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While this book is not meant to cover all aspects of global warming, this reviewer, as a policyanalyst, would like to have seen more of a connection made between the science of weather andclimate, and the “aberrations” in climate change, to policy decisions. The authors were diligentabout showing us how climate change, related to floods and drought, affects people’s lives butfailed to translate this into suggestions for policy decisions at the national and global level. Theauthors ask us to use the knowledge of a globally connected climate to make better technologicaldecisions and to appreciate the relationship between ocean temperature and floods to betterour lives. While this is important, policy makers can use the information presented in the bookto make decisions to reduce the effects of global warming. A great strength of science is toinform the policy process. These links should be made whenever possible.

This book is important because it furthers the knowledge and understanding of the rela-tionships between global climate and local weather events, such as floods and droughts, andtheir impact on people’s lives. Policy makers and scientists, as well as the general public, willbenefit from this knowledge.

Mary BrentwoodEnvironmental Studies Department

California State University, SacramentoCA 95819-6001, USA

Tel.: +1-916-278-6620; fax:+1-916-278-7582E-mail address:mary.brentwood@csus.edu

doi: 10.1016/j.soscij.2004.01.013

The Saving Lie: Truth and Method in the Social SciencesF.G. Bailey, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2003, 200 pages

The Saving Lieis a book by an eminent anthropologist about a general philosophical problem.The social sciences are full of grand theories of human society, yet those theories, in the author’sview, are not strictly true. What, then, is their proper status? Such large theories, it is argued, are“saving lies.” They are theories that organize our thoughts about the social world and enableus to make sense of it. We cannot get work done without them. But they gloss over the actualcomplicated ways in which the social world really works.

This is a book meant for anyone in any social science, since the status of abstract theoriesis a general problem that remains perennially unclear in the social sciences. After decades oftheorizing about all manner of large and small problems in anthropology, F.G. Bailey, ProfessorEmeritus at the University of California, San Diego, gives us his take on this general issue.Bailey focuses on two large important families of “saving lies” in the social sciences, those ofneoclassical economics and those of structural functional anthropology. His aim is to show usthe incompleteness of such totalizing theories. He believes, instead, that it is better to hold sev-eral theories of the social simultaneously, and keep them in constant dialogue with each other.

The book is divided into three overall sections, with several chapters in each. The first sectionis devoted to the neoclassical economics paradigm. Bailey looks at the “pure” individualis-

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tic form of the theory, as articulated by Milton Friedman, but also looks at Ronald Coase’sand Douglass North’s attempts to make the theory more realistic and more integrated withinstitutions. Bailey does a good job making the neoclassical paradigm and successor theoriesaccessible to the non-economist. But he is at his best in pointing out the deficiencies of theseviews. Pure neoclassical economics as articulated by Friedman bears very little relation to whatreally goes on in the real world of buying and selling. Market behavior is not really a matterof self-interested rational individuals making exchanges that have no transaction costs, whostay in business due to their efficiency in the market (rather than bribery, political power, andbeing born into the right caste). Coase and North have attempted to make more realistic modelswhile staying within the rational self-interest framework, by explaining how kin groups, firms,and institutions help make trust possible and make markets more efficient by removing theneed to spend all one’s time making sure one’s trading partner is doing what she says she will.These models do this by introducing a number of new technical terms like “principal” and“contract,” “slack” and “adverse selection.” These terms are used in the service of explaininghow non-market forces can make it rational for individuals to behave in ways that make marketsefficient. But they are vague terms, Bailey believes, that obscure all the actual psychologicaland social mechanisms that are really making things happen. Traits like honor and self-respectthat are actually essential to making real economic actors do what they do are ignored. Mys-teries about why agents do not shirk their duties, and why regulators are not corrupt, remain,as do questions about why the shirking and corruption that does go on, goes on to differentdegrees in different countries. To really understand why any economic or any social agentsare doing what they are doing, it is important to look atmoralnotions like generosity, pride,and loyalty—the very ideas that are absolute anathema to even realistically-inclined rationalchoice theory practitioners.

Bailey’s next section concerns structural functionalism in anthropology. Whereas neoclas-sical economics focuses on the question of how markets and prices come to exist, structuralfunctionalism examines how societies themselves exist, rather than falling apart. How do var-ious institutions in society coexist, each functioning as part of a unifying whole?

