On Statistical Analytsis for 'Judicial Activism'

(sent to lawcourts in response to a post about a problem with using certain "measures" for "judicial activism")
 
... which only gets to the tip of the iceberg about why anyone would use the measures over having an appropriate sense of biography and the decisions themselves. These things are fundamentally contextual. It would be like one who never watched a Jet game last year talking about Favre's quarterback rating. Newsflash: if you watched the season, you don't need the stats.  And always, those who rely upon the stats without witnessing the context are deficient in what they claim to know. But same is not true in reverse. You can always see the fallacy in stats in something you have yourself lived. And if someone knows the context and produces stats in a way that supportive of it, all you have then is a piece of mathematical art.

I wonder when it will begin to set in that terms like "ideology," "activism" "conservatism," etc., only provide a moral critique a person's casuistry?  When is it going to set in that it is a moral grammar? I wonder when it will set in that these terms do the same general sort of thing in language as saying "the decision is virtuous, honorable, has integrity" and so forth? Which justice had more honor? (I don't know, check the stats). 

These topics can only be properly beheld in an intellectual field that accepts ethics and philosophy as craft, and that relies upon biography for its information. Only if you recreate the psychology of the decision maker can you say anything about the "politics" -- which, after all, is nothing other than the drama of the person and his generation in history.

Somewhere -- maybe about 20 years down the road I'd say -- it will finally set in among lawyers and political scientists that this whole area is nothing but a form of art appreciation. It isn't science. It isn't positivism. And the answers are not in STATA.  It's an industry a lot like those NFL analysts. Who's going to win the game? "Well, this one is ranked 2nd in such-and-such, but this one is 80% in 3rd down conversion in the red zone after playing on Mondays." (Give me Dandy Don singing at any time of the week over that). 

I wonder why it hasn't set in yet that quantitative analysis is fundamentally an empirical technique developed for things humans can't see (and therefore need some guessing method). You know, does drug X cause side effects? What do the people think of an issue after the Court decides it? For this sort of thing, you need stats, which function as a kind of journalism. But you really can't use it for things like, "which one was more liberal," "who was more active."   This would be like asking who was more of risk taker -- Favre or Bradshaw? And so someone produces some stats. But if you REALLY wanted to know, you'd just look at the games. But even then, you would only be left with an answer in the nature of art appreciation because of the changed circumstances and contextual complexity . You are ALWAYS only ever going to be left with art appreciation.

(Sigh)

Judicial Common Space Scores, Science and Language

(sent to lawcourts)
 
Hi Chad.

First, thanks so much for sharing this.

Could you tell us a little about the semantic assumptions in the naming of the scores? For example, if someone were to call them the "legal philosophy space scores," would they be wrong? Or, what if they called them something like the "relative casuistry differential" -- would that be off the mark? When you tell others that you have "common space ideology measured," you surely don't mean "conventional ideology," right? And there is, of course, no way for a judge to decide a case that doesn't result in having an "ideology score?" And, if we were to develop measures of this sort of thing for scholars when they make decisions as a group that require judgment -- even the grading of exams -- they, too, would have "common space ideology?"  

I think I know a little about these scores. I admit I haven't paid great attention to them, but I have paid slight to moderate. And as I remember perusing them a while back, I've always found it curious what political science means when it calls them "ideology scores" and why empirical researchers would adopt non-scientific vocabulary for work such as this. Why not actually call the scores by a scientifically jargonized name, as real science does when it studies something in the external world? You do agree, after all, that the only thing quantitative models actually observe in the external world are the indices themselves, not the things they say they are seeing (e.g., "ideology")?  It seems to me that, somewhere down the road, you all may want to develop a science for the creation of indeces like this that could result in a jargonized lexicon that spoke the language of science.

Because as long as you are out there saying you've got "ideology" empirically observed, you really are in danger of sounding like creation science. There is no place in the external world where "ideology" is; the word itself is a normative conclusion about the status of beliefs. It would be something similar to saying, "I've got their epistemology measured." Imagine someone saying, "I have their correctness measured."  "So and So has a correctness score of X." You could, of course, find things in the external world to measure that bear upon a debate about these things, but you really can't say you have the things measured, because they, themselves, are fundamentally accusations about about the normative content of beliefs.  

I really want to help political science become either real science, or -- better yet -- good philosophy.

Regards and thanks. 

Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
Redesigned Website: http://seanwilson.org/
SSRN papers: http://ssrn.com/author=596860
Twitter: http://twitter.com/seanwilsonorg
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/seanwilsonorg

What's Wrong With Quantitative Ideology Models Used by The Political Science Social Club

Hello Ted.

1. I'm glad you share some sympathies toward my orientation. You are not right, of course, if you mean to say that i cannot productively converse on this subject with you (or anyone). Indeed, my contributions would be quite well thought out, and I imagine both of our ideas about the subject would have benefited. I do understand your concerns, however. Talking with a Wittgensteinian can be a headache. 

