Frédéric GonthierProfessor of Political Science at Sciences Po Grenoble and at the Pacte laboratory, @FredGonthier

How would you define objectivity in the social sciences?

The social sciences have largely infused society. Who hasn't heard that the choice of spouse isn't free, that schools contribute to legitimizing inequalities, that voters are increasingly volatile, that the French are among the Europeans most suspicious of those in power? This media coverage focuses attention on what the social sciences do to the policies, actors and institutions they examine. But it tends to overshadow the long process of developing scientific objectivity, which goes through at least three major stages.

Let's take a result of the type: " social mobility today is rather lower in the United States than in Europe ". Here, the prerequisite for an objective approach is to question the received idea of theAmerican Dream, according to which social fluidity is very pronounced in the United States. In the social sciences, objectivity often means deconstructing obvious facts or relationships that seem natural. Since Bachelard, a major epistemological tradition has defended the idea that objectivity in the social sciences is "won" against the illusion of immediate knowledge of society. In other words, it is won over against our everyday knowledge, which is practical knowledge, useful for living in society. 

The second stage can be summed up by saying that objective results are not given, but constructed. In other words, they are based on a rigorous approach that consists - very schematically - of developing appropriate definitions for the phenomena under investigation, formulating hypotheses and testing these hypotheses using qualitative, quantitative or experimental methods.

In our example, this means defining what is meant by social mobility and the associated notions: what is an upward trajectory, over what period of time is it measured, what factors linked to transformations in the social structure can be taken into account .... This also presupposes access to data, such as occupation or diploma nomenclatures from public statistics, which can be used to construct mobility tables. Hence the importance of shared definitions and measurement tools, facilitating the replication and accumulation of knowledge, and more broadly, the establishment of scientific conventions. 

The final step is to explain a result. What is required of the social sciences is not simply to describe social mobility. Above all, it is to account for its explanatory mechanisms. These mechanisms have an objective basis. In addition to changes in social structure, social mobility can be explained by levels of education, social origin, family strategies, the transmission of certain resources... But in the social sciences, these mechanisms also have a subjective basis. So, toexplain is to refer back to the motivations of the actors and try to understand them. In our example, this means explaining that belief in merit is more deeply rooted in so-called liberal welfare states. That this belief leads to the perception of high social mobility and the relative acceptance of the inequalities that result from it - even though it has been shown that American tolerance of inequality is not as high as we might imagine.

An important clarification is in order. The social sciences have a similar objective to that of the natural sciences: they seek to produce facts and identify trends and general laws, which can sometimes be formalized mathematically. But the object on which they work - "man" in society and institutions - is different from that of the natural sciences. It is a historical object, never completely determined by its intrinsic characteristics or by its external environment, unlike a stone that falls according to the law of falling bodies.

In other words, the social sciences are not as "soft" as is sometimes claimed. They are subject to a system of objectivity and the administration of proof that is no less rigorous than that of the natural sciences. It's just that the general laws they enunciate are not universals, as their validity is limited in time and space. As Merton pointed out, the social sciences therefore mainly formulatemiddle-range theories.

Is researcher neutrality possible and desirable?

We are all familiar with Durkheim's recommendation that "social facts should be treated as things". Researchers must approach social phenomena in a neutral manner, with an attitude comparable to that of a physicist. This position is desirable, but difficult to maintain. Why is this so? It's easy for a physicist to dispense with all value judgments: physical phenomena are indifferent to what can be said about them. Telling a stone that it falls according to the law of falling bodies does nothing to change its fall [1]. On the other hand, telling voters that their votes are not completely free, and that they are, for example, influenced by the negative tone of political campaigns, can change their electoral behavior. 

In the social sciences, the researcher's neutrality is complicated by the fact that his results have direct effects on society. They are received in a political and social context, and can therefore become stakes in material or symbolic struggles that pre-exist them. Let's take another example. In 2006, anthropologist Emmanuel Terray explained that the illegal immigration control policy of the then Minister of the Interior relied on police instruments comparable to the anti-Jewish raids of the Vichy government. His text sparked off a lively controversy, with the executive on one side and those who found the historical parallel inappropriate, and the Syndicat de la Magistrature and associations such as Cimade and RESF on the other, who saw it as an opportunity to denounce the policy towards migrants. This controversy is a good illustration of how a scientific question - in this case, "What is a raid? 

