Wisconsin Plan to eliminate Liberal Arts at the University of Wisconsin

[DireWolfSpirit]

On March 23, 2018 at 0:10 PM, Suttree said:

 

On March 22, 2018 at 10:29 PM, King Ned Stark said:

I’ll grant that CO2 emissions affect the climate, that’s fine, but the lefts answer to it is farcical.

Can you please articulate what you think the "left's answer" to climate change is?

 

Just reposting this question to King Ned, I didnt catch his response?

[Zorral]

36 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

To be clear I’m not saying history is purely subjective.  I’m saying its reliance upon the written recollections of people we cannot check behind and upon the preservation of such accounts make it more subjective than other disciplines like mathematics or physics.  

Your points about archeology and climate finds are well made but even with those additions history is always going to be subject to the points of view of the records we have from the times being examined.

Wouldn't you think that monuments built by / for the memorializing of Egyptian pharaohs, with the dates inscribed and so on, are reliable documentation?

Now what follows below that, are surely what the pharaoh and / or successors want people to believe.

On the other hand, other monuments of female pharaohs, which have their dates and inscriptians chiseled off, even destruction of the wort to remove the 'female' identity, tell us something else that isn't in dispute.  Just like the long and many pages about Genghis Khan giving various parts of his empire to various daughters to rule because he saw them as far more competent than his sons -- and then the pages being covered over with ink, with other pages following that have the sons killing the daughters and taking their place.  That also tells us something irrefutable.
 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

3 hours ago, Zorral said:

Wouldn't you think that monuments built by / for the memorializing of Egyptian pharaohs, with the dates inscribed and so on, are reliable documentation?

Now what follows below that, are surely what the pharaoh and / or successors want people to believe.

On the other hand, other monuments of female pharaohs, which have their dates and inscriptians chiseled off, even destruction of the wort to remove the 'female' identity, tell us something else that isn't in dispute.  Just like the long and many pages about Genghis Khan giving various parts of his empire to various daughters to rule because he saw them as far more competent than his sons -- and then the pages being covered over with ink, with other pages following that have the sons killing the daughters and taking their place.  That also tells us something irrefutable.
 

It does but the conclusions drawn from those facts are necessarily subjective.

We know all the facts surrounding the start of the First World War.  Based on those facts what nations are primarily responsible for its outbreak?

[Altherion]

14 hours ago, dmc515 said:

I apologize for that.  Seriously.  I don't know what that was, but it obviously was mean spirited towards you.  Again, I'm sorry.

No problem (although I was rather surprised).

9 hours ago, Rippounet said:

It tells us that there is no absolute "best" structure, and that values are relative to one's own environment.

I am not sure that it does. Values are certainly relative to one's environment (including the technological era), but for any given environment and the resulting set of values, some structures are clearly better than others and there may very well be one that is optimal.

10 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Who are you to judge entire fields of knowledge and proclaim that they contain "very little" that is scientific? As I said earlier, you may dispute the methods or the conclusions, but there are many objective facts about human societies in the social sciences.

There are undoubted many objective facts about human societies, but their presence in and of itself does not make something scientific. The "social sciences" suffer from several defects which would make their results completely inadmissible in more rigorous fields. Try publishing a physics paper in which your experimental setup differs from the environment you intend to apply your results to in dozens of ways (most of which you can't even disentangle from each other) and see how far you get...

10 hours ago, Rippounet said:

More importantly, the issue of "usefulness" is telling here. You can only view the research as "useful" or "useless" if you're attempting to find the "best" social or family structure for humans. But that's precisely what most of the research avoids because it is scientific. Social research will generally try to describe a given phenomenon in human society and attempt to place it within a greater analytical framework. The point is simply to understand more about ourselves, not to find an absolute truth.

It is simply not true that most of the research avoids this. It's certainly not true of arguably the most famous sociological work (and one still used today by roughly a fifth of the Earth's population) -- as the name suggests, the premise of scientific socialism and its many descendants is to apply the scientific method to history and thereby arrive at a better society. It is likewise not true most "social science" work at American universities. I would have no quarrel with them if all they did is gather facts about the past and about human reactions, but these facts and the framework you mention are then inevitably used to justify policy in our current society which is both absurd and dangerous.

