by Dr. James Alexander, Daily Sceptic:
Everyone here has become familiar with the meaning of the word ‘nudge’ since 2020. It was at the centre of Laura Dodsworth’s book A State of Fear in 2021. In a powerful article of a few days ago Gary Sidley gave us a short history of ‘nudge’.
I always think it is a good thing to have a good argument or good bit of evidence shortened so it can be seen at a glance. Sidley, in short, shows:
- That behavioural science has been central to British Government strategy since Cameron, and came to its height in the happy days of Michie, Sridhar, Hancock and other superior technocrats.
- That this behavioural science is an American invention: an invention which was a grotesque distortion of some academic activity in the 20th century so that it became an exploration of the techniques by which society could be manipulated by a ‘democratic’ regime.
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The techniques developed were many. They included bits of rational exaggeration and irrational suggestion, all in the service of ‘conditioning’ us to accept certain rules and edicts. ‘Nudge’, as explained by the authors of the overtly titled book Nudge of 2008, was a remarkable innovation: as it showed why there was no reason to think that the Western enthusiasm for ‘freedom’ should prevent Western regimes from imposing constraints on us worthy of a despotic or autocratic or let us say Eastern regime, for the ‘greater good’.
Is there any hope? One might think not. I certainly think that there is something highly subtle and sophisticated about the West now: it makes the East look primitive. But there is very good reason to suppose that ‘nudge’ has a great flaw in it. It is the same flaw which runs through all social science. It is a flaw in the form of a self-rupturing loop.
I take no credit for this argument. As with the history of ‘nudge’ detailed by Sidley, there has also been a history of scepticism about social science, including behavioural science. To my mind, at least — I am, as usual, no expert — the great heroes of this are Michael Polanyi, Michael Oakeshott and Alasdair MacIntyre — the last of whom is still alive at the great age of 95. The point is very simple, and I shall first use Oakeshott’s way of putting it, before also mentioning MacIntyre’s rather more elaborate way of putting it, which is so decisive that it should stand as a refutation of the very possibility of the social sciences. I am amazed that it is not more famous than it is.
Oakeshott began by saying that one cannot have a science until one has a subject matter which is ‘intelligible’. This is simple enough. ‘Intelligible’ means that whatever we want to study can be subjected to intelligence. Next, the problem with the social sciences, as opposed to the natural sciences, is that its subject matter is — ‘intelligent’. Atoms and stars are intelligible; but humans are intelligent. Note the problem. We are trying to subject to our intelligence an object which is itself not only intelligent, but intelligent in exactly the same way that we are intelligent. In sum, what this means is that when it comes to understanding ourselves there is no Archimedean point, no external point of view, no godlike vision we can possibly hope to have of ourselves. We are limited by our intelligence, and any pretence that we are transcending it by calling ourselves ‘scientists’ — even behavioural scientists — crashes on the rocks of that limitation. We may pretend to be scientific about ourselves, but it is only a pretence.
MacIntyre wrote a sequence of articles and chapters between the early 1960s and early 1970s which I consider to be a refutation of the social sciences, including the behavioural sciences — proof that they are an impossibility. The argument is really just a version of Oakeshott’s, and even Oakeshott’s was just a way of saying something that had been obvious to some historians and philosophers as early as the late 19th century. But MacIntyre’s argument is particularly potent. It is best found in the article ‘Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution’ in Comparative Politics 5 (1973), pp.321-342.
Here he argues that the purpose of the social sciences is to generate some findings about ourselves that could not be stated by the man on the street or the average educated journalist. If the social sciences are to establish anything at all, this should take the form of the sorts of generalisations we call laws. So MacIntyre decided to explain what a law of the social sciences would look like. He argued on p.334 of his article that it would take the following form:
Whenever an event or state of affairs of type A occurs, then an event or state of affairs of type B will occur, unless (1) intelligent reflection by the agents involved leads them to change their ways or (2) unpredictable factors deriving from creative intellectual innovation intervene.
The “unless” is the rupturing loop. This is because the qualifications (1) and (2) make a law of this form absolutely worthless. MacIntyre explained: “A generalisation framed like this is one whose scope can never be known.” If such a law were ever framed, we would never be able to find a counterexample. So anything would go. The fact that our intelligence is a variable that cannot be controlled means, said MacIntyre, that “refutations cannot occur in social science”. It follows that social science is not a science. And: “From this it follows further that, if there is consensus in the social scientific community, and to the degree that such consensus exists, it will not be rational, but a matter of something else, perhaps of academic politics.”
Let us delete the word “academic” in that last sentence and paraphrase the sentence. If there is consensus, it will not be rational — or scientific — but political.
Now, MacIntyre’s refutation is a refutation of the possibility of having a theoretical law of ourselves. But the refutation also destroys ‘nudge’ and for the same reason. We can always be nudged by A in such a way that we will do B unless — unless — we become conscious that we are being nudged and then decide to confound the expectation. In other words, as soon as we become aware that we are being nudged, we can be nudged no longer — at least not in the way that we have recently been nudged. This is because our knowledge of being nudged enters the nudging mechanism as a new input and dislocates it, since the original “nudge” was only supposed to work if we were unaware of it.
