Disagreeing to Agree: Problem-Solving and Knowledge Production

Abstract

Gabriel Abend identifies too much disagreement as an obstruction to the pursuit of knowledge. This paper introduces problem-solving sociology as a method of knowledge production that can avoid this difficulty. I outline the communal, pragmatist tenets of problem-solving research and its promise of developing genuine knowledge for society.

When astronomers get together and decide that Pluto is not a planet, why is it that it just. . ..stops being a planet? What makes their definition authoritative and accepted, and can social scientists borrow some of whatever it is?

Gabriel Abend (2023, 2024) complains that there is no agreement on how we use words in the social sciences, and this lack of agreement is hampering research, as scholars talk past each other and cannot come to conclusions because the truth about (say) neoliberalism varies depending on how you define neoliberalism. Abend argues that it is useless to ask what a word or a concept really means, or to critique others’ research for not adhering to what we want the word to mean. Instead, we should admit that all these words, as well as the distinctions social scientists love to make, are social constructs, and then we should rationally and purposefully construct what we mean by them, keeping in mind that we want constructions that will be useful for the greatest number of people. Abend imagines large meetings to determine how words and distinctions should be used, like the conferences in which astronomers decided Pluto was not a planet. These meetings would be held on every word or distinction we use in the social sciences, and would include not just social scientists, but also everyone who might be affected in any way by the concepts under review. And once the resolution has been reached, everyone would abide by it.

Abend’s discussion gets to the heart of some basic issues in the social sciences. One of the ingredients of successful knowledge production is the institutionalization of disagreement: that anyone can dissent from the common understanding and has the chance to make their case. Students are trained to disagree with classical texts to sharpen their critical abilities, and eventually become scholars who disagree with the latest research in order to find intellectual space for their own papers. Disagreement is essential for a discipline to remain creative and avoid orthodoxy, and to continually push against the limits of understanding.

But as many scholars have observed, the end result of this proliferation of disagreement is not always knowledge. Instead, you often just get a proliferation of disagreement. Duncan Watts (2017) notes that disagreements and contradictory understandings persist in the social sciences without anyone reconciling them, or even noticing them, and worries that the social sciences have become a branch of poorly written literature, driven by fads and fashions. Besbris and Khan (2017) ask: “if we constantly require new theoretical developments, what good is theory for understanding the world? What is the use of a particular theory if scholars are asked to make theory anew with every publication?” (p. 147) Gerald Davis (2015) notes “an emerging consensus in some quarters that the system of journals and academic career incentives often favors novelty over truth in publications” (p. 181) and frets that the end of this relentless churn is not knowledge, but a new kind of nihilism.

Abend’s worry about disagreement over definitions is a subset of these worries. In his book Abend (2023) does not examine in depth any particular social scientific debate that has turned on the definitions of words or concepts, mentioning a few but saving his detailed attention for questions such as what defines a sandwich, or what defines a planet. My own sense is that disagreement over words and concepts is only a small subset and not the most important subset of scholarly disagreement. Even if people agree about what constitutes neoliberalism (or whatever else is being studied), they will disagree on how much weight should be given to specific pieces of evidence, or specific policies, or specific countries, or which time period to examine, or what quantitative methods are most appropriate, or how to interpret a historical document and its effects.

But even if one accepts Abend’s diagnosis (which we could perhaps manage by squeezing all of these other issues into his concept of “distinctions”), examining his solution leaves one thinking what Marx and Engels thought about the utopian socialists: how will it happen? Where will the energy and momentum come from to put on a big conference, much less ensure that scholars abide by its results? Outraged fifth graders aside, there is not much social concern over what gets called a planet, which makes the definition easier to enforce. But a conference to define neoliberalism is, if nothing else about our practices changes, an engraved invitation for scholars to critique the resulting definition.

One way to answer this question is to examine where the energy and momentum for change in academic practices has come from in the past. The recent experience of psychologists suggests that change can be immanent: scholars disagree so much that eventually they disagree with all the disagreeing. For decades it has been easier to publish the results of psychological experiments that reach counterintuitive results (i.e., that show disagreement with the orthodox understanding of the world), producing a long string of sometimes bizarre findings. Eventually some psychologists began to disagree with the whole structure that had led to this state of affairs, including practices such as p-hacking and incentives for publication of counterintuitive conclusions. The result of their disagreement is a new infrastructure that enforces more closure, by requiring scholars to pre-register their experiments, and other techniques that seem to be showing initial promise (Protzko et al., 2024). The disagreement over too much disagreement led to social procedures to try to get to agreement. One might think that experimental procedures would have kept scholarly discussions from getting too far out of control. But astronomy is an observational science and there is no experiment that determines whether Pluto really is a planet, whereas psychological experiments could not control the wild proliferation of disagreeing ideas. Even the new trend of meta-analysis of experiments does not do so, because the meta-analyses disagree. As Abend teaches us, it is not experimentation, but social procedures, that control disagreement.

The hyper-scientific practices that psychologists adopted are not appropriate for all fields, however. In my own field, sociology, which appreciates more humanistic modes of inquiry, they would be welcomed by only a minority of scholars.