11 hours ago, Rippounet said:

The depth to which you understand "laws of nature" makes a huge difference.
It's one thing to know that the sun rises and sets everyday without understanding why or how ; in that case it's easy to invent a story whereby God can suspend the movement. It's another to know what the sun is, because it then makes divine intervention considerably more complex and impressive.

Does it? Understanding the laws of nature also makes it easier to understand how something could be done. To take your example, suspending the motion of the sun for the Earth as a whole indeed becomes a lot more impressive (especially if one wants to do it without people noticing the angular acceleration). However, to make it look like the sun has stopped moving in a relatively small region of the Earth (as any ancient city would be) is nowhere near that difficult: all it would take is some optical tricks with sunlight relatively high up (probably in orbit). This is still beyond our civilization, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not actually that hard.

 

[baxus]

 

On 3/24/2018 at 3:20 AM, Altherion said:

You have now. More seriously, I think this is at least a little bit a matter of semantics. The Latin root of the word "science" means simply "knowledge" so in principle it can be used to mean practically anything, but, at least in the US, most people reserve it for fundamental laws of nature and thus distinct from its applications (such as technology, engineering and medicine) and the study of human phenomena such as history. I personally feel the latter distinction is very useful while the former one is more or less worthless.

I know where it comes from, but it's strictly an English language thing.

In Serbian, you have natural sciences and social sciences (roughly translated, of course) and if I remember my German and Russian lessons, it's the same for those two languages.

On 3/24/2018 at 6:32 AM, King Ned Stark said:

How can you prove there is no God?  I’m curious.

The thing is that those who are claiming that God exists need to prove his/her/its existence.

Until God's existence is proven, God's nonexistence is the current state of affairs.

On 3/24/2018 at 3:33 PM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

History is necessarily an extremely subjective discipline.  I’ve always thought of “Science” as a discipline that has a more objective method of inquiry than history provides.

Not really, it isn't. History is pretty exact, it relies on historical sources and documents, follows scientific procedure. Its findings need to be confirmed, it's not enough just to say "Oh, it's happened just like that. Trust me, I know."

What you talk about is that it's more open to interpretation than those areas that US schools system calls "science". People are more likely to interpret their countries history in a favourable way then they are to claim that this or that particle behaves in a certain way.

[Rippounet]

19 hours ago, Altherion said:

I would have no quarrel with them if all they did is gather facts about the past and about human reactions, but these facts and the framework you mention are then inevitably used to justify policy in our current society which is both absurd and dangerous.

Depending on what you're thinking about, I may agree with you.

But you're talking of "framework" using a singular, when there are always many different analytical frameworks used in each field.

Are you not seeing uniformity and coherence where there really is none?

19 hours ago, Altherion said:

It is simply not true that most of the research avoids this.

That's a serious assertion. How can you back it up?

My original argument is that most of the research is not only apolitical, but hard to politicize.
I base this on the fact that only a small portion of the existing research even gets much attention in the first place, let alone has anything to do with the public debates on what should be government policy. Also, quite frankly, most of the research done on a daily basis deals with intricate details within a particular sub-field ; it takes a long time to produce grand theories, and not all researchers achieve that.

Now you say that most of the research actually does aim at bettering society. I wouldn't dispute the fact that researchers do want to better society. But few people perform research that can directly lead to real-world applications. And it's quite common for any kind of application to have never been proposed by the researchers themselves.

I doubt you can prove your assertion. It seems to me you are working with your own personal impressions here.
But I'd be curious to be proven wrong.

19 hours ago, Altherion said:

It is simply not true that most of the research avoids this. It's certainly not true of arguably the most famous sociological work (and one still used today by roughly a fifth of the Earth's population) -- as the name suggests, the premise of scientific socialism and its many descendants is to apply the scientific method to history and thereby arrive at a better society.

