Ockham's Mug

Hanging out in Guildford:

Recently, I had the privilege of spending a number of weeks as the guest of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Surrey in southern England. The University is about an hour's train ride from London, and is located in the town of Guildford.

For someone like me from the United States, Guildford is the perfect archetype of a British town. It sits abreast the gently rolling hills of the valley of the River Wey. Its High Street winds up and along the hill from the train station, past the Medieval Guildhall and the ancient Castle, to reach Upper High Street Way and the Royal Grammar School. Guildford is a market town, where the 16th century Tudor Rose Restaurant and MacDonalds, the Chelsea Football Shop and the Gap, and Waterstone's Books and the Internet Cafe manage to coexist in prosperous splendor.

Along the banks of the Wey itself is a beautiful river walk, a series of small river islands, a maze of locks and gates and pedestrian bridges, and dockings for the long low narrow river boats that have made their way up and down this deep and narrow river for centuries. Somehow, modern office and residential buildings, and ancient churches and pubs, exist side by side in architectural harmony along the river edge.

The other side of the river is dominated by winding streets crowded with cozy brick and stone houses, the imposing modern presence of Guildford Cathedral perched high atop a hill, and the University itself. Every day I would make the fifteen minute stroll from the clean and modern YMCA, where I was staying, past the train station, up the hill past the Cathedral, and then to the University. Every evening I would take the long way back, down the gentle slope toward Farnsworth Road. Sometimes, I would stop at a convenience shop along the way and pick up a pack of McVities Chocolate Nobbles or perhaps a tin of shortbread for my evening tea. I would take my tea in my small but comfortable room on the second floor of the YMCA, which looked out on the River Wey. My electric kettle chirped when the water was beginning to boil, and I would parcel out two or three biscuits or shortbreads to savor it my strong hot tea.

Working with Nigel:

As you might imagine, this whole experience was heavenly for me in a number of ways. Not only did I get to play "Brit" for an extended time, but first and most foremost I had the chance to work with some of the best qualitative researchers on the planet.

Great places often take their lead from the folks who run them. The director of the Institute of Social Research was Nigel Fielding. Nigel, who is a criminologist and sociologist in addition to his expertise in qualitative research (and the use of computers for qualitative analysis in particular), had spent much of his childhood in the United States. His father was an Aerospace Engineer, and so they moved around to such high tech locales as Atlanta, Washington DC, and finally California. But, when it came time to go to college in the late 1960's, Nigel returned home to study at the University of Sussex and has lived in England ever since. So he had one foot firmly placed in his home culture, but he was also able to understand this crazy Yank who was there to visit and learn. Nigel was fast becoming a genuine friend.

Nigel and I had previously corresponded sporadically for several years over matters qualitative. We also had a deep mutual love for folk music. When he invited me to his house for supper, we spent several hours afterwards sipping sherry and listening to old but well preserved Peter Rowan albums. We also talked then, and have since started some writing, on our mutual concern that qualitative research is currently too prescriptive in its outlook.

Running out of time:

I had come to Surrey in late February, just as the chilliest of the winter rains were starting to subside. Over the next few weeks, I was invited to give two presentations while I was in residence at the Sociology Department at the University of Surrey. The first dealt with metaphors of schooling, and we will touch upon a few of those issues in a later lesson.

The second presentation addressed my long time fascination with Medieval thinkers, and how certain Medieval thinkers can still offer us guidance as we wrestle with thorny conceptual issues in qualitative research. I have often noticed that my Medieval work has always been better accepted in Europe than it is back home in the States. I think this is due to the fact that there is still a substantial Medieval presence in Europe. When we visit these ancient castles and cathedrals, and wander along the narrow walled streets of towns that first came into prominence in the Middle Ages, it is easy to feel the presence of those who have gone before us.

As a matter of fact, one of my goals as a visitor to the county of Surrey was to make a trip to the village of Ockham if it still existed. Anyone who has ever taken a course in the history of science has heard of William of Ockham (or sometimes, Occam). He was the author of Ockham's Razor, or the principle that the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. Back in engineering school, we learned the following rhyme:

"Cut causes and chop 'em, said William of Ockham

Wiping his Razor on the sleeve of his blazer."

How could I not visit the home of such a famed and important thinker? Nigel mentioned that Ockham was a mere six miles from Guildford, and that it still had a pretty famous pub that served a good old fashioned pint of British ale. He promised me that we would go there someday. But one day followed the next, and soon it was clear that I was running out of time.

A pilgrimage to Ockham:

By the end of March, I was nearing the time for my departure back to the States. We had all been so busy that we had to keep postponing our little side trip to Ockham. Just as I was beginning to resign myself to the possibility that this little trip would have to wait for another visit to England at a later time, Nigel, being the good-natured and good-hearted person that he is, surprised me with a lunchtime visit to Ockham.

There was very little there to see, alas. The village itself was long gone. Apart from a farmhouse here and there, the only public buildings in Ockham were the Hautboy pub and All Saints Church.

The Hautboy pub was open, but it was mid afternoon and we were the only customers. We retreated to the cellar dining room where we had a delightful lunch and a pint of ale each. The beer at the Hautboy was served using the old-fashioned wooden taps that operated by hand pumping, and not the new-fangled electric pumps that were springing up in even the most venerable pubs in even the most remote corners of the English countryside.

We drove the short distance from the pub to the church, and parked in the small and empty church lot. From the outside, All Saints looked like it belonged on a postcard representing the typical small English church. It seemed however that we were out of luck. There were no other cars in the parking lot, and the building appeared to be locked.

As fate would have it, however, a church volunteer pulled in as we were preparing to leave. She was bringing some decorations for Holy Week, which was soon to commence. Even though she was obviously pressed for time, she graciously allowed us to go inside.

Like many old churches, All Saints had been built and rebuilt over the centuries. Its crowning glory was its 13th century East Window. In the words of Canon Winnet's (1991) guide to the church:

"This window, which has been described as 'one of the loveliest features to be found in any village church in England', has seven lancets, the only other mediaeval seven lancet window in this country being at Blakeney in Norfolk. (The seven lancet window in the Victorian church in Millbrook, Southhampton, is a copy of the Ockham window.). The arches of the window have dog-tooth moulding and rest upon shafts of Petworth marble surrounded by capitals carved with a leaf design. The glass of the window, depicting the Risen Lord with saints and children, is Victorian and commemorates the wife and infant daughter of the Rev. Seymour Neville, Rector 1869-1899. It was designed by Sir Thomas Jackson, the architect in charge of the 1875 restoration. The bases of an earlier window of three lights can be seen on the outside of the east wall (p.4)."

Two other aspects of this church were of particular interest to me. The first was the baptismal font. The upper part of this small font had been restored, but the base dated to the early 13th century, and was almost certainly used to baptize William of Ockham. The other feature was the West Window in North Aisle, again as described by Winnett (1991):

"The window commemorates the 700th anniversary and the birth of William of Ockham (c.1285-1349) and was dedicated on 20th April 1985. On the same day Professors of the Franciscan Institute of Bonaventure University, New York, presented thirteen newly published volumes to the church. These contain the first critical edition of William's surviving theological and philosophical writings and are on permanent loan to the Theological Department of King's College, London (p. 5)."

We learned from the hospitable caretaker that the Franciscans from New York had not been alone on that occasion. A number of dons from Oxford and Cambridge had come to Ockham for the occasion, and they had set up a banquet in the small church. And now, 14 years later, the only remaining memorabilia from that feat were several coffee mugs. As soon as I saw these mugs, I knew that I really wanted one. I asked if they were for sale, and she assured me that they could be had for a quid apiece. Nigel and I both bought one. I do not know what he does with his, but mine sits in my office in a place of honor, and I do not ever intend to actually use it.

