Transcript Humanities Postgraduate seminar Wednesday 23 August 2006

Humanities Postgraduate seminar
Wednesday 8 August 2007
Ways of knowing in the social sciences
Bob Pokrant
Social Science Program
Media, Society and Culture
[email protected]
What is it to know something?
• To represent the world in some way-verbally, written form,
•
•
•
•
•
•
pictorially
Acquired through thinking, asking/observing/interacting
with others/things
Knowledge originates with social
groups/persons/institutions
These groups make claims about the world
Tacit knowledge-common sense-taken-for-granted-tooth
brush-lay knowledge
Codified knowledge-discursive consciousness-expert
knowledge
Knowledges competing with each other for recognition and
acceptance
• Academics compete with academics; with non-academics.
•
•
•
•
•
Climate change debate
All knowledge is obtained in mediated formtheory/touch/smell/first and second-hand experience-these
are frames of understanding
Cognitive knowledge-claims about what is (episteme)
Moral knowledge-claims about what should be done with
what is (phronesis-value rationality)
Policy knowledge-claims about how to achieve policy
objectives (techne-instrumental rationality)
Aesthetic knowledge-claims about what is
beautiful/uplifting about what is
• Three interconnected-claims of what is used to legitimate
•
•
•
claims of what should be-’race’, gender etc
Truth claims-accepted belief; true belief-modernist-postmodernist split
Concept-reality: Do babies exist before they are given
names or called babies?
Are brains social constructs?
Why did the Twin Towers collapse on 11 September 2001?
•
•
•
•
•
If a then b. If fast moving object strikes fixed object, the
fixed object collapses.
On September 11 2001, a fast moving object (plane)
struck the fixed object (Twin Towers) and as a result, the
Towers collapsed.
Does this explain why the towers collapsed? Yes and no.
The physical explanation is a necessary condition for the
understanding of the event, but insufficient to explain it.
One could say this is a mechanical explanation whereas
as social scientists we also need explanations at the level
of social meaning. But all explanation is meaningful in
some sense.
• Levels of reality and explanation:
– Planes hit the buildings
– Skilful/poor piloting-training
– Poor design of the buildingsdesign/builders/architects
– Poor surveillance-security personnel
– Terrorist attack-person(s) designated as
terrorists-who says?
– Globalisation seen as threat by some
communities/groups
Kind of explanation/knowledge
• Cognitive-what are the facts of the case? What constitutes
•
•
•
•
•
a relevant fact?
Objects of investigation (people) are self-conscious,
reflexive beings like ourselves. The double hermeneutic.
Critical realism: we do perceive a world that exists
independently of our perceiving it, but not as it is in itself,
unperceived, but always and necessarily only as humanly
perceived.
Science is only possible if it is about something that exists
independently of our senses
Surface appearance of things can be misleading about their
true character: posits a stratified model of reality.
Scientific work is to investigate and identify relationships
and non-relationships, respectively, between what we
experience, what actually happens, and the underlying
mechanisms that produce events in the world
• Aim is to tap the deep reality of mechanisms, powers, flows
•
•
•
•
etc
Knowledge is always tentative and our beliefs about the
world are subject to falsification: can be shown not to be so
(could be accident, another terrorist group etc)
Anti-naturalist ontologically: social life is maintained
through active agents.
theories actively created by researchers within theoretical
traditions: physics, aeronautics, architecture, security
studies, anthropology etc.
the knower tried to grasp imaginatively how others
experienced their world, how they constructed it, and what
meaning it had for them.
Exercise 1:
Does the social world have a pre-existing order
which you as researchers seek to discover?
Must you rid your minds of pre-conceptions of
the world in order to study it?
• Exercise 2:
• How central are people’s own understandings to
•
•
your research?
Can you give an example of people’s intentions and
what they mean.
Is your job done after describing their intentions
and understandings?
• Exercise 3:
• Do you have a casual account as distinct from an
•
interpretivist account of why your research subjects act the
way they do?
What are its main components?
• Exercise 4:
• Can you give an example from your research of meaning
beyond that of your subjects/respondents/informants?
• Exercise 5:
• Why did the attack on the twin towers in New York
•
•
•
•
•
in 2001 occur?
In answering, think about the following:
What constitute the facts of the case? Significance
Is the question a single question requiring a single
answer?
Are there why and how explanations?