But if it's a better society, it's already different from having a bias.
A problematic bias would be if the researcher already has a fairly decent idea of what is a better society and merely uses research to find arguments to support their initial position. On the other hand, if the researcher is merely testing hypotheses without letting any one of them affect the methodology, then how could the quest for progress be a problem?

Isn't that what we're really discussing here? Conservatism tends to propose a fairly well-constructed image of what is supposed to be "best" using moral values and principles grounded in tradition. By contrast, "liberalism" hardly has a well-built overarching vision of the "best" society these days. That is, in fact, it's primary weakness in politics: leftists are constantly divided and feuding, because they seldom agree on the final goal.
How then could there really be anything like a "liberal bias" in the research?
Isn't the "liberal bias" just an easy accusation to be used against any research that might put the status quo into question?
Even worse, isn't conservatism, by definition, reluctant to move toward social progress?
In fact, I would say you're coming dangerously close to rejecting the mere possibility of generating social progress through government policy. You say research shouldn't be used to develop policies implemented in our current society. When should it be used then?
Aren't you really expressing the classic conservative viewpoint that it's best to do nothing and let things be as they are?

19 hours ago, Altherion said:

Does it? Understanding the laws of nature also makes it easier to understand how something could be done. To take your example, suspending the motion of the sun for the Earth as a whole indeed becomes a lot more impressive (especially if one wants to do it without people noticing the angular acceleration). However, to make it look like the sun has stopped moving in a relatively small region of the Earth (as any ancient city would be) is nowhere near that difficult: all it would take is some optical tricks with sunlight relatively high up (probably in orbit). This is still beyond our civilization, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not actually that hard.

It's an interesting perspective, and I genuinely like it.
But I believe it goes completely against your original position.

[Altherion]

1 hour ago, baxus said:

I know where it comes from, but it's strictly an English language thing.

In Serbian, you have natural sciences and social sciences (roughly translated, of course) and if I remember my German and Russian lessons, it's the same for those two languages.

It's true for Russian, although they also have a third category which translates to roughly technical (or engineering) sciences and correspond roughly to the applied sciences in English.

1 hour ago, baxus said:

Not really, it isn't. History is pretty exact, it relies on historical sources and documents, follows scientific procedure. Its findings need to be confirmed, it's not enough just to say "Oh, it's happened just like that. Trust me, I know."

What you talk about is that it's more open to interpretation than those areas that US schools system calls "science". People are more likely to interpret their countries history in a favourable way then they are to claim that this or that particle behaves in a certain way.

I think you are missing the heart of the argument: it's not that historians are slacking off, it's that history is intrinsically impossible to determine to the same precision as we do most things in natural sciences. There are two fundamental reasons why this is the case. First, historical sources are inevitably imperfect and this gets worse the further back in time one goes. One can be as meticulous as humanly possible in gathering historical sources and documents, but it could be that the most important aspect of an event was never recorded (or the record was destroyed). It could also be that one or more of the sources either deliberately lying or simply wrong. Finally, it could be that the source is taken out of context and misinterpreted simply because the context no longer exists. If the historian is lucky, there will be enough sources to do cross-checks, but this is by no means guaranteed to be the case and, worse, there is no real protection against multiple sources being wrong or misleading.

The second reason is even worse: what we call history is actually the confluence of the lives of billions of human beings and all the environmental processes that affect these lives. Even if some godlike entity gave you perfect information about all of this, the entirety of it is way, way beyond what any one human being can comprehend. Cutting it down to something we can discuss inevitably discards the overwhelming majority of it and there is no obvious logic suggesting what is important enough to keep. Thus, even when the records are relatively complete and the historian does a great job of assembling them, there will always be a subjective element to any historical analysis.

[DireWolfSpirit]

3 hours ago, baxus said:

Not really, it isn't. History is pretty exact, it relies on historical sources and documents, follows scientific procedure. Its findings need to be confirmed, it's not enough just to say "Oh, it's happened just like that. Trust me, I know."

What you talk about is that it's more open to interpretation than those areas that US schools system calls "science". People are more likely to interpret their countries history in a favourable way then they are to claim that this or that particle behaves in a certain way.

^^^These points shouldnt go unnoticed. 