To the naked eye, this piece does not look like much of a keepsake. It is actually just a fairly ordinary looking cream-colored coffee mug. On one side, in brownish letters, it read:

William of Ockham

c.1285-1349

On the other side was the following:

"Occam's Razor"

Frustra fit

per plura quod

potest fieri

per pauciora.

Inside the mug was a slip of paper with the English translation: "It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer."

Ockham's legacy:

The irony to all of this Ockham worship on my part is the fact that, as far as I am concerned, he is the Enemy. If it were not for Ockham, qualitative inquiry might well have evolved centuries ago. But because of this one Medieval Franciscan, empirical inquiry took a turn toward the Scientific Method as well as a cultural turn to Scientism.

For one thing, he is the father of Nominalism. He also helped develop the framework that allowed inquirers to entertain the notion that the laws of nature are merely labels for systematic, and probabilistic, regularities in experience. In this fashion, he was one of the first thinkers to bring together both induction and Nominalism as a way to grasp the nature of empirical reality.

Ockham cut quite a figure in the history of scientific thought. Consider these words by Kisch (1992) in the commemorative pamphlet provided for admirers of the Ockham window in All Saints Church:

"In his early days at Oxford Occam challenged the older dons and professors with his maxim, 'Occam's Razor', 'It is useless to do with more what can be done with less;' also sometimes stated as 'Don't invent classes of things unless you have to.' In other words 'The fewer the assumptions, the better the argument' (p. 3)."

Kisch (1992) goes on to paint Ockham as a sort of intellectual and scientific folk hero:

"The philosophers were divided into two camps, both seeking the truth behind the natural phenomena of the world but from different standpoints. The realists, led by Duns Scotus and following partly in the steps of St. Thomas Aquinas, believed that true reality was not to be found on earth whose values derived from some ideal originals (i.e. truth, good, white, red, house, etc.) which existed beyond earthly limits, perhaps in heaven or the mind of God. Occam, leader of the nominalists, believed that the only real thing was an actual object which a person could comprehend and be immediately aware of by means of his senses. The word 'table' had no real meaning but this table in front of me is real and positive. The graduates and undergraduates were prepared to discuss and debate these matters at endless length and with great enthusiasm. But Occam landed himself in trouble by taking the argument one step further. It is useless, he said, for scientific enquiry to be limited by theological directions from the church or even the Pope: it must be allowed to pursue its enquiries without any such limitation, bearing in mind that religious belief is a matter for faith while science is purely a question of reasoning: in other words science and philosophy were totally separate disciplines from religion and neither wad admissible of proof by the other (pp. 3-4)."

Fr. Coppleston lays out a more cautious and scholarly picture of Ockham, but even this account of the role of Ockham in the founding of scientific reasoning shows how contemporary the ideas of Ockham and his followers truly were. Coppleston (1963) in the following passage could well be quoting from any number of current works on research in the social sciences:

"It is true, of course, that certain philosophical positions maintained by Ockham himself or by other followers of the via moderna were calculated to influence the conceptions of scientific method and of the status of physical theories. The combination of a 'nominalist' or conceptualist view of universals with the thesis that one cannot argue with certainty from the existence of one thing to the existence of another thing would naturally lead to the conclusion that physical theories are empirical hypotheses which can more or less probable but which cannot be proved with certainty. Again, the emphasis laid by some philosophers on experience and observation as the necessary basis for our knowledge of the world might well encourage the view that the probability of an empirical hypothesis depends on the extent of its verification, that is, on its ability to explain or account for the empirical data (p.176)."

The war begins:

Kisch's picture of Ockham is too simplistic and some of the things he attributes to the Realism of Scotus are actually part of an earlier and more naive version of Realism. But Kisch is right about one thing. No one in Western thought had said these things before Ockham had said them. We read Ockham's discussion of how only individual things are real, and how science and philosophy are methods that are independent of religion, and they seem to be commonplace statements to us. But these were ideas that were new to Ockham, and through him, new to his world.

Like many new ideas, Ockham's vision of Nominalism and scientific inquiry was controversial. A war was started between the Realists and the Nominalists. And unlike many such intellectual wars, this one had a clear-cut historical winner. Nominalism won. Ockham's ideas eventually held the day. In fact, his model of Nominalism did not go far enough. Structures and models and causes and the like were relentlessly stripped away, until we have finally reached the era of Positivism and Materialism.

In the human sciences, this sort of material reductionism has taken the form of a radical sort of biological understanding of all anthropological, sociological, and psychological phenomena. In the clearest example of what I mean, we no longer talk about the mind -- we talk instead about the brain.

But, like all really powerful ideas, realism was never totally annihilated by Nominalist sensibilities. We can see how some Realist issues have struggled to emerge by looking at the following curious debate.

The strange case of the qualitative--quantitative debate:

The greatest stumbling block for today's more generalist model makers and theorists in social science research has been the problem of the so-called "incommensurability" of worldviews (Rorty, 1979 is considered by many to be the defining statement of this issue).

Incommensurability just means that you cannot reduce one worldview to another, since there are concepts in each worldview that simply cannot be translated into the terms of the other view. Perhaps the most influential version of this idea in terms of empirical inquiry has been Kuhn's (1970) notion of the "paradigm shift" in science. When there is one of these paradigm shifts (and Kuhn himself claimed that there had only been a handful of these shifts in the history of empirical inquiry in the West), all the rules change and all former bets are off. That leads inevitably to incommensurability.

Ever since Kuhn, people have been seeing evidence of paradigm shifting all over the place. One of the current manifestations of such a shift within social science research can be seen, for instance, in the so-called qualitative vs. quantitative debate (Eisner & Peshkin, 1990 lay out most of the issues that qualitative research struggles with as part of this debate). The debate, in its simplest form, is this: does the development and use of qualitative methods represent a Kuhnian paradigm shift or not?

But the problem with this debate as it is currently formulated, is that too often it uses issues of methodology to mask the real nature of the issue of incommensurably. That is, efforts to widen or bridge the gap, depending on how you see his debate, inevitably focus on issues related to asking research questions and comparing methods used to address those questions. But the crisis of the incommensurability or non-incommensurability of worldviews is actually much deeper. As you might guess, it is not so much a matter of method as it is a matter of vision.

This crisis that fuels this debate, however, is not a new phenomenon. We will see it in sharp focus when we go back and look more carefully at Ockham’s time. But to start out, we will stay closer to our own familiar time and way of looking at inquiry.

We can see this crisis, from our current perspective, in a “purer” form when we look at the philosophy of Western inquiry as it stood in the late 19th and early 20th century. To grossly oversimplify a complex situation, we can say that this crisis in inquiry during the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century centered on the clash between phenomenological vs. logical positivist attempts to understand the world.

This clash is complex, and rather than attempting to describe the opposing sides directly at the outset, we will look at them first through the lens of metaphor. In this fashion, we can get at the essence of each view in ways that a straightforward description might not highlight.

Looking at the matter analogically, we can say that phenomenological views resembled the thought of Impressionist painters (who were creating their own manifestos during the latter half of the 19th century). For an Impressionist, the task was not to paint bridges or apples or haystacks or trees, but the play of light across these objects. It was this play of light that informed the senses, not the essence of the things themselves. In one sense, the purpose of apples and haystacks and the light was to serve as a complex and interesting source for this play of light. Furthermore, there is no theoretical need to suppose that there is anything other than this play of light! It is in the light, and not directly from the objects (which may or may not exist) that we draw our information and understanding of the visual world. We will build on this metaphor in a later lesson to tease out the various threads of phenomenology that inform qualitative research, but for now we need to move on to look at the other side of the argument.

What sort of metaphor helps us understand the worldview of the logical positivist researcher? Here we see a strong kinship with the Modernist architect. Starting with the Bauhaus movement in the early 1920’s, there was a strong desire by these architects to strip away all the facades that might interfere with experiencing the essence of a building. Social, historical, and cultural issues were ‘clutter’ that obstructed the appreciation and use of a building.