In public debate, scientific concepts and results are very often disqualified when they are put to politically interested uses. All the more so when the researcher has intervened directly to accompany their public reception and has tried to steer it. However - and this must be forcefully reiterated - it is not because a notion or result is rejected or used tactically by actors that it ceases to be empirically valid. The fact that the term "Islamophobia" is mobilized with this or that political intention in no way detracts from the descriptive power of the notion, understood as designating the negative attitudes and behaviors of which people are the victims because of their real or presumed Muslim faith. In the same way, the fact that religious discrimination against French people of North African origin in recruitment is contested in no way detracts from the reality of such discrimination. 

How important are methods to you as a researcher? 

Whether qualitative, quantitative or experimental, methods play an essential role in guaranteeing what Weber called "axiological neutrality ". Researchers, as social subjects internal to their object, cannot be perfectly neutral. They have what Habermas called "knowledge interests"(Erkenntnisinteresse), values that lead them to take an interest in this or that subject. The right question, then, is not whether the researcher is neutral or not, but rather at what stage of the scientific process he or she should really be.

This is where methods come into play: as soon as the researcher agrees to conform to the methodological customs recognized in his community, he will produce facts that he will have to recognize as such, whether he is in favor of it or not. When I use quantitative surveys on the values of the French and Europeans, I sometimes obtain results that I don't necessarily endorse morally or politically. But that doesn't mean I'm going to dismiss them. Another advantage of these methods, particularly quantitative ones, is that they enable us to "generalize", i.e. to identify trends whose weight and scope can be estimated statistically. This is a great help in overcoming the researcher's subjectivity. In short, methods are ways of neutralizing our values. 

The media coverage of researchers - and their self-mediatization on social networks - has the perverse effect of shifting the center of gravity of controversy from the scientific to the political arena. A potentially polemical result, generating traffic and an audience, is more likely to be relayed than the austere methodological protocol used to produce it. Moreover, the increasing specialization of academic knowledge has distanced us from the figure of the generalist intellectual. Academics are increasingly experts on a particular subject - what Foucault called "specific intellectuals" as opposed to the universal intellectual. Under these conditions, intellectual power - understood as the ability to influence society through the dissemination of ideas - is less a matter of overhanging magisterial authority than of strategic advice, the formulation of useful recommendations that can be acted upon by non-academic players.

All this calls for a rethinking of scientific practices and ethics. From now on, the researcher must be ever more vigilant, keeping a close eye on how non-academic players will use, or not use, his or her results. This is the difficulty, but also the opportunity, of the social sciences: their expertise on reality is part of reality, and can help transform it. This concrete, operational dimension is worked on at Sciences Po as part of the social science methods courses, as well as by the Progis Master's team dedicated to opinion, marketing and media research.

Could you present an example of research, ideally from your own work, to illustrate the issues and tensions surrounding objectivity and neutrality in the social sciences?

With colleagues at Sciences Po, I recently became interested in the political values of the Gilets jaunes. One element that struck us early on was the centrality of the figure of "the people" in the movement. Through a major online survey, we were able to objectify three facets of this phenomenon. Firstly, we were able to measure the weight, stronger than in the rest of the French population, of the opinion that the people should decide in all circumstances, and that their sovereignty has been confiscated by morally unworthy elites. Secondly, we were able to characterize the Gilets jaunes as being above all a population of working poor. Finally, more qualitative elements enabled us to better understand that the "people" the Gilets jaunes claim to be is that of a community of "essential" workers, who produce the country's real wealth. 

All this led us to talk about the "economic populism" of the Gilets jaunes and to make the connection with other research on this theme. But behind the scenes, we hesitated a lot before using the term "populism". The term is indeed highly politically charged, and we know it's often used to discredit popular movements. Our dilemma was therefore: to mobilize a notion that seemed scientifically relevant to describe the specificities of the Gilets jaunes, or not to use it so as not to lend the flank to a possible disqualification enterprise. It's a typical example of the tension between a demand for objectivity and the necessary vigilance with regard to the social effects of research that we talked about before.

We solved this dilemma by adapting our discourse to the type of audience. Instead, we reserved the term "populism" for our academic publications and places of public debate where we could justify its use. But when we spoke in the media, we refrained from using the term "populism" to avoid abusive instrumentalizations that would have served our purpose. 

[1] As Spinoza ironically remarked Spinoza pointed out, if stones had consciousness consciousness, they would imagine that they fall according to their free will.