Quote

Archaeological science. Archaeological science, also known as archaeometry, consists of the application of scientific techniques to the analysis of archaeological materials, to assist in dating the materials. It is related to methodologies of archaeology.

For instance, we can tell through archaeological science that the biblical story of Exodus is a completely inaccurate account. 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

3 hours ago, baxus said:

Not really, it isn't. History is pretty exact, it relies on historical sources and documents, follows scientific procedure. Its findings need to be confirmed, it's not enough just to say "Oh, it's happened just like that. Trust me, I know."

What you talk about is that it's more open to interpretation than those areas that US schools system calls "science". People are more likely to interpret their countries history in a favourable way then they are to claim that this or that particle behaves in a certain way.

We have a pretty good grip on the facts surrounding the inception of the First World War.  What nation is definitively more responsible for its start than any other?

My point is that even when all possible historical facts can be known different historians can see those facts and draw very different conclusions from them.  History is not simply recounting what is known with certainty.  My Historiography professors emphasized the duty of a historian to provide analysis of the facts they discuss.  That is beyond mere facts and is subjective endeavor.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

10 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

^^^These points shouldnt go unnoticed. 

For instance, we can tell through archaeological science that the biblical story of Exodus is a completely inaccurate account. 

 

Yes.  How does that make historical analysis non-subjective and not dependent upon the information we can find?  We are producing our analysis and speculation with the full knowledge that there will always be huge amounts of information that we do not have and will never find.

[TrueMetis]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

We have a pretty good grip on the facts surrounding the inception of the First World War.  What nation is definitively more responsible for its start than any other?

My point is that even when all possible historical facts can be known different historians can see those facts and draw very different conclusions from them.  History is not simply recounting what is known with certainty.  My Historiography professors emphasized the duty of a historian to provide analysis of the facts they discuss.  That is beyond mere facts and is subjective endeavor.

We have a pretty good grip on the facts surrounding evolution. How should the evolution of humanity be guided? Nothing about this line of argument suggests to me that studying history is any more or less subjective than studying climate.

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Yes.  How does that make historical analysis non-subjective and not dependent upon the information we can find?  We are producing our analysis and speculation with the full knowledge that there will always be huge amounts of information that we do not have and will never find.

You've just described how we go into every science ever.

[DireWolfSpirit]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Yes.  How does that make historical analysis non-subjective and not dependent upon the information we can find?  We are producing our analysis and speculation with the full knowledge that there will always be huge amounts of information that we do not have and will never find.

I wasnt having the conversation about analysis and interpretation with you and Baxus. I'm focusing on how the sciences can inform our understanding of history.

[Altherion]

3 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Depending on what you're thinking about, I may agree with you.

But you're talking of "framework" using a singular, when there are always many different analytical frameworks used in each field.

Are you not seeing uniformity and coherence where there really is none?

That's a serious assertion. How can you back it up?

My original argument is that most of the research is not only apolitical, but hard to politicize.
I base this on the fact that only a small portion of the existing research even gets much attention in the first place, let alone has anything to do with the public debates on what should be government policy. Also, quite frankly, most of the research done on a daily basis deals with intricate details within a particular sub-field ; it takes a long time to produce grand theories, and not all researchers achieve that.

You have a point in that there might be plenty of research that does not fit my description which gets no attention from the press and therefore I'm not likely to have heard of it. Thus, I will revise my statement: most of the research that matters (i.e. that is heard of by people outside of academia) is used to support political actions in modern society.

3 hours ago, Rippounet said:

But if it's a better society, it's already different from having a bias.
A problematic bias would be if the researcher already has a fairly decent idea of what is a better society and merely uses research to find arguments to support their initial position. On the other hand, if the researcher is merely testing hypotheses without letting any one of them affect the methodology, then how could the quest for progress be a problem?

Because it's entirely possible that somebody will take the results and apply them to the real world and, because even the most scientific social science work is practically never up to the standards of the natural sciences, the application is unlikely to yield anything like the researcher had in mind (it sometimes happens that they come close, much for the same reasons that a stopped clock is correct twice every 24-hour period).