Much as a shipwright might scrape away barnacles to get down to the real hull of a ship, Modernist architects and later Modernist painters stripped away anything that was deemed unnecessary for rendering a pure and context free form, be it building or painted form.

We can say that phenomenology is ‘impressionistic’ to the extent that it is interested in the play of consciousness on the objects of the world. Such thinkers as Husserl and Heidegger, and later on Schutz and von Glasersfeld, wrestled with the development of phenomenological methods in the social sciences in particular. But this effort leads phenomenology into a dilemma shared to some degree with Impressionism. How can the Impressionist painter be sure that he or she is painting anything other than light? In a similar fashion, how can phenomenology be sure that he or she is not just studying consciousness, rather than the play of consciousness within a larger frame of reality? Certain phenomenological positions contend that only consciousness matters. Reality is ‘constructed’ by the acts of consciousness, so that there is no sense in talking about things beyond this play of consciousness. Contemporary radical constructivism, with its emphasis on multiple realities and the construction of meaning, falls directly into this camp.

Contrast this view with logical positivism. Thinkers such as Comte, Moore, Bridgeman, Carnap, and the like were committed to the notion of the transparent researcher cutting through the clutter to present the ‘pure’ essence of the phenomenon under study. Issues of meaning and interpretation were dismissed as idiosyncratic and subjective, to be either eliminated or, if absolutely necessary, calibrated by agreed upon operations. In this fashion they, like the Modern architect, could build context and culture free theory that could be used to run trains and bake bread, regardless of how one might wish to interpret the process or allow one’s consciousness or culture to ‘play’ across the process.

Now we can see the crux of the notion of incommensurability for our current way of understanding these issues. Does consciousness create the order that we find in the world, or does it mask this order? One side is committed to using such phenomenological tools as introspecting and intuiting, and later on bracketing and coding, to work with consciousness to bring about meaning as a form of order. The other side is committed to the development of context-free types of calculi, grounded in logic and mathematics, which describe general laws of reality that stand outside history, culture, or the machinations of individual consciousness. Here we have verifiable (and later falsifiable) claims as the foundation for order.

So we see that both sides are committed to the notion of order. One side sees order as interpretive and generated by the play of consciousness upon things that may or may not be really in the world. This view is not only phenomenological; it is also a version of a position known as Idealism. Idealism holds that knowledge (and for some Idealists, even reality) is ultimately matter of the mind. The other side sees order as a set of simple dynamics that need to be excavated and systematized from the clutter and confusion of ordinary appearance and interpretation. So we have diametrically opposed and apparently incommensurable models of order underlying these different systems.

Is this debate really a debate?

Has the old Realist vs. Nominalist debate resurfaced and changed as a Realist vs. Idealist debate? It is tempting to say that the logical positivist side is Realist in its perspective, and the phenomenological side is Idealist. But that is simply not correct.

First of all, there is absolutely nothing Realist about logical positivism; it is Nominalist to its very core. Logical positivism is instead, Materialist. But even more interestingly, logical positivism shares, with phenomenology, the notion that organized knowledge is a property of the knower and not the world. The world is just a repository of empirical or logical facts. Any theoretical structure we might find is just a property of our need to order and organize those facts.

Phenomenology is also Idealist, in that it claims that order comes more from the mind than from the phenomenon; but it is just as Nominalist as logical positivism. So if both phenomenology and logical positivism are Idealist and Nominalist, then there is really not much of a debate going on. The quarrel is really one about what counts of evidence, and not one about fundamentally different ways of looking at the world.

To get at something really different, we would have to return to Realism. And there certainly is no Realism to be found anywhere on this scene, thanks to the work of Ockham and his followers down the ages. If we want to see Realism in action, we have to turn elsewhere.

A quick tour of Realism:

In order to see what Realism is, we have to look at it on its own terms. Realists are people who think the first and most important question to answer is the following: What is real?

When we start with ”What is real?” we are saying that the ability to distinguish between reality and appearance is the most basic, and most important, issue we address as empirical inquirers. Let us call the strategy of starting with the question “What is real?” the Ontological Strategy. Ontology, like Metaphysics, is a term that deals with the philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality.

There have been many great (and not so great) Realist thinkers in the history of Western thought. In this section we will ignore most of them. We will only look at three major Realists here, and two more in a later section.

Plato and Aristotle:

The first two Realists are best looked at as a matched set. They knew each other, argued with each other, and influenced not only each other but all of Western civilization. I am speaking, of course, of Plato and Aristotle.

Plato and Aristotle agreed on several important points. First of all, they agreed that the ontological strategy was the best, and indeed the only approach to any form of inquiry, including empirical research. That is, they agreed that empirical inquiry consisted of discovering the identity and natures of various real foundations in the world of experience. In other words, the reality of every phenomenon or regular event in the empirical world was based upon some grounding of that event or phenomenon to the nature of the reality of the empirical world as a whole. Plato and Aristotle further agreed that these grounding principles were best conceived as universals. In addition, they agreed that unless we discovered and understood the various universals that served as the basis of any aspect of the empirical world, we really could not say anything about the empirical world that was true. In other words, they believed that the question, “What is true?” could not even be raised until the question, “What is real?” had been adequately addressed. By virtue of all of these agreements, Plato and Aristotle were both Realists. However, they disagreed on the nature of universals, and this disagreement made them different types of Realists.

Throughout most of their philosophical careers, Plato and Aristotle engaged in a pitched battle of perspectives. Given that Aristotle was Plato’s prize student, this battle has interesting psychological connotations, but we will leave all of those issues alone. Instead, we will look at the way each of these geniuses addressed the issue of determining what is real and what is only apparent within the world of experience. As usual, we are oversimplifying centuries of thought, commentary, and debate.

Plato's version of Realism:

Plato is best understood as an absolute Realist. By that, we mean that Plato believed that the nature of universals in and of themselves defined the nature of reality proper. That is, universals were blueprints, or better yet, molds for the things that actually exist in the empirical world. For example, there is a master mold of Apples, that we can call the Universal Apple, and all actual and existing and even possible apples are nothing more than copies of this universal apple. Where can we find these master molds? Outside space and time as we understand these concepts, since universals have to undergird the very foundation that even space and time must exist within. Plato believed that one of the most important tasks of empirical inquiry was to infer, as best as possible, the nature of universals from the poor copies we have to work with here in the empirical world.

Aristotle's version of Realism:

Aristotle was a moderate Realist. As such, he took a more subtle, but ultimately more fruitful, approach to the nature of universals. Unlike Plato, he did not feel that universals existed outside reality as we know it. Universals, to Aristotle, were an important and necessary part of the empirical world, since without them, things in the empirical world could not manifest their genuine natures. To see this, let us take some perfectly ordinary object like a chair. What is real about a chair? According to Aristotle, the reality of the chair is an interdependent interplay between two irreducible aspects of the chair. First of all, the chair has to be physically realized in order to be real. In other words, the chair has to be made of something. I cannot sit on an imaginary chair, unless I am engaging in some act of deception where I only pretend to be sitting on something. So, a chair has to have some tangible presence in the empirical world in order to be real. For an item like a chair, that tangible presence in most often physical. For a more abstract item like justice or fair play or even truth, the tangible presence is more indirect -- usually in terms of the difference between the presence or the absence of the abstract item in some tangible set of circumstances. That is, we cannot reach and out and touch justice in this world, but we can understand the difference between the presence and absence of it!

What is the second aspect of the chair? Let us go back to our design of a chair. We know that, in order to have a chair, we have to actually make it. Suppose I decide to make a chair, under the tutelage of a master chairmaker. I am in a hurry to get started, so I go out and buy a whole bunch of balsa wood. She laughs at me, and asks me how I think that balsa wood will do the job. I look perplexed. She goes on to ask me what it is that I want this chair to do. And whether or not balsa wood can deliver the properties that I need. In other words, she has told me in no uncertain terms that I have made a formal error.

