The following reflection is based in
my personal experience as a second year PhD student in international development.
I suppose that I am part of those who decided to undertake such a journey with
the hope that interdisciplinarity would provide more comprehensive answers to
social conundrums than single-based approaches such as those of economics,
political science or sociology. Today I would not say that such an expectation
has perished, but I am surely more skeptical towards the way it is
philosophically grounded. With that in mind I would like to briefly discuss
three ideas regarding the challenges of studying development: 1) the obsession
with empiricism, 2) the myth of pragmatism and 3) the cult to simplicity.
By empiricism I refer to the way in
social researchers claim to derive causal conclusions by relying exclusively in
perception and experience (i.e. from statistical analysis to qualitative
interviewing) rather than in the understanding of why certain variables relate
and interact with others. In the academic arena, this practice has driven the
attention of researchers into binary objective-subjective debates and, hence, (for
instance) the need to minimize biases in the process of data collection and analysis.
With some exceptions, one can hardly encounter deep reflections on what is causality
and what are the implications of studying causal relations in settings inhabited
by reflexive human beings. And as typical responses vary from flat statistical
definitions to the argument of self-subjectivity (i.e. causality as an idea steeped
in the memory of people), the goal of providing explanations to social problems
remains quite unfulfilled.
The latter is connected with the
myth of pragmatism, or the idea that the researcher can simply mix research tools
with no other argument that claiming that more
means better. The use of mixed-methods (i.e. N-data surveys with
qualitative inquiries) has become a fashion in contemporary social research, despite
the fact that some of their bare foundations (or assumptions) restrict their
use in the study of certain aspects of the social world. There is no need to
dig in very deep in the philosophy of knowledge to illustrate this issue. Think,
for instance, in the following question: if one of the arguments of using
statistical analysis is the need to account patterns of social behaviour
without the “subjective” influence of the researcher in the answers of people,
how can one argue the use of face to face interviews (in which the researcher
clearly affects responses) to verify what numbers say? This is basically the
reason why is difficult to foster dialogues between economists and
anthropologist. Hence, I ask myself: is it really possible to add their
opinions in order to provide an interdisciplinary outlook?
This drives us to what I
characterized as one of the curses of development studies: the cult to
simplicity. People demand simple answers to complex questions; students demand
simple tools to fight poverty and inequality; policy makers demand simple
recipes to avoid hampering their legitimacy among their potential voters. And
this derives into the previous challenges: the obsession for empiricism and the
attractiveness of pragmatism. The problem is that society is full of complexity
and human beings are far from being automat rational respondents whose
behavior can be traced and predicted in a simple way (i.e. with a mathematical
formulation or through an exclusive emphasis in the answers of key informants).
Here the argument of practicality, meaning with it defending a given approach
for its ability to provide an answer regardless its internal philosophical
consistence, is certainly misleading.
In the end, my main argument is that
all of these challenges collide to hamper the possibility of interdisciplinarity
and, consequently, its augmented power to inform the development agenda. As far
as there are philosophical unacknowledged misunderstandings between disciplines,
and a lack of wiliness to properly address them, development studies will
continue wasting its potential of real comprehensiveness. And what is even worse, as
the benefits of having multiple visions do not entirely compensate the costs of not making deeper submersions in each of them, the students and scholars in
development studies are continuously risking the undermining of their professional
and academic position.
