Social Goals and The Machine System

The scientific community has traditionally resisted the notion that it should deal explicitly with social values and goals as a part of its enterprise. There has been a strong belief that the domain of values and goals is "off-limits" to science. The tradition of logical positivism, so strong in science, has held that judgments of value are merely emotional or verbal assertions removed from categories of truth and falsity—a position also characteristic of some Marxist and linguistic philosophers.

Two other factors were probably equally important. First, in that broad domain of physical concepts where a machine system paradigm is operational, science could make great advances without considering social goals and values. Taking these to be exogenously given, it could restrict its attention to operational rules or efficiency criteria. Second, there was a strong desire on the part of the science community to protect its life and growth from persecution by religious and political institutions that considered the realm of value their exclusive domain.

Economists and other social scientists have been inclined to be hypersensitive about their claim to a position in science. They have, accordingly, slavishly emulated the physical sciences. They have worked hard to apply to social phenomena the machine system concepts that have proven so fruitful in application to many physical phenomena. Successful applied social sciences have emerged where certain social phenomena can be reasonably approximated with machine system concepts (especially in economics). Limited success in some areas has encouraged them to continue applying the same concepts persistently and mistakenly to social phenomena that are manifestations of a process of social learning. They have also been conscientious in protecting their "scientific purity" by excluding issues of value as matters beyond legitimate concern of the objective social scientist.

This sense of professional insecurity may have reinforced, in turn, their attachment to deterministic models. The classical market equilibrium model of the economist, for example, is essentially the model of a machine system closed to new knowledge. In such a concept the economic system can be seen as occupied with purely instrumental goals (like producing bread or refrigerators) that are indirectly related to more general social goals considered as given. Under the control of such a model the economist can absorb himself with considerations of system efficiency yielding a static state optimum.

When he moves to a consideration of the phenomena of social development and is confronted with options for changing social behavior, the social scientist has greater difficulty in dodging the normative problems. Nevertheless, an attempt is made to carry the focus on instrumental efficiency over into the developmental realm. This may help explain the great appeal of the deterministic developmental models. Under the control of such concepts, a change in social behavior can be evaluated in terms of whether or not it efficiently contributes to the transformation leading to a predetermined terminal state. Even those who are concerned with stochastic models (e.g., game theory, decision theory, etc.) are primarily occupied with establishing the rule for efficient procedure in advancing or protecting established goals in the context of uncertainty and competition between the decision units. The nature of the goal and its transformation over time is not seen, itself, to be a function of the process.

Under the control of the social learning metaphor the goals must be acknowledged to be a function of the process. In evolutionary experimentation it is the goals that form the test of the developmental hypothesis, and through its practice the goals themselves are brought under periodic review and modification. If social science is to concern itself with the study of this process, it will be brought to an inescapable confrontation with the realm of values.