I am doomed to fail as a chairmaker before I even start, because I did not sit down to figure out what a chair really is. A chair is that sort of material object that exists in the world in such a way that people can sit in it, and it will support them. If I build a chair out of flimsy materials, such as balsa wood, then it will only look like a chair, and not really be a chair. But, having made that point, I suddenly realize that I have a great deal of freedom not only to make a wide variety of chairs, but to also discover things in the natural world that already satisfy the formal properties of chairs, and which can be put to use as they already are for that purpose.

For instance, a sturdy rock in the woods of adequate size and height satisfies the formal properties of a chair, and can be used as such. Tribes in the South Seas who live together as happy and healthy communities might not have an explicit code of justice, but their ordinary lives satisfy the formal properties of a just system, and so we can say that their society is really a just society.

In addition, going back to the notion of the chair, so long as we satisfy the minimal formal properties of a chair, we are free to make it whatever color we wish, with or without arms, or we can even make bean bag chairs.

The properties that chairs possess which are optional, so to speak, Aristotle called accidental properties. The Throne of the Queen of England is really a chair, but then by the same test, so is the chair I sit on to type this lesson. Not only are they both real, but they are both real as chairs, and as members of a category that we call “chair” by dint of some universal rules of both construction and manifestation. And, most importantly, unless we have sorted out the necessary properties from the accidental properties, our inquiry is doomed to fail.

Note that this is not a question at all of truth. Our chairs truly have these accidental properties. But these accidental properties do nothing in and of themselves to help us grasp the universal notion of “chair” that we need to either build chairs or to find them in nature.

Aristotle and empirical inquiry:

It is almost impossible to overestimate the role that Aristotle has played in the development of empirical inquiry. His place in the history of thought is so profound that, during the Hellenistic and Late Medieval periods, he was referred to simply as “The Philosopher”.

Our task as Aristotelian empirical inquirers, then, is to be able to approach any phenomenon or event in the empirical world in such a way that the ”universal-ness” of the event or phenomenon is correctly identified and distinguished from those aspects that are only apparently important. Unlike the Platonic inquirer, we do not believe that these universals have independent existence. But we do believe that they exist, and that they exist on the level of being universals. What this does, in effect, is to add at least two levels to the existence of any phenomenon or event. Let us take a chair that I successfully manage to make under the tutelage of my master chairmaker. This chair is real as a singular and existing things, here and now. If it were not, then it would not be real, period. But it is also real as a chair. We cannot ignore the fact that it was formally designed as, and as a consequence functions as, a chair.

What are the consequences of the Aristotelian model of reality on empirical inquiry? There are two major consequences that I would like to identify. First of all, this twofold nature of reality requires that the ontological strategy be used. We cannot depend on issues of truth vs. falsity to settle the question of what we really have in front of us. This leads directly to the second, and most important, consequence -- that we cannot even talk about whether something is true or not until we have settled the “reality issue.” In other words, we cannot even begin any sort of empirical inquiry until we first have erected a conceptual scaffolding and foundation, which we can use, prior to any act of inquiry, to sort out what is real from what is illusory or apparent. Furthermore, once we have identified something as a universal, we have to take it seriously in our inquiry. These two points -- building an a priori conceptual foundation of universals, and then staying within the framework of that scaffolding, is the definition of rigorous empirical inquiry from an Aristotelian perspective.

I like to think of such models of rigor as “portrait” models. Suppose I am a painter, and I have been hired to do a portrait of, say, Madonna. What sorts of skills and understandings do I have to possess in order to do such a task?

First of all, I have to have painting skills. If I do not know how to hold a paintbrush, or mix paint, or sketch and fill in a human face, then I will not be able to render anything at all. But, once I develop the skills needed for the craft of painting, am I done? Not at all.

Painting a portrait is more than just rendering a physical likeness on canvas. When I paint Madonna, I am painting a human being. I attempt to capture the complexity of her human face. My subject’s gender and age are carefully rendered. Then, I go beyond the obvious to look for the key to her uniqueness, her personality.

I am careful to avoid a caricature of my subject; I reject the temptation to paint her just as a cultural icon. I do this not only because I want to capture her in all her complexity, but also because as a human being, I know that she embodies contradictions and complexities. By avoiding the temptation to gloss over these aspects of her personality, oddly enough I am able to capture an image of Madonna that, in its complexity, highlights the universal.

In her portrait, we should be able to see some of what it means to be a human being. And not just because she is either glamorous or notorious. When DaVinci painted Mona Lisa, she was nothing special to that culture at the time. Neither were the peasants that Van Gogh rendered. But in their portraits, we are able to see something that transcends our particular place and time. This is not magic; it is extraordinary art. But its entire success depends on the assumption that there is something universal about being a human being that can only be realized in individual human beings. Unless we understand the universal aspect of “humanity” then all of our inquiry into human affairs falls short of its mark. At least this is what Aristotle would hold.

Just the facts, Ma’am:

Now it is time to turn in another direction. This time, we look at those people who choose to start with a different basic question. Like the first question, this second basic question is equally simple: What is true?

When we ask, “What is true?” we are first and foremost interested in making sure that we can certify that our data and observations are free from falsehood of any sort.

Falsehoods take many forms, all of which are dangerous to empirical inquiry. They can include deliberate deceptions and misrepresentations, unconscious errors of attribution or judgment, mistaken readings and observations, improper understanding or application of theory, unseen or unanticipated contaminants, inaccurate measuring devices, conscious or unconscious bias, and so on.

The strategy for avoiding falsehood, in this case, is to focus on a clear and simple idea of what is true in whatever situation we are involved with in our research, and then to actively and conscientiously root out and eliminate the manifold sites and processes of actual and potential error.

This strategy involves a detailed and thorough attempt to control all extraneous processes that might impact our research. Let us call the strategy of starting with the question, “What is true?” the Epistemological Strategy. Epistemology is a term that deals with the philosophical inquiry into the nature of truth.

All of this Realist talk of universals and copies and such seems strange to our contemporary ear. Most of us, when we read the kinds of strategies associated with the second question; namely, “What is true?”, will recognize in this approach the basic shape and form of what we have come to know as rigor in empirical research. In other words, rigor as we usually understand it is a function of the epistemological strategy.

The agenda of logical positivism:

How did this dependence of rigor on epistemology come about? To address that question, we need to talk a bit about logical positivism. As a movement, logical positivism arose out of the positivism of the 19th century. It came to a head in the so-called Vienna Circle of the 1920’s. These thinkers were dedicated to the project of creating a common and simple philosophical language allowing for a unified approach to empirical inquiry -- from cosmology on one hand to psychotherapy on the other. Ultimately, they hoped to replace all other and earlier foundational strategies with the scientific method, broadly conceived.

Rather than starting with what a logical positivism might say about rigor, let me start with what she would not say. What would a logical positivist say about the issue of rigor, as applied to the question. “What is real?”

The answer is fairly startling -- the positivist would say that we are wasting our time raising the issue of reality as a separate question from, “What is true?” By denying the need for any universals at all, logical positivism is one of the clearest examples of Nominalism. Let me sketch out this argument briefly.

In the first place, the logical positivist would say that truth is the best test that we, as empirical researchers, are on the right track. That is, if we can demonstrate that what we are seeing and what we are willing to say and theorize about experience is true, then for all intents and purposes any issue of reality has already been settled.

For the logical positivist, there are two ways that anything can be true. It can either be formally true, such as 2 + 2 = 4. Such a truth, they point out, does not really tell us anything that we do not already know. But it does keep us aware of those formal truths in the course of our inquiry, and so they are important in that way.

