The Qualitative Outpost

The Spirit Lectures

2011-03-29T19:50:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I wrote out a series of formal lectures for a series I called "The Spirit of Qualitative Research."
Just for fun, I am going to post these lectures as a series of blog entries. If you find them interesting drop me a note.

gary

Swimming in the Rainforest

2011-03-29T19:49:00.001-07:00

Into the Rainforest:

Several years ago, my daughters and I spent a week’s vacation at the Grateful Bed and Breakfast near Loquillo, Puerto Rico. The Grateful Bed and Breakfast sits atop a breezy hill, and if you turn your head just right you can almost see a sliver of ocean from the main gate. Loquillo is a sleepy little artist’s colony type of town some 90 miles east of San Juan, and boasts two lovely public beaches and numerous semi-accessible tiny private beaches. But the real claim to fame of the Grateful Bed and Breakfast (besides its nightly diet of bootleg music) is its proximity to El Junque.

El Junque is one of the finest rainforests in the Caribbean, and for that reason it is also a National Park. Because it is a park, it is laced with mile after mile of hiking trails. Some of these trails are easily accessible gradual descents down wooded canyons, while other trails are serious challenges for even seasoned hikers. Few people outside of the Park Rangers know these trails well.

One such person is Marty Souci, the owner of the Grateful Bed and Breakfast. Marty is a renegade New Yorker, who had once upon a time been one of Geraldine Ferraro’s speechwriters. But one day he decided to toss it all in, and open his own tourist spot in the tropics. He apparently had mellowed a little bit since his high-pressure political days, but he still was able to make use of the frantic New Yorker side of his personality when he needed it. For instance, he set out to learn every single trail in El Junque and every off the beaten path tourist sight on the eastern side of the island. So, when he said that he could give us advice on places to go where we would be free from the average tourist, he was able to make good.

The first morning after our arrival at the Bed and Breakfast, I was awakened by the squawk of birds. I stepped outside in the early morning, and received two surprises right away. First of all, I was stunned by the sheer intensity of the tropical sun. We had flown in during the late afternoon, so by the time I got our rental car and headed off from the San Juan airport, the sun was low in the horizon. It was early August, but in the tropics all that meant was the fact that it was about five degrees hotter, and the day about 30 minutes longer, than in the dead of winter. Except when the sun was overhead; then, the sun literally shimmered in the sky. I spent the rest of the week bathing in 30 SPF waterproof sunblock.

The second surprise was the fact that the squawking birds that woke me up were a pack of parakeets. I had not seen that many green and yellow birds this side of Woolworth’s basement on Capitol Street in my hometown of Charleston, West Virginia. The thought of all those birds flying around in the wild made me laugh; first, at the surprise, and second, at my naiveté on the matter.

My two teenage daughters were up and about shortly, and we were off to the dining hut for breakfast. Bob was the sole Grateful Bed and Breakfast employee, and he doubled as handyman and gourmet chef. Bob had once been a college linebacker, had been married three times, had spent several hitches in the Air Force and an extended stint as an air traffic controller before he, too, decided to pitch it all in and come down to the tropics. For all of the historical data listed above, Bob turned out to be one of the happiest, gentlest, and most laid back people I have ever met.

As we stumbled in for breakfast, he shot us a huge grin and welcomed us to paradise. He was putting the final touches on a massive bowl of fresh fruit cocktail, featuring mangoes from the tree just outside the dining hut, and was firing up the griddle to make us a batch of Karma Cakes. Bob’s Karma Cakes were whole wheat and buckwheat pancakes filled with tropical fruits and nuts and yogurt, yet which were still amazingly light and buoyant.

Marty strolled in and joined us for coffee, and asked us what we would like to do that day. The girls wanted to go to the beach, and I wanted to wander the rainforest. Marty recommended the beach for the morning, when it is less crowded, and the rainforest in the afternoon. Since we would be wearing our swimming gear, he suggested that we could take a dip in the Mameyes River.

The Mameyes River plunges and meanders along the entire length of El Junque. Even on the hottest day, its waters are still refreshingly cool. One of the most interesting quirks about El Junque is the fact that it is most likely the most benign rainforest on the planet. Puerto Rico has almost no fauna, except for the birds that have wandered in, various animal companions and vermin that have accompanied humans and human habitations, and the ubiquitous coquis. Coquis are tiny little frogs who can only live, for some unknown reason, on Puerto Rico, but who manage to occupy every cool damp place they can find. We had a whole tribe of them living and peeping merrily in the water tank for our toilet.

Because Puerto Rico is so lightly populated with animals, there are no predators lurking in the rainforest. No leopards, no jaguars, no mongeese, no poisonous snakes, no venomous insects. If it were not for the mosquitoes, a person could sleep out in the open under the night sky in El Junque. Because of this lack of danger, tourists and locals alike cavort through the jungle and splash around freely in the waters of the Mameyes River, without worrying about any sort of threat at all.

After a pleasant morning bodysurfing at the surfing beach, we took Marty’s suggestion and set off to swim the invigorating Mameyes River. Our first stop was a rather famous and picturesque waterfall. We slid around on the water-smoothed stones, and arched our bodies under the pleasing pressure of the torrent of tropic river water squeezing its way through a narrow rock opening and down a concave rock wall face.

After this natural shower, we took a path less taken that wound its way down a fairly steep bank along a nearly overgrown path. When we reached the bottom, the river had settled into a valley. The only other persons there were three or four local teenagers. They were using a stout rope tied to a thick tree limb to swing out to the middle of a clear deep pool. The pool had to be at least some fifteen or twenty feet deep, since the water was crystal clear but you could not see the bottom. We spent the better part of the afternoon at this pool; it was truly an idyllic tropical setting. I was especially glad that Marty had assured us that there were no snakes, alligators, crocodiles, or freshwater barracudas to threaten us.

The week drifted along at its own lovely pace. One evening, Marty took us for a late night cruise to a bioluminescent cove. There we darted and glistened in the moonlit waters, with the phosphorescence shimmering upon us and in our wake and making us look like psychedelic angels.

Late in the week, we took a catamaran to a tiny desert island just off the eastern coast of the island, where we spent the day snorkeling around a coral reef and dodging an unfortunate infestation of jellyfish that had decided to crash our party. We were told that we could keep our snorkeling tubes, and I mistakenly thought that this meant that I could keep my mask as well. I took the gear back to the Grateful Bed and Breakfast.

By this time, we had only one more morning to spend before we caught our flight back to Chicago. We decided to revisit our little swimming hole and swing out on the rope again. This time, I decided to take along my newly acquired snorkel tube and mask, and to explore the bottom of the pool.

The water was just as clear as it had been before, but the bottom was still obscured. This time, though, I had the tools to penetrate the obscurity. Once the girls were happily preoccupied with frolicking on the rope, I swam out to the center of the pool and dived down. The first few feet were uneventful. Then, the water grew murkier from the lack of light. I pressed on a few more feet, until I saw a school of huge narrow fish with long snouts and serious teeth, swimming about in the deeper water. I was so startled and frightened by this sight that I barrel-rolled in the water in a frantic attempt to get to the surface as quickly as possible. From the top of the river, I must have looked like some churning mini-maelstrom. It was enough to cause Bridget and Morgan to ask why I had made such a commotion underwater. Needless to say, we left early, and found something else to do to top off our last morning in the rainforest and at the Grateful Bed and Breakfast.

But here is what I pondered on the flight back to the States, and what I ponder on now. On the one hand, there were in truth schools of frightening looking fish that lived in the deep pools of the rainforest. That is a fact. I have seen one such school with my own eyes. But these creatures, which are so fearsome looking, are apparently no danger at all to humans who swim in the river. This is also a fact. When we splashed and swam in that pool, that first afternoon, we were oblivious to the creatures just below the surface of the water. But there is no escaping the fact that, just below us, were these creatures with teeth sharp enough to rip our flesh to shreds.

Here is my point: What am I to make of this experience? In other words, what did my little snorkeling adventure actually mean?

A Question of Vision:

I do not think we can underestimate the importance of having a vision when we set about to conduct our own research activities. With sincere apologies to people who are blind, in many ways empirical research boils down to a question of sight. Or rather, of looking. As Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, writing in 1686 (and whom we will look at in some depth later on) put it:

“All philosophy... is based on two things only: curiosity and poor eyesight; if you had perfectly good eyesight you could see perfectly well…, and if you were less curious you wouldn’t care about knowing, which amounts to the same thing. The trouble is, we want to know more than we can see (1686/1990: 11).”

Let us take Fontenelle’s claim seriously, and think about research as a form of seeing. Is there only one type of seeing in research, or are there multiple ways to see? If there is more than one way to “look,” do these multiple ways of seeing stand apart or can they be reconciled? And finally, how are each of these ways of seeing unique?

It is with the consideration of these apparently simple and humble issues that we can start to make some real headway on the thorny issue of discovering a unique and powerful vision for grounding qualitative research. First we need to see what sorts of “visions” have dominated and shaped empirical inquiry. Then, we can discern the aspects of qualitative research that give it its own unique vision. Once we do that, we can then compare that unique vision with the other visions that we find in the history of doing empirical inquiry.

The Mirror:

Let us start by returning to that crystal clear pool in the Mameyes River. But this time, lets do some time traveling. We are no longer in the Twentieth Century, but we are back in the prehistory of the island. Let us suppose we are following the peregrinations of one of the indigenous Taino natives who populated this island prior to the arrival of European civilization, and who as a people have purportedly been totally assimilated into a Euro-Afro-Taino mix that now characterizes today’s “native” Puerto Rican. Furthermore, we will assume that the Taino native whom we are following is like any other prehistoric person anywhere, bereft of any formal “scientific” empirical inquiry skills (not that there is anything inherently superior about having these sorts of skills or derogatory about not having them -- I am just describing a simple state of affairs).

I realize that the scenario I have drawn up is highly artificial and historically unlikely, so that consequently I have shifted out of history proper and into myth. But I hope that this will not concern us overmuch, since it is in the realm of myth where I hope to make my strongest points after all. Besides, what is history anyway, other than mythology with receipts?

So here we are, in some mythic prehistory of the Mameyes River valley and the dawn of human habitation on the island of Puerto Rico. Along comes a spear-bearing Taino native, looking perhaps to catch a fish for supper. The water is perfectly smooth. Also, the sky is overcast, since a storm is drifting in from the east. On a clear day, the pool reveals its depths to some degree, and our native can peer into it to look for a fish swimming near the surface. On this particular day, the flat grayness of the changing sky does something strange to the surface of the pool of water. It turns it into a reflective surface.

The Taino hunter bends over the edge of the still pool, spear arched and eyes on alert for a darting fish just under the surface. But he cannot look under the surface. Instead, for the first time, he sees his image, reflected on the surface of the water. This gives him serious pause. Perhaps he not aware right away that he is looking at himself. Why should he, if the whole idea of a reflection is outside his prior experience? But our hunter moves his arm slightly, cocks his head a bit, turns his torso first to the left and then to the right. The image on the surface of the pool follows suit. He is left to conclude that, in perhaps some magical way, he is seeing himself.

Surely such an experience must restructure the consciousness of the viewer. He has been privileged with the awareness of self as a material object in the world, such that it can now be seen as any other object can be seen. Jacques Lacan (1977) called this the mirror stage of consciousness, and suggested that it happens fairly early in infant development. Walker Percy (1983) pondered on the momentousness of this ability to draw the self into the realm of the inquirer, and recalled the words of Helen Keller when she described the day that she realized that things had names, and that she was both namer and named in this arrangement.

The discovery of the mirror has to be one of the greatest technological advancements in human inquiry. Remember that the mirror is indeed a piece of technology, because it helps us correct the “poor eyesight” that Fontenelle bemoaned earlier. It allows the inquirer to correct for the fact that he or she cannot see himself or herself seeing. But it has a richer connotation as well. The smooth still surface of a pool is a mirror because it allows for the reflection of light from its surface. In this fashion, it gives the inquirer a direct and visual look at himself or herself.

But all reflection need not be so direct or so simply visual. Is it possible for more complex phenomena or occurrences to be “reflective” in a less direct, more metaphorical way? Suppose, for example, we see an albatross gliding gracefully and effortlessly above the ocean, only to hit the water in a gangling and comical fashion when it tries to land. We might be tempted to laugh, but might we also be tempted to see a parallel in our life, or in the lives of others? Are there times when we, too, must abandon our natural grace and crash into the only kind of “landing” we are equipped to make? Does it metaphorically reflect our strengths and shortcomings in being a teacher, a parent, a theorist, a human being?

The Mirror and the Conduct of Empirical Inquiry:

Let us call this the “mirror” form of empirical inquiry, to honor the role of the mirror in its discovery. But it is really deeper than just looking for one’s image cast in the ways and nature of the world. Empirical inquirers from the late Classical era in Greece up through the medieval era (these empirical researchers, by the way, were called “Natural Philosophers”) labeled this form of inquiry as “speculative” inquiry.

The word “speculative” is derived from the Latin word “speculum” which means “mirror.” Speculative inquiry started in Greece, but reached its richest systematic form during the medieval era. During the Middle Ages in particular, there was a deep and abiding belief in the notion that the world was one of the two Books of God (the Bible, of course, was the other!), and that by learning to “read” nature we would then be learning about ourselves and the human condition. In other words, every time we looked at the world, in some fashion we were seeing a reflection of ourselves in the grand scheme of things.

Alan of Lille, a 12th century French scholar, makes this point succinctly in the opening verse of one of his finest nature poems (from Raby, 1957: 15):

“omnis mundi creatura

quasi liber et pictura

nobis est, in speculum,

nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis,

nostri status, nostri sortus

fidele signaculum.”

Or, in my own rather loose translation:

“All the creatures of the world

Are as if a book and picture to us,

A mirror of our lives, of our deaths,

Of our state, of our fate,

A faithful little sign.”

Alan is saying that everything is a mirror if you learn to look at it properly. For this reason, it is not enough just to study something to find out what it is. The proper inquirer goes further to find out what it can tell us about ourselves. For this reason, speculative or reflective inquiry is, at heart, a contemplative exercise in the understanding of the self and the culture and indeed the nature of humanity.

The medieval world is filled with examples of such inquiry: the Speculum Naturale, the Speculum Morale, the Speculum Mundi, and even the Speculum Stultorum, or the Mirror of Jackasses (sometimes we forget that we in the modern world did not invent satire). In addition to the Speculum compendia, we have an enormous variety of bestiaries, which are accounts of the natures, habits, and contemplative and spiritual meanings of animals, plants, and in some cases even stones. It is no surprise that in all of these cases, the “reflective” structure was primarily Christian. Even though all of these works strive to incorporate known facts and beliefs about history, morals, the natural world, animals and plants, and even the foibles of fools, nonetheless the “tain” or consistent reflective coating on the “back” of each of these “mirrors” was the teaching of the Gospels. Because Gospel wisdom was seen as fixed and omnipresent in this era of Christendom, the writers were then free to incorporate any other mode of knowing into the process. In the bestiary we find one of the best examples of this process in action. Animals are described in terms of their habits, their appearances, their legends, their human-like attributes, their metaphorical resemblances to poor sinners, the Devil, Christ, and the like. The consistency of the Christian worldview served as an anchor to hold together these apparently disparate acts of understanding the natures and meanings of animals in the world.

As we can see, the medieval researcher had a much different view of the nature of reality, and how to study nature and the rest of the empirical world. Reality, for medieval scholars, was rich and complex. Because reality for them was held together ultimately by an omnipotent God, there was no need to try to trim down the principles of reality into a simple set of basic concepts. God was certainly free to make reality as complex as He wished it to be. The medieval mind was much less interested in simplifying reality than in learning how various aspects of reality, taken on their own terms, were woven together and related to other aspects of reality. By contemplating these sorts of relations, we could learn more about our own place in the scheme of things, for it was as if all these other aspects were able to function in some fashion as clues to the nature of our true selves.

The Middle Ages also sustained a deep respect the notion of the text, since as a manuscript culture they were dedicated to creating and preserving basic texts as a fundamental act of inquiry and scholarship. Early on, they integrated procedures for interpreting texts and interpreting nature. We see this tendency at the very beginning of the medieval era, in the work of Augustine. From his perspective, everything natural or conventional (i.e., textual) could be “read” not only in a literal fashion, but also simultaneously in a metaphorical fashion, an allegorical fashion, and in a morally instructive fashion. Augustine (c.427/1958), in De Doctrina Christiana, talked about reading as an act of integrating understandings from a literal level, an allegorical level, a practical level, and an anagogical, or spiritually enlightening, level, and most medieval speculative philosophers were happy to follow his lead. And as you might guess, this model of empirical inquiry was, in its own way, just as complex and subtle as any contemporary scientific model of inquiry that we might study.

The Mirror versus “Nuda Natura”:

Did it never occur to the medieval scholar to try to confront nature directly as an object for a simplifying type of inquiry? Of course it did, but the idea was rejected as being both dangerous and unseemly. The following early 13th century poem, which has been called “Nuda Natura,” talks explicitly about such matters. I am indebted to the legendary Medieval philologist and linguist James Marchand (Marchand, personal communication, 28 January 1998) for guiding and shaping the following translation. The Latin can be found in Raby (1957: 22):

“A poet, having discovered the bedchamber of Nature

And entering and opening it up deserved to get what you hear:

He fell asleep and he saw himself walking through a woods.

