Thursday, July 03, 2008

The End of Theory, and the US Army on "the Cusp of Postpositivism"?

In an interesting Small Wars Journal article, Christopher R. Paparone (associate professor in the Army Command and General Staff College’s Department of Logistics and Resource Operations) looks at the new Army FM 3-0, Operations - and argues that this shows that "the Army-at-war is transitioning from a positivist to a postpositivist philosophy." Paparone's argument is often compelling, but a number of questions remain outstanding. In particular, I would doubt whether the type of postpositivism discussed by Paparone will allow the Army to copy with some of the ways in which conflict is now taking place.

A couple of weeks after Paparone's article went online, Chris Anderson posted The End of Theory on Wired. For Anderson, today's deluge of data means that conventional approaches to the scientific method - I think he would include positivism in this - is now obsolete. However, what is also obsolete is certain postpositivistic approaches to making sense of the world, and researching how we make sense of it:

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right...Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required.

Anderson's argument is itself problematic: the data deluge he diagnoses (perhaps something akin to the loss of any real behind an excessive hyperreality, as analysed by Baudrillard?) does not seem to me to dictate a prioritising of mathematical analysis, or a complete end to the utility of a (social) scientific method. People can, and do, do effective work in unknown and shifting contexts, and there is also the potential for political and military actors to themselves create the contexts in which they work.

That said, I find Anderson's short piece is compelling in a number of ways. Anderson does make a strong argument against the type of positivism and postpositivism that Paperone finds in FM 3-0. One can argue that many of the current opponents of the US - for example, the networked insurgencies in Iraq - have already moved beyond postpositivism, and are enthusiastically embracing a number of aspects of the petabyte age.

States and state militaries have struggled and are struggling to respond to this. The move to a type of postpositivism discussed by Paperone is interesting, but I suspect that it will not be a sufficient response to such opponents.

Posted by jon_mendel at 02:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)