3 hours ago, Rippounet said:

How then could there really be anything like a "liberal bias" in the research?
Isn't the "liberal bias" just an easy accusation to be used against any research that might put the status quo into question?
Even worse, isn't conservatism, by definition, reluctant to move toward social progress?
In fact, I would say you're coming dangerously close to rejecting the mere possibility of generating social progress through government policy. You say research shouldn't be used to develop policies implemented in our current society. When should it be used then?
Aren't you really expressing the classic conservative viewpoint that it's best to do nothing and let things be as they are?

First, you are taking the word "conservatism" too literally. It's not that conservatives want to exclusively preserve the status quo -- they also have a set of policy changes that they want to implement if given a chance. Academia in the US is biased against conservatives because it opposes their changes and favors that of the liberals. Second, I'm not saying that research should not be used to develop policy. I am saying that if the behavior of academia continues, conservatives will fight back (they've already started doing so) and, sooner or later, they will inflict some damage on it in one way or another. It's not a moral judgement, it's simply cause and effect.

[baxus]

7 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

We have a pretty good grip on the facts surrounding the inception of the First World War.  What nation is definitively more responsible for its start than any other?

Now we are coming back to that interpretation I was talking about.

No one is denying that Serbian historians are likely (might as well say certain) to blame Austro-Hungarian empire, while their Austrian and Hungarian counterparts are just as likely (meaning certain) to blame it on assassination of their prince.

Facts are that everything was moving in direction of war and Franz Ferdinand's assassination was a pretty handy excuse to start one. It's pretty naive to think that the war would've been avoided had he not been assassinated. It would only start a couple of months or years later.

[Yukle]

Reading through this I have been reluctant to say anything because I always fear the sensible response to when anyone says anything on the Internet: “Pfft, I don’t believe you!”

I will say this, at least: history incorporates scientific study, but isn’t a science in and of itself. Here’s my reasoning:

I have been paid to work as a historian, and still do freelance stuff for a textbook company (those are still a thing). Not for long, I will say, as having kids takes up a lot of time and it doesn’t pay well. I usually just do two pieces per year now. I considered going further with my field but I really don’t want to now I have a permanent teaching position.

My masters focus was the effects epidemics had on migration throughout the Arabian and Mediterranean worlds during the second and third centuries.

As part of my literature review I considered existing work on the epidemics of the sixth century.

Research in this area is pretty scientific because it can be measured, experimented on and quantified. Skeletal remains show yersinius pestis, the bacterium causing bubonic plague. Of course, it is disputed how old such samples are and if they correspond to the Justinian plague, but the actual analyses are scientific.

My time period of focus lacked that data. There is, as yet, no measurable and easily experimented upon evidence to use. Most research suggests that the plagues throughout the second and third centuries were probably smallpox. However, that is from written accounts. Even if they are accurate, the description could apply to something like measles (a super deadly strain) or another disease no longer extant. Without DNA or RNA evidence it is hard to say.

Smallpox definitely existed at the time. Ramses V of Egypt was mummified after dying of smallpox centuries earlier than my field of study. He was so well preserved that the characteristic scarring and disfigurement of smallpox is still on his skin. That took scientific analysis to figure out. But not a historian as such.

But my job isn’t scientific. You can’t measure it or repeat my experiments as I didn’t make any in that rigour of science way. Think of history as you would a thorough investigative journalist: they will utilise scientific data such as forensic reports, photographs and artefacts but will not perform any of these tests themselves.

If I had done any of the testing, it would be archaeology. As it is, when I had to trawl through footprint data, ship wreck accounts and tooth/bone analyses to spot famines, I didn’t repeat any of the experiments used to figure out what such data meant.

The closest to science my job ever got/gets is when comparing accounts of events to determine accuracy or to work out what really happened when you filter out probable biases. But this is definitely subjective, and not a scientific process. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t take skill and isn’t useful, as it is, just that the past doesn’t give us easy means to measure it.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Yukle said:

Reading through this I have been reluctant to say anything because I always fear the sensible response to when anyone says anything on the Internet: “Pfft, I don’t believe you!”