Dark night followed after clear day;

He was alone, and the dark woods all resounded

With the clashing sound of the varying voice of wild animals.

Stunned by these he was uncertain as to what he should do.

By chance catching sight of an old house, he came to it,

In the middle of the woods, surrounded by a small clearing

He saw that old house as if abandoned,

And coming to it he saw sort of a bit of light inside

And in its midst something like the figure of a naked virgin.

Eager to get a look, he sought to gain entry.

The wall was high and in it was a small hole

The woman had closed the door and kept it closed;

There came wild animals wanting to surround the

Walls of the house, ready to eat him as he stood outside.

Fearing them greatly, he sought to hide himself inside if he

could.

She being without clothes, turned her back to him seeking

with her hair and her hand to cover her nether regions,

And, as she was unwilling to bear the importunings and the

eyes of the man,

She offered him the following words, having taken note of him:

`Stand off, and no longer seek to bring shame on me.

I have scarcely allowed you to penetrate into my secrets,

And you ought to offer me true service and to hold ever in

pious love as your mother and your mistress;

But you, why did you not fear to hold me in low esteem,

To treat me as worthy of the name of prostitute,

For you acted as a prostitute by publishing abroad what you

knew of me.

Therefore, I will not suffer that you any longer see me up

close,

But cast afar, I will leave you to death and the beasts.’

Made anxious by the things he had heard and seen, the poet

awakened, frightened,

And he had learned that not all things are to be told to all, that

they might know.

What nature commands to be hidden, is for few and

trustworthy ones to expose, lest it become dirty in the vile

ear.

He who judges all will find a harsh judgment,

He will deservedly soil his own mouth who speaks evil.”

The author of this poem is acknowledging that we can stare directly at the secrets of nature. He is claiming that we ought not to do so. Nature is to be respected and guarded, like a treasured elderly grandparent, and not coldly dissected at the first chance. The poet seems to believe that any truth that can be learned from a direct gaze onto “Nuda Natura” herself can only be superficial and cheap knowledge, since it fails to take into account the inherent richness and complexity of nature. He is not saying that we are not incapable of doing such inquiry; instead, he is saying that such inquiry is wrong-headed and ultimately pointless.

The Window:

The message of “Nuda Natura” is a far cry from the scientific worldview. We can see this very clearly when we look at science from a mythic perspective. In spite of quarrels to the contrary, science does indeed have its share of mythic accounts.

By myth, I mean of course a story whose historical veracity is irrelevant. Did Newton really get hit in the head with an apple? Did Galileo really drop two stones from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Did Einstein really will his brain to science? It doesn’t matter which of these tales are true and which are false. They have points to make about the nature (and culture!) of science nonetheless.

There are many scientific myths that we could look at, but I will confine myself to two. The first I have already discussed a bit; let us call it “The Tale of Gary the Tropical Pool Snorkeler”. I was actually being a pretty good scientist when I put on my snorkel and mask and set out for the bottom of the Mameyes River pool. I was also using yet another venerable technology of looking; one that is a hallmark of scientific inquiry. My clear mask was functioning as a window. The window is the prototypical scientific visual device. Its job is to give as clear and undistorted a look as possible at something where such a look was not possible at all before the advent of said window. The clear front piece of my mask was a window, because it allowed me to look without my vision being obstructed by the water. A typical window is a piece of wall that, unlike the rest of the wall, is clear enough to look through. A microscope is a window that gives us a relatively undistorted look at something quite small, and a telescope is a window that gives us a relatively undistorted look at something far way. All of these windows allow our eyes to be somewhere and looking at something as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be doing so. This is an incredibly powerful enhancement of our ability to see.

Coupled hand in hand with this new way of looking is a new way of thinking about those things that we see. The warning of “Nuda Natura” now falls on unsympathetic ears. Our first priority is no longer the range of significance of what we see. Now, we are far more concerned with making sure that what we see has not been distorted by any substance or event that might occlude our window. What brought about such a remarkable change in perspective? To answer that question, lets turn to our second scientific myth.

From Bruno to de Fontenelle:

Our second myth is the familiar story of the rise of the heliocentric worldview during the 17th century. Then, as now, major changes were in the air, and there was no shortage of resistance to change. Being an innovator at that time could get you into trouble if you were not careful; it got Giordano Bruno burned at the stake in 1600.

This was also the era of Galileo, who helped craft a new way of thinking about the heavens and who backed up his thoughts with observations and data. Still, Galileo was more prudent than revolutionary. He only went public when he was convinced that the new pope, who was also his personal friend, would look favorably on his new findings. So, in 1632, Galileo decided to publish his ideas in the form of a dialogue and contest between two thinkers, where the thinker of the older geocentric school is bested at every turn by his scientific counterpart. He also published this work in Italian, to make it more accessible to the average reader.

This was also the time of Tycho Brahe, who tried to reconcile the Ptolemaic and Copernican worlds by creating a complex set of epicycles and the like that preserved the centrality of the earth while addressing the orbits of planets around the sun. It was the work of Tycho that gave the church intellectuals the courage to repudiate Galileo, and to demand that he recant his views, not in favor of the Ptolemaic model, but the epicycle model of Brahe. You might say that Tycho was the first mixed methods researcher on the scene.

We all know how this struggle turned out. Battle lines were drawn, and it was turned into a war of science vs. faith. Manifestos, conflicts, and incommensurable worldviews clashed in this high stakes war.

But toward the tail end of all this fuss, in 1686, we have the publication of a remarkable little book in France. Its author is Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, and the book is called Entretiens Sur La Pluralite Des Mondes or Conversations On The Plurality Of Worlds. This book is a huge success, and is translated into every major European language. Fontenelle himself personally creates seven more editions over the next 56 years, constantly updating facts to keep the work fresh and accurate. Where Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake and Galileo was humiliated and put under house arrest, Fontenelle was lionized and celebrated. Why?

When we turn to Conversations on the plurality of worlds, we are taken by surprise at every turn. To the contemporary ear, the title sounds as if it would be right at home with such relativist works as Nelson Goodman’s (1978) Ways Of Worldmaking or Richard Rorty’s (1979) Language And The Mirror Of Nature. Are we looking at a 17th century constructivist here?

By no means. Fontenelle is as scientific in temperament as Galileo or Newton. The plurality of worlds he talks about are those worlds which orbit stars. They are not fictional or constructed; he is convinced that they do indeed exist. But I am getting ahead of myself. We need to take the time to talk about these conversations and this book at its own pace and on its own level.

The book consists of a series of five conversations, held on five consecutive evenings on the grounds of a chalet in rural Normandy. The hostess is the remarkable Marquise of G****. She is a woman of formidable native intelligence, and the narrator, presumably Fontenelle, respects her intellect and power of reasoning throughout the work. These conversations all take place in a garden on the grounds of the chalet, and Fontenelle and the Marquise start off by engaging in the sort of formal flirtatious behavior that characterizes such liaisons by persons of leisure in the France of their time.

He begins by asking her if she does not find the night to be more beautiful than the day. They engage in a reverie of the night as the meeting place of lovers, as the guardian of secrets, and the home of the stars:

“I love the stars (she said), and I’m almost angry with the sun for overpowering them.”

“I can never forgive it,” I said, “for making me lose sight of all those worlds (p.10).”

Her curiosity aroused, the Marquise begs Fontenelle to explain himself. He demurs, and then agrees to proceed so long as she promises to keep secret his efforts to explain the nature of the heavens, when, by all rights, he should be wooing the favors of the beautiful Marquise. He describes the Copernican model in brief detail. She infers that the basic actions of nature, including the movements of planets and stars, are essentially mechanical in nature:

“So mechanical,” I replied, “that I fear we’ll soon grow ashamed of it. They want the world to be merely, on a large scale, what a watch is on a small scale, so that everything goes by regular movements based on the organization of its parts. Admit it! Didn’t you have a more grandiose concept of the universe, and didn’t you give it more respect than it deserved? Most men esteem it less since they’ve come to know it.”

“Well I hold it in much higher regard,” she answered, “now that I know its like a watch; it’s superb that, wonderful as it is, the whole order of nature is based on such simple things.”

“I don’t know who has given you such healthy ideas,” I said, “but I’m sure few people have them besides you. Most cherish a false notion of mystery wrapped in obscurity. They only admire Nature because they believe she’s a kind of magic, and the minute they begin to understand her they lose all respect for her. But Madame, “ I continued, “you are so much more disposed to hear what I want to say that I need only draw back the curtain and show you the world (p. 12).”

And from here, Fontenelle begins to weave his tale of moons and planets and worlds and suns and galaxies; it is essentially the tale of the clockwork Copernican universe. The Nature of “Nuda Natura” is dead; she is replaced by a nature whose apparent complexity is only on the surface, and whose real nature lies the handful of simple principles that holds together cabbages and kings, waterfalls and worlds, clocks and the cosmos. In one brief fell swoop, Fontenelle crafts a vision of science in the 17th century that would be right at home with, say, Carl Sagan in the late 20th century.

The Window versus the Mirror:

So we have a clash of visions; of the world as the inscrutable but fascinating and always enlightening Book of God vs. the world as a perfect and harmonious Cosmic Clockwork, ticking off its apparent complexity in simple and orderly applications of principles. But why did these visions have to clash? Could they not have co-existed within the world of empirical inquiry?

The reason for the “war” between the “mirror” researchers and the “window” researchers can be found in the fact that these two visions inevitably lead to different positions about reality and truth. In a later lesson, we will address this issue head on, and in some detail, but we need to sketch out a few points here about the relation of such positions to a vision of empirical inquiry.

We have already seen that reality in the world of Natural Philosophy is rich and complex. But the natural philosopher was able to make sense of the world by assuming that there are certain universal principles that are true in and of themselves. Once you know the applicable universal principles, and understand how those universal principles operate in the world, then the task of empirical inquiry becomes much easier. These views fall within the philosophical position known as Realism. Realists start by sorting out the real from the apparent, and by identifying universal principles about those things that are real.

Speculative inquiry is both foundational and realistic in nature. We have to find “real” mirrors that give us “genuine” reflections. The world is full of mirrors that give us a look at appearances only, and not at the universal principles underneath that serve as the foundation for the real world. We must learn to identify and discard these erroneous mirrors, by staying close to our prior understanding of what is real and what principles we already know to be universal. Only after basic issues of what is real and what is universal have been settled can we really pay attention to things in the empirical world on their own level.

Reality in the scientific world is no longer rich and complex for its own sake; it is merely an orderly aggregate of simpler factors. The simpler the factors, the more real they are. Complex structures are built out of these simpler factors. Looking upon these complex structures as universals is nothing more, to the window researcher, than not seeing clearly what is there before your eyes.

The scientist says that all so-called universals are just labels for collections of simpler things. We do not need to know beforehand the basic and universal principles of reality in order to do research. What we do instead is discover simple processes at work, and then verify that they truly work in the ways we think they do. Keeping our gaze clear and transparent -- in the fashion of the window -- is our best safeguard from error.

In philosophy, this view is called Nominalism. Concepts, instead of being foundational and real on their own terms, are just names ('"nomine" is Latin for "name") for these collections of simpler, and more real, things. In many ways, the so-called clash of science and faith that characterizes the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment was really the war between Realism, the basic school of thought of both the Classical and the Medieval world and therefore of the mirror vision of inquiry, with the emerging Nominalism of the scientific world and the window vision of inquiry. This clash continues to this day. There is no way to be a Realist and a Nominalist at the same time. These views cancel each other out.

This brings us to the present time. We can say that Nominalism has won out within the tenets of empirical inquiry, but that Realist thought has never been totally suppressed. While Realism has not played any direct role in empirical inquiry for centuries, it has not totally vanished either. One reason for the lingering presence of Realism is the fact that science has not been able to claim a complete victory over all other visions of empirical inquiry.

It is no secret that Nominalistic science has been less successful in explaining the actions of human beings, than it has been in explaining the movements of the cosmos. Walker Percy (1991) points this out quite clearly in his Jefferson lecture on “The San Andreas fault in the modern mind:”

“...our view of the world, which we get consciously or unconsciously from modern science, is radically incoherent. A corollary of this proposition is that modern science is itself radically incoherent, not when it seeks to understand things and subhuman organisms and the cosmos itself, but when it seeks to understand man, not man’s physiology or neurology or his bloodstream, but man qua man, man when he is particularly human. In short, the sciences of man are incoherent (p. 271).”

We are now at the center of the problem. One vision by itself apparently cannot do the whole job within empirical inquiry. Furthermore, there are areas within empirical inquiry where neither the mirror nor the window can give us a clear picture. Therefore, we seem to be in need of yet another way of looking.

But let us not be too hasty in requiring yet another vision for empirical inquiry. Can we instead fix what we already have? Why, we might argue, can't we just return to the mirror, to Realist-guided speculative inquiry, and commit ourselves once again to the search for universals in the empirical world? We started with the mirror, and it showed us our own reflection in the world. This is an extraordinarily valuable tool. At the same time, the mirror presents us with an impenetrable surface. In other words, the mirror can only reflect, whether it is useful to reflect or not.

Another possible solution is to try to fix those things that are wrong with the Nominalist-guided window vision, so that it works better to describe those factors that are most important in studying and understanding human beings. We need windows to look thought things. And when we discovered the window, we could look through almost everything. Except the mirror. The other side of the mirror, or “man qua man” in Walker Percy’s terms, remains dark.

The Lantern:

So, let us tentatively conclude that there are areas within empirical inquiry where neither the mirror nor the window can improve our vision.

The logical result is to seek out a third approach. We need to turn to a third basic technology of looking in order to deal with the complexities of understanding human beings in their complex lifeworlds.

When we look at qualitative researchers over the decades as they have struggled to craft conceptual tools for their trade, we find an implicit reaching for such a third vision. We see them use such words as “illumination” and “insight” and “understanding.” We see researchers going to faraway places and ordinary settings, trying to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. We find researchers struggling to see the world through the eyes of others, to understand acts in terms of strange motives and to fathom cultures in terms of strange presuppositions. We find other qualitative researchers using interpretative tools and techniques to decipher cultural codes and social mores from marriage rituals to dealing with uncommunicative students.

Our definition of qualitative research as a systematic inquiry into meaning also suggests a new vision for inquiry that uniquely applies to qualitative inquiry. Where speculative inquiry is grounded by the vision of the mirror, and science is grounded by the vision of the window, qualitative research is grounded by the vision of the lantern. From its simplest beginnings as a hand held flaming torch to its contemporary form as a high tech halogen flashlight, the basic nature of the lantern has remained unchanged. Its role is to shed light where no light is currently available. Sometimes, this means shining light where no light has shone before.

Therefore, the goal of qualitative research is insight, enlightenment, illumination. We are neither contemplative Mirror researchers nor unbiased Window researchers. We are searchers and discoverers and reconcilers of meaning where no meaning has been clearly understood before, and we do not feel that our understanding of meaning is complete until we understand its role in practice and experience.

In subsequent lessons, we will see that our emphasis on meaning puts us squarely in the camp of Pragmatism, as understood by the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1955, 1992.,1998).

There are pitfalls aplenty on the qualitative trail. One problem that we will return to, over and over again in this work, is the temptation of falling back into more traditional positions. This first pitfall is pretty obvious. Unlike most empirical inquirers, we cannot think that the human lifeworld is simple and simply just made up or "constructed" of complicated combinations of simple factors. Most efforts to create a non-numerical type of qualitative research, which is no different in principle from other forms of science, make this type of error. Most, if not all, so-called “mixed” designs ultimately fall prey to this error, as do many forms of grounded theory studies and nearly all computer-driven coded analysis schemes.

But we cannot make the compensatory error of assuming that the human lifeworld is somehow artificial and constructed. This is to hold a conceptual error that, because reality is not simple a la the rules of Nominalist thought, that reality is not natural. To make this error, as many constructivists do, is also to refuse to turn away from Nominalism. Another form of this error is to assume that there are many realities, and that each of us lives in our own reality. This is nothing more than solipsism, and really does not represent anything more than trying to make the results of our inquiry align with the dictates of our will. This is more of a definition of magic than inquiry.

Over the course of this textbook, we will try to maintain our serious commitment to the notion that qualitative research is a systematic empirical inquiry into meaning. It has its own unique guiding vision, it is grounded in its own philosophical position, and it privileges its own unique form of logic. Because it is different from both speculative inquiry and science, it can ask questions that make no sense from either prior position.

Why should we adopt such a broad and revolutionary understanding of qualitative research? One answer will suffice. By taking this broad position, we are in the best position to realize its vast potential as a new form of inquiry. We will be much less concerned here with learning all the details and techniques that we currently call qualitative research, and much more concerned with discovering and shaping what the field can come to be.

What do all of the efforts have in common? Simply put, they all deal with expanding our understanding of meaning in empirical settings. So let this be our basic definition of qualitative inquiry: it is the systematic empirical inquiry into meaning.

The Big Deal about Meaning:

Meaning is the most overrated and the most underrated concept in contemporary Western thought. So it is no surprise that a systematic empirical inquiry into meaning ends up being a complex task to navigate. We will address some of these issues later, but for now we need to be a bit more practical. What are some key aspects about meaning that all empirical researchers, and particularly qualitative researchers, need to keep in mind at all times? Here is a short list:

• The path to truth always goes through meaning. Qualitative research is not an excuse to discard the concept of truth. Deep in our hearts, no matter how much we might rail against and denigrate the notion of truth, ultimately we cannot deny its existence. The problem is that we have not properly understood the role of meaning in the search for truth. We cannot really understand and perform qualitative research until we have a clear sense of the role of meaning in our inquiry.

