Trust, Incommensurability, and the Limits of Intersubjectivity
A response to “Can We Trust Social Science Yet?” by Ryan Briggs
In a thoughtful (and honestly unsettling) essay for Asterisk Magazine, Ryan Briggs asks a question many social scientists now confront with increasing unease: Can we trust social science yet? The concern is not merely that individual studies contain errors—those are inevitable in any empirical enterprise—but that the systems responsible for producing, vetting, and aggregating social-scientific knowledge may no longer reliably distinguish robust findings from fragile ones.
Briggs’s diagnosis is careful and measured. He points to familiar problems: replication failures, underpowered studies, coding errors that escape review, and institutional incentives that reward novelty over verification. None of this is new. What makes the moment different is that these weaknesses now bear directly on public legitimacy. Social science no longer speaks primarily to itself; it is routinely invoked to justify policy, moral claims, and institutional authority. When its findings prove unstable, the costs are no longer internal.
I want to extend Briggs’s argument in a sympathetic direction—not by disputing his diagnosis, but by situating it within a broader epistemic problem that methodological reform alone cannot resolve. This will get nerdy, so, um, bear with me.
From pluralism to incommensurability
Much of contemporary social science rightly emphasizes subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Human behavior is meaning-laden, historically situated, and shaped by perspective. Ignoring this would be naïve. Indeed, the turn toward interpretive sensitivity corrected real failures of earlier universalist models that mistook partial viewpoints for neutral truths.
The problem is not that subjectivity entered the epistemic picture. The problem is that our institutions have struggled to articulate how much weight subjective and intersubjective claims should carry, and under what constraints.
Pluralism is healthy when different approaches remain commensurable—when disagreements can be translated into shared standards of evidence, inference, and error. But pluralism becomes destabilizing when those standards erode, and when knowledge claims no longer meaningfully contest one another. At that point, disagreement does not sharpen understanding; it fragments it.
This is where many social-scientific fields now find themselves. Studies increasingly differ not only in conclusions, but in what counts as evidence, explanation, or even error. Claims do not fail one another; they pass in parallel. The result is not diversity of insight, but epistemic incommensurability.
Healthy intersubjectivity vs. epistemic capture
This distinction matters, and it is easy to get wrong.
Healthy intersubjectivity treats experience, interpretation, and positionality as inputs into knowledge production—valuable but constrained, contestable, and ultimately answerable to shared standards of adjudication. Subjective insight expands the space of hypotheses; it does not end inquiry.
Epistemic capture, by contrast, occurs when subjective or intersubjective claims are elevated without clear rules governing their interaction with other forms of evidence. When institutions fail to specify how such claims can be challenged, overridden, or reconciled with competing accounts, subjectivity ceases to function epistemically and becomes strategic.
At that point, sincerity can substitute for accuracy. Moral urgency can substitute for explanation. Disagreement shifts from empirical terrain to identity terrain. This is not because actors are acting in bad faith, but because the incentive structure rewards claims that are insulated from adjudication.
Briggs documents how (some very) fragile results persist in top journals. The deeper issue is why such fragility is institutionally tolerable. One answer is that incommensurability weakens collective error correction. When fields lack shared standards, there is no obvious mechanism by which weak claims are systematically displaced by stronger ones.
Why legitimacy erodes
Trust in social science does not require certainty. It requires bounded reliability: a shared understanding of what claims mean, how confident we should be in them, and how disagreement is resolved. When those conditions fail, legitimacy erodes—not because the public is hostile to expertise, but because expertise no longer speaks with constrained authority.
This erosion has consequences beyond academia. In the absence of epistemic coordination, policymakers cherry-pick findings. Advocacy groups weaponize selective evidence. Extremist actors—of various ideological stripes—thrive by offering certainty where institutions offer ambiguity. The resulting polarization is not merely political; it is epistemic.
Importantly, this does not mean that subjectivity causes extremism, nor that pluralism is a mistake. It means that pluralism without governance is unstable. Democratic societies require not only political institutions, but epistemic ones capable of adjudicating claims across difference.
Why methodological reform is necessary but insufficient
Open science reforms—preregistration, data transparency, replication—are genuine advances, and Briggs is right to emphasize them. But transparency alone does not restore legitimacy if researchers fundamentally disagree about what counts as evidence, explanation, or success.
In other words, verification cannot substitute for commensuration. Without shared standards of weighting and adjudication, methodological rigor risks becoming procedural rather than substantive.
Re-earning trust
The question, then, is not whether social science should return to a lost positivist innocence. That world never existed. The question is whether the field can rebuild institutions that allow pluralistic knowledge to remain collectively intelligible.
That would mean:
rewarding clear falsification as much as novel framing
penalizing overclaiming more than null results
valuing being wrong in shared terms over being right in isolated ones
Trust is not a badge conferred by status. It is a social contract sustained by institutions that make disagreement productive rather than fragmentary.
Briggs is right to ask whether social science is trustworthy yet. The harder question is whether it is still capable of agreeing on what trust would require.