They have the concerned looks to match the learned degrees. Questions from others come with a certain reverence. They are with us always, but never more than in a crisis, and we seek them out, in search of the truth. They are more than willing to offer a view with little doubt or pause – this is science and they are — experts. We aren’t talking about natural science here, where facts are facts. The experts are social scientists, experts in the science of human interaction. What they want you to believe, what they need you to believe, is that natural science and social science are the same thing, that human interaction and social interaction can be studied the same way, in the same terms.
What is required to make this leap is the presumption that the human person, the individual, is an ordinary part in the natural machinery. Modern philosophy has led us this way. All knowledge is developed from sense experience, physical interaction with the natural world. Anything else is meaningless. Human interaction, therefore, becomes just another science governed by physical facts.
Aristotle said – “So we must examine the conclusion we have reached so far by applying them to the actual facts of life: if they are in harmony with the facts we must accept them, and if they clash we must assume they are mere words.” The Covid 19 pandemic provide an excellent test. At the onset of the virus, experts were called in to model how the virus would impact the population. Policy judgments were made based on the models. Perhaps the most influential model was produced by Imperial College in London, one Neil Ferguson being lead researcher. He said with little doubt that many millions of people would die from the virus, even if we made radical adjustments to our social interactions. If we didn’t it would be worse. Policy makers viewed this as fact, as science, as truth, and reacted. Economies were shut down, people stayed at home, social interaction came to a standstill.
Not in Sweden. In Sweden, it seems to me, the policy makers took a kind of Bayesian approach. Before the pandemic began, people in Sweden had some intuitive prior distribution concerning the risks of everyday life. As information began to surface about the virus, these prior were revised with the new data. Perhaps I should limit my close social interactions to those I know well. As the virus developed, new priors are adjusted again. The government did little more than provide information about the risks, like sharp curve signs on the highway, and relied on the individuals in society to adjust as they saw fit. The result was that outcomes in Sweden were not materially different than other developed countries. The rational human was not just a predicate of a natural chain, but an active participant in the process. Trust me, dogs did not change behavior because of the virus.
“Social Science” requires the rejection of the uniqueness of the human condition. “Man’s physical nature is taken to be the whole of his existence and knowledge is attained through sense perception. Once these Ontological and Epistemological assumptions are adopted, it is of little surprise that the methods of natural sciences are adopted.” (Maladies of Modernity: Scientism and the Deformation of the Political Order, David N. Whitney, Page 130). There can be no super-natural.