The other sorts of truths are claims that are verified in experience. Generally, we make predictions and our actions bear out the accuracy of those predictions. These claims are, at best, only probably true, to some degree of estimated probability. In other words, instead of being formally true, they are contingently true.

The role of reality in logical positivism:

What do we have to know or say about reality, in order for the processes above to work smoothly? Surprisingly, very little. Remember, reality is based on sorting the apparent from the real. If we say that the true is what is really real, then the apparent is nothing more than another name for error. If we eliminate error, then we eliminate the merely apparent, and we are left with the real and the true -- all at the same time.

Some of you may be scratching your heads about now. This looks a little bit like bootstrapping, in a sense. That is, you start out with an idea of what is true, and you test that idea to see if it pans out in experience.

But where did the idea come from in the first place? Presumably, from prior experience, either singularly or collectively. The codification of such experiences is what we really mean by theory. But all of this happens at the contingent level, so it has to play out over time. And that means that there has to be, in the beloved term of the engineer, some tau zero. That is, there has to be some initial set of conditions to the question, “What is real?”

So, whether the logical positivist wants it admit it or not, there has to be some answer to the question, “What is real?” prior to truth testing and theory building from the ground up.

And, in fact, there is. It is a variant of our old friend, Occam’s Razor. The first task of the logical positivist is to reduce the nexus of causes and effects to its simplest possible form. Everything else is discarded, and can only come back into the network of understanding if it has been verified as being empirically true. In other words, the simpler the structure, the more real it is.

I like to think of such models as examples of the “barnacle scraping ” models we looked at earlier. Now let us see what this model looks like in action. Suppose we are empirical researchers and we have set up shop at the harbor. We want to know what a ship “really” looks like. Above the water, we start checking out various cabins and decks. We see that the sailors and passengers have, say, put posters on the wall, but we can easily remove, or imagine the removal, of all of these little “add-ons.” They are not really part of the ship, we decide.

But, below the water, we hit a snag. The hull of the ship is encrusted with barnacles. But we do not care about barnacles. They are at best a nuisance, keeping us from doing our job. At worst, they obscure what we seek to look at, and give us a totally false picture of what a ship’s hull really looks like.

So, what do we do? Simply enough, we scrape off the barnacles, so we can see the hull beneath. In the process, the complex and organic and historical outer shape of the hull has been reduced to its neat, clean, simple and original state.

Giving up on truth and meaning?

So far, we have charted two diametrically opposed models of empirical research. If we start with the ontology strategy, then we are led to an inquiry that looks to create a foundation for the real before it attempts to make empirical and contingent truth claims. On the other hand, if we start with the epistemology strategy, then we seek to eliminate the need for any realist foundation at all. Instead, we hold the notion that reality is simple, and any irreducible complexity indicates that we have not finished the job at hand. Note that, as formulated, these research strategies are in direct conflict with each other.

The choice of a research strategy is a complex and serious problem. Which of the two described above seems to be most useful to you? Which supplies the most adequate vision for doing research? And, as if the whole matter is not complicated enough, yet another strategy seems to be gaining more and more support in contemporary thought.

It is based on a third question: “What is good?” In keeping with our earlier practice, we will call it the Axiological Strategy. Axiology is a term that deals with the philosophical inquiry into the nature of value.

At first blush, starting an inquiry with the question of what is good seems to be not only a reasonable approach, but indeed an inherently humane one. But almost immediately, we run into a serious problem. There have always been ethical models in empirical inquiry. But these models were byproducts, or consequences, of prior ontological or epistemological positions.

How can we start with axiological issues? In fact, this approach can only work if we can show that the “good” we come up with as the basis and orientation of our inquiry is not derived from our claims about reality and truth.

In fact, it would work the other way; anything that we say about reality and truth is derived from our effective practice of what is “good.” Put this way, the project now looks somewhat strange. What happens when we set out to create a model of right thought and conduct that is not grounded in prior theories of reality or truth?

In point of fact, there are two distinct directions that this “inquiry into proper practice” has led.

The first direction was an offshoot of pragmatism. The hallmark of Pragmatism is a notion that its founder, C.S. Peirce, called the Pragmatic Maxim. In paraphrase, the Pragmatic Maxim says that two concepts have the same meaning if they lead to the same consequences in practice. Fort instance, do the terms "sofa" and "davenport" have different meanings. If we can show that we can use these terms interchangeably, and nothing changes in our practice, then we can say that the world of action has told us that these two concepts mean the same thing.

When Peirce crafted the Pragmatic Maxim, he meant it explicitly to be a theory of meaning. But William James (who was a close personal friend of Peirce) and other later pragmatists have instead seen it as a theory of truth. In this fashion, James and his followers had decided that humans naturally and successfully get together, and as a result develop a practice and conduct that lead primarily to satisfaction and successful living.

James held that it was these actions, not any verbal rendering of them, which are the basis for human society and individual happiness. We get into trouble when we create abstract models of the good, and the real, and the true, and then try to live up to them. What we need to do instead, argues this particular type of pragmatist, is to just go ahead and do things, carefully note their consequences, and improve upon practice with more and better practice.

In this fashion, we turn things around for the better. We do something, and if it is successful, then we say that it is true. Like the epistemologist, we do not even worry about what is real, outside of our successful practice. Note that this practice can be either physical or mental or both; so long as there are tangible consequences it does not matter what type of practice is involved.

Right away, we can see that this approach eliminates not only the need for any sort of absolute or universal, but the possibility of absolutes as well. It seems to hold out a promise for an evolutionary culture that does not box itself into a corner by insisting that certain things be true or real independent of our practices.

A tale of two islands:

Interestingly enough, many researchers argue that qualitative research should be based on this sort of Jamesean strategy. But is his model a formula for utopia or disaster?

Let us explore that question by considering the following thought experiment. We have two remote and isolated islands in the South Pacific. Each has evolved its own stable and happy culture. Let us call the first island James Island, and the second one Peirce Island. Each island depends upon agriculture for survival, and the agriculture depends upon a period of soaking spring rains.

On Peirce Island, the natives pay careful attention to the moon and the stars, to predict when the spring rains will come. They prepare their fields on the eve of the Vernal Equinox, and plant them two days later. By the end of the week, the rains come.

On James Island, the routine is different. At high noon of the Vernal Equinox, the sun shines through a slot in an ancient and sacred standing stone. At that time, the fairest maiden of the island is accompanied by the entire tribe to the highest cliff on the island. There is much singing and celebration along the parade route. When they reach the peak of the cliff, the maiden says a brief prayer to their gods, and hurls herself off the cliff to her death on the craggy reefs below. A week later, in repayment for the sacred sacrifice, the gods bring the needed spring rains and the tribe thrives for yet another year.

Here is our question: Which practice is true? That is, which practice best represents the reality of the coming of the spring rains?

According to the axiological strategy, both approaches are equally true, and both capture the reality of each particular situation. How can that be? It is simply a matter of beneficial practice. Both approaches seem to work, and so each tribe is justified in claiming that their practice is true and in addition captures the essence of reality.

But what about our "enlightened" outrage at the James Islanders? How can we condone the needless slaughter of innocent maidens, year after year? First of all, the maidens are just as convinced that their practice is correct as the next islander. They willingly throw themselves off the cliff. And the needed results come, year after year. Who are we to say that they are wrong?

All of this seems to work, so long as there is a homogeneity between belief and practice. But what would happen, say, if the natives from James Island and Peirce Island should be relocated on the same island? To make matters even, let us suppose that both tribes have been relocated to the same neutral island.

Which practice would prevail? Here, we turn to the contemporary advocate of this Jamesean position -- Richard Rorty. Rorty would say that the worst thing that could happen would be for each tribe to try to impose its belief structure on the other. Instead, they should realize that the search for truth in the empirical world is nothing more than a conversation. So long as practices yield success, then inquiry is an afterthought.

