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

Tue Nov 6 17:34:15 PST 2018

An interesting point to add to the discussion is the role that ontology plays as a tacit form of gatekeeping in many disciplines and journals (though thankfully, from my experience, not MCA). I have started to find this out as I have been publishing papers on International education from my doctorate (which I am going to defend in December). As part of this experience, I have found that:

The journal article form does not lend itself to prolonged discussion of ontology due to length restrictions. So much of what is fundamental to research is left unsaid, but really needs to be said! Qualitative researchers need to justify themselves more substantially than quantitive researchers because notions of positivism (validity, generalizability, etc) are normalized and therefore do not require explication. However, your typically journal article does not provide enough room for qualitative researches to justify themselves.

Reviewers and journals function as gatekeepers (just like funding agencies) so it is sometimes necessary to conform to a certain 'house ontology' in order to get the work out there. An issue I have found is that reviewer's can impose their ontology onto the writer - that is, their implicit assumptions about reality function as a framework for understanding and most significantly evaluating the work before them. If the work does not conform to their framework - if there is ontological dissonance - the work is likely to be rejected or heavily critiqued, leading to substantial rewrites that change the essential nature of the paper. On the other side, writers also impose their ontology onto the reader.

This is all a roundabout way to say that ontology is also inextricably linked to power, and takes on dialogic and discursive dimensions. Essentially, ontology can be invoked by either side as a way to demonize or legitimize research, depending on where you stand. Ideally, it would be possible to transcend dualism, but practically speaking dualism functions as a convenient mechanism for gatekeeping and control.

So whilst I agree completely with Martin (whose book I started to read yesterday and really like) that it is imperative to develop ontologies that do not split researchers into partisan camps, actually making this happen is problematic, not least of all because the journal article itself (which I would argue is the paradigmatic academic form these days) does not lend itself to this endeavor. The issue is also an economic one: paywalls, limited space in journals, pressure to publish, and suddenly ontological idealism is compromised. I do think a new form of academic paper needs to be developed that can support greater reflexivity in order to bring out our ontological and epistemological assumptions. The standard 6000ish words, intro methods, findings, discussion, conclusion structure leaves little space for reflective/reflexive writing.

Anyway, just a doctoral student's take on ontology in relation to publishing.

Adam

________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net>
Sent: 07 November 2018 04:11:34
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Fwd: Re: What is science?: Where to start doctoral students?

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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