The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Enquiry by Martin Savransky (review)

Scientists are regularly asked what the relevance of their research is. Some, mostly in the “hard sciences,” can promise a vaccine for a given illness or a means of improving computer performance, but what can social scientists answer to a question that insinuates, more often than not, the vacuity of their knowledge? Because of its sneakiness, the question of relevance has “outlived its usefulness,” according to John Long, a historian of psychology. On the other hand, Martin Savransky declines to abandon so rich a concept. For him, relevance becomes toxic only when linked to the “ethics of estrangement” that is, unfortunately, accepted in large part by social scientists.

Take, for instance, a sociologist who explains away the experience of the beautiful by appealing to the determining influence of social structure: “you believe that Picasso’s paintings are beautiful only because you belong to a particular social class.” Savransky builds another example based on Kregg Hetherington’s work among the Paraguayan peasants: “you speak about soya beans that kill humans, but in fact, goes the argument that Hetherington opposes, those beans are only a representation for the social relations you entertain with your neighbors.” Such reasoning corresponds to the habit—encouraged by the ethics of estrangement—of invalidating the experience of actors (their beliefs, dreams, hopes . . .) in an effort to discover an underlying reality (consisting of social and economic structures, cognitive mechanisms, or biological needs). In this way, social scientists ignore and even suppress what is important to the actors themselves. In a similar way, funding institutions ignore what social scientists deem significant in their own research in order to impose on them an external definition of relevance (“economic impact,” for example).

To resist the reduction of relevance to external factors, Savransky invites social scientists to invent alternatives to the ethics of estrangement. With this aim in mind, he proposes to reword the question of relevance: how, he wants us to ask, do things come to matter in any given situation? This little inflexion bears important consequences. The reformulation commits Savransky to a radical empiricism in the path of William James and Alfred North Whitehead—an empiricism that takes into account the whole of experience. By asking Savransky’s question, researchers in addition reframe their encounter with the people with whom they work, and it is the latter who can teach the researchers how, and to what, anything may be relevant. Things are not relevant in themselves, but neither is relevance imposed on things by people. Relevance emerges in the encounter between them.

This idea is linked to a theory of causality, defended by Isabelle Stengers who wrote the foreword to Savransky’s book. Her argument is that a cause does not have the power to bring its effect into being. A thing, even a painting by Picasso, does not have the power to produce an experience of the beautiful; neither, however, is a subject alone capable of producing that effect. (Indeed, even the subject plus her social, cultural, neural milieu cannot explain away the beauty of the painting.) The rejection of any kind of reductionism is a recurrent pattern of Savransky’s clearly written book. Against a general sentiment of resignation, he shows how the social sciences could recapture the concept of relevance and render it generative in their research.