• The world is full of meaning. One of the worst mistakes we can make as qualitative researchers is to assume that there is no meaning in the world at large, or in the little part of the world that we are studying, unless we put it there. The world is perfused with meaning. It is intelligible, but only on its own terms. Why would we assume that the world was put together in such a way as to make it easy to be understood by humans?

• We only know something to the degree that we understand it. This is a paraphrase of the first point. It does, however, point us toward the necessity of taking the act of understanding, of discerning and reconciling meaning, seriously and on its own terms. Changes in knowledge are incremental and accumulative; we know more and more about something. Changes in understanding are powerful and revolutionary. How often are we awash in facts and true claims, only to lack the understanding to see what all these facts and claims really mean?

• Sometimes, things are only meaningful. Even in the empirical world, there are things that matter only as sources of meaning. Because we are continually oriented toward the approach of taking care of meaning as quickly as possible, we overlook these things in the empirical world. Did the Three Little Pigs really talk? Did they really live? Do we know anything factual about their lives? These are silly questions, because the “truths” embodied in parables, like the Three Little Pigs, are truths that are rooted only in meaning. How many of these parables are waiting to be discovered in the empirical world, serving in their own ways as guides to insight into practice and understanding?

One Last Look at the Rainforest:

There are many other places where we could go, but for now let me return to the place where we started our little mythic journey. We are back at the banks of our rainforest pool on the Mameyes River. I am sitting on a rock, my mask pushed up my forehead and my snorkel tube in my hand. I know that wild horses, so to speak, could not drag me back into that deep spot in the river. But I also know that I, and countless others, have been able to swim in this pool with peace and safety. What am I to believe? What am I to make of the genuine doubt that I feel about my safety or lack of safety in swimming in this pool?

What does this mean?

The Simple Point:

Meaning is important for its own sake.

The Judgment:

Good researchers seek to correct their weaknesses.
Great researchers build upon their strengths.

The Dinner Party

2011-03-29T19:48:00.000-07:00

A brief thought experiment:

We will soon be looking at a lot of people who have been invited, in one way or another, to gather together, to eat, and to talk. These activities will get pretty intense, so we need to pace ourselves. Let us start out in a fairly mundane way, to get a feel for eating and talking and gathering in more “ordinary” circumstances. Imagine that we are in a busy, but not crowded, restaurant. It is in the evening. We are looking at three tables:

The first table is a small table near the back. There is a single man, in his late 30s or so, eating by himself. We will call him the Diner.

The second table is actually a booth, toward the front. Sitting in the booth is a young couple, in their early 20s, facing each other and eating. They seem to be quite fond of each other. We will call them the Couple.

The third and final table is quite large, and is in the middle and slightly toward the back of the restaurant. There are eight people sitting around the table, eating and chatting and laughing. Some are men and some are women. The youngest is in his mid 20s, and the oldest is in her late 50s. We will call them the Party.

What do we see when we look at each table?

The Diner is hunched over his plate. Perhaps he is reading a magazine or a newspaper as he eats. Every now and then, he looks up and casts a quick, furtive glance around the room. Ethologists call this action a “Horizon Scan” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). According to ethological theory, it is a programmed behavior for herbivores and scavengers. It is a biological defense system against predators. He seems to be eating rather quickly, as if he wants to consume his food and move on to another location. Beside his plate is the Sports section of the local newspaper. Perhaps he has been reading this, as he eats.

Now let us turn our gaze to the booth. The Couple are using a much different eating strategy. Their pace is more leisurely. They are talking and looking at each other, and only pausing now and then to eat. The conversation seems to be as fulfilling, and in a sense as nourishing, as the food on their plates.

Finally, we check out the Party at the big table. There is a riot of activity here. Some people are standing, some are sitting. One person is talking, and is waving his arms as he speaks. Most of the rest are laughing. Food has been spilled here and there, but it is not that big a mess. This is no longer just a meal. It is an Event. There is eating, and there is conversing, but there is also celebrating.

What is my point? It is very simple: Eating and communicating and celebrating are some of the most fundamental things that people do. The Diner has to eat to survive, but he eats without deliberately communicating with others. His behavior is rushed. Eating alone is evidently not a pleasurable experience for him.

As we add more people who actively seek to communicate with each other, the situation changes radically. Now, the dinner table takes on a different character. Eating becomes only one of many things that are going on. The more people we add, the greater the variety and energy of interactions.

One of the hidden strengths of qualitative research is that it is built on these same kinds of fundamental activities. There are no skills in qualitative research that are not built from simple basic human activities. We look, and listen, and talk to each other, and ask questions, and pay attention to what others say, and ask more questions, and so on.

To explore this point, let us leave this restaurant and move on to another type of table.

Sitting with Forster:

When I was a graduate student, and trying to learn the intricacies of interpretation, I had the good fortune to stumble upon Aspects of the Novel. Novelist E.M. Forster turned critic to look at his medium in the 1927 Clark Lectures at Trinity College in Cambridge. Forster (1927) frames the entire lecture series by rejecting the notion of looking at the development of the novel over time. He opts for a more intriguing image (p. 14):

“Another image better suits our powers: that of all the novelists writing their novels at once. They come from different ages and ranks, they have different temperaments and aims, but they all hold pens in their hands, and are in the process of creation.... Let us ...[imagine] that all the novelists are at work in a circular room.”

From this image he is able to build a stunning set of lectures that focus on the harmony and continuity that pervades the writing of novels, regardless of time, place, or station in life. While the lectures were impressive, I was most taken with Forster’s boldness of putting great artists together, so that we could gain a sense of the culture created by their works. This image has never left me, and it serves as the point in my scholarly life where I realized that learning has an historical dimension, and that this dimension is best understood as a type of conversation. What else is reading, but listening to those who cannot be with you in the moment?

Dining with geniuses:

I was able to partake of my own grand Round Table several years later in Toronto. I was a young visiting scholar at the University of Toronto during one of their summer programs in Semiotics and Structural Studies. By virtue of an NEH grant, I was staying at Massey College for the month of the program and conducting a series of workshops on empirical semiotics.

While I was in Toronto, I was surrounded by some of the giants of contemporary continental and semiotic thought. For instance, Michel Foucault and John Searle and Umberto Eco were all at the Summer Institute teaching courses.

Dinner hour at Massey usually involved lively discussions of the day’s fare -- Eco’s model of sign production and its links to medieval thought, or Searle’s unfolding vision of intentionality, or Eugene Vance’s discussions of Augustine the rhetorician. Searle and Eco and Foucault were staying elsewhere, but some of the instructors were living at Massey.

My most regular dinner companion was none other than Paul Riceour. Professor Riceour had an encyclopedic knowledge of all things symbolic and interpretational, and darn near every other aspect of human civilization, for that matter. Occasionally I would dine at High Table with Robertson Davies, the esteemed Canadian novelist and Master of Massey College. Davies was a textbook example of an eccentric and curmudgeon, wearing a cape even in the summer and muttering as much as making more civil noises. But he was gracious in his own fashion, and when he did speak instead of mutter, he added to our conversation greatly.

When our table was in full swing, however, we held our own with the likes of Forster’s circular cadre of novelists. And like Forster’s imaginary table, we held time and space in suspension as well. Symbolism, from the cave paintings of France to emerging postmodern cinematic grammars, bounced back and forth, released and unbound from genres or eras.

The table as art:

Let me add on final table. Toward the end of the Toronto summer session, The Art Institute of Ontario was displaying “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago. For those who are not familiar with “The Dinner Party,” it is a massive artistic undertaking to celebrate women throughout history. The main part of the exhibit is a triangular shaped table with 13 place settings on each of its three wings. The 39 place settings celebrate 39 women from all of history and a multitude of cultures. Each woman was commemorated with a specially designed plate to showcase her femininely grounded strengths, as well as a banner. As I walked slowly around the three sides of the table, I was struck not only with the artistic magnificence of the work, but also on how fascinating it would be if all these women were really there, talking and sharing ideas.

Setting our own table:

By now, we have seen three different sorts of formal tables. At Forster's table, we have novelists discussing their craft. At High Table at Massey, we have scholars exploring the frontiers of contemporary thought. At the Dinner Party, we have an artistic celebration of women who get to sit at the table instead of cooking the food and bringing it to others. What can this mean to qualitative researchers?

I would like to suggest that we use this metaphor of the dinner table and the dinner party to take a fresh look at the history of our field. While qualitative research deals with basic human activities, we do not re-invent the field with every new researcher. There is a historical record, and a developed lore of craft and skill, that a good qualitative researcher needs to know and drop insight from.

Knowing how to approach the history of the ideas of a field makes all the difference. Too often, we look at what others have done before us as if it were some kind of repository. We go to this Information Bank, and withdraw techniques. Sooner or later, this sort of shallow and slavish approach will get us into trouble. What can we do instead? We can be like Forster, and put important thinkers in the field together, and allow them to talk to us about key issues.

This lesson centers on learning how to listen to this sort of qualitative table talk. As someone new to qualitative research, you may have heard or read certain key concepts and phrases. Where did they come from? What meaning did they have when they were first used? Are these meanings the same as we use today? Are they faddish and likely to fade from the scene, or do they mark lasting ideas in qualitative research?

My qualitative research dinner party:

To provide for the possibility of such historical conversation, I have assembled my own dinner party of sorts. Around this table sit people who have crafted ideas and terms that are in heavy use in today’s understanding of qualitative research. Do I think all of these people are equally important? No. They are here because their ideas are used by many, if not most, qualitative researchers. I think that if we put together a similar table 25 years from now, some of these folk would still be here and others would be gone or replaced. But for here and now, they cannot be ignored.

There are a few simple rules for this exercise. I have not chosen all the folk who deserve to be at the table. Those whom I have chosen are generally both theorists and active researchers, so that they have informed both sides of the process. They have generated ideas or methods that are still in current usage. And, if you return to their primary sources, you can gain real insight into both the history and nature of qualitative research as it is currently understood.

I have taken the liberty, following Judy Chicago in a fashion, of making “labels” for each of my dinner guests. Also, I must confess that if it were possible, this dinner party would be just as rewarding a site for eavesdropping as the one that I had the good fortune to participate in at Massey College.

I have tried not be set up any sorts of competitive rules or hard and fast judgments or criteria regarding who gets to sit at the table and who is not invited. There is too much of this idle sort of sheep and goat sorting in academia anyway. Sometimes I suggest another person who would be just as good, and you can think in these terms as well.

Finally, I would like to point out that I am not trying to summarize any body of theoretical or empirical claims or findings. Instead, I have tried to capture something of the methodological visions of the people involved, taken from their own writings whenever possible. Think of these place settings, then, not as summaries of thought, but as statements by the guests to begin our conversations with them.

Without further delay, here are the guests --

“The Father of Modern Fieldwork”:

When we look at early anthropological fieldwork, we see two important researchers who set about to help create a truly objective and scientific set of field research methods for the study of different cultures. Either one could lay claim to the title of "father of modern fieldwork."

One excellent candidate for this dinner party seat helped anthropology distance itself from an emerging racist ideology of the times, and gave the field a rallying point to study cultures for themselves, and not as models of superior or inferior societies. In what may or may not be an ironical turn of affairs, cultural anthropology and ideological racism came into being roughly at the same time. As Herskovits (1963) noted:

"The question of race as a factor in human affairs has only been raised in relatively recent times.... Such aspects of the human form as pigmentation, eye color, hair form and color and facial contours did, of course, not go unnoticed. But they were not assigned social, economic and political significance until about the late seventeenth century, with the era of European expansion over the world. Theories of racial superiority and inferiority were given systematic expression only at about the middle of the nineteenth century, and ran in two main currents. Earliest came the attempts to justify, on scientific ground, the institution of Negro slavery.... Then, on the continent of Europe, came the works of the Comte de Gobineau in France and Houston Steward Chamberlain in Germany. The writings of these men centered on establishing the thesis of the intellectual and cultural superiority of the Aryan race -- the tall, blond, blue-eyed European type, which later came to be called by the term Nordic (p. 5)."

Herskovits goes on:

"It must not be thought that racism went unchallenged. But the anthropologists who refused to accept a racial interpretation of history were scattered, their attempts to rectify the distortions of their science diffuse, while their researches, for the most part, ignored the political and social implications of the doctrine they rejected. It was, therefore, not until the publication of The Mind of Primitive Man that the anti-racists could refer to a single work which, in the best scientific tradition derived its conclusions from measured, objective analysis, and presented its data in terms of their wider implications, marshaling the known facts to bring them to bear on disputed questions (pp. 6-7)."

The Mind of Primitive Man (1911/1963) was the masterpiece of Franz Boas. In this groundbreaking work, Boas stepped away from the task of ranking cultures, to the project of trying to understand them on their own terms. Later anthropologists would extend this work to the point where no one could possibly support the anthropology that was used to buttress the aforementioned shameful 1906 exhibit. Most notable of these later efforts was Claude Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind (1966).

Boas (1911/1963) neatly laid out the fundamental problem facing cultural anthropology in its infancy: "Ever since the time when the study of human cultures was recognized as a problem, attempts have been made to interpret it as a unit phenomenon even before anything like a fair amount of material had been collected (p. 162)."

He goes on to point out that the "...mental activities of primitive man have been compared to those of children and vice versa... (p162)." Other analogies used to describe primitive societies included the evolution of organisms and the description of primitive societies as if they were psychotic aberrations of civilized societies. Boas categorically rejects all three of these models. While he valued the scientific study of culture, and the ability to hold open our judgments until we have sufficient evidence, he also warned us not to use what was then our growing scientific awareness of cultural dynamics against individuals:

"Our tendency to evaluate an individual according to the picture that we form of the class to which we assign him, although he may not feel any inner connection with that class, is a survival of primitive forms of thought. The characteristics of the members of the class are highly variable and the type that we construct from the most frequent characteristics supposed to belong to the class is never more than an abstraction hardly ever realized in a single individual, often not even a result of observation, but an often heard tradition that determines our judgment (pp. 241-242)."

Boas concluded this thought with a series of points that are not only important for those who study culture, but those of us in qualitative research who seek to balance the study of the culture at large with inquiry into the nature and skills and insights of particular individuals:

"Freedom of judgment can be attained only when we learn to estimate an individual according to his own ability and character. Then we shall find, if we were to select the best of mankind, that all races and all nationalities would be represented. Then we shall treasure and cultivate the variety of forms that human thought and activity has taken, and abhor, as leading to complete stagnation, all attempts to impress one pattern of thought upon whole nations or even upon the whole world (p. 242)."

If we had to choose one person to lay claim to the title of "architect of fieldwork as we know it today", however, that person might well be Bronislaw Malinowski. In Malinowski's work in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands, we find the embodiment of the following canons of modern field research: Go there. Pay attention. Look. Listen. Find informants. Live with the people you study, do what they do, seek to see the world as they see it. Put aside your own preconceptions if you can. And then, while you are doing all of the above, write down what you see quickly, accurately, and as objectively as you can.

But what did Malinowski the person bring to this experience of fieldwork? We are fortunate that, in 1967, his field diaries from New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands were published posthumously (Malinowski, 1967/1989). Although these diaries are controversial, they bring us face to face with issues that will come to dominate later thinking in ethnographic research and writing. How objective are we really being? What are we writing when we sort through our fieldnotes and diaries and the like, and come up with ethnographic reports? We will look at some of these issues as raised by Marcus (1986), Van Maanen (1995), and Clifford (1986), among others, when we take a closer look at field work in Lesson Four. For now, we can look over Malinowski's shoulder, as he grapples with conceptual and personal issues as they intermingle in his private diaries. Here is an entry toward the end of his stay in New Guinea:

"Friday, 1.23.15. I am 'covering the ground' of my territory more and more concretely. Without doubt, if I could stay here for several more months -- or years -- I could get to know these people far better. But for a superficial short stay I have done as much as can be done.... After breakfast I took a pile of tobacco and went to the village and photographed the lugumi, then... went to buy stuff. Usually I overpay tremendously, I think, but I bargain until I am ready to drop. After lunch lay down and read Mexico. Two fellows brought me oba'ua -- little axes made of shells. I went to the village around 4, bought two bamboo sticks with feathers; then I sat by the sea with Keneni and his family. Dini, Kavali's brother, came. Keneni (their uncle) and Dini went home with me and gave me descriptions of the specimens. After supper, terrible thirst -- drank some soda water -- then, very tired -- changed plates; I walked down to the sea; the stars were shining and there was a crescent moon in the est. I sat withdrawn, not thinking much, but without homesickness; felt a dull pleasure in soulessly letting myself dissolve in the landscape. I fell asleep with difficulty, dreaming about the possibilities of research in New Guinea (pp. 72-73)."

