[Xmca-l] Re: The Science of Qualitative Research 2ed

[David Kellogg]

It is interesting (and important) that a lot of time-honored
misunderstandings we reject rather dogmatically at first turn out to be
based on inconvenient truths that never quite disappear. Dualism, for
example, is really based on the inconvenient truth that a weightless
thought will move a weighty limb. We must, if we are honest enough to admit
that our initial rejection of the law of conservation (of mass, of
energy) was as dogmatic as the Cartesian acceptance of it, end up with
something like a law of conversation (of matter, of meaning) instead. I
think that my rejection of the distinction between quantitative and
qualitative research was also initially based on dogmatism, and in
retrospect my colleagues were right to resent it.

For example, in linguistics, studies which are more interested in the
"language system" end of the cline of instantiation (that is, the continuum
that links the language as a whole with an individual instance of text,
running through text types, registers, and register types) tend inevitably
to the quantitative while those that are more interested in individual
texts have to be more qualitative. The law of conversation, however,
requires that you see the choices made in an individual instance of text
against the backdrop of the choices afforded by the language system as a
whole which were not made. Conversely that the language system as a whole
really boils down, in the end, to the sum of all the textual ever made or
makeable by a speech community as instances of text.

Every text is an irregularity made possible by quantitative regularities,
which in turn gives rise to a qualitative regularity of its own. But in
giving rise to that qualitative regularity, it gives an imperceptible nudge
to the quantitative regularities, both renewing and altering them.


David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full


On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 10:43 AM, Martin John Packer <
mpacker@uniandes.edu.co> wrote:

> Interesting, Ed. It was while teaching that course that I realized what a
> hot potato teaching research methods can be. After all, in a graduate
> program one is teaching the current and future research assistants and
> associates of one’s faculty colleagues.
>
> As I recall we taught the course once and then my co-instructor (I won’t
> name names) received funding that relieved her from teaching for a year or
> two. That first year we alternated ‘blocks’ of empirical-analytic and
> interpretive approaches, seven blocks in all, each a few weeks in length.
> We tried to involve the students in a dialog between the approaches,
> emphasizing their similarities as well as their differences. It sounds as
> though subsequently the two approaches became divided into separate
> semesters.
>
> Martin
>
>
> On Dec 20, 2017, at 7:59 PM, Edward Wall <ewall@umich.edu<mailto:ewall@
> umich.edu>> wrote:
>
>       I, for various and sundry reasons, became interested in the very
> thought of teaching mathematics and came to UM a few years after Martin had
> left. Talking with some of those who probably were among Martin’s students
> and some of his teaching colleagues, I was left with the impression that
> ‘research methods’ happened in a very different atmosphere than what I then
> felt around me. I took this two semester course Martin speaks about. I
> almost left UM after the first quantitative semester (I have a very, very
> strong theoretical background in probability and statistics) as I couldn’t
> figure out why somebody would engage in such things and, although the
> second qualitative semester made a little more sense (and there actually
> was one interesting use of mathematics), I began seriously wondering why I
> was there. It took a former colleague of Martin’s to first introduce me to
> Vygotsky and later to Gadamer (who sort of introduced me to Heidegger)
> before I thought there might be something interesting to think about as
> regards the teaching of mathematics. However, they and I were definitely in
> a small minority.
>
>      So, Martin thank you for that course. Although I never was exposed to
> it, I was exposed to several who were influenced by it and was exposed to
> teaching colleagues of yours who shared some of your thinking at that time.
>
> Ed
>
>
>
>