Fads and Fallacies in the Social Sciences

Steven Goldberg has devoted his career to exposing fallacious reasoning, misrepresented fact, and ideological agendas in the social sciences. His scholarly critiques offer alternative, and sometimes controversial, explanations that are notable for their logical integrity and loyalty to empirical reality. Best known for his work in the physiological roots of sex differences, he has also written on a myriad of other subjects, which, as he bluntly states, "are as fallaciously reasoned in professional journals as in the cocktail party conversations that naively repeat the errors first propounded in those journals."

In this new collection of essays he is as lively, interesting, and provocative as ever. In addition to lambasting the fallacies infusing the received wisdom on many issues, he also directly addresses the factors and motivations that underlie the contemporary surrender of the social sciences to the forces of antiscientific ideologies, which subordinate logic and evidence to wish-fulfillment and political goals.
Among the subjects addressed are the validity of intelligence tests, group differences, the death penalty, sex differences in aggression and cognition, the family, abortion, and the nature of modern society. Also included are a couple of polemics, observations on the O. J. Simpson trial, and a moving encomium to his hero, Jackie Robinson.

Goldberg's work has been praised by reviewers as "persuasive and accurate"(Margaret Mead); "coolly, tightly, even brilliantly reasoned" (Morton Kaplan); and "the most significant . . . on the subject in decades" (Murray Rothbard). Readers who appreciate razor-sharp rigor and logical elegance will be richly rewarded by these essays on many of the most hotly contested issues of the social sciences.

Goldberg (sociology, City U. of New York-City College) gathers 19 of his essays, most previously published, that describe wrong turns, mostly in his own discipline. In general, he says, the error was generated by the intrusion of political ideology into science. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Steven Goldberg, Chairman of the Department of Sociology of City College of the City University of New York, is the author of Why Men Rule, When Wish Replaces Thought, and The Inevitability of Patriarchy.