There is a different way forward. Sociology as a discipline has always sought knowledge that addresses injustice and improves the human condition, and there is an energy in trying to fight injustice and oppression. Aldon Morris (2015) argues that networks that have been excluded from power have hidden strengths, most notably the emotional energies generated by the perception of injustice, which lead scholars and activists to make greater efforts and get more out of fewer resources. Morris calls this “liberation capital” and in his telling it keeps open a space for marginalized forms of social science.

But liberation capital can do more than that. No scholar can remove injustice alone, which means scholars with such goals will naturally seek out a community. And in order to actually get anything done the community will have to reach agreement on what injustice means, how it is produced, and how it can be overcome. If scholars genuinely want a solution to a problem, they will be dissatisfied with the parlor game of eternal disagreement. Disagreeing with disagreement, they will seek ways to reach agreement. Trying to solve a problem can create a community interested in reaching agreement for practical and policy reasons, which can trigger the process of closure necessary for knowledge generation.

It is hard to force such a community into being, but sometimes one emerges from the seams of the world. One may be emerging now on climate change, as scholars are increasingly concerned with not just describing climate change, not just trying to bring awareness to it, but in using sociological understandings of organizations, politics, and collective action to try and help solve it. This does not mean disagreement is banished, as the imperative to say something new continues, and these scholars may eventually disagree their way into questioning whether climate change is a problem. But for now, there is a community oriented in a particular direction.

Abend’s discussion suggests that even those sociologists who do not care about climate change should be interested in this development, because it means a community has emerged that will impose upon itself some of the definitional closure needed for knowledge production. Genuinely trying to solve climate change would necessarily produce knowledge on some of the most central issues that concern sociologists, such as the role of culture and economics in social change, organizational adaptation to new societal demands, the transformation of industrial orders, governance under globalization, and much else. In seeking closure for policy reasons this community will generate knowledge on all kinds of issues central to understanding society. One could complain that the knowledge generated is always provisional knowledge, that is, knowledge only if you accept the premises the community has accepted. But by provisionally accepting the premises you get provisional knowledge (which can later be elaborated, critiqued, revised, built upon), and by not accepting them you get nothing.

There is nothing new or unusual about the suggestion to focus on practical problems as a means of knowledge generation. As scholars of science have pointed out, it is incorrect to draw a sharp distinction between basic and applied sciences. Consider the famous example of Louis Pasteur, who developed the germ theory of disease out of a research agenda that had begun with the question of how to improve beetroot alcohol (Stokes, 2011), or the CRISPR gene editing technology, which resulted from trying to make better yogurt (Grens, 2015). Closer to home, the methodological innovation of respondent-driven sampling emerged from attempts to prevent AIDS (Heckathorn, 1997). Genuine attempts to solve social problems are likely to result in new knowledge because a social problem indicates the limits of a society’s understanding. Trying to solve the problem means pushing those limits.

The standard critique of this argument is, who defines what is a problem? The community may be wrong in what it designates a problem, or in its understandings of the dynamics, or its proposed solution. The community’s actions could make things worse.

But, as I’ve argued in my work on “problem-solving sociology” (Prasad, 2021a, 2021b), not acting is also a decision, which could also be wrong, and could also make things worse. If the seas are rising and children are starving on the streets of this earth, and you decide not to try to do anything about it out of fear that you could be wrong in thinking this is a problem, then you are making a decision. That decision—not to act—could also be shown to have been wrong in the long run, and could also make things worse in the long run.

The solution is not inaction; it’s acting with the recognition that you could, later, be shown to be wrong and have to change your direction. The nineteenth-century pragmatist philosophers called this stance “fallibilism.” They opposed this to a stance of radical doubt, what they thought of as “skepticism” (and which we might call post-structural or post-modern). They argued that skepticism is illogical in practice, as we cannot avoid acting in some way or other; inaction out of a desire to remain objective and withhold judgment is just a different kind of action, an implicit stamp of approval of the status quo. Fallibilism, on the other hand, means acting (or intentionally not acting) with the acceptance that any one of our current beliefs could eventually be shown to us to have been wrong, in which case we will then change our actions. And being open to being shown to be wrong means subjecting our beliefs to the scrutiny of others, that is, being part of a research and problem-solving community. The pragmatist recipe for knowledge generation can be summed up as: act on social problems, with humility, in community. (I direct readers to Prasad, 2021a, 2021b for a more detailed discussion of these points, as well as advice on how to conduct research that tries to solve social problems and can get published in sociology journals.)

With this understanding in place, we can see Abend’s suggestion in a broader light. A conference of the kind that Abend suggests is a symptom of the successful creation of a community interested in genuine knowledge production. If such a community were in existence, it would as a matter of course hold workshops and conferences and coffee klatches and colloquia, working towards an understanding of what the most important disagreements are and how to resolve them and move forward. The conference is not the point; the community that seeks genuine knowledge is.

But how do you begin? How do you find a group of people genuinely committed to solving the problem that you want to solve? Who could work with you to find your way past the eventual disagreements? Indeed, how do you figure out, yourself, what problem you are most interested in solving? I am not sure if communities can be created from scratch, but they can certainly be nudged along. Over the last few years, we have created an infrastructure to help scholars interested in conducting research that tries to change the world—the only kind of social science research that can produce genuine knowledge. Come join us at problemsolvingsociology.com.