Several scholars have returned in recent days, the old debate about the social relevance of the work of scientists (including social scientists, despite the redundancy). Stephen Walt, for example, writes in an article in Foreign Policy for social science policy-oriented. Something very similar to the argument put forward by Craig Calhoun, Social Science Research Council and professor at New York University, this text . Calhoun however refers to what he called relevance and Public Knowledge public (to avoid the term "policy-making", and his distinction of what academic knowledge "pure"). Calhoun text of a paragraph that I copied below, is quite interesting. While not fully take communion with the author's ideas, I think he argues his position well, and that leaves some key elements for reflection.
Social scientists engaging public questions need to offer truth. If scholarly knowledge has no authority, if it doesn’t provide good reasons to believe that some courses of action are better than others, or riskier, or less reliable, then it doesn’t have a distinctive value. But the authority of scholarly knowledge isn’t and can’t be perfect. Science is, after all, in large part a process of learning from errors, not just a process of accumulating truths. And especially in social science, truths are often highly contextual and conditional, predictions of what is more or less likely under certain circumstances, not statements of absolute and unvarying causal relationships. Social scientists bring real knowledge, but inevitably incomplete knowledge. The truths of social science are, moreover, graspable in different ways. They have to be communicated and this always means rendering them in ways that foreground certain aspects more than others, that illuminate some dimensions and leave others in the shadows. Knowledge is part of culture, not easily and fully abstractable from the rest of culture. But it is partly through the effort to communicate knowledge to non-specialists that researchers (like teachers) see new implications of what they know, new dimensions to issues they thought they understood fully, and sometimes limits to their own grasp of what they thought were established truths.
Francamente, yo todavía no he conocido a ningún científico/a social ignore the reality or public sphere, or who refuses to talk to "practicioners" and listen. Quite the opposite. So in some ways, I see where the problem lies. In other words, it's hard to put a face "like-minded scholars" focused on small matters referred Walt, but maybe it's live in hiding in their caves, solving "problem sets" and / or doing experiments.