Lest you think Malinowski is above us mere mortals, check out the following entry from his stay in the Trobriand Islands. Just about every emotion and issue that can haunt a field researcher seems to crop up here:

"12.19.17. Got up at 7. Yesterday, under the mosquito net, dirty thoughts: Mrs. (H.P.); Mrs. C. and even Mrs. W.... I thought that even if E.R.M. had been here, this would not have satisfied me. Dirty thoughts about C.R. The doctrine of this man (Ceran) that you’re doing a woman a favor if you deflower her. (Solomon Hirschband). I even thought of seducing M. Shook all this off.... Today got up at 7 -- sluggish; I lay under the mosquito net and wanted to read a book instead of working. I got up and made the rounds of the village. Breakfast. Gimwali. I resolved absolutely to avoid all lecherous thoughts, and in my work to finish the census, if possible, today. At about 9 I went to Kaytabu where I took the census with a bearded old man. Monotonous, stupid work, but indispensable. Toward the end I was exhausted, panting for breath. Then took out the dinghy. For lunch -- crab with cucumbers. What I eat at present: morning, cocoa; lunch relatively varied, and almost always fresh food. Supper very light, banana compote, momyapu; one I ate a lot of fish and felt no ill effects. Tendency to constipation (iodine or arsenic?). In the afternoon (it took me 2 hrs, to eat the crab!), at 3, census in the obukubaku. At five went to Wawela with a young fellow from Kaytabu (Mwanusa) and Morovato. I did not feel too buoyant and feared the walk would tire me. But not at all; when I saw the sea I cried with joy: transparent water with a dark steely sheen in the distance and a line of black and white breakers -- gaping black when they vault and then white with foam -- this created a kind of background of holiday spirits, which I miss here on the lagoon. A coconut grove, the gently curving bay with its green vegetation, which rises like an amphitheater above the sandy beach. the coast stretches on into the distance toward Yakuta, pandanus trees with broad leaves along the shore. We went in the boat. I thought of E.R.M. I feel a mystical link between her and this view, particularly because of the line of breaking waves. I am happy at the thought that I'll live here (pp. 156-157)."

Generation after generation of anthropologists have walked this same sort of path. Purposely thrown into fieldwork with little or no formal training, they wrestled with achieving understanding and dealing with the constant surprises that seemed to lurk around every corner. They became multiple-personality-disordered after a fashion; trying to think like a native by day, and trying to write like a scientist by evening. None of this would have been achievable, had it not been for pioneers like Boas and Malinowski leading the way. And with Malinowski's field diaries, we can converse with him with a degree of intimacy that we would not have dreamed possible from his more formal work.

“The Architect of Social Reality”:

One of the most influential books in recent sociological history is Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966). They were dedicated to looking at the issue of multiple realities within complex social settings and its impact of what might be counted as knowledge. In this project, they moved epistemology, or the study of knowledge, from being strictly a philosophical question to being also a sociological question. This position has helped provide conceptual grounding for a number of contemporary qualitative methodologies, most notably naturalistic inquiry (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

Berger and Luckmann themselves acknowledge their debt to Alfred Schutz: "Throughout his work, both as philosopher and as sociologist, Schutz concentrated on the structure of the commonsense world of everyday life (p. 16)." In particular, Schutz sought to demonstrate how rich and how complex those so-called "commonsense worlds" really were, and how socially constructed was so-called "everyday life."

Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) was born and raised in Vienna, where he eventually studied law and the social sciences at the University. His earliest debt was to Max Weber. From Weber he derived two important issues.

The first issue was one that Schutz pursued for his entire career. Weber had been convinced that it was possible for the social sciences to be genuine science. But in order for this to happen, there had to be a single and consistent methodological foundation for all the social sciences to draw upon. Furthermore, this single consistent foundation itself needed to be grounded in the fundamental principles of science. Otherwise, each discipline would drift in its own direction, and at some point find itself removed from science in general, and its follow social sciences in particular.

Secondly, Weber also believed that any consistent methodological foundation had to be based on the central concept of meaning. But Schutz felt that Weber had not taken the pursuit of meaning far enough along the scientific path. For that reason, Schutz was the first social scientist to turn in a systematic way to the work of Husserl and the emerging discipline of phenomenology. Schutz realized that balancing science and meaning was the key issue in the creation of a sociological method of phenomenological research:

"...two other questions have to be answered. First, we have seen from the previous analysis that the subjective meaning an action has for an actor is unique and individual because it originates in the unique and individual biological situation of the actor. How then is it possible to grasp subjective meaning scientifically? Secondly, the meaning context of any system of scientific knowledge is objective knowledge but accessible equally to all his fellow scientists and open to their control, which means capable of being verified, invalidated, or falsified by them. How is it, then, possible to grasp by a system of objective knowledge subjective meaning structures? Is this not a paradox (Schutz, 1967: 35)?"

Schutz immediately attempts to answer these concerns:

" As to the first question, we learned from Whitehead that all sciences have to construct thought objects of their own which supersede the thought objects of common-sense thinking. The thought objects constructed by the social sciences do not refer to unique acts of unique individuals occurring within a unique situation... The second question has to be faced. It is indeed the particular problem of the social sciences to develop methodological devices for attaining objective and verifiable knowledge of a subjective meaning structure. In order to make this clear we have to consider... the particular attitude of the scientist to the social world.... This attitude... is that of a mere disinterested observer of the social world.... He does not act within it, vitally interested in the outcome of his actions, hoping or fearing what their consequences might be but he looks at it with the same detached equanimity with which the natural scientist looks at the occurrences in his laboratory ( pp. 36-37)."

Schutz brings this full circle when he compares the scientist to ordinary person who lives life within the framework of a phenomenological life-world:

"All science presumes the special attitude of the person carrying on science; it is the attitude of the disinterested observer. In this manner it is distinguished above all from the attitude of the person who lives naively in his life-world and who has an eminently practical interest in it. With the transition to this attitude, however, all categories of experience of the life-world undergoes a fundamental modification. As a disinterested observer, not as a private person, which certainly he also is, the scientist does not participate in the life-world as an actor, and he is no longer carried along by the living stream of intentionalities. The person living naively in the life-world can become, as we have said, motivated so as to raise the question concerning the structure of its meaning. But, although he reflects in this manner, he in no way loses his practical interest in it, and he still remains the center, the 'null point,' of this his world, which is oriented with regard to him. But to make up his mind to observe scientifically this life-world means to determine no longer to place himself and his own condition of interest as the center of this world.... The life-world, as an object of scientific observation, will be for the investigator qua scientist predominantly the life-world of Others, the observed ( p. 137)."

While we will talk much more about phenomenology later on, let us pause for a second to see what Schutz has set up. With the focus on the life-world of the individual, which Schutz brought to social science from Husserl, we find the genesis of the notions of "multiple realities" and "socially constructed realities" that have pervaded much of sociological thought since Schutz. But note how Schutz appropriates these ideas under the aegis of science. Husserl's method of inspecting and understanding the life-world was essentially introspective. Schutz, by appealing to the principle of disinterested observation, moves the method away from introspection to an observation and theorization of the Other. With this one move, a whole new way of doing empirically grounded social research was born. While many social scientists may not know Schutz or his work directly, it has profoundly influenced sociologists and social scientists from Berger to Moustakas.

“The Defender of the Feminine Psyche”:

Boas (and, later, Levi-Strauss) had tackled misconceptions and misunderstandings of the minds of primitive peoples. But, ironically, half of the human race remained misunderstood and mislabeled at the intellectual and affective level. For a male-dominated field, understanding the minds of women proved to be more of a challenge than understanding the social codes of headhunters in the New Guinea highlands.

That situation has begun to change today. Feminine voices qua feminine voices have been allowed into the arena of the social sciences. One of the first and most influential examples of this is Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982). Mary Pipher has assembled an impressive array of clinical case studies to support her claim that contemporary culture is toxic to adolescent girls in her critically and popularly acclaimed Reviving Ophelia (1994). And these are only two of many, and a growing, list of explorations by women into the minds of women and their impact on culture and society (cf. Maher & Tetreault (1993) for a typical example in the field of education).

Researchers like Gilligan and Pipher and others draw upon the work of a number of pioneers in the social sciences. Two women in particular come to mind.

One logical choice is Margaret Mead. Before Mead, anthropology was a male field. What few women there were that were involved with fieldwork were careful to make sure that their work was as rigorous, and their focus identical to, men working in the field. Male conditions and cultural artifacts and understandings were the “default” conditions, with feminine issues, if raised at all, treated as special cases.

Mead is the pioneer of the study of the development of women and feminine institutions in their natural settings. From Coming of Age in Samoa (1928/1953) to Male and Female (1949/1975) she tackled tough issues about how sexual and gender issues are mapped out within and across cultures. Based on her work with seven peoples of the South Seas (the Samoans, Manus, Mountain Arapesh, Balinese, Mundugumor, Tchambuli, and Iatmul), she developed a general model of the interaction of males and females, and the interplay of the masculine and the feminine, across cultures. Only then did she feel comfortable in discussing gender issues in contemporary Western society (Mead, 1949):

“There has long been a habit in Western civilization of speaking as if it were possible for men to have a picture of womanhood to which women reluctantly conformed, and for women to make demands on men to which men adjusted even more reluctantly. This has been an accurate picture of the way in which we have structured our society, with women as the keepers of the house who insist that men wipe their feet on the door-mat, and men as keepers of women in the house who insist that their wives should stay modestly within-doors (p. 296).”

She sought to go beyond any particular cultural model to then understand the dynamics and potentials for both female and male growth within a society:

“We have seen how children of each sex learn, from their own bodies and the way in which others respond to their bodies, that they are male and female. And we have seen that each sex position can be stated as the surer one, with the other sex a pallid or compensatory or imperfect version of the other. We have seen that the girl may feel herself an incomplete person and spend her life trying to imitate male achievements, and that equally the boy may feel himself incomplete and spend his life inn symbolic and far-fetched imitations of the girl’s maternity. Each sex may be distorted by the presence of the other sex, or it may be given a fuller sense of sex membership. Either solution is possible, neither is inevitable (p. 367).”

As great as Mead's contributions were, the seat at this dinner party is reserved for a less well known, but tremendously important, inquirer into the nature of the mind of modern Western women. Karen Horney refused to accept the standard notions of the feminine psyche as laid out by Freud and his successors in psychoanalysis. In Feminine Psychology (1967) we find a lifetime of articles that point the way to understanding the feminine psyche on its own terms. Consider this, from a paper first published in 1926:

“Like all sciences and all valuations, the psychology of women has hitherto been considered only from the point of view of men. It is inevitable that the man’s position of advantage should cause objective validity to be attributed to his subjective, affective relations to the woman, and according to Delius the psychology of women hitherto actually represents a deposit of the desires and disappointments of men (p. 56).”

We can argue that the cornerstone for feminist research in the social science might well have been laid by Horney within the following passage from the same article:

“If we are clear about the extent to which our being, thinking, and doing conform to ... masculine standards, we can see how difficult it is for the individual man and also for the individual woman to shake off this mode of thought. The question then is how far analytical psychology also, when its researches have women for their object, is under the spell of this way of thinking, insofar as it has not yet wholly left behind age in which frankly and as a matter of course masculine development only was considered. In other words, how far has the evolution of women, as depicted to us today by analysis, been measured by masculine standards and how far therefore does this picture fail to present quite accurately the real nature of women (p. 57).”

“The Revealer of Racial Oppression”:

One of the noblest objectives of Western social science has been its attempt to understand and thereby oppose racial oppression. Whether that oppression is colonial in nature, as Franz Fanon (1968) described in his masterful The Wretched of the Earth, or whether it is best understood as cultural oppression within given societies (particularly the United States), racial oppression is a way of life that most of us agree should no longer be tolerated in civilized societies.

The problem with eradicating racial oppression, however, is that racism is often more subtle than we realize. It is particularly hard for those of us who belong to a dominant racial category to understand racial oppression on day to day terms.

We could easily seat W.E.B. Du Bois at our table. His masterpiece, The souls of black folk (1903/1995), is a diverse and insightful chronicle of many of the aspects of the Reconstruction Era in the American South, and the impact of those efforts on the assimilation of former slaves into the fabric of American life. The picture that Du Bois draws is both stark and immediate:

"In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches -- one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and streetcars (p. 206)."

Du Bois was most concerned with discovering and eradicating the lingering poisons of slavery in the psyches and social conduct of former slaves:

"The long system of repression and degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation for the beautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering (p. 219)."

Du Bois refused to back away from the facts as he saw them, and avoided drawing either a romanticized or sentimental picture of the plight and challenges faced by former slaves and their recent descendants. His work is a lesson in honesty as well as moral concern. But the seat at the table goes to another remarkable individual who chronicled the oppression and malevolent power of slavery from the inside.

In 1845, Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave was published in Boston. This remarkable book makes it perfectly clear what slavery can do to the human spirit.

Douglass somehow managed to learn to read and write, which was often a perilous activity for a young slave. His mistress had begun to teach him a few things, but her husband soon put an end to those efforts. Douglass reflects on the impact of slavery on this kind and gentle woman:

"My new mistress proved to be all she appeared when I first met her at the door -- a woman of the kindest heart and finest feeling. She had never had a slave under her control previously to herself, and prior to her marriage she had been dependent on her own industry for a living.... But, alas! this kind heart had but a short time to remain such. The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon (p. 46)."

For in the words of her husband:

"'Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,' he said,' if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there will be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy (p. 47)."

Douglass then reflected:

"These words sunk deep into my heart, stirring up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty -- to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I the least expected it (p, 47)."

The real power of Douglass's narrative, however, lies in his understated chronicling of the nearly endless outrages of a culture of slavery. Such basic things as a person's age or birthday was beyond the average slave:

"I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. They seldom come nearer to it than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time (p. 19)."

And:

"My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant -- before I knew her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age.... I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and each of these times were of short duration, and at night. She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve miles from my home. She made her journeys to see me in the night, traveling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her day's work. She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty for not being in the field at sunrise.... I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone.... Death soon ended what little we would have while she lived, and with it her hardships and suffering.... I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. She was gone long before I knew anything about it. Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger (pp. 20-21)."

And finally:

"Overseers will sometimes indulge in a witty word, even with slaves; not so with Mr. Gore. He spoke but to command, and commanded but to be obeyed; he dealt sparingly with his words, and bountifully with his whip, never using the former where the latter would answer as well.... His savage barbarity was equaled only by the consummate coolness with which he committed the grossest and most savage deeds upon the slaves under his charge. Mr. Gore once undertook to whip one of Colonel Lloyd's slaves, by the name of Demby. He had given Demby but few stripes, when, to get rid of the scourging, he ran and plunged himself into a creek, and stood there at the depth of his shoulders, refusing to come out. Mr. Gore told him he would give him three calls, and that, if he did not come out at the third call, he would shoot him. The first call was given. Demby made no response, but stood his ground. The second and third calls were given with the same result. Mr. Gore then, without consultation or deliberation with any one, not even giving Demby an additional call, raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more. His mangled body sunk out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he had stood (pp. 37-38)."

Douglass brings the phenomenon of racial oppression out of the realm of abstract theory into the terrible light of its all-too-real concrete forms and consequences. He does so without sentimentality or false intellectualism, without hyperbole or distancing abstraction. By balancing his view between mere reporting and outraged sermonizing, he helps us see this complex phenomenon in its own light and on its own terms.

“The Thick Describer”:

The lure of being "scientific" has haunted the social sciences from their very inception. There have been a number of important thinkers who have realized, however, that interpretive acts are fundamental for human beings, and any attempt to understand human actions must somehow incorporate our interpretational abilities as an irreducible part of the process.

One obvious champion of the view mentioned above was Herbert Blumer (1969).. His model of symbolic interactionism addresses the role of meaning and interpretation directly:

" Symbolic interactionism rests in the last analysis on three simple premises. The first premise is that human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that these things have for them... The second premise is that the meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one's fellows. The third premise is that these meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters (p. 2)."

Blumer, as a sociologist, is turning away from the psychological tendency of his times; the desire to render all human acts in terms of the causes of behaviors. He sees the role of interpretation as being fundamental:

"The position of symbolic interactionism, in contrast, is that the meanings that things have for human beings are central in their own right. To ignore the meaning of the things toward which people act is seen as falsifying the behavior under study. To bypass the meaning in favor of factors alleged to produce the behavior is seen as a grievous neglect of the role of meaning in the formation of behavior (p. 3)."

Blumer's model of symbolic interactionism, among other things, made room for meaning in the systematic empirical pursuit of sociological inquiry. But the place at the table is reserved for an anthropologist who has made important theoretical and methodological contributions to the issue of meaning and its role in culture. In fact, this insistence on the power of meaning in his work has even changed the terminology of observation.

Clifford Geertz (1973) is perhaps best known for his use of the term "thick description." While some erroneously think Geertz coined the term, he cheerfully acknowledged that he found the term in the work of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle:

"From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise. What defines it is the kind of intellectual enterprise it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, 'thick description'.... Consider, he says, two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. In one, this is an involuntary twitch; in the other, a conspiratorial signal to a friend.... As Ryle points out, the winker has not done two things, contracted his eyelids and winked, while the twitcher has done only one, contracting his eyelids. Contracting your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public code in which doing so counts as a conspiratorial signal is winking. That's all there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleck of culture, and -- voila! -- a gesture (p. 6)."

The notion of thick description is often misunderstood. Some people think they are doing thick description when they lather on detail after detail. But that would be like labeling each of the micro-muscular movements made by the eyelid in a wink, and timing the duration of these movements to the microsecond. What we get then is a (painfully?) detailed description. A thick description moves directly to the issue of meaning via signification:

"Analysis, then, is sorting out the structures of signification -- what Ryle called established codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for it makes the enterprise sound too much like that of the cypher clerk when it is much more like that of a literary critic -- and determining their social ground and import ( p. 9)."

