The judgement of research quality: a response to John Smith

Abstract

The paper by John Smith (2009) relies on the assumption that positivists’ proPopperian methodology of making science is historically rooted in some kind of a social-political-religious conspiracy aimed at exhibiting power of respective institutions. It remains, however, the mainstream methodology today though it is not explicitly claimed to be attributed to the same reasons. The conclusions of the article are somewhat different from sharing the ‘conspiracy theory’, and are based more on familial experiences, and their personal interpretations. The main question after reading the article remains: How can we distinguish between good and ‘not so good’ scientific inquiries, and does this article provide us with better tools to do so? I will briefly share with the readers my impressions and reflections. It is claimed that well-known scientists, such as Galton and Pearson, among others, developed their scientific methods and tools to justify the interests and policies of the formal institution about the distribution of intelligence among human beings. To do so, also the statistical methods of observing and analysing data, which pertain to intelligence, were developed to satisfy the ‘power intentions’ of policy-makers, who happen to belong of course to the upper class. To make justice to this view, one may assume that political interests indeed govern research preference; this is the case also with US NIH and NSF grants today. However, does this indicate that the research method adapts accordingly to political preferences? Isn’t it more reasonable to assume that the first statisticians in the UK, headed by Fisher, were driven more by developing statistical tools which better fit the data and phenomenon under investigation than by ‘power and dominance’ needs? Say this tools would not be developed, can we assume that intelligence is NOT normally distributed in the population? What exactly one tries to say here: Is the distribution of intelligence in the population dependent on institutional power interest? Of course, the arguments about political and institutional power are valid today as they were in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the making of science and the development of scientific tools were independent of these needs, unless one comes and presents hard evidence of this conspiracy theory. This of course is not aimed at disputing the new trend of using qualitative and mixed methods in social and behavioural sciences. Just as rigorous are the methods in the life and natural