In his latest book, controversial City College
sociologist Steven Goldberg continues to challenge the "politically
correct" biases that he believes are ruining the quality of work being
done in the contemporary social sciences. 
He insists that science must pursue the truth, letting the chips fall
where they may.  In the book’s most
valuable chapters, Goldberg offers convenient summaries of his already
published attacks on feminist sociology, skewering the myth of the existence of
matriarchal or pristinely egalitarian human societies. He also formulates a
careful analysis of the different considerations that must be taken into
account when discussing the social consequences of openness to
homosexuality.  His treatment of
possibly innate differences in average intelligence between groups of people,
his comments on the allegedly discriminatory practice of capital punishment in
the USA, and his take on the O.J. Simpson trial, are all very useful exercises
in the proper appreciation of statistical data.  These essays are essentially conceptual.  They map-out the various ways that different
claims about society must hang together or oppose each other, often without
indicating which logical possibility the author believes to be actualized in
reality.  They are clearly written and
unburdened by jargon, and could serve very well as readings for freshman
college courses in sociology, statistics, or critical thinking.

While driving home many crucial points, the book is
some ways rather disappointing.  It
lacks fundamental unity.  It contains a
hodge-podge of materials written across the past three decades, including both
well-developed theoretical essays as well as short opinion pieces.  The editorial decision to include a paean to
Jackie Robinson and a 1970 interpretive essay on the lyrics of Bob Dylan hardly
dispels the impression that Fads and Fallacies in the Social Sciences could
have been no less appropriately titled All Kinds of Stuff that I Wrote that
has not yet been Republished in a Book.

Goldberg consistently pulls his punches on ethical
and political issues (excepting issues of academic politics), falling
back on the rather old-fashioned and shallow empiricism that reduces any debate
of values to an irresolvable question of personal taste.  He also brings in none of the juicy
historical and technical detail that readers have come to expect from good
popular scientific writing.  At several
turns, this lack of factual detail becomes more than a mere stylistic
deficiency and damages the credibility of his substantive arguments.  We are expected to take on faith that
sociology has been warped by a feminist agenda without actually being offered
an analysis of any particular instance in which this occurs, other than  Goldberg’s description of moves made against
the publication of his own work.  For a
book that is so involved with the proper interpretation of statistical means and
distributions, Fads and Fallacies contains precious few hard numbers,
and even less indication of where those numbers come from.  For an author who is so concerned with
maintaining scholarly standards and intellectual honesty, Goldberg offers his readers
precious few bibliographical leads that might enable them to judge the facts
and arguments for themselves.

© 2003 Berel Dov Lerner

Born
in Washington, D.C., Berel Dov Lerner studied at Johns Hopkins and the
University of Chicago, before becoming a member of Kibbutz Sheluhot in Israel’s
Beit Shean Valley.  He completed his
Ph.D. at Tel-Aviv University, and currently teaches philosophy at the Western
Galilee Academic College.  His first
book, Rules, Magic and Instrumental Reason was published in 2001 by Routledge.

Categories: Philosophical