The best solution is to acknowledge that each tribe is correct, that each view is true, since each tribe creates its own reality by virtue of its practices. Someday, perhaps, through a conversation carried on in good faith and with good will, they might be able to reconcile their practices into a single common view.

But there is no need to do so. So long as tolerance and respect prevail, there is no reason that each tribe cannot live out its own reality in a peaceful coexistence with the other tribe. This is what is at heart in the sort of relativism that many proponents of qualitative research champion as the foundation for their worldview.

So far, the axiological strategy seems to be at least harmless. But there is a dark side to this approach, and it is a side that surfaced quite early from its inception. The Jamesean version of pragmatism is the bright face of relativism, but even as such a hint of the dark face shows itself inevitably. Suppose the two tribes, for instance, find the views of the other tribe so repugnant that they cannot tolerate coexistence. What should they do? When your inquiry is framed entirely from a relativist perspective, you cannot turn to some absolute ethical position to settle the matter.

Furthermore, every ethical principle in every culture is either negated or refuted by the practice of some other culture, or else there are allowable exceptions to the practice within one’s own culture. So it does us no good to look for universal ethical principles, since none are in actual practice anywhere.

But at the same time, these cultures appear to be coherent and stable. Something seems to be holding them together. If we reject a universal realist foundation, or the notion that there are truths that are not simply the consequences of the successful and stable practices we are trying to understand in the first place, then what is left to hold cultures together?

The answer is simple: Power. Neitzsche was the first person to understand this situation. When he said, “Might is right” and “God is dead”. he was laying the groundwork for a certain version of contemporary thought that celebrates the role of power in society.

In a way, this form of cultural relativism is like Einstein’s physical relativity. In Einstein’s case, all motion in space and duration in time is relative to one single physical absolute -- the speed of light. Because the speed of light is the same no matter when or where you measure it, it serves as the fulcrum to define the relativity of all other positions and movements.

In a similar fashion, the “bright” relativism of James and Rorty, and the “dark” relativism of Neitzsche and his main contemporary disciple, Michel Foucault, are calibrated and defined against a single cultural metric -- the will for power. Empirical inquiry in this model, whether it realizes it or not, or accepts it or not, is a form of power seeking.

On one hand, there is something to be said for the judicious seeking and use of power, especially if the rules of such efforts are benign and enlightened. On the other hand, where in the history of humankind has the deliberate pursuit of power successfully policed itself?

Humans will seek power naturally enough. Is it necessary, or advisable, to make that effort a virtue? Rigor, in the axiological strategy, is a function of the successful improvement of the practices and lives of its inquirers. It also involves a dedication to the notion that there are many truths and many realities, and so long as a reality is successful, then we have no business or reason to interfere with it. Unless, of course, it gets in our way. Which it almost certainly will.

My credo:

It is time for me to step forward and say where I see myself in relation to all these issues.

I agree with many of my fellow qualitative researchers that the Epistemological Strategy is not the proper foundation upon which to build a discipline and practice of qualitative research. Epistemology eventually demands verification, and there are many issues in qualitative inquiry where verification per se closes down the path, rather than opening it up. That is, we cannot have an inquiry into meaning, if we insist that issues of meaning always have to be reconciled with issues of truth. Also, without any realist principles, epistemological models will inevitably drift on their own toward some version of Nominalism. And Nominalism, with its belief that the whole is the sum of the parts, is antithetical to genuine qualitative thought.

I also agree with most of my colleagues that there is no going back to Classical Realist models, either Strong or Moderate. We live in a world where our systems of knowledge are open, and we cannot just impose foundations for the sake of having foundations.

But I do not see relativism, either in its Jamesean or Neitzchean form, as our answer. Whether we like it or not, there are things in the world of experience that make sense on their terms, and not necessarily on ours. There are also dynamics to culture that become oppressive when the orientation shifts from that of reason to one of power.

We have to move beyond all of these positions. All the indicators point to a new and much more sophisticated version of Realism.

Does Qualitative Research need Realism?

The simple answer is "yes." The more complicated answer is "yes, but..."

Qualitative research is the study of meaning, which is irreducibly interactional and mediated. Therefore, breaking meaning apart into pieces does not really show how these interactional and mediational dynamics actually work, grow, and evolve in real-life empirical settings.

So we are in trouble if we try to do Qualitative Research from a strict Nominalist position. But the Relativism described above seems both too simple, and frankly too dangerous, for us to use too comprehensively.

But we cannot return to either the realism of Plato, or the original or Christianized realism of Aristotle, since we already know that these approaches are seriously flawed.

What we need are Older and Wiser Realists. Fortunately, there are two excellent candidates, patiently waiting in the archives of Western thought for us to look their way once again.

The Black Sheep and the Dunce:

The two Older and Wiser Realists I am referring to are kindred spirits who lived 700 years apart.

One of them was a contemporary of Aquinas, and the other was the Black Sheep member of a prominent Victorian era New England intellectual family. Both of them were geniuses, and both have been seriously misunderstood. They were both well ahead of their times, but right now their ideas look surprisingly fresh and contemporary.

Our first genius was John Duns Scotus. Scotus was a Franciscan and Master at the University of Paris. His brief life spanned the last three decades of the 13th century and the first decade of the 14th century. Like his contemporary Aquinas, Duns Scotus threw himself into the task of taking Aristotle's realism and making it legitimate for Western Medieval culture. Duns Scotus became convinced that Aquinas had misunderstood a number of crucial, but subtle, points in Aristotle's realism. By "correcting" this interpretation of Aristotle, Duns Scotus created a powerful, if hard to understand, type of realism.

For centuries, the followers of the Dominican Aquinas clashed within the universities with the followers of the Franciscan Duns Scotus. Over time, the followers of Aquinas eventually won out, and the ideas of Duns Scotus were relegated to relative obscurity. In a final act of bravado, the conquering Thomists redefined the conical academic regalia of the Scotian followers as a "dunce" cap, in mockery of their fallen intellectual foe.

Our second genius was Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce was an American logician and philosopher, the founder of Pragmatism and the basic intellectual force behind American semiotic theory.

In Peirce we find the same struggle for order mirrored in the clash within empirical inquiry at large between the positivist and interpretational camps. He is at the same time antagonistic and sympathetic to both views. On one hand, he is committed to the notion that empirical inquiry is grounded in beliefs and is truly propelled by what he calls ‘genuine doubt.’ On the other hand, as a logician, he is equally committed to the notion of both clear thinking and that something is real when it is the way that it is, regardless of what anyone might think about it.

In a sense, he was searching for a larger sense of order that was grounded not just in the fact, or the interpretation, but in an awareness and understanding of how these two aspects grounded and influenced each other in the course of inquiry.

His broad reading on the topic of logic ultimately led him to the work of the Medieval Scholastics. As he examined the logical issues debated and refined during this period, he was apparently struck by the work of John Duns Scotus. Scotus was more than just a logician however. He was struggling with order in a way that led Peirce to see the older thinker as a kindred spirit. In fact, Peirce came to label himself as a Scotian Realist .

How did the work of Scotus relate to the clash of worldviews experienced by Peirce and the rest of us, some 700 years later?
The Problem According to Scotus

John Duns Scotus found himself caught between two apparently incommensurable worldviews. As a Franciscan, he was heir to the Augustinian tradition of thought, which was essentially Neo-Platonic in nature. However, he also lived during the period when the work of Aristotle was being re-discovered in the West. Thomas Aquinas was instrumental in translating Aristotelian thought into the prevailing Christian worldview.

Augustinianism and Thomism were as far apart in their own ways as qualitative and quantitative inquiry are in our day. Augustine held that the purpose of the human intellect was to receive illumination from divine being. So, for the Augustinians, “divine being” is the fundamental mode of being. The goal of human life was to come to love God as illuminated in the world. The world, therefore, was like a book of lessons to be read and learned by humans. Ultimately, however, the love of God was the goal of human life.