Bailey discusses structural functionalism’s roots in Radcliffe-Brown’s notions offunctionalunity“a condition in which all parts of the social system work together with a sufficient degree ofharmony.” He spends the bulk of this section discussing Evans-Prichard’s magisterial exampleof work in this paradigm with hisThe Nuer,in which he discussed how each social institutionof Nuer society was related to every other. He goes on to discuss Edmund Leach’s variantin which a number of alternate structures coexist in society, and how tensions between themcan be catalysts for change. This section is not nearly as well organized as the previous one.This is unsurprising. Structural functionalism was never anywhere near as unified a paradigmas rational choice-based economics; so articulating its central ideas is no easy task. Bailey,however, determinedly tries to give it a center in the notion of morality. Rhetorically, thisworks nicely, since moral ideas are just the ones that the rational choice perspective tries toignore. But as an accurate portrayal of what structural functionalism was all about, I find it a bitof a stretch. Bailey wants to contrast structural functionalism’s warm-blooded actors pulsingwith feelings of duty and honor to the cold-blooded calculators of neoclassical economics.But, in my view, the structural functional paradigm was every bit as bloodless and inattentiveto the thoughts and feelings of individuals as neoclassical economics. Bailey, in some sense, is

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aware of this, for this is undoubtedly one of the reasons he considers structural-functionalisman abstract organizing “saving lie” rather than a theory that accurately describes societies withall the complexities they really have. But to say that the general abstract theory centers aroundmorality is itself a “saving lie” that glosses over the complexities and contradictions of thisparadigm.

In the final section, Bailey changes tone dramatically. In this section, he wants not just todiscuss, but to reallydepicthow there are multiple ways of viewing things—none of which is thecomplete and correct way. Instead of dissecting scholarly writings, he talks about anecdotesinvolving ordinary situations—a beggar’s asking for food, a landholder’s request to buy alintel. To emphasize his point, even his writing style changes. Instead of carefully reasonedargument, Bailey writes using impassioned poetic rhetoric. In this section, he agrees with andextends Leach’s point that multiple competing structures always coexist in societies. Variousforces struggle to try to create different ways of viewing the world. Bailey thinks that we needto understand that the world is actually a complex multifaceted place. We should not reallybelieve abstract unifying “saving lies” of the social sciences that do not really let us see thecomplex contradictory intricacies of the world. Instead of accepting a unifying world viewlike neoclassical economics or structural functionalism, “The sensible course is to be thankfulfor both tools, admit each does a limited job, not claim they do what they cannot do, and, forpractical purposes, work both sides of the street.”

The perspectival relativism that Bailey advocates in this section has been in vogue in thehumanities for about two decades now. With all the advocates of postmodernism, poststruc-turalism, and deconstruction in the humanities and social sciences, one wonders why we needyet another treatise saying that we could see things in ways other than we do, and that noway of seeing is correct. It is true that Bailey has important differences from Foucault or Der-rida. He does believe that there is some utility in seeing things through the prisms of abstract“saving lie” theories. But this section’s emphasis on creating rather than discovering structureand Bailey’s tendencies to richly poetically describe rather than argue, here, has this sectionsounding much like something written by someone bitten by the postmodernist bug. This sec-tion, however, also illustrates the sort of deep and abiding commitment to relativism that hasbeen present in anthropology long before it was trendy anywhere else. Such relativism tends tocome with the territory in anthropology, a discipline in which researchers are constantly tryingto negotiate their way through situations they believe are defined in one way, while their infor-mants conceptualize them in dramatically different ways. While anthropology’s commitmentto relativism is deep and thoroughgoing, one cannot help but wonder if this is partly an artifactof the sorts of social phenomena most cultural anthropologists tend to focus on. Most culturalanthropologists tend to focus on things like kinship, courtship, roles and status. These sorts ofsocial facts, based on perceived rights and responsibilities, areinherentlywhat they are onlybecause of what of what peoplebelieveabout them. A dollar actually has a different worth toAmericans and to Kalahari Bushmen for no other reason than the different populations’ beliefsabout it. Relativism is virtually built into social facts like this. One wonders if cultural anthro-pologists would be so thoroughly relativistic if they were focused more on social facts likegrain harvests, birth weights, or home construction than ones centered around roles and duties.

The strongest features of this book come from Bailey’s enormous erudition. He is verylearned in a very wide variety of fields. He is equally at home quoting Adam Smith, Walter

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Heller, and Cicero. He is also a great stylist, and some passages are so well written you wantto read them out loud. But for all his erudition, Bailey seems to have a surprising blind spot.Since the 1962 publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a largenumber of historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science have been writing about howscientific paradigms form and why their followers adhere to them, despite the fact that that theyoften describe the world incompletely and inaccurately. Bailey’s book is also about the causes,costs, and benefits of looking at things in terms of a unifying paradigm. Yet he hardly cites anywork at all from Science Studies, and never once mentions Kuhn. This omission is glaring.When Bailey discusses what might cause people to stick to believing in the reigning paradigmdespite problems, he ignores all of the careful social, historical, and psychological researchon just this question done by Science Studies scholars. Instead, he talks vaguely about howunifying paradigms help to organize our thoughts; and he trots out tired armchair speculationabout how certain paradigms serve the interests of the ruling classes. And, given that this issuch a philosophical work, Bailey’s inattention to philosophy is also striking (though he iscertainly not the only social scientist guilty of ignoring philosophy). Bailey’s focus in thisbook is on the status of theoretical structures that do not seem to truly describe reality. Thestatus of ontologically odd-seeming entities and epistemologically dubious beliefs has beena major focus of philosophy since it’s beginnings. Philosophers have been thinking aboutthe status of the entities discussed in abstract scientific theories since the birth of science.Questions about the ontological and epistemological status of “asset specificity” are exactlyon par with questions about the ontological and epistemological status of electrons—a subjectthat hundreds of essays have been written about in philosophy of science journals. To write aphilosophical book about the status of theoretical entities in a science while consulting almostno philosophers is as intellectually lazy as philosophers writing about the theoretical entitiesin a science without consulting scientists in that field (a not uncommon practice).