In what ways do your explanations link back to
bedrock assumptions and concepts about the nature
of how the world works (or your view of it)?
The end
Making knowledge claims
•
Empiricist/objectivism
•
interpretivism
•
phronesis
Empiricist/objectivist paradigm
•
social world exists in itself independently of our minds
•
To know that world properly is to have
cognitively/linguistically unmediated access to it
(collecting facts)
•
True knowledge is a copy of mind-independent entities
•
rid their minds of pre-conceptions to allow the facts to
register
•
The method of inquiry said to be common to social and
natural science
Critique of E/O paradigm
• Facts do not speak for themselves, they must be
given significance
• Facts are theory-impregnated
• Researchers actively construct accounts of the
world within theoretical traditions.
Perspectivism and Interpretivism
•
Perspectivism:
Dominant epistemological paradigm today
Facts are a product of conceptual schemes
•
Interpretivism:
Knowledge consists of understanding the meaning of
what others do as expressed in their own terms
•
objects of investigation (people) are self-conscious,
reflexive beings like ourselves. The double hermeneutic.
•
the knower tried to grasp imaginatively how others
experienced their world, how they constructed it, and
what meaning it had for them.
•
person as active creator of reality rather than passive
bearer of it a la positivism and structuralism.
•
This human-created world might correspond to some
real world, that is, constructivists can be realists.
Extreme constructivists are anti-naturalist/realist
Interpretation and cause
•
•
•
•
•
•
Knowing what people mean when they say or do
something is a necessary but not sufficient condition of
understanding social life.
Social life has regularities not intended by members of
the society
unanticipated consequences of people’s acts
Unconscious
Unknown conditions
Knowing is interpreting and explaining
• Social scientists must also go beyond seeing meaning
•
as simply the intention of the actor who acts. The acts
of terrorists may have their own personal meanings
but they have wider meanings that the terrorists may
or may not be aware of.
Interpretation here is placing the meaning of acts
within wider contexts-9/11 means the birth of a new
era of ontological insecurity; 9/11 means the
emergence of non-state actors as serious threats to
national order; 9/11 means that US policy in the
Middle East has failed; 9/11 means disaffected Muslim
youths can seek new identities in a new religious
movement.
Social science as phronesis
• 3 intellectual virtues:
–
Episteme: Scientific knowledge. Universal, invariable,
context independent. Based on general analytical
rationality. The original concept is known today by
the terms “epistemology” and “epistemic.” Social
science practiced as episteme is concerned with
uncovering universal truths or laws about society.
– Techne: Craft/art. Pragmatic, variable, context
dependent. Oriented toward production. Based on
practical instrumental rationality governed by a
conscious goal.
– Appears today in terms such as “technique,”
“technical,” and “technology.”
– Social science practiced as techne is consulting aimed at
better policies by means of instrumental rationality—a
type of social engineering—where “better” is defined in
terms of the values and goals of those who employ the
consultants, sometimes in negotiation with the latter.
– Phronesis: Ethics. Deliberation about values with
reference to praxis. Pragmatic, variable, context
dependent. Oriented toward action. Based on practical
value rationality. Social science practiced as phronesis is
concerned with deliberation about (including
questioning of) values and interests aimed at praxis.
What claims does phronesis make?
–
–
–
–
–
That it provides ethical guidance for science and
technology
That the key questions of social inquiry should be:
Where are we going?; who gains and who loses, and
by which mechanisms of power?; is this development
desirable? what, if anything, should we do about it?
Rejects foundationalism and relativism and replaces
them with contextualism or situational ethics.
That scientists must work with those they study
That objectivity is a process of taking a critical
attitude to one’s own pre-conceptions, one’s own
evidence, and one’s own research place within
scholarly, civil society and other networks
Readings
• Fay, B (1996): Contemporary philosophy of social science. Oxford:
•
•
•
•
Blackwell Publisher
Flyvbjerg, B (2001): Making Social Science Matter: Why Social
Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Mark Harris (ed) (2007): Ways Of Knowing: New Approaches in the
Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning. Oxford: Berghahn
Jonathon W. Moses and Torbjørn Knutsen (2007): Ways Of Knowing
Competing Methodologies in Social and Political Research. London:
Palgrave Macmillan
White. S K (2002): “Review of Making Social Science Matter: Why
Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again,” American
Political Science Review 96, no. 1: 179-80.