I will say this, at least: history incorporates scientific study, but isn’t a science in and of itself. Here’s my reasoning:

I have been paid to work as a historian, and still do freelance stuff for a textbook company (those are still a thing). Not for long, I will say, as having kids takes up a lot of time and it doesn’t pay well. I usually just do two pieces per year now. I considered going further with my field but I really don’t want to now I have a permanent teaching position.

My masters focus was the effects epidemics had on migration throughout the Arabian and Mediterranean worlds during the second and third centuries.

As part of my literature review I considered existing work on the epidemics of the sixth century.

Research in this area is pretty scientific because it can be measured, experimented on and quantified. Skeletal remains show yersinius pestis, the bacterium causing bubonic plague. Of course, it is disputed how old such samples are and if they correspond to the Justinian plague, but the actual analyses are scientific.

My time period of focus lacked that data. There is, as yet, no measurable and easily experimented upon evidence to use. Most research suggests that the plagues throughout the second and third centuries were probably smallpox. However, that is from written accounts. Even if they are accurate, the description could apply to something like measles (a super deadly strain) or another disease no longer extant. Without DNA or RNA evidence it is hard to say.

Smallpox definitely existed at the time. Ramses V of Egypt was mummified after dying of smallpox centuries earlier than my field of study. He was so well preserved that the characteristic scarring and disfigurement of smallpox is still on his skin. That took scientific analysis to figure out. But not a historian as such.

But my job isn’t scientific. You can’t measure it or repeat my experiments as I didn’t make any in that rigour of science way. Think of history as you would a thorough investigative journalist: they will utilise scientific data such as forensic reports, photographs and artefacts but will not perform any of these tests themselves.

If I had done any of the testing, it would be archaeology. As it is, when I had to trawl through footprint data, ship wreck accounts and tooth/bone analyses to spot famines, I didn’t repeat any of the experiments used to figure out what such data meant.

The closest to science my job ever got/gets is when comparing accounts of events to determine accuracy or to work out what really happened when you filter out probable biases. But this is definitely subjective, and not a scientific process. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t take skill and isn’t useful, as it is, just that the past doesn’t give us easy means to measure it.

Very well said.  Making use of science and the scientific method within a discipline does not, by itself, make the discipline discussed a science.  The method of analysis and the manner of analysis matter.  While historians can make use of science they do venture well beyond the scientific method for the analysis they offer to the people making use of their work.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

On 24.3.2018 at 6:32 AM, King Ned Stark said:

How can you prove there is no God?  I’m curious.

The issue is fundamentally not about proving the existence or non-existence of God, but, rather, about disproving the hypotheses propogated in 'creationism' as the most probable explanation for the origins, development, and current state of the world. In this regard, creationism utterly fails in providing a satisfactory explanation of the available evidence. Also, I think that creationism kinda misses the point of the "creation account" in Genesis.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

51 minutes ago, Matrim Fox Cauthon said:

The issue is fundamentally not about proving the existence or non-existence of God, but, rather, about disproving the hypotheses propogated in 'creationism' as the most probable explanation for the origins, development, and current state of the world. In this regard, creationism utterly fails in providing a satisfactory explanation of the available evidence. Also, I think that creationism kinda misses the point of the "creation account" in Genesis.

The plural creation accounts in Genesis.

[Buckwheat]

17 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

We have a pretty good grip on the facts surrounding the inception of the First World War.  What nation is definitively more responsible for its start than any other?

My point is that even when all possible historical facts can be known different historians can see those facts and draw very different conclusions from them.  History is not simply recounting what is known with certainty.  My Historiography professors emphasized the duty of a historian to provide analysis of the facts they discuss.  That is beyond mere facts and is subjective endeavor.

Scot, how do you quantify responsibilty?

Some sciences rely on facts that cannot be quantified. It does not mean they are not any less scientific, it is just that they are differently scientific.They rely strongly on what other researchers have figured out before them and research less quantifiable facts that you cannot experiment with.