Thomism, on the other hand, believed that “material being” was the most fundamental mode of being. Our job as human beings is to look at the material world and extract out of it the universal and fundamental aspects of reality. In principle, this extraction process will lead us via intellectual refinement to a greater and greater knowledge of God.

The difference in choice was vast and critical. Do we as humans seek encounters with the empirical world as a source of illumination or as a source of extractable knowledge? Is God revealed to us by His own illuminative efforts to our ready and willing minds, or do we put together knowledge of God by careful observation and thought within the material world?

Scotus, like Peirce to come, was both sympathetic and antagonistic to both views. Also like Peirce, he felt that there was a third way, which was itself grounded in logic. Scotus starts with the issue of the most fundamental mode of being. For him this was neither divine being nor material being. In a brilliant and daring stroke, he declared that the fundamental mode of being was “being qua being”!

What does this declaration mean to the Augustinians and Thomists of the time, especially in regard to the way that they would approach empirical inquiry? Let us deal with this issue by looking at something as prosaic as a chair. For the Augustinians, following the lead of Plato, a given chair is nothing more than a poor copy of the divine form of a chair. From examining this chair we might be led to understand why God has put or allowed chairs to be in the world. In other words, how is this given chair ultimately a path to God? For the Augustinian, then, there is a link, if not a pure equivalence, between the Platonic Form of a chair and its divine being. The fact that the chair has a material existence is just an aspect of the fact that there has to be matter involved in order for the chair to exist in the world. Matter, then, is entirely subordinate to form, and empirical inquiry for the Augustinian is at least rationalistic if not theological in nature.

When the Thomist view privileges material being, then, it rejects a Platonic view of reality. For a Thomist, a given chair is an interdependent merging of the form of a chair and the matter used to create the chair. If there were no form, then there would be no matter, because matter needs form to take shape. But without the matter, there would be no realization of the form of the chair either. It would be nothing more than a mere idea. So, for the Thomist, material being always also implies the presence of a form. Otherwise, there would be nothing. As empirical inquirers, then, we can then intellectually abstract the form from the material thing we have before us. We must be careful, then, to actually discover form, and not just impose it as an intellectual exercise. Through a careful series of mental abstractions, then, the form can finally come into our awareness, although it always had to be there in order to shape and organize the matter at hand. Form was not something that was directly available to the empirical inquirer, so any type of being (such as divine being) that was defined in terms of form was also not available. Only material being filled the role of that type of being. Therefore, the understanding of form was entirely subordinate to the understanding of that form as materially realized. Therefore, Augustinianism and Thomism were incommensurable in their approaches, at least, to empirical inquiry.

Scotus was not interested in reducing inquiry, empirical or otherwise, to the pursuit of either divine or material being through the pursuit of form or matter. Instead, he was interested in the ways in which these modes of being were related to each other. If we hold that “being qua being” is fundamental, then all modes of being, divine or material or otherwise, were logically related to each other by virtue of the fact that they were all, first and foremost, modes of being. Unlike the Augustinian, he did not feel that matter was totally subordinate to form. But unlike the Thomist, he felt that it was possible to have matter without form, such that matter would then provide the potential for many sorts of form. So in his worldview, form and matter were neither totally dependent nor reducible to each other. Therefore, there was no need to try to account for one mode of being in terms of the other. Instead, we need to understand how they are logically related to each other.

Before we proceed we need to make a brief modification in language. Because we are not interested in theology per se, we will make a slight shift in terminology that will help us link this argument to contemporary models of empirical inquiry. We will continue to talk about material being, but we will substitute the term “immaterial being” for “divine being.” This does no real violence to the concepts as they were used, since any thinker in 13th century Western thought would just assume that any immaterial being would have its origins in divine nature.

Scotus would then hold, in an argument similar to that used for form and matter, that material being was a mode of being on its own terms and irreducible to immaterial being. In the same fashion, immaterial being was a mode of being on its own terms, and irreducible to material being. There was unity to experience, but it was not a reductive unity to either type of being. It was a unity grounded first in the fact that, as modes of being, material being and immaterial being are logically related. It is therefore within the realm of logic, and not rationality or materiality, where the unity is found.

This unity is not symmetric however, at least in the matter of empirical inquiry. Scotus agreed with Aristotle that all inquiry starts with the senses. But this does not mean that inquiry is reduced to sensory data, and that reality is a matter of material being. It merely means that all immaterial being must first be discovered as it relates to some aspect of material being. But once it is so discovered, then its nature and reality is not bound in any motivated way to its initial manifestation in material being. That is, immaterial being has to be first found within material experience, but once it is found, it is free to be understood on its own terms. This is because the link between material and immaterial being from the first instance is not causal or even contingent, but logical.

The issue described above can best be understood with a concrete example. Suppose I am a mother and I have six very good children. I decide to give each one of them a cookie as a reward for their good behavior. But when I check the cabinet, I see that I only have five cookies. Up to now, everything has run smoothly. Now, because of this experience within material reality, I have been introduced to the immaterially real concept of fairness. Had I not come across this little crisis, the immaterial being of fairness would have continued to elude my awareness. But this does not mean that fairness is not real, nor does it mean that the reality of fairness can be reduced to the realness of the material circumstances that made me first aware of its existence. Once it has been realized in my experience, fairness is now free to take on its own nature and character, without me having to tie down each and every thought and example of fairness to my initial situation of six good kids and five cookies. I am also free to contemplate and study and expand the concept, to make it more abstract or to link it to other immaterial but equally real concepts.

In other words, kids and cookies were the path of discovery to an immaterial and real mode of being we have called fairness. But now that fairness has begun to be sorted out from the concreteness of the material world, we can study its relations to other modes of material being and other previously discovered modes of immaterial being. In short, we cannot understand the order within reality unless we incorporate both material and immaterial being. But as empirical inquirers, we are restricted to using only material being and immaterial being already retrieved from material circumstances.

Scotus, however, was not finished in his effort to reformulate inquiry. Since the time of the Greeks, there was the notion that the individual is someone inferior to the general. This is easy to see in Plato. For Plato, the individual is nothing more than an inferior copy of the general Form. It is the presence of the general, no matter how poorly copied and degenerate, in the copy that gives that copy its reality. The situation is a bit more circumspect in Aristotle. Suppose we have a person named “Bob Jones.” If we think of “Bob Jones” as a concept, we can predicate the concept “human being” from “Bob Jones.” However, we cannot predicate the concept “Bob Jones” from the concept of “human being.” Therefore, “human being” is more general, more universal, and consequentially more real than “Bob Jones” which is more individual, more idiosyncratic, and more accidental. As a result, once we understand “human being” then we understand “Bob Jones” but if we understand “Bob Jones” we do not necessarily understand “human being.” This leads us, as empirical inquirers, in the direction of generalizability. When we generalize, we abstract, a la Aristotle, the general from the particular. When we do so, we feel that our intelligible understanding of the world is greatly enhanced, and that further, we understand the fundamental and most important thing there is to understand about “Bob Jones.” This has become such a crucial part of Western empirical inquiry that we experience it more as a truism and less as the philosophical conclusion it truly is.

