The right to give offence

I've never read a word of Phillip Pullman's fiction, maybe I will when my daughter is older, but I admire his response to a christian antagonist at the Oxford Literary Festival last weekend. Nobody has the right not to be offended whether they be athiest, agnostic, christian, jew, muslim, hindu, sikh or whatever. If you think otherwise, then you don't understand what freedom of expression (under the law) means in a liberal society. Not gratuitously giving offence in everyday life is, of course, a matter of decency, good manners and prudence: but it is not a moral imperative.

Words from the wise 1

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Nelson Algren

Research Assistant Job

If you want to do some number crunching for me you might take a look at this advert.

Social Poetry

The epigram at the start of a book I read recently was from the art historian Kenneth Clark:

Facts become art through love, which unifies them and lifts them to a higher plane of reality.

Quite so, but what does it mean? It is a syntactically correct English sentence that fails to convey anything very definite to me. I can parse it but I can't tell you what exactly is being asserted about the world. The only conclusion I can reach is that it is a species of poetry. It would be absurd though, I think, to say that the sentence or indeed poetry in general is meaningless. What poetry conveys about the outer or indeed the inner world depends on symbolism - which is just a vocabulary of associations that is, to an extent, culturally learned. If I'm right it makes, belated, sense to me of an important part of studying poetry at school - "learning how to respond". To be sure learning to do science is also a culturally acquired behaviour, but what is learned is rather different from what is required if one's modus operandi is social poetry. The great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga hit the nail on the head:

From the causal point of view, symbolism appears as a sort of short-circuit of thought. Instead of looking for the relation between two things by following the hidden detours of their causal connexions, thought makes a leap and discovers their relation, not in a connexion of cause and effects, but in a connexion of signification or finality.

He was writing about the medieval mentality, but he might have been writing about an influential strand of contemporary British sociology.

More advice on writing

It's coming round to that time of the year when MSc students begin to think seriously about writing their dissertations. Starting to write anything is daunting and sometimes it's helpful to listen to somebody talk about the process. I think this interview with Cambridge anthropologist Alan Macfarlane contains some useful advice.

Lies, dammed lies and politicians

The recent spat between the Conservative Shadow Home Secretary Christopher Grayling and Sir Michael Scholar, head of the Statistics Authority, seems to be a perfect example of what would happen if we were to spend too much time denigrating basic social science descriptive spadework. The 'facts' would be constructed by every Joe Six in bar room debate or, even worse , by politicians: enormous whoppers would routinely go unchallenged.
The latest sickening round of half-truths and misrepresentations is dissected on the BBC Home Editor Mark Easton's blog.

Users for sale

As everyone knows the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) makes a great thing out of research funding applicants demonstrating "user involvement" and "user benefit". I wonder if they are aware that in doing so they are creating a nice little earner for some folks. Yesterday a colleague told me the following story.
They are currently putting together a grant proposal in a fairly applied area. So, you would think, no problem to find users willing to say they are interested in the work. They approach a contact in a well known (partly publically funded) think-tank to talk about the proposed research, find out if it is the sort of thing the think-tank might find useful etc - basically something that could be done over lunch at my colleague's expense. Imagine their surprise when they got a response along the following lines: "Talking to me for 1 hour will be charged at £70 + VAT".
The justification was that the think-tank get a lot of requests of this sort and therefore need a mechanism to bring demand and supply into equilibrium. I guess from their standpoint the logic is impeccable, but surely this is not the kind of thing ESRC intended when they began to make user involvement one of the criteria to be taken into account in funding decisions. In some circumstances ESRC also demands input from user referees. I wonder if they should start to have a section on their grant application forms where the applicants have to declare the "consultancy" fees they have been obliged to pay to users and user referees have to declare any income they have received from the applicant. Can anyone think of any good reasons why such information should not be in the public domain? After all, if we are going to have a market let's have an efficient mechanism for disseminating the going rate. Anyone got anything to hide?