The perils of ignoring philosophical work are most evident in Bailey’s casual relativisticattitude regarding theory truth. Over and over again he makes statements like “a scientific factis whatever those who follow scientific procedures agree is a fact.” Bailey’s anti-realism isactually a more nuanced anti-realism than this quote would suggest, though his exact beliefsregarding truth and objectivity are nowhere made clear. But if he wants to propose a sort ofanti-realist position towards theoretical entities, he needs to do more explicit arguing than hedoes here. Anti-realism might be the modedu jour in the humanities these days, but for alarge percent of philosophers who devote their careers to thinking about the nature of truth,anti-realism is not just false, but inconceivable. Consider this from philosopher John Searle:“I do not believe it makes any sense to ask for a justification of the view that there is away that things are in the world independently of our representations because any attempt atjustification presupposes what it attempts to justify. Any attempt to find out about the real worldat all presupposes that there is a way that things are” (fromMind, Language, and Society).Realism about truth, in other words, is a tacit presupposition of any inquiry, in Searle’s view.Now Searle could be wrong about truth and objectivity and Bailey could be right. But, giventhat so many experts on truth hold a very different view of truth than Bailey seems to hold,the obligation is surely on Bailey to give a clear extensive argument about why we cannotexpect truth from scientific theories in general or social scientific theories in particular. Baileyhas certainly done a good job explaining why we should not think of neoclassical economics

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or structural functionalism as giving us true theories. He needs to do more if he wants us tobelieve we canneverexpect true theories from the social sciences.

But suppose Bailey and various other skeptics are right, and we cannot fully expect scien-tific theories to give us truth. Bailey believes this should lead us to accept a kind of theoreticalpluralism—we should simultaneously hold alternative theories. But why should this be thesolution to an inability to know truth, rather than the traditional empiricist alternative of choos-ing the bestmost useful theory? Bailey does not devote enough argument to showing whythis should not be the preferred alternative. Many philosophers and scientists, while agreeingthat we cannot expect truth from theories, have argued that we often have good grounds forthinking a certain theory is the best one we currently have. A theory may be best because itis the simplest, or because it makes the most predictions. (This is Freidman’s position regard-ing neoclassical economics.) To his credit, Bailey does make some attempt to say why weshould not just accept the theories that make the best predictions. He points out that any setof predictions can be explained by more than one theory. And predictive observations can bedistorted by their being partially shaped by the theories they are meant to verify. But these arejust versions of complaints that have been made against empiricism over and over again. Andempiricists have continually shaped and refined new versions of empiricism that attempt tomeet these criticisms. Given these refinements, it is not enough for Bailey to simply repeat theold criticisms. He needs to say more about why a tolerant pluralism must be better than anyempiricist instrumentalism that tries to pick a single best theory.

It seems to me that the idea that all we can have in the social sciences is a set of differentcoexisting models that don’t really describe reality is itself a kind of “saving lie.” Like themodels Bailey criticizes, this assumption helps us organize our thoughts. And like the models hecriticizes, it has been a standard unquestioned operating assumption in many areas of the socialscience for decades now. I believe it is time we give the assumption of theoretical pluralismas thorough and searching a critique as Bailey has given the assumptions of neoclassicaleconomics and structural functionalism. If we do as good a job at this as Bailey has on thesetwo social science paradigms, we will have a much better understanding of how we shouldthink of social science theorizing, in general.

Todd JonesDepartment of Philosophy, University of Nevada

Las Vegas, 4505 Maryland ParkwayLas Vegas, NV 89104-5028, USA

doi: 10.1016/j.soscij.2004.01.014

Dam Politics: Restoring America’s RiversWilliam R. Lowry, Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 2003, 306 pages

This innovative book takes its readers on a journey towards restoration of natural conditionson America’s rivers by addressing the intricate web of issues surrounding restoration of riverecosystems. It takes a look at how restoration policies are affected by both physical differencesin rivers and by the interactions among various stakeholder groups and policy makers. It