What happens when we reach a different philosophical conclusion? This is precisely what Scotus did. Scotus agreed with Aristotle that we could predicate the more general term from the specific individual, such as predicating “human being” from “Bob Jones.” But Scotus looked upon the individual as something that had being on its own terms and at its own level. All people share the general and immaterial being of being a “human being.” This aspect Scotus called the common nature that held all humans together. But it was a logical, not a constitutive distinction. “Human being” was the concept that logically defined the “common nature” that allowed us to group all people together as examples of a single type. But we are more than just examples of a more general type. That is, “human being” is a less real label for the individual in question than “Bob Jones” is. There are things that will never be intelligible about Bob Jones unless we look at him on the “Bob Jones” level; and more importantly, there are things that will continue to elude us about the nature of “human being” as a fully realized immaterial being unless we actively seek out the ways that “Bob Jones” expands and informs this earlier concept. This is because “Bob Jones” and “human being” are related logically in a way that does not allow us to reduce one to the other. We can easily see the folly of trying to use “Bob Jones” to explain “human being.” The folly works in both directions, however. If we seek to understand “Bob Jones” in his full reality, then “human being” merely tells us what he has in common with others. Note that Scotus says that “human being” is real and important and not just a label for a collection of “Bob Jones” types; that is, Scotus is not a Nominalist. He just says that it is a related, but not a complete, way to understand things in the world like “Bob Jones.”

In conclusion, empirical inquiry for Scotus consists in careful examination and action in the world of experience in a threefold way. The first way deals with the identification and discovery of materially real things. The second way deals with the identification and discovery of immaterially real things. The final way deals with discovering and understanding the logical relations between the first two. Never does Scotus yield to the temptation to reduce these logical relations to one or the other mode of reality, as we saw in the “human being/Bob Jones” example. This sort of logical understanding has its own mode of intelligibility that does not have to be reduced or restricted to either material terms or a limited set of rules of intelligibility such as generalization.

But as important as these points are for the form of empirical inquiry that we call qualitative research, they still are not enough to complete the picture. Scotus never explicitly says that this third activity of logical relation and understanding charts out a mode of reality of its own. That will remain for Peirce to discover.

Peirce as a Scotian:

Peirce held that all empirical inquiry starts with the belief system of the inquirer, or more properly a community of inquirers. In this sense, he takes a phenomenological view of inquiry that makes him akin to Husserl and his followers.

This is not surprising when we see that both Peirce and phenomenology as we have come to know it have their points of departure in Kant. But while Husserl sought to realize Kant’s thought in a systematic empirical way, Peirce soon diverged from his initial Kantean perspectives.

Peirce rejected the notion that there was anything over and beyond phenomena in empirical inquiry. We cannot have any concepts, said Peirce, of that which cannot be cognizable. Therefore, we must observe the phenomena of the world, and infer the nature of that world from our observations.

Empirical inquiry then is nothing more than the skilled use of logical inference, where the idea of logic is broadly understood. These inferences then come to play upon our collective belief systems to guide our confident practice in the world. At some point in the future, when our beliefs have been corrected by our actions in the world, we will arrive at a state of true understanding of that world. But since we can never be sure that any belief has finally been corrected, we will never know that we finally understand the empirical world!

If we say that the goal of phenomenology is to understand the functioning of consciousness in the empirical world, and the goal of logical empiricism is to know the true mind independent laws of reality, we can now see how Peirce is a synthesis of these two positions. The flaw with phenomenology, he might say, is that it is not logical enough, and the flaw with logical empiricism is that it forgets that empirical inquiry is for the use of human beings to refine their beliefs about the world and thus is irreducibly phenomenological.

We can see that Peirce is at least implicitly using Scotus as a conceptual roadmap here. The phenomenologists are the modern heirs to the Aristotelian position of privileging material being, but with a curious twist. For the phenomenologist, material being is nothing more than the material world as displayed to consciousness. The existence of more general laws, which would by their natures be immaterial, are themselves constituted by the restrictions of consciousness. So we are left with a curious brand of Aristotelian thought, where the form that is interdependent with matter is nothing more than the filters of consciousness! If we are not careful then, we are left with the conclusion that reality is whatever we happen to think that it is.

On the other hand, logical empiricists are carrying on the work of Plato, if not the Augustinians. The Forms of the logical empiricists are mathematical and context free descriptions of the laws of nature realized in a mechanical and consciousness-free manner. Because they are consciousness-free, all aspects and effects of meaning have to be purged from the process of inquiry. This has led to such efforts as operationalizing all meanings within an empirical modeling system. So we have a system of inquiry that has eliminated, on the surface, the role of consciousness.

Peirce saw in this general situation the equivalence to a Scotian solution. There are general laws of nature. There is a role for belief and consciousness in inquiry. Neither aspect can be reduced to the other, nor should either aspect be eliminated from the inquiry process. But to achieve this goal, then we need to understand how these aspects are related to each other.

The turn to Ockham:

Now we can see just how important Ockham really is for Western thought. His invention of Nominalism gave researchers a much simpler way to look at these complex issues. But did this simpler way cut off an entire avenue of research -- research that looked upon complex phenomena in their complexity and tried to understand them on their own terms. Occam's Razor effectively cuts the throat of any type of inquiry after this fashion, since we are turning in the direction of greater complexity and more involved explanations when we do so.
What Does This Have to Do with Qualitative Research?

All of this rarefied philosophical discourse is well and good, but what does it mean to the conduct of qualitative research? If we see the qualitative vs. quantitative debate as an extension of the phenomenological vs. empiricist argument, then Peirce’s refinement of Scotian logical realism offers us a way out. The interesting consequence is that we will no longer look at qualitative research as being a branch of phenomenological inquiry as that inquiry is currently understood. It is now a larger semiotic mode of inquiry that does not try to eliminate meaning on one hand or make everything into meaning on the other hand. I feel that there are five major points that constitute a semiotically grounded model of qualitative research:

• Qualitative research is the systematic empirical inquiry into meaning.

• Qualitative research allows us to reconfigure current collective patterns of meaning in the empirical world in order to lead to new insights and understandings.

• Most, if not all, of these new insights and understandings are relationally real. As such, we need not be overly concerned with them being materially real, so long as they do not contradict other materially real situations.

• Meaning is part of our empirical and pragmatic pursuit of intelligibility. It is therefore related to other modes of intelligibility, but it is not reducible to those other modes. Therefore, such established modes of intelligibility as generalizability or mathematical demonstration are valued, but insight and understanding are not necessarily reducible to these or other modes.

• Meaning is not some subjective activity, but is actually a form of inference. Therefore, qualitative research becomes the coordination of observational and inferential activities within the framework of uncovering or discovering new aspects of meaning in the world.
A mug, or a cup of tea?

I cannot resist taking note of what, for many of you, is a sense of struggle and resistance toward the material here. For many of you, these issues seem trivial and pointless. The question at hand, after all, is getting about to the task of doing good qualitative research. To you, all of this philosophical navel gazing just slows down the process, and makes the whole enterprise more complicated than it needs to be.

I have two things to say to this charge. I hope you take both of these in the playful and friendly spirit that I intend, if you are suffering over these weighty matters.

First of all, just about anything we consider to be obvious and transparent has a history and evolution to it. Do you feel that it is the most natural feeling to locate your consciousness just behind your eyes? Do you believe that your mind lives in your brain? Would it surprise you to learn that both of these ideas are fairly recent, and that there are cultures on earth today that would consider both of these ideas to be strange and bizarre? Things are often less natural and universal than you might think them to be. Knowing where they come from can really matter, even in a practical way.

So, if you feel impatient with these ideas, get over it. You are running the risk of being provincial and culturally chauvinistic when you do so, whether you realize it or not. Relax, and think about what these issues could really mean. Some of these implications might really dazzle you.

Finally, I want to end this lesson by returning to the concept of a drinking vessel. This time, we are not going to look at Ockham's mug. Consider instead the following little fable from the annals of Zen Buddhism (Reps & Senzaki, 1957):

"Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

"Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.

"The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself. 'It is overfull. No more will go in!'

"'Like this cup,' Nan-in said, 'you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup (p. 19)?'"

The Simple Point:

The universe runs by rules written on its own terms, but we were meant to understand them eventually.

The Judgment:

Good researchers know how to break complex things apart carefully to study them.
Great researchers know how to study complex things as wholes.