[Xmca-l] Re: Fwd: Re: What is science?: Where to start doctoral students?

[Martin Packer]

Well Huw I’ll take a shot! I’ve never thought that xmca-ers worry too much about overcomplicating a thread!  :)

Quantitative research (and I’m talking about the way this is construed in the social sciences, not in physics, for example) is generally taught as experimental design and hypothesis testing, which is largely the model the logical positivists laid out a hundred years ago. They considered ontological (metaphysical) claims to be untestable, and so unscientific. Consequently, courses in quantitative research pay little or no attention to ontology. The result is that the researcher’s ontological assumptions are tacitly imposed on the phenomenon. After all, quantitative researchers believe (as the logical positivists taught them) that they can ‘operationally define’ their variables. That’s to say, *they* get to decide what is intelligence, or poverty, or a student, or a woman…

The result is something that Alfred Schutz complained about: "this type of social science does not deal directly and immediately with the social life-world common to us all, but with skillfully and expediently chosen idealizations and formalizations of the social world.” The result is "a fictional nonexisting world constructed by the scientific observer.”

Harold Garfinkel made a similar point: he rejected "the worldwide social science movement” with its “ubiquitous commitments to the policies and methods of formal analysis and general representational theorizing.” He saw that the statistical and formal models built by formal analysis “lose the very phenomenon that they profess.”

I’ve tried to attach an article by Spencer (1982) that is, in my view, making essentially the same point, but the listserv rejects it:

Spencer, M. E. (1982). The ontologies of social science. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 12(2), 121-141.

 Typically, social scientists are completely caught up in the ontology of their discipline, and completely ignore the ontology of the phenomenon they are studying - that’s to say, its constitution: what its constituents are and how they are assembled.

On the other hand, the issue of the implicit ontology of qualitative research is the central theme of my book. I argue there that by and large Qual has bought into the ontological dualism of mind-matter, so that researches assume that the natural sciences study matter (objectivity), and so qualitative research must study mind (subjectivity).

The book develops an argument for escaping from this dualistic ontology, and actually paying attention to human being - a kind of research that Foucault called ‘a historical ontology of ourselves.’ Along the way I try to do justice to what has been called the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology, the argument that different cultures have distinct cosmologies, rather than distinct cosmovisions - that’s to say, they have different ontologies; they live in distinct realities; they don’t simply have different ways of conceptualizing a single underlying reality. Latour’s most recent work is making a similar argument about the different institutions in which all of us live - that each institution has its distinct mode of existence (its distinct way of being; its distinct ontology). 

So if I had my way, or my ideal winter holiday gift, it would be that qualitative research provides a way for psychology (and perhaps the other social sciences) to move beyond dualism and embrace multiple ontologies.

Martin

"I may say that whenever I meet Mrs. Seligman or Dr. Lowie or discuss matters with Radcliffe-Brown or Kroeber, I become at once aware that my partner does not understand anything in the matter, and I end usually with the feeling that this also applies to myself” (Malinowski, 1930)



> On Nov 6, 2018, at 11:22 AM, Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com <mailto:huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> Best to leave that for the time being, no point overcomplicating the thread.
> 
> Huw
> 
> On Tue, 6 Nov 2018 at 15:02, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net <mailto:mpacker@cantab.net>> wrote:
> And what do you take their implicit ontology to be, Huw?
> 
> Martin
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Nov 5, 2018, at 6:33 PM, Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com <mailto:huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> The problem that I was responding to before regarding "qualitative and quantitative" labels is that the adoption of these labels (and their implicit ontology)...
> 

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