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“Soft” Area Studies versus “Hard” Social Science: A False Opposition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Loren Graham  and
Jean-Michel Kantor
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Abstract

Much criticism of area studies has come from social scientists, some of whom consider area studies to be “soft,” emphasizing description and culture, while social science is “hard,” emphasizing mathematics, rigor, and replicability. Loren Graham, an area studies specialist, and Jean-Michel Kantor, a mathematician, maintain that this contrast is simplistic and undervalues area studies. They show that an area studies approach can help understand, not only society, but mathematics and quantitative approaches themselves. They use an area studies approach to help explain developments in set theory and relativity theory and call for a resurgence of area studies, for both intellectual and political reasons. At the same time, they do not undervalue social science, and celebrate its achievements. As they argue, a sophisticated understanding of social reality will require multiple approaches, including both social science and area studies.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 66 , Issue 1 , Spring 2007 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2007

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26. See the recent essay by A. N. Parshin, well-known mathematician, pupil of Igor Shafarevich and corresponding member in the department of mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences: Parshin, “Svet i slovo (k filosofii imeni),” in Polishchuk, ed., Imiaslavie, 529-44.

27. Egorov's deep religiosity is described in Demidov, “Professor Moskovskogo universiteta Dmitrii Fedorovich Egorov,” 137. Luzin's conversion by Florenskii to a religious viewpoint is described in various sources, including Ford, Charles, “The Influence of P. A. Florensky on N. N. Luzin,” Historia Mathematica 25, no. 3 (August 1998): 332-39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Ford, , “Dmitrii Egorov: Mathematics and Religion in Moscow,” Mathematical Intelligencer, no. 2 (1991): 24–30 Google Scholar. Florenskii's best-known published statement of faith is probably his Stolp i utverzhdenie istiny (Moscow, 1914), published in English as The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton, 1997).

28. Polishchuk, ed., Imiaslavie, 513.

29. Ilarion (Alfeev), Sviashchennaia taina tserkvi, 2:114.

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36. While we know that Egorov was a leader of this circle, we have no concrete evidence that Luzin was a member or even ever attended meetings. We do know that Luzin was a friend of Father Florenskii, that he was familiar with the Name Worshipping movement, and that in his mathematical research he put great emphasis on “naming.” Luzin was more cautious than Egorov and probably made more of an attempt to conceal his religious views from the Soviet authorities.

37. Florenskii was first arrested in 1928, then released, then arrested again in 1933 and sentenced to ten years in labor camps in Siberia. He was executed on 8 December 1937. Rehabilitated in 1956, he has slowly gained attention since then as a philosopher of language and culture, a theologian, and, most recently, as an influence on Russian mathematics. See Richard Gustafson, “Introduction,” in Florenskii, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, ix-xxiii. Egorov was rebuked by the Communist Party in 1929, arrested in 1930, and sent to prison. There he went on a hunger strike. Just before his death, he was taken under guard to a hospital in Kazan; he died on 10 September 1931. We are told that he died in die arms of the wife of the mathematician N. G. Chebotarev, who was a doctor in the hospital. Chebotarev's son G. N. Chebotarev wrote, “On umer na maminykh rukakh” (He died in my mother's arms): G. N. Chebotarev, “Iz vospominanii ob ottse,” in Iu. B. Ermolaev, ed., Nikolai Grigor'evich Chebotarev (Kazan, 1994), 56. Luzin was submitted to an ideological trial in which many of his former colleagues turned against him. See Demidov, S. S. and Esakov, V. D., “'Delo akademika N. N. Luzina’ v svete stalinskoi reformy sovetskoi nauki,“ Istoriko-matematicheskieissledovania, 2d ser., 39, no. 4 (1999): 156-70Google Scholar. Demidov, S. S. and Levshin, B. V., eds., Delo akademika Nikolaia Nikolaevicha Luzina (Petersburg, St., 1999)Google Scholar; Iushkevich, A. P., “Delo akademika N. N. Luzina,” Vestnik ANSSSR, no. 4 (1989): 102-13Google Scholar; Levin, Alexey E., “Anatomy of a Public Campaign: ‘Academician Luzin's Case’ in Soviet Political History,” Slavic Review 49, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 90–108 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bogoliubov, A. N. and Rozhenko, N. M., “Opyt’ ‘vnedreniia’ dialektiki v matematiku v kontse 20-kh nachale 30-kh godov,” Voprosy filosofii, no. 9 (1991): 32–43.Google Scholar

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52. Fock, Theory of Space, Time, and Gravitation, 193; also see 366-75.

53. Siegfried Miiller-Markus, a German historian and philosopher of science, noting leading physicists’ praise of Fock's work, ended up writing a book positively interpreting Fock's views of general relativity, even though his original intention had been to criticize them. See Siegfried Miiller-Markus, Einstein und die Sotujetphilosophie, vol. 2 (Dordrecht, 1970).

54. See John Wheeler's response to Loren R. Graham, “The Reception of Einstein's Ideas: Two Examples from Contrasting Political Cultures,” in Gerald Holton and Yehuda Elkana, eds., Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives (Princeton, 1982), 107-36 (Wheeler's response appears on p. 135).

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62. See Hacking, Social Construction of What? The initial and best-known episode in the controversy was Alan D. Sokal's spoof of social constructivists in his “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text, no. 46/47 (Spring/Summer 1996): 217-52. Sokal revealed that this article was a hoax designed to parody diose who “socially construct” science in his “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca (May/June 1996): 62-64. Sokal's original article was very clever and he was correct in ridiculing the views of the most extreme social contructivists. The basic issue of the controversy—to what extent are science and mathematics affected by the society in which they developed?—remains, however, unresolved. See also Noretta Koertge, ed., A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science (New York, 1998), especially the essays by Alan Sokal and Philip Kitcher.