But that is a very not-English-speaking-world definition. The English language generally uses "science" to only mean what some other languages - I am acquainted with Slovene and German, and apparently also Serbian and Russian, as Baxus said up there - explicitly call "natural sciences". The other pole are the "social sciences" or however you want to call them, the ones that research the phenomena that are results of human action. In this group are history, sociology, political science (!), literary theory etc. Again, not less scientific, they just operate as a different science.

So both of these groups are defined as "science" in many languages, only English uses it a bit differently and that is where the problems with this seem to come from. Also, humanities have been trying to make use of more quanifiable data, have connected with natural sciences and took some of their methods to apply it to their fields etc. to make themselves more "scientific". I wonder where the magical border is that these are allowed to be seen as "science" - do they only need to work with data that can be quantified? Do they need to follow specific methods?

I read an article by one of my literary theory professors about these differences, how he could not explain to Americans what he was doing because there just wasn't a good translation for "literature science" in English, and that is how other languages call what Americans would likely call "literary criticism".

Basically, what I am trying to get at is that I think this is very much an argument about the meaning of the word "science" and how people from different backgrounds interpret it.

[Rippounet]

16 hours ago, Altherion said:

You have a point in that there might be plenty of research that does not fit my description which gets no attention from the press and therefore I'm not likely to have heard of it. Thus, I will revise my statement: most of the research that matters (i.e. that is heard of by people outside of academia) is used to support political actions in modern society.

I'm glad we can agree on this at least.
I will also point out that this is thin ice to tread on: if you say research that "matters" is the one that makes it to the public debate and might sometimes be translated into policy, the researchers themselves often have a significantly different idea of what "matters."
In other words, what researchers see as important in their field and what gets media attention may be very different.

Then, there's the separate issue of academia (as in, the community of researchers) and academia (as in the research produced).
While academics in some fields are left-leaning, it doesn't follow that their research is biased in any way. The political involvement of an individual may have no impact on the research whatsoever.

Where I'm getting at is that seen from a distance, academia could very well seem affected by the "liberal bias." And yet, from within, the picture can be very different, with the highly-political academics and highly-political research being only a fringe phenomenon.
If you take history for instance, while many works in contemporary history could be seen as slightly biased in some way or the other, the vast majority of historical work isn't... Quite simply because people working on the distant past are far more cautious about deriving any lessons for our current societies.
And while we're on history, I'll point out that many books on recent events are not written by actual historians to begin with.

I'll illustrate some of my points with an example: Noam Chomsky is no doubt a liberal academic, politically involved in several causes.
But his research in linguistics is completely apolitical, and nearly impossible to politicize.
I would even say some of his political research is not as "biased" as one might think. The "manufacturing of consent" for instance, could very well be used by conservative-leaning academics just as it is used by left-leaning ones. In fact, I'll daresay it is. Even with such a liberal-leaning academic as Chomsky, the research itself is not as liberal as one would think it is.

16 hours ago, Altherion said:

Because it's entirely possible that somebody will take the results and apply them to the real world and, because even the most scientific social science work is practically never up to the standards of the natural sciences, the application is unlikely to yield anything like the researcher had in mind (it sometimes happens that they come close, much for the same reasons that a stopped clock is correct twice every 24-hour period).

Well if unbiased research is used by politicians then the researchers are blameless.

And certainly, applying research from the social sciences into the real world is not easy.

16 hours ago, Altherion said:

First, you are taking the word "conservatism" too literally. It's not that conservatives want to exclusively preserve the status quo -- they also have a set of policy changes that they want to implement if given a chance. Academia in the US is biased against conservatives because it opposes their changes and favors that of the liberals.

I'm curious: i) what policy changes are you thinking about? ii) is this about the research or the personal ideas of academics?

16 hours ago, Altherion said:

 Second, I'm not saying that research should not be used to develop policy. I am saying that if the behavior of academia continues, conservatives will fight back (they've already started doing so) and, sooner or later, they will inflict some damage on it in one way or another. It's not a moral judgement, it's simply cause and effect.

Yeah, I don't dispute the causality in itself. I just think that the whole talk about "liberal bias" comes just as much from conservative craziness as it does from the political involvement of academics, if not more. You can't deny that some conservative groups find facts and science inconvenient.