Abstract
The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murry put American academic social scientists in an uncomfortable place.1 The conclusions of the book are unwelcome, while the methods of the book appear to be the standbys of everyday social science. The unstated problem for many commentators is how to reject the particular conclusions of The Bell Curve without also rejecting the larger enterprises of statistical social science, psychometrics, and social psychology. In some sense, that is the general problem addressed in various ways in this collection of essays. The hard issues lurking behind the discussion are whether large parts of the social sciences and their methods are bogus, phony, pseudo-scientific, and whether, if and insofar as they are, they must be.
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Glymour, C. (1997). Social Statistics and Genuine Inquiry: Reflections on The Bell Curve . In: Devlin, B., Fienberg, S.E., Resnick, D.P., Roeder, K. (eds) Intelligence, Genes, and Success. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0669-9_12
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