Heidegger

>1. That the Iraqis’s own testimony about their quality of life belies your
>allegations about how they have been treated by the US.

Anthony, you are probably aware that both the principle of testimony
and the principle of credulity have a very suspicious place in the history
of the (social) sciences and it was already Hume who was very skeptical
of their empirical accuracy and reliability.

The polls you keep on quoting suffer from the same problems and more.
Let me rehearse the most salient issues in question, as i have done in the
past, in the hope you stop feeding us with this pseudo-scientific nonsense.

1. Sane theorizing
One of the important lessons we can learn from Heidegger’s SuZ is his
critique of naturalism in the human sciences i.e. studying and explaining
human behavior as if humans were mere artefacts like physical objects
in the natural sciences is a completely flawed enterprise because it over
looks the fundamental deep and broad aspects of human beings living
with eachother in the world. A human being is not a dumb or blindly
determinated artefact, but a consciously living body with moods and a
ratio, living in a closely nit web of social relations, thrown in a context
of historical and cultural practices gifted with aspirations to a future of
openness. Heidegger’s hermeneutic-phenomenological approach has lead
modern human scientists to develop and adopt a whole range of research
perspectives to accommodate to this broader and deeper view. Examples
of these methods are: triangulation, longitudinal studies, multiple trend
analysis, cultural cross-comparisons etc. The characteristic strenght of
these new methodologies lies in the fact that they employ a mixture of
quantitative data collection aimed at causal explanation [Erklaeren] and
qualitative participative description aimed at interpretive understanding
[Befindlichkeit Verstehen]. You will understand that when we want to
study broad and deep psycho-social phenomena as well-being, trust in
the future, security etc. in Iraq (or elsewhere) a proper scientific strategy
should minimally take above theoretical considerations into account, if
not our findings and their explanatory power will be nihil. Now what we
have in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan are some scattered and isolated
data from different agencies of a very limited time frame. Sorry Anthony
but your polls are simply nothing more than a random indication, some
losely and out of date snapshots. If one wants to draw valid conclusions
about the true state of affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan, we need long term
surveys with a mix of research methods embedded in a context of cross-
cultural comparisons. As long as these criteria are not satisfied, and polls
simply certainly do not, there is no basis to claim or infer anything.

2. Methodological considerations
A while ago (17-10-2003) i’ve already expanded on the methodological
pitfalls of the instrument of polling. Let me, for the sake of the argument,
repeat the main points with some minor alterations. The quality of a good
poll is determined by two methodological requirements, namely, the
principle of internal validity and the principle of external validity. The
issue of internal validity regards the reliability of the data collection
process. In the case at hand it would f.i. focus on questions as: In what
language was the poll held, was it in arabic or english ? Who did the
interviewing, were it native Iraqis or westerners (inter/cultural bias) ?
When and where did the polling take place, was it at some freefood
delivery outlet, at the entrance of a hospital, at a cafe, or at a mosque
after the friday prayers ? How familiar are the respondents with the
medium ‘polling’ ? (There is an old methodological caveat: the less
familiar the respondents are with a medium of research the more they
will tend to be biased to socially acceptable behavior and responses.)
Which incentives are given to the respondents to participate, do the
respondents know why the poll is held, where it will be published, for
what purpose and in whose interest ? Futhermore there is the issue of
’suggestive wording/questioning’. One of the questions in the poll was,
if i remember well: “Is life better than two months ago ?”, but why not
ask “Is life now better than two years ago ?” And what about the phrase
“any hardships endured since”. What does it mean, what does it suggest
for an Iraqi dasein ? What would Iraqis have replied when Saddam had
polled them after the first Gulf War, in promise of a brighter future ? The
question of external validity deals with the possibilty of generalization
of conclusions. Here we are concerned with issues as sample size and
sample selection. Is the polled group an accurate representation of the
society, are all social strata proportionally represented in the sample
e.g. qua gender, age, socio-economical status (employed), religion etc. ?
As far as i can tell only very limited amounts of respondents have been
questioned: in Iraq ca. 1000 on a total population of 25 mill. and for
Afghanistan only a meagre 570 on a total population of 20 mill. Of the
other criteria (gender, age, socio-economical etc.) we heard nothing, so
one can hardly call this way of sampling a valid representation. If this
is coupled with the facts that the collection of data was performed by
different agencies (BBC, Oxford, ABC, Time etc.) and not clear if the
same respondents were questioned on the same variables without any
follow-up, conclusions that these polls give any reliable information or
have explanatory and predictive power are methodologically speaking
highly questionable.

3. War, stress and biases
It’s not a paradise in Iraq or Afghanistan, i don’t have to tell you that. The
actual reality these peoples are living in is one of daily violence, of war
and chaos and lack of basic needs, and these circumstances have severe
repercussions for doing research and interpretation of data. There is a
whole body of reseach and theory that deal with the psycho-sociological
aspects of reasoning, perception and behavior of people that endure deep
stress inflicted on them by situations of war, criminality or others sorts of
violence and insecurity. The phenomena i have in mind here are known as:
cognitive dissonance, collaborative storytelling, the Stockholm syndrome,
reaction formation, projection, memory block-outs and reversal. These
mechanisms are very well studied and seem universal. They are conceived
by social scientists as important (additional) sources of biases in peoples
testimonies and their credulity: thus the overall conclusion held by most
modern social scientists is that when people are exposed to situations of
war, violence and insecurity the levels of personal and collective stress
will to augment to such degrees that normal processes of perception and
reasoning, of emotions and rapport will lead to abnormal disturbance of
one’s personality and sociality. All in all, psycho-social data collected in
times of war and stress are deeply biased, notoriously unreliable and very
difficult to interpret.

pentecostally yours,
Jan

Posted on Sunday, June 4th, 2006 at 2:10 am
comment | rss 2.0 | trackback
Tags: opinion»