Blumer and Geertz have not only made a place for interpretation in social science research, they insist that the research cannot be done without its deliberate, reflective, and judicious use. Geertz makes this point crystal clear in his poetic description of culture and the way that he seeks to study it:

"The concept of culture I espouse... is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning (p. 5)."

“The Grounders of Grounded Theory”:

Two gentlemen share this place. at the table because they shared their most important works. Working in San Francisco in the early 1960’s, they helped transform sociology by inventing a whole new way to generate theory in that field.

For many years, sociologists, and particularly members of the Chicago School of sociology, had conducted field studies within fairly familiar American venues. But as sociology matured as a discipline, the lure of theory building took over and pushed aside much of the strictly field-oriented work. Classics like William Whyte’s Streetcorner Society (1943/1955) were being read and studied, but the journals were being filled with theoretical models driven, too often, by precious little data.

In many ways, the situation of sociology in the 1950's and 1960's was similar to the psychology of learning in the 1930's and 1940’s. Learning theorists like Clark Hull came along and built massive amounts of mathematical theory around tiny little bits of laboratory data, mostly collected from rats in mazes. Consider the following "postulate" from Hull's masterwork, Principles of Behavior(1943):

"The effective habit strength sHr is jointly (1) a negative growth function of the strength of the habit at the point of reinforcement (S) and (2) of the magnitude of the difference (d) on the continuum of that stimulus between the afferent impulses of s1 and s2 in units of discrimination thresholds (j.n.d.’s); where d represents a qualitative difference, the slope of the gradient of the negative growth function is steeper than where it represents a quantitative difference (p. 199)."

In the midst of all this chaos came B.F. Skinner, who demanded that psychology go back to the direct observation of the organism. All of the fancy theoretical constructs that Hull and others mathematized into existence were just not necessary. Any laws of learning would be built from the data up, and the more data the better. And that data, whatever else it was, was always also behavior. So, for Skinner, all theory and all understandings were built from actual, observed data.

This was the basic vision of Behaviorism, and the psychology of learning would have collapsed without it. Skinner (1974) sought to simplify the process of understanding human action by focusing strictly on behaviors as observed:

“Human beings attend to or disregard the world in which they live. They search for things in that world. They generalize from one thing to another. They discriminate. They respond to single features or special sets of features as ‘abstractions’ or ‘concepts.’ They solve problems by assembling, classifying, arranging, and rearranging things. They describe things and respond to their descriptions, as well as descriptions made by others.... They discover and use rules for deriving new rules from old. In all this, and much more, they are simply behaving, and that is true even when they are behaving covertly (p. 223).

Compare the ideas of Skinner to what Glaser & Strauss (1967) have to say about doing grounded theory:

"In contrasting grounded theory with logico-deductive theory..., we have taken the position that the adequacy of a theory for sociology today cannot be divorced from the process by which it is generated. Thus one canon for judging the usefulness of a theory is how it was generated -- and we suggest that it is likely to be a better theory to the degree that it has been inductively developed from social research (p. 5)."

Glaser & Strauss are employing that particular use of the term "inductive" that emphasizes a move from the specific (or in this case, the aggregation of many specifics) to the general, whereas "logico-deductive " means postulating a general and then deducing specific predictions and implications from that general. They clarify this point in the following:

"Generating a theory from data means that most hypotheses and concepts not only come from the data, but are systematically worked out in relation to the data in the course of the research. Generating a theory involves a process of research (p. 6)."

Therefore, Glaser & Strauss are not talking about piling up heaps of observation and other data, and then processing it into theory. They lay out a recursive process they call the constant comparative method. In a sense, enough data is collected to help frame a basic version of a theory, and then more data is collected that are used to refine, shape and modify the various permutations of the evolving theory.

For many people, qualitative research is grounded theory. The issues that Glaser & Strauss first raised have become the coin of the realm in many qualitative circles: concerns with rigor, qualitative vs. quantitative concerns, the notion of the researcher as an instrument, saturation, axial coding, and so on.

In recent years, Glaser and Strauss have parted ways. Glaser (1978) held onto the notion of approaching data as a blank slate and trusting to one's sensitivity to the data in order to help generate theory. Strauss (who is recently deceased), most particularly in Strauss & Corbin (1998) went along a more algorithmic direction, particularly in the creation and use of coding in order to organize and theorize from the data.

This latter approach has lent itself readily to computerization, and a number of qualitative computer programs to order, code, and organize data have emerged recently. Fielding & Lee (1998) have taken the most balanced and thorough look at this issue of computer use in qualitative research, although Miles & Huberman (1994) address the topic as well in their more inclusive sourcebook of qualitative data analysis.

“The Literate Liberator ”:

It is hard to imagine a more thankless and hopeless task. It is Brazil of the late 1950's and early 1960's. Fresh from his doctoral work and newly appointed as a Professor of the History and Philosophy of Education at the University of Recife, Paulo Freire turned his efforts toward eliminating illiteracy among the hug masses of poor peasants of the Northeast part of Brazil. By 1964, his literacy efforts have proved to be so effective and so dangerous to the status quo that he is jailed for 70 days by the new military government, and then is "invited" to seek exile. How has Freire transformed something as apparently innocuous as literacy into a powerful liberating and revolutionary force?

For Freire (1968), education is meant to be an act of humanization, and any act that does not humanize is thereby an act of oppression. Peasants have not innocently not learned to read and write; their illiteracy is nothing more than a tangible act of oppression against them:

"...while both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives, only the first is man's vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity (p. 28)."

So, what should be done about illiteracy, if it is indeed a form of oppression? Freire responds:

"This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed; to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both (p. 28)."

Toward the end of his life, in a letter to his beloved niece Cristina, Freire (1996) draws a vivid picture of just how illiteracy and oppression are related. By this time, he had been allowed to return to Brazil:

"About three or four years ago, I had the opportunity to teach a final class to a group of young popular educators on a farm in Rio Grande do Sul. The farm had recently been successfully claimed by the landless movement. The following day, the educators were to split up and leave for the different settlements into which the farm had been divided. At one point, a young man who was a literacy educator active in the movement spoke. In his speech, after a small pause to organize his thoughts, he said, 'During one of the early moments of our struggle, we had to cut, with the strength we gained from our union, the barbed wire surrounding the farm. We cut it and entered. But when we got in, we realized that the hardest fences to cut were within ourselves. The fences of illiteracy, ignorance, and fatalism. Our ignorance makes for the happiness of the land owners, just as our learning, reading, improving memory, and advancing culture makes them tremble in fear. That is why we have to transform what was a huge latifundio into a great cultural center' (p. 119)."

Freire (1968) critiques the very notion of education, showing how it is no more immune to ideological abuse as any other aspect of culture. He elaborates on what he calls the "banking" model of education. This is a very asymmetrical model: Teachers teach and students learn; teachers talk and students listen; teachers choose and students comply; teachers choose content and students adapt. This model of education is easily adapted into a procedure for use in domination and oppression:

"Education as the exercise of dominations stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression. This accusation is not made in the naive hope that the dominant elites will thereby abandon the practice. Its objective is to call the attention of true humanists to the fact that they cannot use banking educational methods in the pursuit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit (p. 65)."

Freire has set the stage for a whole new type of education, where the lines between teacher and learner, and learner and researcher, are blurred:

"Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information.... Accordingly, the practice of problem-posing education entails at the outset that the teacher-student contradiction be resolved. Dialogical relations -- indispensable to the capacity of cognitive actors to cooperate in perceiving the same cognizable object -- are otherwise impossible. Indeed, problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical patterns characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function as the practice of freedom only if it can overcome the above contradiction. through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on 'authority' are no longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. Men teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are 'owned' by the teacher v(p. 67)."

Setting up other tables:

And now we have seated our guests. One thing I will not do is to apologize for people who have been left out. There are so many others who could have been chosen, that to list a few is more erroneous than simply saying what can this particular table tell us? We have seven (or actually eight) guests who have concerns that they have addressed with power and spirit.

Why don't you think of how you might set up some other dinner parties in this great Qualitative Methodological Conversational Feast.

The Simple Point:

History is a conversation.

The Judgment:

Good researchers know how to listen to the past to gain insight.

Great researchers know how to talk to the past to gain insight.

Ockham's Mug

2011-03-29T19:46:00.001-07:00

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.

