Humpty Dumpty

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scorn­ful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — nei­ther more nor less.”

“The ques­tion is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many dif­fer­ent things.”

“The ques­tion is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be mas­ter — that’s all.”

— Through the Look­ing Glass, Chap­ter 6

Just like Humpty Dumpty, Repub­li­cans in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and their Fox News enablers have started to decide what words mean. This week’s word: sci­ence.

Yes­ter­day, DC out­lined how the Republican-​​controlled North Car­olina State Leg­is­la­ture has tried to define an accept­able rate of sea level rise from global warming.

Pig (left); Con­gress­man Jeff Flake (right)

I’ve writ­ten about how a Republican-​​led leg­is­la­ture in Ten­nessee decided that cer­tain reli­gious beliefs are actu­ally sci­ence, while global warm­ing is not.

Dur­ing the Repub­li­can Pres­i­den­tial debates, can­di­date Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Michele Bach­mann (R-​​Stillwater, MN) just plain made up sci­ence to fit her preëx­ist­ing belief system.

And of course, the decades-​​long Repub­li­can War on Sci­ence is well-​​documented.

So it should come as no sur­prise that National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion (NSF) fund­ing bill amend­ment, spon­sored by Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jeff Flake (R-​​Mesa, AZ) and passed by the House last month, pur­ports to define what is, and what is not, “science”.

Flake began by try­ing to cut the NSF bud­get by $1.2 bil­lion. (The FY2012 bud­get for NSF is just over $7 bil­lion.) Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Mar­sha Black­burn (R-​​Brentwood, TN) and Paul Broun (R-​​Athens, GA) offered sim­i­lar spend­ing cuts. Blackburn’s DW-​​NOMINATE is +0.753, Broun’s is a mighty con­ser­v­a­tive +0.949, and Flake’s is an eye-​​popping +1.014. This is a DW-​​NOMINATE record, sur­pass­ing even the jus­ti­fi­ably obscure Charles L. Under­hill, who served as a Mass­a­chu­setts Repub­li­can from 1921 to 1933. (Note that all three cur­rent Rep­re­sen­ta­tives are well-​​known to Log­a­rchism read­ers for their rabid anti-​​government views. For exam­ple, Broun has appeared here twice before.) Cut­ting agency bud­gets is well within the purview of Con­gress, and an accept­able approach to the country’s cur­rent fis­cal cri­sis. How­ever, such a large-​​scale cut was unpalat­able to Flake’s House col­leagues. They defeated his pro­posal 121–291, also defeated the Black­burn and Broun pro­pos­als, and passed a bill that increases the fund­ing for NSF to $7.3 billion.

Flake then returned with an amend­ment, which the House passed 218–208, that blocks NSF from fund­ing polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­grams, which rep­re­sent $11 mil­lion of the NSF bud­get, or 0.15 per­cent. But since it doesn’t reduce the NSF bud­get — that amount was already set by the appro­pri­a­tions bill — it doesn’t save any money. Rather, it only micro­man­ages the NSF and tells them that polit­i­cal sci­ence is not science.

Inci­den­tally, note the DW-​​NOMINATE scores above. Who funded the polit­i­cal sci­en­tists who devel­oped the DW-​​NOMINATE? Well, the NSF, that’s who:

Rep. Chip Cravaack knows what “sci­ence edu­ca­tion” is.

Fresh­man Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Chip Cravaack (R-​​Lindstrom, MN) also intro­duced, and the House passed 238–188, a sim­i­lar amend­ment ban­ning the use of NSF funds for cli­mate change edu­ca­tion. This doesn’t save any money either, but it does define what “sci­ence edu­ca­tion” is, and appar­ently any sci­ence edu­ca­tion other than cli­mate sci­ence edu­ca­tion is fine with Cravaack.

Charles Lane, at the Wash­ing­ton Post, argues that Con­gress should block NSF fund­ing for all social sci­ences ($247 mil­lion, or three per­cent). He argues that the money could bet­ter be used to fund pro­grams that pro­duce “hard” sci­ence. Appar­ently, knowl­edge is not use­ful, nor is hav­ing a more informed cit­i­zenry. Lane defines sci­ence as “hard” sci­ence, like engi­neer­ing and math­e­mat­ics. He claims that

Charles Lane doesn’t know tact, but he does know what “sci­ence” is.

Fed­eral fund­ing for math­e­mat­ics, engi­neer­ing and other “hard” sci­ences is appro­pri­ate. In these fields, researchers can test their hypothe­ses under con­trolled con­di­tions; then those exper­i­ments can be repeated by others.

Though quan­ti­ta­tive meth­ods may rule eco­nom­ics, polit­i­cal sci­ence and psy­chol­ogy, these dis­ci­plines can never achieve the objec­tiv­ity of the nat­ural sci­ences. Those who study social behav­ior — or fund stud­ies of it — are inevitably influ­enced by value judg­ments, left, right and cen­ter. And unlike hypothe­ses in the hard sci­ences, hypothe­ses about soci­ety usu­ally can’t be proven or dis­proven by exper­i­men­ta­tion. Soci­ety is not a laboratory.

I’m not clear on how Lane could draw a bright line between psy­chol­ogy (listed above as a “social sci­ence”) and neu­ro­science (a “hard sci­ence”). I’m not sure that he under­stands that all sci­en­tists are inevitably influ­enced by “value judg­ments”. After all, sci­ence is per­formed by humans. I’m not sure he under­stands what sci­ence is, or hypoth­e­sis test­ing is. He appar­ently thinks the exis­tence of “value judg­ments” blocks eco­nom­ics, polit­i­cal sci­ence and psy­chol­ogy from the exalted pan­theon of “sci­ence”.

As a neu­ro­sci­en­tist myself, I always thought there was almost total over­lap between the fields of neu­ro­science and psy­chol­ogy. But what do I know? I’m a sci­en­tist, and I always thought that the com­mu­nity of sci­ence got to define what sci­ence actu­ally is. Now I come to find out who gets to define what sci­ence is: a Con­gress­man run­ning for Sen­ate and a for­mer New Repub­lic edi­tor and cur­rent Fox News blovi­a­tor who famously pointed out that Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Gabrielle Gif­fords (D-​​Tucson, AZ) couldn’t “speak nor­mally” after sur­viv­ing a point-​​blank gun­shot wound to the head.

Per­haps we should be fund­ing research to find out why Charles Lane feels the need to fling hurt­ful remarks at peo­ple and events he doesn’t under­stand, like a mon­key fling­ing poo.

Had her attacker not taken so much away from her, Gif­fords might have made a cred­i­ble run for the Class 1 U.S. Sen­ate seat from Ari­zona cur­rently held by retir­ing Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Jon Kyl. The pri­mary date for Flake is August 28, and he holds a large lead but his clos­est com­peti­tor, Wil Car­don, is clos­ing the gap. The Club for Growth is scared enough to run attack ads, claim­ing Car­don is no true Scots­man. It’s sad to think future polit­i­cal sci­ence research may suf­fer a great fall, due to the whims of an extreme right-​​wing Humpty Dumpty.

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