The Impossible Dream: Scientism as Strategy against Distrust of Social Science at the U.S. National Science Foundation, 1945–1980

Distrust of the social sciences has deep roots in American politics, science, and culture. This article examines how distrust became a serious issue in the nuclear age by focusing on the U.S. National Science Foundation’s involvement with the social sciences from 1945 to 1980. I propose, first, that in this context distrust of NSF’s social science activities came in two forms, which rested on two different sources of doubt. Epistemological Distrust stemmed from doubts about the scientific status of the social sciences. Social Distrust involved worries about the social relevance and policy uses of the social sciences. Second, I propose that efforts to address and contain these two types of distrust played a major role in NSF’s elaboration of a view of the social sciences and corresponding strategy for funding them that I will refer to as Scientism, which assumed a unified scientific framework that took an idealized conception of the natural sciences as the gold standard.