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Appendix 2. Note on Facts and Valuations 1041
are, and which are not, established enough to move the national conscience and leave
the scientists free for their work.®
2. Methods of Mitigating Biases in Social Science
Since Benjamin Franklin’s day, American science has quite distinctly leaned toward
a healthy trust in “hard facts.” The inclination to stress empirical “fact-finding” has
characterized the magnificent rise of American social sciences. As a trend it has become
accentuated during the last generation by the huge funds made available for research,
the unprecedentedly rapid growth of universities and research institutions, the equally
rapid increase of the number of persons engaged in scientific pursuits, and the specializa-
tion thereby made possible.
By subjecting popular beliefs and scientific assumptions to the test of facts, specific
biases in the research on the Negro have time and again been unmasked. The recent
history of research on racial differences offers excellent examples. Incidentally, it also
gives a clue as to the direction in which the biases in the Negro problem would tend
to go if unchecked. Generally speaking, our attempts to eradicate biases by stress on
factual research have been the more fruitful, the simpler the problems involved are
from a methodological point of view and the more successfully we have been able to
utilize controlled research methods such as have been developed in the natural sciences.
It must be maintained, however, that Ifiases in social science cannot be erased simfly
by ^^keefing to the facts^^ and by re-fined methods of statistical treatment of the data.
Facts, and the handling of data, sometimes show themselves even more pervious to
tendencies toward bias than docs “pure thought.” The chaos of possible data for
research does not organize itself into systematic knowledge by mere observation. Hy-
potheses are necessary. We must raise questions before we can expect answers from the
facts, and the questions must be “significant.” The questions, furthermore, usually
have to be complicated before they reach down to the facts. Even apparently simple
concepts presume elaborate theories. These theories—or systems of hypotheses—contain,
of necessity, no matter how scrupulously the statements of them are presented, elements
of a friori speculation. When, in an attempt to be factual, the statements of theory
are reduced to a minimum, biases are left a freer leeway than if they were more
explicitly set forth and discussed.
Neither can biases be avoided by the scientists’ stopping short of drawing practical
conclusions. Science becomes no better frotected against biases by the entirely negative
device of refusing to arrange its result for fractical and folitical utilization. As we shall
point out, there are, rather, reasons why the opposite is true.
When perhaps a majority of the foremost social scientists in America have an am-
bition toward, and take pride in, keeping entirely free from attempting to reach prac-
tical and political conclusions from their research, part of the explanation is their high
professional standards. The quest for scientific objectivity is, I believe, more lively,
and kept more explicit, in America than elsewhere. The position is also more under-
standable when considered from an historical perspective. Social science in America in
its modern form developed as a conscious reaction to an earlier highly normative and
teleological doctrine. Monumental theories were built without resort to the observa-
* There are other scales along which biased views fall, such as the scales of dogmatism
—
eclecticism, long-run—short-run perspective, practicality—impracticality. They have been
incidentally taken up in the various chapters.
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