Page 33 - Decoding Culture

26 DECODING CULTURE

shared by many critics of orthodox media research in the forma­
tive period of cultural studies, leading to a wholesale suspicion of
the mass communications research tradition, a suspicion which
has survived in cultural studies to this day. The question to which
we must turn is, then, was this suspicion merited in relation to the
underlying assumptions of mass society Imedia effects thinking?
Elsewhere (fudor, 1995: 82-88) I have explored the distinctive
social ontology and epistemology of effects research, and what
follows is a slightly amended version of that discussion. Consider
first the epistemological assumptions that underwrote the familiar
methodological emphases of effects research. Effects research
grew up alongside twentieth-century social sciences, at times,
indeed, acting as a testing ground for their latest methodological
innovations. Unsurprisingly, it exhibits many of the epistemologi­
cal commitments fundamental to that disciplinary context. It
shares mainstream social science's vision of scientific inquiry, one
centred on the interconnected notions of theory, hypothesis and
test. To know the world properly is to know it scientifically; to
know it scientifically is to establish deductively interrelated propo­
sitions of empirical reference which, appropriately assessed in
relation to evidence, might finally take on the status of 'laws' of
human behaviour.
In practice, of course, neither effects research nor social sci­
ences more generally lived up to this hypothetico-deductive (H-D)
ideal. 'Laws' were never satisfactorily established, and hypotheses
were more often ad hoc empirical generalizations than deduced
implications of precisely formulated theories. But the fact that the
H-D model was not directly reflected in most research practice did
not mean that its distinctive conceptual emphases were of no sig­
nificance. In three interrelated areas, in particular, it had a signal
influence on the development of effects research: in its presuppo­
sition that an 'observation language' can be established to generate

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