Field Hands

2011-03-29T19:44:00.001-07:00

A chimney fire:
For five years during the late 1980's, I was a member of the Santa Claus Volunteer Fire Department. Santa Claus is a tiny village in southern Indiana, and its claim to fame is the fact that its post office hand stamps thousands of Christmas cards every December.
At this time, I lived in Christmas Lake Village. This gated community had been designed to be a resort area, but was growing very slowly. Therefore, it was possible for a working stiff like myself to buy a nice little house in the Village and enjoy its amenities.
There was one large lake, Christmas Lake, and two smaller lakes -- Lake Noel and Lake Holly. Balthazar Drive was the main road in and out of the gatehouse, and Melchior Drive and Kaspar Drive were the two other main throughfares. My house was close to the main gate, and tucked off near a small cove and boat dock for Christmas Lake, on Candy Cane Lane. For twenty dollars a month, I was a member of the Country Club, where I had access to the eighteen-hole golf course. Needless to say, as a left hander named Shank, I did not venture out on the golf course that often. My daughters swam in the lake and the pool at the club, and played slow pitch softball and took the school bus to David Turnham Educational Center in nearby Dale and dressed as baby polar bears for the Festival of Lights in early December.
All of this idyllic splendor was nearly shattered one winter afternoon. To my shame, I had been burning some damp logs in the fireplace when I heard the characteristic whooshing noise that I came to recognize so frequently later on. We had a chimney fire. I went outside to look, and saw a stream of sparks swooshing from the chimney pipe just like some gigantic roman candle. I sprayed the roof with a garden hose while one of my daughters called the Volunteer Fire Department.
A chimney fire seems minor, but in truth it can be an awesome and even fearsome production. When wood burns slowly in a fireplace, or the fire is poorly oxygenated, it generates a lot of soot as it burns. Some of this soot, called creosote, settles on the sides of the chimney lining. As it builds up, the risk increases that it will ignite. After all, dried powder creosote is almost pure fuel.
A chimney fire in full working order can reach a temperature as high as 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. It burns so rapidly that it sucks air through the fireplace opening, creating the characteristic freight train sound that often accompanies these fires. The intense heat can cause the chimney lining to glow red or white hot, particularly if there is a metal flue. This sets up a real risk for spontaneous combustion alongside the chimney, especially when the chimney runs along an inside wall as mine did. The greatest danger is from sparking, which is nothing more than flaming chunks of creosote that have crumbled off the lining and are then shot skywards by the terrific updraft created by the fire.
By the time the firefighters arrived, the fire had more or less burned itself out. They placed wet towels over the glass-lined front of the fireplace, to seal off air from the remaining fire. Two firefighters deployed a ladder and climbed to the steep roof to check for smoldering embers or other signs of sparking damage. Another firefighter worked his way through the crawlspace into the attic area to inspect the final stages of the chimney to make sure that nothing inside had been ignited. A final firefighter crawled in and out of the bathroom pantry space, just behind the fireplace, to make sure the wall there was not warm from a possible flare-up there.
But there was another side to all this commotion. The guy who crawled into the attic was Ed, my buddy from church. Marvin and Dave, who were brothers, were on the roof. Dave sold me my home. The person in the bathroom was Bud. These were my neighbors and some of them were my friends. I asked Bud, who was the Chief at the time, if they needed another firefighter.
"Sure," he said. "Come around to the firehouse this Monday at seven. We meet for training and stuff every two weeks."
A field fire confession:
Every other firefighter I have ever met, volunteer or otherwise, has had a hundred stories or more to tell, and so do I. But that is not the reason I brought up this topic. I want to talk about an event early in my days as a volunteer.
A volunteer department works on a response system. For the first year or so, we were still using our old notification system. This consisted of a special continuous ring for the phones of the volunteers. When you heard this ring, you knew there was a fire call in progress. You picked up the phone and listened to the dispatcher, who told you where the fire was located. As soon as you got the call, you then set off for the firehouse.
We had three fire trucks in our department. The first truck was a modified Ford F250 pickup with a water tank and a hose coil with about 30 feet of one inch fire house. The second truck was Rudolph, our yellow full size pumper with its red bulb on the hood. The third truck was a tanker for hauling water to rural fires. The tanker was actually a modified milk truck with a plastic portable pond strapped to its side. When the tanker was needed, we would drop the portable pond and fill it from the tank. The pumper would then pump water from the pond while the tanker went back to refill at a hydrant or draft water from any nearby farm pond.
By station rule, the Ford F250 was always to be the first truck out of the station. Because it was basically a four wheel drive pickup truck, it could be on scene much faster than the other two trucks. Since I lived the closest to the firehouse, I usually got there first and drove this truck. I was to wait until one more firefighter arrived, then the two of us would proceed to the fire scene. We had two way radios in all three trucks, so we could get in touch right away with the dispatcher and each other. The first person on scene was in charge until either the Chief or the Assistant Chief arrived.
On the day in question, I was driving the F250 and Jim was riding with me. Jim was the property manager of Christmas Lake Village and a long time firefighter. This call was apparently minor. It was late summer, and the weather had been hot and dry for some time. The pasture grass in the entire area was dry as straw. In this case, a farm tractor had backfired, and the jet of flame from its exhaust ignited the pasture land in question. We were there to put out this field fire.
I had never seen a field fire before, and I was fascinated. A field fire generally burns low to the ground, often without any real visible flame. It looks instead like a slow but steady creeping pattern of blackening that works along the ground. There was no real danger that this particular field fire would burst into any kind of greater fire, but it was creeping toward an occupied house trailer. Our job was to knock it down before it endangered the trailer or any other structure.
The key to putting out a field fire is to cut off its progress. A field fire invariably burns in a point, with the most active part of the fire moving along like some mobile point of a triangle. The rest of the fire tags along and spreads out from this point. If you put out the point, the rest of the fire is easily contained.
By this time, Bud, who was the Chief, had arrived via his own personal truck. He was in contact with Jim and me via his two way radio. Our orders were simple. I was to drive the truck alongside the fire until I reached the peak, and then set up a bit ahead of it. Jim, meanwhile, was braced on top, and manning the small hose. Even though Jim was well situated, I still had to drive fairly slowly and carefully so as not to dislodge him.
We were making slow progress toward cutting off the peak of the fire when I got what I thought was a brilliant idea. The bumpiness of the terrain made the going slow, but the stretch where the fire had already burned out was much flatter and made for a much smoother driving surface. So I decided to cut diagonally across this burned patch, and head off the point from the other side. We made good time across the parched pasture, and in no time we were set up and putting water on the point. By the time that Bud had eased his personal truck into the area, we had the fire under control. Bud got out of his truck and started walking to us, and so I hopped out and headed out to meet him and receive his praise and congratulations.
What I got instead was the most severe tongue lashing I had ever received as an adult.
"What the hell do you think you were doing?" he shouted at me, the veins in his neck throbbing.
"What do you mean?"
"Do you know how dangerous that little stunt was? You never never never drive over burnt ground. You want to blow up the truck and kill you both?"
I started feeling a bit huffy. After all, I am not stupid. I am a college professor. I know a thing or two.
"The fire had already burned past the part I drove in," I said, feeling more and more defensive. "There was nothing left to burn."
By now, a dozen or so firefighter had arrived on the scene, and were watching with growing amusement. I think they knew what was coming.
"So you think the field was burned out?" Bud shouted.
"Yeah, " I said. "I know it wasn't the smartest thing to do, but it was burned out."
"I have one more job for you," Bud said. We walked over to Rudolph. In one of the side compartments there were several units that we were colloquially known as Indian Cans. An Indian Can consists of two five gallon tanks that are linked and hooked into a strap harness worn on the back. To the side is a short section of hose with a nozzle. It looks like a giant version of the sort of thing that suburban gardeners use to spray their flower gardens for bugs.
There is one inviolable rule that all fire departments, professional or volunteer, are bound to uphold. No department is to leave a fire scene until the fire is completely out. And so there was one last detail that had to be settled for this field fire. Bud decided that I should take care of it all by myself.
You see, Bud was right. The fire was not completely out. This was grazing land, and so cattle had been here regularly. And where there are cows, there are cow pies. And cow pies, those large round whorls of partially digested grasses, make nice fuel. I walked over several square acres that afternoon, under the blazing sun, lugging the heavy water rig, and squirting one smoldering cow pie after another. My pride was severely wounded, and I thought about quitting. But I decided to learn my lesson instead.
Learning from burning dung:
Bud was right about another matter as well. If I had run over a smoldering cow pie and pulled it under the truck, we would have been killed. Just because I thought the field was safe didn't mean that it was. Like just about anything else that is interesting, field fires have structure and order. But it doesn't follow that the structure and order have to conform to what we want them to be. Things are ordered on their terms, and not ours. If we ignore that order for our own, we run the risk of being wrong in a multitude of ways.
Learning at ten below:
After that incident, I honestly think I became a much better firefighter. And now, as I think back on these matters, I think being a good firefighter helped me become a better field researcher.
Fires are always complex phenomena. You can make certain simplifying assumptions, but you always run the risk of self deception when you do. And self deception at a fire scene is usually more concrete than self deception in a research setting. You can convince yourself that you really do understand some cultural process in action, and if you are wrong you most often only pollute journals and libraries with yet more misinformation. But if you are wrong at a fire scene, you can get yourself or others hurt.
Here is one more war story to illustrate my point. We were fighting a nasty house fire in the dead of winter. It was ten below zero, and the water would freeze on contact. The back side of the house was totally ablaze. The heat was so intense that it blew out all the first floor windows. I was straddling a ladder and trying to direct a stream of water through a second story window. Some of the water always splashes back, and usually that makes the ladder rungs slippery. Under these conditions, the splashback instantly froze, and so footing was treacherous.
Not wanting to fall off the ladder, I hit upon what I thought was the perfect solution. I lowered my right leg to the open window sill just below me, and dug a firm footing into the wooden frame. The ladder was secure, and so now I could simply turn my left side and arc the water up slightly. Everything was working perfectly, except that I forgot that there were firefighters on the other side of the house, shooting water through their windows. One of the streams came through the window where I was bracing myself, and soaked my right thigh. The water froze immediately.
Normally, I should have been able to get past my foolish assumption unscathed. I was wearing standard fire boots, and these are the most rugged footwear on the planet. Broken glass, hot coals, and icy water cannot get through them. At that time, our fire jackets were nearly as rugged, but they dropped only to mid thigh. I was supposed to roll up the rubber extension at the top of my boots to cover the part of my thigh between the jacket and the top of the boot. But who had time to do that, and besides, it didn't look very cool.
It was my good fortune that there is always an ambulance and a team of EMTs at every fire scene. In no time they were able to cut away the frozen section of blue jeans from my right thigh and warm the tissue before there was any permanent damage. But, to this very day, there is one spot on my right thigh that gets numb in cold weather. I look on it as an ongoing reminder to take field circumstances seriously, and on their own terms.
What is on the line?
Most of us, when we do field research, will not be risking our safety on our assumptions and our ability to make tactical decisions on the spot when we turn out to be wrong. But we have a sense that field work can be daunting and intimidating. How do we know if we are doing it properly? In a sense, firefighters are lucky that there are so many tangible and concrete consequences to their actions. The lessons I learned in the field in those settings were clear and substantial.
The lessons we learn in field research are just as clear and just as substantial, if we know their natures and how to look for them. We just have to have the proper dynamics.
To correspond and go beyond:
My colleague Wil Barber hit upon the perfect phrase one afternoon as we were working in committee with the dissertation proposal of a doctoral student. This particular student wanted to do a field study where there was already some basic knowledge of the issues involved, but where this student's access to several exemplary practitioners promised to reveal aspects of the basic topic that had never been explored systematically.
We knew the student would most likely find things that would be supported by prior research, but we also knew that there was a very good chance that something new to the research would be present as well.
"So," mused Wil, " the trick is to see what will correspond and what will go beyond."
This is the essence of field research. It is naive to think that any researcher could or would or even should go into a setting acting like a "blank slate." But research that merely supported what we already know would be pointless. Both dynamics have to be there, and both have to be balanced and synthesized into a new and more comprehensive understanding of the matter under study.
I can demonstrate these points very easily by returning, for what I promise will be the last time, to my ongoing and evolving experiences as a firefighter.
Knowing and understanding fire:
Before I ever went to my first fire scene, I knew a lot about fire. Some of what I knew was correct. Some of it was flat out wrong. Most of what I knew turned out to be shallow and naive.
The first wrong-headed notion I had about fire was that fire was an event. Things catch fire. In order to put out a fire, you had to bring this event to an end. Most often, you ended the event that we call a fire by putting water on it.
These are nice enough ideas, but fires just do not work in these ways. I remember the first time I handled a genuine serious fire hose. A basic fire hose is 2.5 inches in diameter, and will put out water at over 100 pounds per square inch of pressure. This amounts to a lot of water coming out of a fairly good sized opening with a great deal of force. At the edge of the nozzle, where it feeds into the hose proper, there is a handle. In order to direct the hose properly so that you can point the nozzle where you need to point it, you need to have a firm grip on this handle. You also need one or two other firefighters to help secure the body of the hose, so that the whole apparatus will not get away from you.
When you are hanging onto a fire hose nozzle handle and the nozzle is wide open, you are dealing with some serious power. On my first occasion, we were fighting a house fire. One of the lower external wooden support beams was fully ablaze, and it was my job to put out that particular part of the fire. If we could get the support beam fire extinguished, then it increased the likelihood that the rest of the structure could maintain stability and not collapse. When building collapse in, the fire spreads rapidly and the chance of keeping damage to a minimum decreases rather rapidly.
So it is my job, as I thought of it at the time, to end this event called the structure beam fire. I hit the main part of the beam with a steady sweeping soaking stream of water, and before too long the fire was out. Proud of myself for accomplishing my task so efficiently and quickly, I then redirected the hose stream to a nearby part of the building. But then, mere seconds later, when I looked back to the support beam, it was fully ablaze again. It was as if I had not put it out at all.
It was at this time that I learned that a fire was not an Event, but was instead a Chemical Reaction. As a chemical reaction, it depended on three things: oxygen, fuel, and energy. Pouring water on a fire, as I had done with the hose, will cool it down, and by lowering its available energy will temporarily shut down the reaction. But I had not kept up the pressure long enough. It is important to hit a full blown fire not only with a lot of water, but with a lot of water at high pressure. This is called knocking down the fire. When you knock down a fire, you cool it off. But you also smother the fire by denying access to oxygen. The force of the water also dissipates the concentration of the reaction, thereby creating smaller and easier to handle fires.
I also learned that a Chemical Reaction is not completely over until all three components have been addressed. If any part of the fire, no matter how small or how smoldering, is left unextiguished, then there is a very good chance that the fire will re-ignite as long as it has access to oxygen and fuel. That is one of the reasons that I had to put out each and very smoldering cow pattie after the field fire. If a wind had somehow picked up a small piece of smoldering dung and carried it to a part of the field where unburned dry grass was plentiful, then we most likely had another field fire on our hands.
I learned, in short, to respect the systematic and persistent character of most fires. I also thought I had a lot of respect for the power of fires, since I had seen many films and news reports of raging fires. What I did not understand was how quickly fires could grow. Because we were a rural department, it was rare for us to get to a fire scene in less than ten minutes. But after ten minutes, a fire could expand exponentially.
We were particularly leery of house trailer fires. Older house trailers were constructed with materials that, when they caught fire, would give off such nasty fumes as cyanide and sulfuric acid fumes. But a typical house trailer burns so rapidly that the time from the first blare from a smoke detector to flashpoint, when the fire combusts all available oxygen to create a consuming fireball, is rarely longer than fifteen minutes. Firefighters have to act with speed in order to contain these fires. I remember one case where a garage was burning next to a house trailer. My job was to provide a steady stream of water to the side of the trailer closest to the garage. We were in the nick of time in this case, because by the time I started my water stream, the vinyl siding on the trailer was rippling and dripping from the intense heat. Had we not cooled down that side, there was no reason that the trailer would not start burning.
Finally, I was struck with how schizophrenic firefighting is. The lingo for a fire in full blaze is a "working fire." Every time we drove up to a working house fire, my stomach would leap. I could smell that nasty and characteristic stink of a house fire, and know that it was fueled by peoples' furniture and their possessions and their family heirlooms and their keepsakes and, under the worst conditions, the people themselves.
Once we were able to determine that all the people were safe, and thank God in my five years as a firefighter that was always the case for me, you had to put away those feelings and attack the fire as if it were some abstract project. A strategy had to be put into place, and the firefighters went about executing that strategy as if it were any other job.
And then, once the strategy was in gear and things were going as smoothly as possible, it was my unofficial job to slip back into the earlier mode. It became my practice to sit down with the homeowners and try to get them to relax. People react to fires in different ways. Most people get disoriented, and tend to stare at the fire in disbelief and detachment. They need another human being to ask them if they are okay, and to tell them that this is not the end of the world and that there are people who will help them. This is an important role for firefighters to perform, if they can spare the time from the fire itself.
I was constantly amazed at how stoic and brave fire victims are. I never saw anyone who was hysterical, or who verbally abused firefighters for not putting the fire out. People were concerned about the welfare of their loved ones and their pets, but they were not out of control. And when the fires raged at their heights, I saw far more despair and sadness than fear or panic. It is hard to convey just how significant these human moments really are, and how often they play out according to inarticulate but human instincts. So there is much to articulate and to learn from them.
From field fires to field research:
Human disasters, like fires, are inherently complex and significant. But really good field research teases out those far more subtle and ambiguous human dramas that comprise that marvelous tapestry we call culture. What are some of the less dramatic, but nevertheless important, dynamics that go on every day in the "real world" but are never looked at carefully?
The most exciting thing any field researcher can find is something that is strange. It is in the strange that we see things that our ordinary eyes and ordinary routines might have glossed over.
There are two ways to find something strange. The oldest and easiest way is to go to some strange place, and try to live and work in a strange culture. Everything leaps out as significant under those conditions. But the number of strange places has shrunk in our global culture.
The second strategy is one that I suspect you will use if you choose to do field work. You might find yourself in a familiar place, or in a familiar cultural setting. Your job is to look at it in a strange, and to follow that strangeness to see where it leads.
This was my rationale for a line of research that I came to call the natural educator project.
My natural educator project:
Education is a fundamental human process.
The act of educating, of teaching and learning to and from each other, is as basic for us humans as eating and sleeping and seeking shelter.
Because education is so fundamental, it is a process that is exceedingly difficult if not impossible to tame or control. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that the credentialing process that we call "schooling" represents the basic presence of education in our culture. Schooling represents a presence of education in our culture, but it is far from being the only source of teaching and learning that we have.
Pursuing my idea into the field:
Here was my research idea: If education is a fundamental human process, then there ought to be any number of natural educators out there in our culture. These people are successful educators, even though they have never been trained as teachers and probably never think of what they do as education.
The idea of finding natural educators seemed appealing enough, and my first thought was to watch them in action as educators and then to document their educational activities.
But after some thought, I decided to take a slightly different direction. I would need to document these natural educators as educators, but that need not be a field activity per se. In fact, the people in whom I was interested ought to have some kind of documented educational "trail" already in place. I wanted to move a step further along. I wanted to find these well-documented natural educators, make a strong case as to why we should consider them natural educators, and then ask them to reflect upon themselves as educators.
Why should we want natural educators to reflect on their educational processes? Here is my reasoning. Schooling, which is a massive powerful and influential educational force in our culture, actually draws guidance from a very narrow "bandwidth" of theory, practice, and expertise. There is a culture of information for schooling which has emphasized scientific and psychological models of learning, an engineering approach to teaching that centers on testing and outcome measures and accurate and efficient assessment, content information that has been organized into outcome driven curriculum objectives, and finally methods strategies that are mainly commonsense notions of behavior control dressed up in technical and professional language. All of this massive social engineering that we call schooling goes on within a culture that uses a wide and dazzling variety of teaching and learning strategies on a day to day basis. And no one thinks to ask these out-of-school educators about what they know, what they have learned, and how these ideas could be used in schools.
Finding my natural educators:
I had a good idea: Go out into the field and find excellent educators, and pick their brains for insights to bring back to professional educators. Now, how to go about realizing this idea as a field study?
I decided to set up a few selection rules. I wanted to pick natural educators who had established track records of excellence in their fields. At the same time, I wanted people who operated well outside of any formal educational system. To bring this latter issue more clearly into focus, I decided to use natural educators who were in fields that we themselves of marginal interest to the culture at large. By concentrating on these respected, but marginal, individuals, I felt that I had a better chance of gaining insights that would be further afield from conventional wisdom. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wanted people with long track records of excellence.
