suspicion of arbitrariness and discretion that shaped political culture so profoundly in the same period. Some of this suspicion came from within the disciplines it affected, but in every case it was at least reinforced by vulnerability to the suspicions of outsiders, often expressed in an explicitly political arena.