Information, Knowledge, and the Return of Social Physics

Abstract

The article discusses two vital aspects of the current debate about the societal importance and future role of data, information, and knowledge in the context of social organization, administration, and government. First, it is argued that the debate concerning Big Data suffers from faulty assumptions regarding the societal significance and power of information which needs to be extended to a more comprehensive investigation about the social role of knowledge. Second, the theoretical positions brought forward are illustrated by revisiting an episode from the early history of the social sciences, arguing that misguided ideas about the possibility of "Social Physics" have failed before and are likely to fail again, due to the complexity of social behavior.

Diversifying MIR: Knowledge and Real-World Challenges, and New Interdisciplinary Futures

“…For progress to occur, it should be clear by now, the new forms of interdisciplinarity envisaged should have ambitions not only of epistemological and ontological kinds but of ethical and social kinds. To be clear: this is not a call to reinvent an already discredited wheel -one example is the repeated return to data-rich but impoverished conceptions of the social in the lineage linking Adolphe Quetelet, the early 19th century inventor of empirical social research and of the idea of 'social physics' (Donnelly, 2015;Adolf and Stehr, 2018), through Gabriel Tarde, the early 20 th century sociologist who held that 'society is imitation' fuelled by collective flows of affect (Tarde, 1903), 7 to the 'social physics' espoused by MIT's Alex Pentland (Pentland, 2014). 8 Today's exponents of this lineage risk repeating conceptual and methodological errors while neglecting the abundant resources of contemporary social theory.…”

“…7 On Quetelet, Tarde and their relationship in relation to the history of criminology, see Beirne (1993). 8 On 'social physics' in Quetelet and Pentland, and the connections between them, see Adolf and Stehr (2018). 9 See the Data and Society institute (https://datasociety.…”

Alex Pentland. Sotsial'naia fizika: Kak rasprostraniaiutsia khoroshie idei. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo AST, 2018

“…Сколь бы ни были многочисленны следы общественных реакций, запечатленных в GPS, социальных сетях и Интернете в целом, они едва ли способны в полной мере объяснить и тем более предсказать будущее. Поэтому книга Пентленда, как и большинство работ его предшественников, активно критиковалась: за физическими аналогиями и математическими закономерностями выпадает из виду субъектность и разнообразие человеческого поведения, легко меняющегося без видимых для физики причин (Adolf and Stehr 2018;Miller 2018). К тому же весом становится аргумент социологов, практикующих качественные методы: любой подсчет, сколь бы скрупулезно он не был выполнен, является всего лишь обобщением, а не глубинным описанием реальности.…”