fear of surrendering our minds to yet another fishy belief system. Being sociologically mindful, we can get a better view of what is coming at us by way of new knowledge and where it is coming from. We can also see what is worth catching.
The Kinds of Questions We Can Ask
All attempts to create knowledge are responses to questions, and knowledge must be created in a way that suits the question. For example, if you asked, “How much does this book weigh?” the proper way to get an answer is to weigh it. How many words does it contain? Count them. Will it fly like a boomerang? Give it the right kind of throw and observe the result. These are empirical questions, which means that they are answerable by measuring, counting, or looking to see what happens.
But suppose you asked, “Is the cover of this book beautiful?” What then? You could ask ten artists for their opinions. What if seven said it was ugly, two were ambivalent, and one thought it was beautiful? In this case no measuring stick will settle the matter, because you have asked an aesthetic question—a question about what is subjectively pleasing to the senses—and aesthetic questions are not answerable with data. We can try to say why something strikes us as ugly or beautiful, tasteful or crass, but no evidence or logic will prove us right and others wrong.
Here is another kind of question: Was it worthwhile for me to write this [article], considering that I might have been doing other useful things with my time? Again, this is not an empirical question, since there is no way to get an answer by measuring, counting, or observing. It is a moral question, since it calls for a judgment about what is right to do. I could say why it seemed to me a good thing to write this [article], but my reasons would be based on moral precepts and on my sense of how the future is likely to unfold. There is no data I can show, no standard analysis, to prove that my answer is right. All I can do is to offer reasonable arguments.
There are also questions of interpretation, the most simple of which is “What does this thing mean?” Such questions often arise when we confront works of art. We might look at a painting or read a novel and wonder what the writer or artist wanted us to understand. But any fact, object, gesture, phrase, or behavior—anything that has meaning—can raise a question of interpretation.
Sometimes we can get an answer by asking for clarification. Perhaps the writer or artist can tell us what s/he meant (although writers and artists can’t always fully explain what their work means). Or perhaps there is expert opinion available to help us make sense of things. Other times there might be so much ambiguity that no clear interpretation can be nailed down. All anyone can do then is to give reasons to support the plausibility of a particular interpretation.
You can perhaps see now that research is better suited to answering some questions than others. It is a good way to answer empirical questions. It can also be useful for answering interpretive questions, because we can sometimes dig up evidence that supports the plausibility of an interpretation. And although it is wise to search for ideas and information to help guide our moral and aesthetic judgments, research will not tell us which judgments are correct.
It is good to be mindful of the kind of question we are facing. Sometimes we get into fruitless debates because we are not clear about this. There is no point, for example, in trading opinions about the correct answer to a simple empirical question. Are crime rates rising? Go to the library and look up the best answer you can find. If it is the answer to an empirical question that is in dispute, we should stop disputing and go get the answer.
Interpreting the Answers to Empirical Questions
Sometimes the answer to an empirical question can create a great deal of interpretive trouble. For example, to ask “What are the rates of poverty among blacks and whites living in the United States?” is to ask an empirical question. We can look up the answers because someone else (the U.S. Census Bureau) has already done the counting and the arithmetic. As I noted earlier, the poverty rate among blacks is about 30 percent and among whites it is about 15 percent (these figures fluctuate somewhat and can also vary depending on how poverty is defined). But what do these figures mean? How can we interpret them?
I once presented these figures during a discussion of racial inequality. The class suddenly got quiet. No one wanted to comment on the meaning of the percentages. When I pressed for some reaction, a white student said, “I think no one is talking because the figures are embarrassing.” Did he mean that the figures were embarrassing because they pointed out a failure to overcome racial inequality? I wasn’t sure, so I asked him to be more explicit. “The figures are embarrassing,” he said with some hesitation, “to black students.” I was baffled by this.
After further conversation, it became clear that the student who spoke about the figures being “embarrassing to black students” saw the figures as evidence of black inferiority. His presumption was that the poverty rate of a group was an indicator of the capability of people in that group. I saw the figures as evidence of racism and discrimination. In this case, the facts about poverty rates were clear, but they did not speak for themselves. The same facts lent themselves to nearly opposite interpretations.
To support my interpretation, I might have said that in the United States, millions of people, black and white, are poor because they can’t find jobs that pay a decent wage, or they can’t find jobs at all. Sometimes the jobs available in an area don’t match people’s skills. Or else the jobs disappear when employers move factories to foreign countries where they can pay workers less. And so people can end up poor, or very nearly poor, even though they are able and willing to work.
I might have added that the higher poverty rate among blacks is a result of factories being closed down in inner cities in the North, where a lot of the black population is concentrated. It’s a result of schools that do not serve black children well. It’s a result of discrimination in hiring and network advantages enjoyed by whites. In some cases, part of the problem is a lack of marketable skills, but that’s because access to education and training is limited, not because people’s natural abilities are limited.
I might have said all this—and probably did—but was it enough to establish my interpretation as correct? Although I am sure that my statement helped some people see why the white student’s interpretation was wrong, others who preferred to hold onto that interpretation could point out, correctly, that I had not really proven—by anything I’d said or any evidence I’d shown—that blacks were not inferior to whites. All I had done was to suggest that “black inferiority” was not a plausible explanation—if other things were taken into account, if those other things were true, and if no significant counterevidence was being overlooked.
My interpretation was not, however, a matter of opinion. My interpretation was based on previously answered empirical questions. Have jobs disappeared in areas heavily populated by blacks? Do employers discriminate against blacks? Do whites enjoy network advantages when it comes to getting jobs? Do schools serve black kids as well as they serve white kids? Is there a lack of access to education and job training? With knowledge of the answers to these empirical questions, we can determine which interpretation of the poverty-rate figures is most likely to be correct….
Mindful Skepticism
Once, during a discussion of the benefits of education, a black woman said she was outraged to learn that, on the average, a high-school diploma was likely to yield higher earnings (by mid-life) for a white man than a college degree was likely to yield for a black woman. When she said this, another student, a white male said, “I don’t believe it. How can you possibly know that?” Before she could answer, I said, “She probably read the article that was assigned for today. If you look on page 34 in the text, you’ll see a table that shows what she’s referring to.” He paged through his book