My first choice was a personal idol of mine. I knew that Frederik Pohl lived in a nearby Chicago suburb. Pohl is one of the most respected and important science fiction editors/writers in history. I also knew that this brilliant individual was a high school dropout. I had never met him, but I had heard that he was a friendly and helpful person. So, in the parlance of door to door sales, I made a "cold call". After I explained the project to him, Pohl graciously agreed to do an interview with me.
My second choice was Fr. Matthew Kelty. Fr. Kelty had been a retreat master at the Trappist monastery of Gesthemani for many years, and had also served first as a missionary and then as a hermit in New Guinea. The Abbey of Gesthemani was some distance from where I lived, some 90 miles southeast of Louisville, Kentucky. I had spent a week at Gesthemani the previous year at their retreat house, though, and I knew that I could combine a short retreat with an interview with Fr. Kelty as part of a longer trip to a conference in Louisville. Unfortunately, the Abbey was booked well in advance for the time period I sought, but there was room at Bethany Springs, a nearby retreat house that was run by an order of sisters. Fr. Kelty agreed to talk to me as well.
Am I ready to go?
After my first two natural educators were secured, I had to decide whether I wanted to stop with these two, or to push ahead and gather more natural educators.
After much reflection and, frankly, after paying careful attention to my intuitions, I realized that I already had a fascinating complementary balance between my self-taught writer, editor, and scholar, and my teaching monk and hermit. So why not lay out the develop and writing of this project along these dimensions?
One more concern might arise here; how can you be sure that your natural educators are typical? Can their experience generalize to other natural educators? Again, let me remind you that more often than not we are not interested in the typical when we do qualitative research. In this case, I am looking to find things from these two men that I most likely would not find from any one else. In a sense, it is almost the antithesis of generalization. But when we document these unique experiences, they now belong to our common heritage and our common treasure trove of educational insight.
So here are some of my field actions and results from the Natural Educator project. I am not saying that this is any kind of formal and final treatment of this material, but I do think that you might appreciate looking over my shoulder as I seek to give form and synthesis to the rich insights that I gained from talking to these two men.
Another interesting point to consider -- each of these men has a fairly extensive biographical and autobiographical print trail. You might ask: Should these more formal materials be used in a field study? And I would respond: Why not? Or better still, isn't this just another case of finding what corresponds and what goes beyond?
Finally, one last logistical note. I will look at Pohl in this lesson, and save my explication of Kelty for a future lesson. If you want to look ahead and read these two reports together, please feel free to do so. I want to reserve my thoughts and experiences of Kelty in order to make a few points about the relation of action to contemplation in research, however, which is why I talk about him later on.
Talking about Pohl:
In his last highly anecdotal exercise in autobiography, Issac Asimov devoted 24 of his 166 episodes to dealing with individuals by name (not counting his family, of course). The first person outside his family that he devotes a segment to is Frederik Pohl. He says of Pohl (Asimov, 1992):
"Frederik Pohl was born in 1919 and is just a few weeks older than I am. When we met as fellow Futurians in September, 1938, we were each of us edging toward his nineteenth birthday. Despite the equality of our chronological age, he has always been more worldly-wise and possessed of more common sense than I…. Fred is taller than I, very soft-spoken. He has a pronounced overbite and an often quizzical expression on his face that makes him look a bit rabbity but, in my eyes, cute, because I am very fond of him.... Fred is a very unusual fellow. He does not flash from time to time as I do, and as several of the other Futurians did. Instead, he burns with a clear, steady light. He is one of the most intelligent men I have ever met... ( p. 64)."
Charles Platt (1980), who traveled around the United States and England in the late 1970's talking to science fiction writers, stopped in on Pohl when he was living in Red Bank, New Jersey. By this time, Pohl had left the Futurians far behind. During the 1950's, after he had established an early name as a teenage magazine editor, Pohl teamed up with fellow Futurian C.M. Kornbluth to write sociologically-oriented SF (the preferred abbreviation for the field of science fiction -- to the hard core devotee, the term "sci-fi" is an insult). Platt acknowledged the importance of what they had done:
"Together, Pohl and Kornbluth pioneered and excelled in a complete new kind of science fiction. They invented and played with 'Sociological SF' -- alternate futures here on earth, exaggerating and satirizing real-life social forces and trends that most other science-fiction seemed too removed from contemporary reality to understand or perceive clearly. This sophisticated material was a powerful but difficult form to write. Few people handle it with finesse even today.... (p. 57)."
The key to good sociological SF is also the key to understanding Frederik Pohl. Platt continues:
"The problem is that good sociological SF requires such broad-ranging insights -- into everything from politics to organized crime, economics to advertising, mass-media to big-business. These are the forces that have molded twentieth-century life, and they are likely to endure, stemming from such bedrock motivations as greed, ambition, power, and fear. Pohl and Kornbluth understood it all, better than anyone else around, and so their future scenarios remain the best of their kind, unfailing plausible and unsettling.
"Kornbluth died tragically young, in 1958, but Pohl has continued to work vigorously as a writer, as an editor, and as an activist who has gone out and tried to apply some of his socio-political perceptions in the real world. He has written a non-fiction guide to politics, has run for political office himself, has addressed business groups, and has even worked for the State Department, lecturing throughout Eastern Europe (p. 58)."
What about my belief that Pohl is a natural educator? Is there any evidence to support this feeling? Consider Pohl's own words to Platt about the value of writing science fiction:
"'In science fiction one can say a great many things that are unpalatable and that people prefer generally not to think about; because it's expressed as fiction you can slip it through their defenses. Science fiction can provide all sorts of insights, into technology, natural resources, the grandeur of being out there in space, and they're all valuable. But that's not what science fiction is good for. It is the only kind of writing that allows you to look at the world we live in and change one piece at a time. What I mean is the process of taking the world apart, taking some elements and throwing them away, replacing them with others and seeing how the thing works after that. I think that that is very valuable (p. 61).'"
When pressed by Platt to reveal his main themes, Pohl reflects:
"'One is that most of the problems of the human race are human inventions. We don't have severe natural enemies any more -- wolves don't come through the streets of London carrying off babies. What endangers people in London or any large city are taxicabs, muggers, and so on. Therefore I think the solutions to most human ills must be social solutions. I'm not as convinced as I once was that political solutions are possible, but some sort of social solutions are necessary, and that shows in most of what I write (p. 61).'"
Platt makes an interesting indirect case for Pohl the educator, but what did Pohl himself have to say about his own education. In 1978 he published his autobiography, The Way the Future Was. In that book he talks about his own experiences in school. He starts his story at the age of ten, when he first discovered science fiction. Science fiction, as an established genre, was all of three years old at the time:
"'A boy of ten is not without intelligence. It seems to me that I was about as educable and perceptive as I was ever going to be in my life. What I did lack was knowledge (p. 1).'"
His educational career, however, was fairly unusual:
"I missed four years out of the beginning of my school career, partly from moving, partly from maternal stubbornness. Every time I went to school I got sick. Not just sniffles or Monday-morning fevers, but thumping good cases of all the UCD. The law said I had to go to school at a certain age, and so obediently my parents sent me off; I got whooping cough and was in bed for a month. They sent me back; I got sick again, with something else; sent me again, and I came home with scarlet fever. In the 1920s, that was no fun. It meant a Board of Health quarantine sign on the door, all my possessions baked in an oven for two hours, and nothing for me, for weeks on end, but to lie in bed and wish I had something to do. Well, I did have something to do, I read. I don't remember a time when I couldn't read, and the Bobbsey Twins and Peewee Harris kept me content when I couldn't go out and skate.
"After my mother came to the conclusion that the New York City public-school system was proposing to kill her only child with its diseases, she kept me out of school entirely. It helped that we moved so often. Even so, form time to time the truant officer would come around to complain. She would inform him that she herself was a fully accredited teacher, a graduate of Lehigh State Teachers College and well able to tutor her son at home. Perhaps she was. I don't remember any lessons, only books in endless supply. But that is not a bad way of getting an education (p. 3)."
By the time he was eight he finally found his way back into the public school system. Pohl reminisces about exactly one teacher from his grammar school days:
"That was a close knit class..., because we were all united in a bond of common terror. Our teacher, Mary Maude Mahlman, was nine feet tall, ferocious of mien, and possessed of compound eyes, like a fly, so that even when she seemed to be looking at the blackboard or a student across the room, at least one facet was always and unwinkingly fixed on me. She told us that herself, and I believed every word she said. For a time. Then my courage came back. By the end of the term I had learned to look industrious while daydreaming, and I actually wrote a short science-fiction story, my very first, under her eyes on a drowsy May morning in English class (p. 23)."
At the end of grammar school he enrolled in Brooklyn Tech:
"There was no high school specializing in science fiction, which is what really interested me. There was not even a High School of Science, and perhaps that's a pity, because I like to think I might have liked being a physicist or an astronomer. What there was, was Brooklyn Technical High School. It was said to give many courses in science, which I recognized as being some part of science fiction, and besides, it was an honor school, requiring a special examination for entrance, which appealed to my twelve-year-old snob soul (p. 23)."
He made friends with future writer Dirk Wylie while at Brooklyn Tech, but his formal education would soon end voluntarily:
"Although we were schoolmates, school was the least part of our lives. Partly it was because of Brooklyn Tech itself, splendid school but not for us. It was necessary to declare a specialty at the end of the first year, so that at the age of thirteen I committed myself to a lifelong career as a chemical engineer, which was nonsense. (I uncommitted myself a few years later by dropping out of high school without graduating.) Not all of it was unpleasant. There was a lot of how-to-do-it in the curriculum, and we found ourselves operating machine tools and casting molten iron into greensand cope-and-drag molds, and that was fun. Lab work in chemistry and physics was enjoyable, and the math courses were challenging, but the rest was a washout. Both Dirk and I were readers, and so it was our custom to read our textbooks all the way through in the first week of any term, and so the rest of the term was unendurable tedium. But the excitement of the world outside never waned (pp. 25-26)."
I now had a strong case for Pohl as a natural educator. He was respected as a writer and lecturer, he traveled all over the world speaking and consulting on the impact of science on culture and society, and counted such respected intellectuals as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan as close personal friends. He and Leon Lederman, the Nobel Laureate and discoverer of the quark, were on warm personal terms. Not bad for a kid who dropped out of high school.
Making contact with Pohl:
Fred Pohl lives in a nice house in a quiet neighborhood near a public school in suburban Chicago. It is the sort of place that you would drive by and think, if it caught your eye at all, that a physician or a small business owner might live there. There were certainly no trappings to signal that one of the most respected writers and editors in the science fiction field lived within.
That is, until you got up to the front door. There, hanging next to the door was a modest wooden plaque that read "Welcome to Gateway." Gateway is the name of one of Pohl's most successful novels. Among other things, it looks at the consequences of stumbling upon a network of instantaneous matter transporters that were apparently abandoned in our galaxy by an unknown alien race. In Gateway, Pohl never tells us about that race. That would be too predictable.
I managed to interview Pohl on two separate occasions. Each interview exposed a different facet of Pohl's nature as a natural educator. The first interview began building around the notion of an editor, how an editor relates to writers, and how this might inform the educational process. It then shifted to cover his reflections about his writing career, and what made writers tick. The second interview was much more personal, exploring Pohl's lifelong career as a self-directed learner, and reflecting on how he might change the public educational system.
A quick methodological digression:
There are two issues I want to discuss before talking about the interview themselves. First of all, please note that I used the term "facet" when talking about aspects of this field work. This is my personal replacement for the term "theme." Much of the literature on field work talks about finding and describing themes. I have problems with this term. A theme could, in principle, stand apart from other themes. For instance, in the worst examples of data management computer models, these themes are considered to be independent of each other. This allows for any given meaning unit to be assigned to one and only one thematic "slot." While this can be great data management, I am not so sure it is very good research.
How does a facet differ from a theme? Consider as our organizing metaphor the notion of a facet on a gem stone. A facet is a cut that brings into focus some aspect of the gem, but only as it relates to the gem as a whole. Rather than being independent, it is necessarily interdependent. One bad facet cut does not make for a bad facet, it makes for a bad stone. In similar fashion, any aspect of field work that we bring to the foreground does not stand independently from the rest. It is an interpretive angle that adds richness to our overall understanding. So I personally feel that the term "facet" captures all the "good" stuff we want from the term "theme" without all the "mutually exclusive and exhaustive baggage" that comes with trying to set up a system of independent themes. You might say -- I never intended for my themes to be taken as independent. But, if you use a data management and organization system that assigns meaning units to particular themes, then you are making them independent whether you mean to or not.
If you are instead using advanced or better designed data management systems that allow for links among themes, are you better off? It depends on the nature of these links. If your system allows data to belong to more than one theme, and the links are a graphical way to illustrate that point, then you are really dealing with the experience as a whole and using the themes as sites of interpretive focus. That is, your themes are now facets, to use my terminology. But if your system still insists on creating "homes" for given meaning units, then you are back to the original problem.
The second issue has to do with the notion of generosity. The one thing that makes field research work so well is the fact that the world of experience is a generous place. There is the obvious generosity that Fred Pohl and Matthew Kelty showed to me by giving me the time to talk to them. Both are extremely busy men, with many demands on their time, and I am grateful for every minute they gave me. But there is another aspect of generosity that surrounds fieldwork. I have never been in the field, doing research, when the world of experience did not give me much more than I had expected, or even in most cases deserved. This has become so ubiquitous a phenomenon that I no longer expect the world of experience to give me some really unique and insightful look into what I am studying -- I depend on it.
This is what I mean when I say that qualitative research is tactical. It is important to have a strategy when going into the field -- in other words, to have a sense of what to expect and what to do, guided by what we already know and what we want to find. But unless we are tactically sensitive, and ready to drop our preconceived plans and move in a direction that the field has generously revealed to us, then we are missing the real point of field research.
Pohl the magazine editor:
It was Frederik Pohl the editor who was my early idol. I knew and appreciated his writing, especially with Kornbluth. In fact, when I gave an invited address, at a meeting in San Francisco, which I entitled "Qualitative research, semiotics, North Beach, South of Market, Jack London, and the Grateful Dead" I modeled the address very explicitly on a Fred Pohl story called "Three portraits and a prayer" that I had read some twenty years prior to the address in question.
But every time I got a new copy of If, or Galaxy, or Worlds of Tomorrow, the three magazines he edited throughout most of the 1960s, I would nearly salivate with anticipatory delight. In their pages I knew I would find some of the freshest and most innovative ideas, both hard and soft, to be found in the field of SF.
A brief word on the distinction between hard and soft SF. For decades, Astounding (later renamed Analog) was the primary source of excellent short science fiction. John W. Campbell, who reigned as the editor of Astounding/Analog from 1938 until his premature death in 1971, had shaped the field to his image. Stories in his magazine had a "realistic" edge to them, in that they often dealt with fictional extensions of recent astronomical and engineering findings. In other words, short SF was "hard" SF.
The "softer" sciences, such as anthropology and sociology and psychology, were not represented very often. This changed dramatically when Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction came upon the scene in 1950. Galaxy, under the leadership of H.L. Gold, and F & SF (as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction came to be affectionately known as) under the leadership of Ed Ferman, focused often on these softer areas. All of the important sociological SF novels by Pohl & Kornbluth, for example, were first serialized in Galaxy. F & SF strove to develop a more "literary" reputation, and didn't care about the distinctions between fantasy and science fiction stories. Often, they published stories that could not be easily assigned to either genre. Almost as an afterthought, Galaxy soon acquired a sister magazine, If, that was much more like Astounding than its big brother Galaxy. If never seemed to have much of an identity under Gold.
When H.L. Gold, who was a chronic agoraphobic, could no longer perform his duties as the editor of Galaxy and If, stepped down, Frederik Pohl became his replacement. Pohl had first become a SF magazine editor when he was 19. As he put it during our first interview(Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"I was writing stories and sending them off to publishers and mostly I was delivering them by hand because it was cheaper to take the subway than to put stamps on an envelope. And I got to know some of the editors."
He asked one editor if he wanted an assistant, since Pohl was sitting around and reading all day long anyway, and he thought he might as well get paid for it. The editor had no budget for any sort of an assistant, but he was kind enough to say that Popular Publications was just about to start publishing some new magazines. He suggested that Pohl go across town and talk to them, and he did. He got the job (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"At 19 I was editor of two professional science fiction magazines, very bad ones, but I needed the money. They were Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. They didn't threaten any of the other professional markets."
But Pohl learned the craft of magazine editing, and brought it to full fruition as the editor of Galaxy, If, and Worlds of Tomorrow. Galaxy remained the flagship of the trio, and Pohl continued to feature in Galaxy such important writers as Ray Bradbury and Jack Vance and Poul Anderson. Galaxy also became the home for stories by Cordwainer Smith. This obvious pseudonym concealed the identity of Paul Linebarger, who worked with the CIA and had extensive knowledge of Chinese culture. Linebarger took this knowledge and crafted some unforgettable SF stories, including "The game of rat and dragon" and "The ballad of lost C'mell." The latter was part of Linebarger's series about the Underpeople, who, like H.G. Well's denizens from The island of Dr. Moreau, were created from animals. C'mell, the heroine, was a cat person. From these Cordwainer Smith stories I honed my appetite for exotic cultures, laid out on their own terms. Although there were a few Cordwainer Smith stories floating around prior to Pohl's editorship, it was Pohl who encouraged Linebarger to work and develop these minor masterpieces.
If became, in my opinion, Pohl's own special creation. He turned If from the poor relation into the finest SF magazine of its day. He published the last novel by SF legend E.E. Smith there, as well as novels by James Blish, Keith Laumer, and Robert Heinlein. He also initiated an informal contest where he published at least one new writer in every issue. From this IF first story "contest" came a number of notable writers, including Larry Niven. He also managed to convince his publisher to shift If from a bi-monthly to a monthly.
Worlds of Tomorrow, though short-lived, became one of the most important SF magazines in history. Pohl used it to publish longer pieces, and serials. In its four year existence, it ran long stories and novels by Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Silverberg, Brain Aldiss, Avram Davidson, and two novels by Philip K. Dick. In addition, Worlds of Tomorrow ran a series of long stories that became the Riverworld series by Phillip Jose Farmer.
During the period when magazine SF was at the beginning of its long and continuing death spiral, when Analog was becoming more and more formulaic and F & SF was resting a bit on its laurels, Pohl gave us one last look at what magazine SF could really accomplish.
The voice from the past:
My youthful hero worship of Pohl the editor was also fed by the rare opportunity to actually hear him hold forth on any number of issues, fantastic or otherwise, as a guest on the Long John Nebel show on WOR radio out of New York City. Pohl was a fairly regular guest on this popular and controversial midnight to dawn show. The problem was on my ability to access the show. At the time, I was growing up in Charleston, West Virginia. We lived in a little house at the end of Norwood Road next door to the cemetery. My three oldest brothers lived in a barracks room that had been a converted attic, and my little brother and I squeezed into a tiny room at the end of the house that had once been a covered back porch. Since our room was so small, we slept in bunk beds. I had the lower bunk, and in the summer when I did not have to get up so early, I would often lie under the sheets and listen to my transistor radio turned down low so as not to disturb my sleeping brother. Given the eccentricities of the atmosphere in general and the Heaviside Layer in particular, about one night out of every three I could pick up WOR, lo these many miles away, clear as a bell. But only past midnight, which was fine with me. I might get WOR for an hour, or sometimes just for ten or fifteen minutes. But I knew I was in for a treat when I heard that characteristically soft and carefully paced voice that I soon learned belonged to Frederik Pohl.
It was quite an experience to hear that exact same voice, over thirty years later, as we sat in his kitchen and talked on tape. I had a moment of real anxiety. Even the hardly perceptive reader of this work, so far, realizes that my respect for Pohl is profound, and that I know quite a bit about him and at least part of his history. How would this affect my research? Would I steer away from certain questions? Would I steer him to areas of my concern, and away from other. potentially more important areas? I doubt if any of you will ever interview someone for whom you have more respect and fondness, than I brought to this particular interview.
As fate would have it, Pohl himself rescued me. He took up the issues of education with a great deal of perception and reflection. He patiently allowed me to ramble about my memories of his work, and then gently steered us back on track. He is perhaps one of the most humanely rational persons I have ever met, and so he was able to work through an idea very carefully and very deliberately without losing sight of its link to the human condition. Here, for example, is Pohl on education in general (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"I think that education is what humanity is all about. The human being should want to be educated. I distinguish education from going to school, because they are not necessarily the same thing. And I do think the purpose of school should not be to pour in as much education as a person needs for the rest of his life, but to instill in the person a desire to learn things, a curiosity about what makes things work and what they are like."
Editing as educating:
Pohl the editor had obviously developed special relationships with writers, and so he was getting the best work of the period. How much of this activity on his part was educational, in the broadest sense of the term?
First of all there is the crucial differences between editing and teaching (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"As an editor, you have a similar problem, which is that you have to look at a piece of writing and decide whether it is any good or not. But what you do thereafter is different. If you are teaching, you need to analyze what's wrong with it and try to find out how to make it better and what the person who wrote it needs to know in order to do that. As an editor, you can't do that. You just decide whether you can publish it or not. If there are specific things that you know are wrong and can be made right, you can tell the writer that, but you do have to deal with the stuff that is hopeless or has too many faults."
