Timothy McGettigan

On the Wings of a Fantasy

Sociologist Timothy McGettigan argues that science is the most effective means ever invented to transform fantasies into reality. He discusses how DARPA stimulates scientific progress by challenging scientists to pursue fantasies, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in the 100 Year Starship project.

Field Research for Boneheads: from Naïveté to Insight on the Green Tortoise

In the following story, I catalogue a variety of difficulties that I encountered while conducting field research on the Green Tortoise. Oddly enough, the greatest impediments to the early success of this project were my poorly examined orienting assumptions. Nevertheless, the distortions imposed by my flawed assumptions were effectively sundered by an uncomfortable, but invaluable “corrective” crisis.

Frankenmedicine: The Horrors of For-Profit Medicine

While conducting field research on poverty in Winston-Salem, North Carolina the author acquired alarming insights about the horrors of profit-motivated healthcare. The author witnessed a homeless man dislocate his knee while playing softball. Rather than receiving humane medical attention the homeless man was subjected to hospital treatment that would be better described as medieval torture. The more money that the USA spends on healthcare the more inhumane US healthcare becomes. Although many people believe that money is the key to happiness, in this paper I will argue that the USA’s “profits over people” medical philosophy tends to inspire dreadful forms of inhumanity in the delivery of healthcare.

Dilemmas in Truth and Science: Inquiries in the Midst of the Science Wars

Though it may not appear so at first glance, the chapters that follow are all of a piece. Each is part of a larger endeavor to evaluate the role and veracity of truth in the realm of science. During the 1990s, when I composed the majority of these projects, postmodernists appeared to gaining the upper hand in the Science Wars. To put it bluntly, postmodernists had declared that science was evil and truth was dead. Although certain elements of the postmodern critique clearly had merit, the broader implications for truth and science were more problematic.In the chapters that follow, I develop a critical analysis of the philosophy and practice of science. While I acknowledge the ticklish problems that coercive power often exercises over knowledge, ultimately, I arrive at a very different conclusion than postmodernists about the value of truth and the future of science.

Redefining Reality: A Critical View of Power and Good Science

In this article I propose that a ‘critical’ standard of truth (i.e., a polyvocal standard of truth that derives from negating the influences of coercive power) can create a link between conceptual, philosophical social issues and the empirical practice of sociological science. Such a definition of truth also serves to illuminate the dynamic and multifaceted relationship between social agents and their coercive social environments. I argue that, although agency needs to be defined in terms that are oppositional to structural constraint, agency and social structure must also be compatible and coproductive. Finally, this definition of truth facilitates a broader and more inclusive definition of sociological subject matter, while also advocating a working alternative to the conventional definition and practice of ‘good’ science.

Survival of the Fittest Ideas: The Enduring Importance of Free Speech on Campus

In Unlearning Liberty (2012 - Encounter Books), Greg Lukianoff has published a timely and provocative analysis of contemporary threats to freedom of speech at US colleges and universities. Lukianoff is a First Amendment attorney, and he is also the President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Thus, Lukianoff makes it abundantly clear that there is hardly anyone who is better qualified to author this book.

Golden Rule: Power Politics in the Global Village

Despite the exuberant idealism in its foundational documents, democracy in the United States has fallen short of such high-minded principles. For example, the very documents that promised to institute a government of, by, and for the people also freely endorsed odious manifestations of social inequality. Given that over 200 years hence, many of those inequalities remain in place, some critics argue that American idealism is nothing more than a smokescreen clouding the ulterior motives of a profoundly hypocritical political vision.

Condoning Criminality: Sam Harris's Warped Determinism

Beginning with Laplace, hard determinists have claimed that they can literally explain every event that has ever transpired in the long history of the cosmos -- from the formation of galaxies to the itch on my nose -- as a predetermined outcome of an unbroken chain of causality. However, Popper (1959) points out that, in explaining everything, unfalsifiable theories succeed in explaining nothing.