Thanks for your own thoughtful rejoinder, Graham. We have been down the
last few days, so pardon my tardy response. You are absolutely correct --
this issue will inform how the next generation of researchers approach the
world....
>What is perhaps most interesting in your response is the way I fitted into
>your theoretical dichotomy of (semiotic) realism vs nominalism. As far as I
>can tell, (its always hard to identify all of the implications of the
>positions you take) I did not mean to imply that research methods exist
>outside and
>independently of theoretical perspectives. What I did mean to imply was
>that theoretical perspectives do not prescribe methods. I thought I was a
>realist at heart
But, Graham, theoretical perspectives do prescribe methods. Not small or
local theories so much, but large and all-encompassing theories. The best
treatment of this matter i think is still Steven Pepper's remarkable 1940
book World Hypotheses, where he makes the following two major claims --
there are four relatively adequate versions of ontology that prescribe not
only research methods but even the ordinary ways that we look at the world,
and that no one of these four is strong enough to push out the other three
completely! Interestingly enough, he collapses nominalism into mechanism,
which is where it usually arises. Anyone besides me ever go back and read
old psych articles, and notice that the word "mechanism" is liberally
sprinkled throughout every text? How can this unreflective position not
drive methods? :-)
>My claim that quantitative and qualitative methods are deeply embedded in
>each other comes from my struggles to make sense of the relationship of
>mathematics (and its embodiment in physics and computer software) to human
>experience and meaning making. That remains an unresolved mystery.
This is where Peirce gets a little tricky to follow. Jay is right that i
do not denigrate quant work. In Peircean terms, quant research centers
around our need to get to the heart of what constitutes Secondness (his
mode of being that describes unmediated phenomena, or brute facts). But
mathematics is not embodied in physics or software in terms of Secondness
(except for the fairly trivial sense that tokens are used to establish a
physical trace). Mathematics is Firstness understood as Thirdness -- that
is, pure potential realized via law. Please excuxe the jargon -- i am
trying to get my own thoughts straight here :-). The implications are
that modes of research that attempt to reduce laws down to unmediated and
brute factual accounts are going to miss just about everything that is
going on here. I think again that this is what Jay is calling Old School
quantitative empiricism, and he is right that it has very little to do with
what a physicist would call a quantitative issue.
>And also out of my experience that, as I work with observations and
>recordings and interviews with students in classooms, reading, re-reading,
>seeing new things, seeing connections, themes, - the methods I plan to use
>in future studies emerge as possibilities and opportunities, rather than as
>theoretical positions. One of the things I enjoyed most in Mike Cole's
>Cultural Psychology was the history of the methods he and his colleagues
>tried and discarded, the solutions and puzzles that each study produced.
>There is something compelling about the pragmatic experience of research
>that must figure in the development of theories of research? I don't think
>that's naive, or self-indulgent, but where and how it figures, I do not
>know.
>Others will have clearer ideas.
>Graham
I dont think it is indulgetn or naive either. Probably the best argument
that i could make for realism in sociocultural research is the fact that it
is so much easier. We dont have to explain away large and complex
organizations as aggregates of factors. We dont have to employ ideas like
'emergent properties' -- the whole notion of emergent properties is just a
fudge factor for the nominalist to be able to say that the whole is greater
than the sum of the parts when the essence of nominalism is to say that the
whole IS the sum of the parts. A realist takes seriously that wholes are
greater, and that wholes have integral characters, and moves along in an
easier fashion :-)
ps your ideas are quite clear, my friend...
>Graham Nuthall
>Professor of Education
>University of Canterbury
>Private Bag 4800
>Christchurch, New Zealand
>Phone 64 03 3642255 Fax 64 03 3642418
>http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/educ/ultp.html