Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

60 Chapter 2
anything in science. We try to get closer and closer to the truth by better and
better measurement. All of science relies on concepts whose existence must
ultimately be demonstrated by their effects. You can ram a car against a
cement wall at 50 miles an hour and account for the amount of crumpling
done to the radiator by referring to a concept called ‘‘force.’’ The greater the
force, the more crumpled the radiator. You demonstrate the existence of intelligence
by showing how it predicts school achievement or monetary success.
The Problem with Validity
If you suspect that there is something deeply, desperately wrong with all
this, you’re right. The whole argument for the validity (indeed, the very existence)
of something like intelligence is, frankly, circular: How do you know
that intelligence exists? Because you see its effects in achievement. And how
do you account for achievement? By saying that someone has achieved highly
because they’re intelligent. How do you know machismo exists? Because men
dominate women in some societies. And how do you account for dominant
behavior, like wife beating? By saying that wife beaters are acting out their
machismo.
In the hierarchy of construct reality, then, force ranks way up there (after
all, it’s got several hundred years of theory and experimentation behind it),
while things like intelligence and machismo are pretty weak by comparison.
And yet, as I made clear in chapter 1, the social and behavioral sciences are
roaring successes, on a par with the physical sciences in terms of the effects
they have on our lives every day. This is possible because social scientists
have refined and tested many useful concepts and measurements for those concepts.
Ultimately, the validity of any concept—force in physics, the self in psychology,
modernization in sociology and political science, acculturation in
anthropology—depends on two things: (1) the utility of the device that measures
it; and (2) the collective judgment of the scientific community that a
concept and its measure are valid. In the end, we are left to deal with the
effects of our judgments, which is just as it should be. Valid measurement
makes valid data, but validity itself depends on the collective opinion of
researchers.
Cause and Effect
Cause and effect is among the most highly debated issues in the philosophy
of knowledge. (See Hollis [1996] for a review.) We can never be absolutely