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

[Andy Blunden]

Interesting, Martin.

Purely as an aside (time for my Hegel observation), what
Hegel calls his "Ontology", i.e., the first Book of the
Logic, is the dialectic of Quality. Quantity and Measure. It
is what I call "the observer standpoint," and is thoroughly
quantitative. (The quantities must of course be quantities
*of something* so that is why the first category is Quality,
not Quantity).

The rest of the Logic is, on the other hand, characterised
by *self-consciousness*, not *observation*.

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 7/11/2018 7:11 AM, Martin Packer wrote:
> 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)...
>>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20181107/76ea78e3/attachment.html