One of the themes you will hear over and over in neuromythography is that far too much of social science performatively mimics the language of science without meeting the objectivity standards of science. Social scientists often observe that this criticism ‘is not new’, and then ignore it from the security of the ingroup. Hayek and Popper described this as ‘scientism’, a word that has since been co-opted by others to mean the opposite of what Hayek meant. I have coined a couple of new words–Comtean and Queteletan–to describe reified social constructs and naive empiricism, respectively. These are named after Auguste Comte and Adolphe Quetelet, respectively. Here is a particularly illustrative example in psychology:
A Comtean social construct is proposed– ‘fake news’. The experimental paradigm suggests to the test subjects that intelligent people tap faster, cueing the subjects that the experiment is about measuring their intelligence via their tapping performance. People who receive the cue are, obviously, more motivated to tap faster in order to perform for the experimenters, but this confound is ignored. These Queteletan numerical results are then presented as ’empirical evidence’ for the generalization that fake news has subconscious effects upon ‘people’.
This is only persuasive if your prior is aligned with the political imperative that fake news is something to be suppressed. It is therefore rhetoric, not science. One does not need to be educated to see the common sense objection that the experiment did not validly measure the hypothetical proposition. Before lamenting critics as ‘anti-science’ dullards, one should reflect on whether they are really doing science or not.