2. I think the thing that you must understand from my perspective is that I am a philosopher who was trained both as a lawyer and as an empirical watcher of what this group of scholars call (quite colorfully) "judicial politics." Because I am imminently familiar with philosophy of law, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, Wittgenstein, and "the quantitative arts," it bothers me to no end to see the silliness emanating from powerful segments of one social club being repeated by, and incorporated into, another. I am now seeing more often in books here and there, lawyers starting to say things like "segal and spaeth proved this," "martin and quinn measure  ideology," "the attitudinal model says," etc., etc., without the faintest idea of what the proof or claims therein consist of, what is meant in the charge of "ideology," or how any of that is actually accounted for. Truthfully, what happens is this: a law scholar looks for
footnotes because they think it makes for better "scholarship." It doesn't. It makes only a club product.

Listen to me very carefully. What quantitative political science does is it constructs some index and then gives it a NAME rather than a rigid designator, as all other empirical sciences do. They also make-up the index as a CREATIVE act, not from a science of observation. So there is no real science to the instrumentation. All they ever have is a mathematicized rhetoric. They also don't even realize as a social club that science of this sort, if it were to exist, could only observe its index, not the thing they are calling it. And so, you go to these conferences and out they come. "I'm using this ideology measure because it helps me the best," "I'm using the other ideology measure." "I'm using all of them to make people happy." At one job talk where I used to work one person once said (no kidding), "here are the dots. If I was wrong, the dots would be over there." One of my favorite things to look for at one of these conferences is when someone
claims the "attitudinal model" to be an "elegant theory." This always alerts me to the fact that the scholar knows nothing about philosophy and is at the conference for the art of mixing math with rhetoric. (It also reminds me that the club has a "Hell's Angels" component to it).

Not only do none of these indicies actually measure "ideology," very often the speaker doesn't have a refined idea of what this concept entails among its competitors. Lacking requisite understanding in philosophy of law, language and science, the club, nonetheless, produces its books, and they pass this numerology on to one another like communion -- and before you know it, now the lawyers are saying it, too. Now its on Oyez. And then when one of the favorite rituals of these two clubs comes along -- "this one is the liberal one," "that one was active," "this one used his attitudes" "that one cheated because he liked the result" -- out comes the "science" into the carnival.

I mean, really. One ought to film the thing and put it in Seinfeld or something. 

Regards, Ted, and go Steelers.           
 
Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
New Website: http://seanwilson.org
Daily Visitors: http://seanwilson.org/homepagelucy.html
SSRN papers: http://ssrn.com/author=596860

Martin Quinn Scores and Ideology

Ted, since you seem to know about this, can you tell me what these scores actually say about "ideology" and how you think they have anything to do with the discussion of who's more liberal and so forth? I'd really like to hear someone explain that to me. You know, for the life of me, I never understood why Oyez uses these scores as an indicator of "ideology," other than the fact that the owner of the site doesn't know anything about them. So maybe we can get all of that cleared up in here right now.

Ted, why do these scores map "justice ideology" and what in creation are you talking about when you say that? Who's left and right. Can you actually be left one day and center the next (doesn't that change the sense of talking)?

Because it seems to me that the scores are a kind of casuistry differential index of only dispositional choices. And that they are quite different from what other indicies say, and that, to declare them "ideology," one has to adopt a rather peculiar vernacular. (To say nothing, of course, that, when mapping "casuistry space," any set of choices one makes gets mapped. There is no way for the justice to not have "ideology"). So, what relevance does this have to the "who's the real liberal" pie-throwing ritual that one so often sees? More importantly, what relevance does it have to ANY discussion in jurisprudence?

Here's what I am saying to you,  Ted, and to the rest of the lawyers who know where the web site is. If Martin Quinn scores estimate anything, it would more be in the neighborhood of a set of a mathematicized choice-differential evidencing, perhaps, a sort of IDEATION, not ideology. You might say of these scores, "oh look at justice x's ideating pattern relative to y on the issue of every disposition (affirm/reverse)."  (Of course, even this is problematic because there is no measure of ideation, there is only a set of scores generated from a set of choices. You have to infer from the choices that a ideating path of some sort accompanied the choice).  

So now, tell us how this plugs into the prior discussion, because I can't see it.

Political Science and "Measuring Liberalism"

[sent to conlaw prof re: whether quantitative measures for "liberalism" really compare whatever it is that "liberalism" refers to when talking about justices. Oh brother].  

... I doubt they actually have done that. What I bet they have done is invent something that they say does that, which is then passed to law professors as something that "the scientists did." The whole idea of "comparing liberalism" with an index -- especially across time -- is so fraught with pseudo science that it any conclusion you would draw about it would be limited only to the construct itself.

The mere fact that you can't TALK clearly about the subject in ordinary language is evidence that you really can't properly bring quantitative science to bear upon the subject. One wonders what would happen if they created an index showing a justice's integrity. Compare: "index shows justice X higher than Y on the integrity meter."

Concepts like integrity, ideology, character, or virtue are not like, say, "inflation" (which itself has computational issues). You really ought to let statistics be applied to natural commensurable and stochastic phenomena and stop trying to say "the political scientists have measured their liberalism"

They haven't and they can't.