It appears that the subject of these posts is often related to a book I am reading or have recently finished reading. This entry will be no exception, except that it references two recent reads: Theory and History in International Relations by Donald Puchala and On Being Human, Why Mind Matters by Jerome Kagan. Both authors are writing late in their professional careers and possibly upon retirement from those careers. They are age 78 and 88 respectively. What strikes me in these two works is the common thread that questions much of the "science" which underpins their respective chosen professions--international relations and clinical psychology. The "science" in these disciplines is not the empirical science characteristic of chemistry, physics, and fields of that ilk. The social sciences co-opted the language of the so-called hard sciences some fifty years ago in an attempt to acquire a more equal footing and legitimacy with the traditional sciences. By way of examples, social studies became social science; governmental studies became political science.

These two authors bridge that period of before and after. Puchala certainly questions the value of this change in appellation as a fool's errand. In the search for parity, his chosen profession set for itself an unattainable goal. Rather than develop its own and more fitting tools to express and evaluate the validity of knowledge in the field of international relations, it borrowed the tools of hypothesis, theory, law, experimentation, and replication from the more traditional sciences. The social sciences simply do not lend themselves to such empirical dissection. Causality with respect to the human subject, either as an individual or a group, can not be distilled to the point where a single causality can be isolated from all other causal and coincidental factors. Puchala repeatedly asked the core questions of epistemology: how do we know what we know and what is it that we know? When he distills the possible array of responses to those questions, he is left with a choice of basic assumptions upon which the varied responses are based and depend for their individual claims to validity. Kagan does not ask the epistemological questions, but he sums up his review of the state of knowledge in the field of psychology with the comment (I will paraphrase): I know a lot more than I did 40 years ago, and I know a lot more with less certainty than I did 40 years ago.

Is this what old men do? We re-evaluate our life's work and in so doing find ourselves questioning the very authenticity of the very discipline to which we committed ourselves and our efforts.  I won't propose to speculate with respect to women. If I read Kagan correctly, I suspect he might say that women are less likely to commit themselves to such certainty of knowledge up front. Kagan does posit gender differences and credits those differences to biology although his differentiation is not binary. So here I sit, stand, or otherwise position myself in the 8th decade of my life and find that when I read authors like Puchala and Kagan there is a resonance between their writings and my look-back on my life and chosen profession. It is good to have company. And I also realize that one doesn't have to be alone to be lost.

Both of these authors would support the statement that absolute truth has not yet been discovered by humanity and most likely never will be. It would require a degree of perfection that is not viable in humanity.  Knowledge--our access to The Truth--is a developmental process. It may well be another fool's errand to commit oneself to the search for absolute truth that can be characterized as contextually free, culturally universal, and permanently valid. It is not a fool's errand to examine one's "knowledge" (working philosophy, ethical guides, and worldview) in a never ending pursuit of a more reasoned, internally consistent, and corporate knowledge base which guides our individual human activity. When one has substantial experience to look back upon from the perspective of 8 or 9 decades, one has a mountain of real world data with which to not only assess one's past, but to plot one's future--a future which faithfully integrates that past. In the end, I am responsible only for and to my self (spacing intentional).