The social sciences do the same as the natural sciences. They collect factual material and then attempt to discover regularities, that is, to order and analyze the material data. That data falls into several categories. The first is the sum of daily experiences and observations that more or less everyone has at his disposal. Should one study social science by diving into such materials? No. For the unanalyzed facts are dumb. They are the result of many causes and many countervailing forces. They can be explained in very diverse ways. They are unmasterable as given. We need to consider them, divide them into their elements, and form a judgment regarding the function of each of these elements. That is to say, we must analyze and isolate the various sides of social phenomena. Only then can we begin to discover what is essential and what is incidental, only then does true scientific work that promises to produce valid knowledge begin.
~snip~
We have to dissolve phenomena into their elements and consider each of these elements. Only then do we see the otherwise invisible regularities. So, too, in the social sciences. That is called engaging in “theory.”
~snip~
Lastly, let the beginner keep in mind that any particular theory is never valid in itself, but is always a part of a theoretical structure and can only be understood as such. One cannot grasp a particular proposition outside of its theoretical framework and discuss it as such. One has to understand it in its relationship to the other links of the chain to which it belongs.
Schumpeter, J. A. (2003, March)*. How does one study social science? Society, 57-63. *Date of translation
So soon as we have realized the possibility of ideological bias, it is not difficult to locate it. All we have to do for this purpose is to scrutinize scientific procedure. It starts from the perception of a set of related phenomena which we wish to analyze and ends up-for the time being-with a scientific model in which these phenomena are conceptualized and the relations between them explicitly formulated, either as assumptions or as propositions (theorems). This primitive way of putting it may not satisfy the logician but it is all we need for our hunt for ideological bias. Two things should be observed.
First, that perception of a set of related phenomena is a prescientific act. It must be performed in order to give to our minds something to do scientific work on-to indicate an object of research -but it is not scientific in itself. But though prescientific, it is not preanalytic. It does not simply consist in perceiving facts by one or more of our senses. These facts must be recognized as having some meaning or relevance that justifies our interest in them and they must be recognized as related-so that we might separate them from others -which involves some analytic work by our fancy or common sense. This mixture of perceptions and prescientific analysis we shall call the research worker's Vision or Intuition. In practice, of course, we hardly ever start from scratch so that the prescientific act of vision is not entirely our own. We start from the work of our predecessors or contemporaries or else from the ideas that float around us in the public mind. In this case our vision will also contain at least some of the results of previous scientific analysis. However, this compound is still given to us and exists before we start scientific work ourselves.
~snip~
Now, so soon as we have performed the miracle of knowing what we cannot know, namely the existence of the ideological bias in ourselves and others, we can trace it to a simple source. This source is in the initial vision of the phenomena we propose to subject to scientific treatment. For this treatment itself is under objective control in the sense that it is always possible to establish whether a given statement, in reference to a given state of knowledge, is provable, refutable, or neither. Of course this does not exclude honest error or dishonest faking. It does not exclude delusions of a wide variety of types. But it does permit the exclusion of that particular kind of delusion which we call ideology because the test involved is indifferent to any ideology. The original vision, on the other hand, is under no such control. There, the elements that will meet the tests of analysis are, by definition, undistinguishable from those that will not or-as we may also put it since we admit that ideologies may contain provable truth up to 100 per cent-the original vision is ideology by nature and may contain any amount of delusions traceable to a man's social location, to the manner in which he wants to see himself or his class or group and the opponents of his own class or group. This should be extended even to peculiarities of his outlook that are related to his personal tastes and conditions and have no group connotation-there is even an ideology of the mathematical mind as well as an ideology of the mind that is allergic to mathematics.
Schumpeter, J. (1949). Science and ideology. The American Economic Review(39) 2, p. 346-359.
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