Pohl reflects in general terms on what editors do (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"First of all they take what is submitted and evaluate it. They decide what they can publish and what they can't. They decide what they should ask the writer to change in the hopes that they can then publish it. And then there is an area of stuff that they don’t want to send back to the author but which they want to fiddle with themselves. In that case, it is customary to show the author the edited version and get his approval. It wasn't the case when I was an editor, I wouldn't have bothered. But the world has changed a bit since then."
As writers establish themselves as being publishable, then their relationship to editors change. Now we are in a situation where things look more and more "educational." The writer becomes more and more a part of the ongoing process, and the editor begins to function more and more like a mentor and guide (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"There are more important things an editor has to do, and one is to try to encourage writers to write what he can use, which often means trying to find an incentive for a writer to write a particular kind of story, or indeed to write at all.
"Most of the editors that I know have really thought more in terms of facilitating the work of their writers than in just finding stories that they could publish from whatever comes in. They do this by giving them ideas, encouraging them, keeping after them, letting them know that you are interested so they won't forget you."
The craft of editing also has a complex motivational side to it. These subtle psychological dimensions are usually passed along from editor to editor as an educational process itself (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"Most of what I learned about being an editor I learned from watching other editors, principally John Campbell, who was probably the best editor science fiction ever had. At least up until the point where he began to lose interest in what he was doing. Not only would he farm out ideas to writers, but he would also think of ways of getting writers to write. Bob Heinlein, when he first began writing for John, was a retired Naval officer on a pension with no particular need for earning any extra money, so John would think of things for him to spend money on. Like a swimming pool, and then would have to persuade him that it was better to write stories to pay for the pool rather than doing it himself. I learned from that."
Editors want writers to grow and develop, but they also need to develop a sense for when a writer has taken a wrong path on this journey (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"Editors will try to protect a writer as much as possible. They do this by trying to keep him from making a fool of himself, by telling him when there is a mistake in what he is doing, by telling what you think he does better than other things, so he will continue doing them. Of course, this involves necessarily knowing what is right for him, which outside persons don't always do."
A good example of what happens when an author gets to be too big to protect is the sad case of the later writings of Robert Heinlein. Pohl had first look at all of Heinlein's novels when Pohl was editing If, but even Pohl himself acknowledged that Heinlein should have been sending the material to Campbell and Analog. But there had apparently been a falling out between them, and matters only got worse (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"Heinlein was not that easy to deal with. What went wrong with Heinlein as a writer is that he got to be too much of a cash cow for anyone to argue with. No editor could edit him, because he would just take it across the street."
Like any good educator, an editor is a prudent risk taker. Sometimes this risk is manifested in putting forth writers, and waiting for the readership to catch up (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"There were writers I thought my readers should enjoy if they got in the habit of enjoying them. R.A. Lafferty for example. I was publishing R.A .Lafferty for some time with no expression of interest from the readers at all, but it is great stuff, and after a while they began to see how great it was."
Risk taking is even trickier in the book publishing business (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"I think that pushing risky works is one of the things an editor should do, but in order to do that he has to have the freedom to make mistakes. When I was at Bantam, I signed up a couple of books I had no real hopes for, but I thought they should be published. To my great fortune, one of them sold a million copies -- Chip Delany's Dahlgren. It was turned down several times, once by me as magazine material. You have to persuade the sales force that it will sell. I went to the sales conference and pitched Dahlgren myself. I got up before the assembled salesman and told them that if they put it into bookstores people will buy it. It surprised me by taking, but if I hadn't gone to the sales conference it wouldn't have got the distribution it did."
Pohl reluctantly left his editorial position at Bantam and returned to full time writing when it became clear to him that the climate for editing had gotten too corporate. He reflects on just how hard it was to get a major SF novel of the 1970s into print (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"Nowadays, if an person is an editor for a major publishing company, he has to prepare a Profit & Loss statement on every book he wants to buy before he can get a contract approved. The P&Ls may or may not represent reality, they may be made up, but if they are too far from reality too long, he is probably going to get fired. So he has to pretend that a book is going to make money, even if he is not sure that it really will. Most of the editors I know now will edit their book lines in the same sense that a mining engineer will decide where to dig for the next load of ore."
Pohl the writer:
The best way to start looking at Pohl the writer is to see what writing has meant to him personally (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"Being a SF writer has meant freedom, basically. The great good thing about my life is that I hardly ever do anything I don't want to do and people give me money for the things I do want to do. But it’s meant freedom and the opportunity to talk to a lot of interesting people and go to a lot of interesting places and generally be on vacation for the last 40 years or so."
Like any writer, he has thoughts on the process in general, and I suspect these thoughts would be shared by many if not most of his colleagues (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"Good writing is having something to say and getting the reader interested in what you are saying. It is better to have both the craft of writing, and the ability to say something that no one has said before.... The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. If you have good ideas, you will find a way to write them."
Looking at how he, himself, goes about the writing process is a different matter, however (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"I don't know how I write, actually. The way I begin to write something is that some of the various notions and facts that float around in my head stick together at some point, and I find I have a problem, and a character, and an environment or something that all seem interesting and I put them together and start to write. And then I ask myself what does this imply for these other factors in the world or in the person and so on, and in trying to answer those things I write the story. And so I guess I have to deal with complexity because I'm not making up a story that is going in a definite direction to a definite end. I don't usually know how a book is going to end until I get there. On the few occasions where I knew how a book was going to end, I haven't liked it. I wrote a book called Slave Ship some thirty years ago, where I knew when I wrote the first page what the last page was going to be, and I think it made it difficult for me to explore in the book the way I wanted to.... Complexity and exploration in writing comes from being curious and inquisitive, or trying to figure out how things would be given certain circumstances."
When asked if there were any basic themes that he has explored consistently in his work, he and his wife came up with totally different answers (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"I guess there are two or three main questions in my writing. One is what is the place of man, specifically me, in the universe. Do I play any part in what is going on, should I, could I, or am I just the consequence of forces that are acting on me from outside? And should I really be worrying about these things? And then there are questions of why do people behave the ways they do, which involves psychology and politics and economics and all the subdivisions thereof. It is my opinion that political science and economics and the social sciences are all branches of psychology and should all be all be subsumed under the heading of psychology. For instance, political science is the study of the transfer of power, but power is not transferred according to laws of power, but according to what people elect to do, which makes it actually a psychological problem.... My wife and I were being interviewed once, and someone asked her what was the central theme of Fred's writing, and without missing a beat she said that he wants people to play nicely with each other."
Pohl has specific thoughts about reading and writing SF and its value in today’s culture (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"When I talk about SF I am talking about a proportion of it. Theodore Sturgeon once said 90 percent of SF is crud, but then 90 of everything is crud. But in the parts of SF worth considering, you tend to ask yourself as you are reading the story, or after you have read the story, could this happen, if so what would make it happen, what is happening now that could lead to this, and so you begin to question what society is all about, what is happening now, and that is a useful thing to do.... SF writers are highly individualistic, pig-headed, and quite confident that they know what the world is like. It means that they have to have a certain integrity of purpose, so that they are going where they think they should go, and look at what they want to look at, and that what makes some of the stories really great."
Writing SF is different from writing other forms of fiction, especially in today’s publishing climate (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"The publishing business got itself into a trap of publishing books which were specifically aimed for four year olds, or ten year olds or whatever. The first book I remember reading all the way through was Candide, when I was nine....... There are a lot of things that an average science fiction fan, whether 14 years old or 50 years old, does not know but which they are perfectly capable of understanding.... I write what I think I would like to read. I have written no books that are fantasy. I know a lot of fantasy writers and I like some of what they write, but science fiction and fantasy have different effects on readers. SF makes you want to know more, and fantasy satisfies your taste buds. Horror is a meaningless thrill. Pornography is about the thrill of sexuality without any of its significance."
SF, even his own SF, has changed as science itself has grown more complex. Pohl spends an enormous amount of time and energy reading contemporary science, and it shows in his work. Consider the following from the novel The world at the end of time (1990), first published when Pohl was 70 years old. He is talking about Wan-To, a dispersed energy creature who lived in the heart of a G-3 type star:
“For Wan-To, living in a star was fun. In any star he happened to occupy he could always find a satisfying variety of environments.... Even a medium-sized G-3 star is a vast place, and so the pieces of Wan-To were separated by thousands of miles. What held him together was the network of neutrinos that served him for neurons. Only neutrinos could do that, for nothing else could move freely about in that choked, squeezed interior of the star, but that was all right. Neutrinos worked just fine. What Wan-To was composed of was that strange state of being called plasma. Plasma isn’t matter, isn’t energy, is some of both; it is the fourth phase of matter (after solid, liquid, and gas) or the second phase of energy, whichever you prefer to call it. In Wan-To’s view, it was simply the stuff that intelligent beings were made of (pp. 3-5).”
What has this increased complexity meant to Pohl as a writer and as an natural educator? (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"Science fiction has come to deal with more complex and abstract issues, or less abstract issues. It either is pure adventure like Star Wars or it asks more complex and more advanced questions. And its sort of hard to make a story out of the more advanced questions in science today.... One of the things that gave me great hope a year or so again is that I got a fan letter from a guy who said that he was 18 years old and The world at the end of time was the first book that he had read all the way through. A lot of the stuff in this book is cutting edge stuff, some of it so cutting edge that it probably is not true. If I can get this 18 year old to read it all the way through, then there is some hope that he will become interested in other aspects of physics and science."
When asked to reflect explicitly on the link between writing and education, Pohl thought for a moment and then replied (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"Writing is a kind of educating experience. Any piece of writing worth reading gives you some sort of information. It may not be the kind of information that’s of any real value to you in any sense. In science fiction in particular, it gives you, if not an understanding of science, at least a notion of what science is all about. And it also teaches you something about society, because if you are writing about the future you have to make some sort of prediction of about how people will live."
Pleasant and mostly unpleasant educational experiences:
As we learned earlier Pohl dropped out of high school (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"I dropped out of high school for several reasons. I may have been at the wrong school. I went to Brooklyn Technical High School, which was basically an engineering high school. I had entered when I was twelve, and by the time I was thirteen I knew that I didn’t want to be an engineer. I wanted to be a writer. I had no great real hopes that I would be able to support myself as a writer, but I didn’t want to support myself as an engineer either, and so I was floundering around."
I asked him if he had had any good teachers. He mentioned Mary Maude Mahlman, whom he had described at some length in his autobiography. When pressed, he did manage to think of two more teachers whom he considered to be good for various reasons (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"There was an English teacher I had in high school, I don’t remember her name, but she was the most involved teacher I ever had. By then, I was 16 or 17 and knew as much as she did about grammar and punctuation. I hadn't learned how to use the language gracefully yet, but I didn't expect to learn that in school anyway.... I had a math teacher who told us that we would all be happy to sign up for a lifetime salary of $100 a week, but in ten years we would realize that we had made a terrible mistake. He was the first person to teach me about the arbitrary value of money. I'm not so sure that he taught me any algebra, but he did teach me something about the world which I liked."
He had no trouble in remembering the worst teacher he had ever had (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"The most horrible teacher I ever had in my life was when I had transferred out of Brooklyn Tech, because I realized that I was never going to be an engineer, to another high school in Brooklyn which was academically on the lower fringes. I was just marking time until I was old enough to quit school. I had a history teacher whose name I don't remember but he had a fairly unruly student body and he could not cope with them. So at the beginning of his class he would turn off his hearing aid and read to us from the textbook for an hour without looking up to see what was going on. At the end of the class he would turn his hearing aid back on and clear us out of there and get ready for the next class. He was an elderly man, and he was just trying to get through long enough until he could collect his pension. He was probably the archetype of the worst teacher category."
Mostly, he was lukewarm about his former teachers (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"I had a lot of other teachers who were not particularly bad, but who were not holding my interest. In high school in particular it was my practice at the beginning of each term to read the textbooks, and hope there would be something going on that wasn't covered that would be interesting, and usually there wasn't."
In general, he was not hostile toward his public school experiences but instead considered them as not being very necessary or useful (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"I took very little away from my public school education. The basic thrust of public school education is teaching people to read and write, which I already knew how to do. I learned something about elementary math, and really not much else."
What sort of school would he have liked to attend. Pohl reflects on such a place, but also does not fail to point out what happened to this “utopian” school (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"The kind of school that I would have liked to have attended is sort of like the Greek Agricola. It would be a matter of asking questions and getting answers. It was tried in Toronto at an experimental college a number of years ago by my ex-wife Judy Merrill, and it was up to the students to find the right resource people and ask the right questions. What it turned out to be was a crash pad for druggies and the school ultimately folded."
When asked if he ever talked to fellow SF writers about their public school experiences, and if their experiences were similar to his, Pohl gave the following considered answer (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"SF writers come in all shapes and flavors. Some of them have doctorates, and some have resisted formal education. John Brunner did what I did and dropped out of school. He was a brilliant writer and knew a lot of things but could not stand the environment of a school. J.J. Pierce, the former head of Bell Labs, said that the one thing he learned in high school was touch typing."
Did the lack of a high school degree ever hamper him in his search for a job as a young man? (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"The only time I have ever been turned down for a job for a lack of education was for a copyreader job at the New York Times, because they only hired people with bachelor's degrees.... Where there is no expertise or validation available, a person can avoid the need to be certified. If I were 19 and a high school dropout today, I would probably be writing web pages."
When asked if he had ever been tempted to get a GED, Pohl gave the following fascinating answer instead, regarding his friend Marvin Minsky (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"I did want to go back to school at one point; what I wanted to do was to get a bachelor's from Syracuse University (where his son was studying at the time) as quickly and cheaply as possible so that I could to MIT and be a graduate student with Marvin Minsky. Minksy was doing some fascinating work with computers at that time. He was developing the computer generated arm and a computer eye that could recognize shapes. The hand was working really well except that it had no self knowledge and in going form here to there it would break itself into pieces. It would have been a process of discovering things and I would have liked that."
Lifelong learning and curiosity:
There were two key points that really struck me when I talked to Pohl. The first is just how balanced and rational he was. Time after time he would express an opinion, even a strong opinion, and then acknowledge that there is another side to the story. This is particularly clear when he talks about educational reform, in a bit.
The second point deals with his inexhaustible curiosity. I did not expect a man in his late 70's to be so curious about the world, so eager to stay current in new and sophisticated scientific findings, and to relate them to what he has learned from a lifetime of personal inquiry.
The following statement illustrates these points perfectly (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"I have found out a lot of interesting things, and the more I find out the more I want to know. There are some really big profound questions to which no one has an answer but people are trying to found out how to find out the answers, and I would like to be a part of that process, even if only as a spectator."
Most of the time he manages to juggle both his insatiable curiosity and his natural sense of intellectual balance (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"It is my desire, which I can never achieve, to know everything about everything. But there are a lot of things I can know, and I try to learn as much about them as possible. Some things more than others. Even though I am not that interested in biology, there are things in biology I feel I ought to know and to learn about."
Where did this penchant for lifelong learning come from? (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"No one ever brought up the notion of lifelong learning to me. It came as an observation that the smartest people I knew came from all kinds of scholastic backgrounds, then it seemed to me that there was something involved in the process of learning that was extraneous to what you did in the schoolroom, and what it is a curiosity and an interest in what is happening to make you want to know more than what you already know. But I don't know how to make that happen in schools."
His interest in science, not surprisingly, is linked to his lifelong love of science fiction in particular, but his love of reading per se is also an important part of the process (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
My curiosity and will to learn about science came largely from reading science fiction and wanting to know how things are really like. It also came from reading in general.... I don't recall ever learning to read. I don't remember ever not knowing how to read."
Books were more than sources of entertainment (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"My top teachers were all books. I still learn things, and there are whole areas of culture and knowledge where I know very little. Umberto Eco, for example, makes me aware that there are areas of knowledge that are interesting but which I know very little about.... I never had any decent history classes in school, and it was a great discovery for me to realize that there is a sense of continuity in history. Will and Ariel Durant's history of everything was a great influence on me. I once wrote a whole book about Tiberius, which is why the Encyclopedia Brittanica asked me to write their section on Tiberius. L. Sprague de Camp had written a novel called Lest Darkness Fall which was a fantasy about the later Roman Empire, and I got interested in the topic. There was no book on Tiberius, so I decided to write one. The entry for the Encyclopedia Brittanica took me roughly twice as long to write as the book. And Durant covered just about everything I said in the whole book in four pages. "
Mathematics was one area in particular that Pohl personally explored on a regular basis. He mentioned casually that once he had studied probability in some depth. I asked him why (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"I wanted to learn probability just because it seemed to be relevant to what the world was like."
He was personally disappointed in his own formal educational preparation in mathematics, and had some very specific ideas about how it should be taught (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"I like mathematics and have tried to learn some complex forms of it -- I got deeply involved in number theory at one time -- but the courses usually were very boring. I learned how to do things like plane geometry and trigonometry and a lot of algebra courses. But they weren't taught to me in any way that made me want to retain them. And I didn’t retain most of them.... Why are some numbers rational and some not? Is the decimal expansion of pi ever going to terminate? Is there any such thing as an ultimate prime number? Some of these are subject to fairly simple proofs, once someone tells you what they are. And I would try to interest them in these sorts of things, in the expectation that if they began to thinking of math as something they could have fun with, they would want to go on having fun with other kinds of math. Whether or not that would work I do not know, but that is what I would try."
But Pohl takes a realistic, and perhaps a pessimistic, approach toward thinking about what sort of actual math teacher he might have been (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"If I had been a math teacher, I would probably have done very little different from what I had, because I would have been stuck with the curriculum that was laid out for me. But if I had the been allowed the freedom of choice I would have tried to interest the students in some of the times that interested me."
The once and possible teacher:
Pohl had some very rich and reflective thoughts about the formal educational process, over and above his earlier notions about teaching mathematics. In each case, there was a deep and natural reluctance to drift into rhetoric or ideology.
He started off talking about his own, albeit limited experiences as a teacher in a formal setting. His most extended effort was a future studies course one semester at the University of Kansas (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"I am a really good teacher, and I am good at talking to people and communicating to them what I think they should want to know. What I really bad at is grading papers and dealing with academic politics. The only time I taught at formal level, I team taught and someone else did all that."
Did he feel that his experience in writing would help him teach, and vice versa? He gave the following tongue in cheek answer (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"Teaching and writing have many things in common. Somebody once said that the title of any book is 'How to be more like me' and I think that this is true for both teachers and writers."
What would be the one thing he would most often strive to do, if he were a public school teacher? How would he deal with the same sort of apathy that he himself felt toward the end of his own formal education (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"I don’t know how, but I would try to sponsor interest in my students. I wish my teachers had done the same for me, but if they had, I would have probably stayed in school and maybe ended up being a teacher somewhere. And that would not have been as much fun as what I am doing now."
Motivation and curiosity:
While he was reflecting on his own lifelong curiosity and fascination with science, Pohl acknowledged that curiosity is one of those hard to measure things that seem to be present in all real forms of education (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"I think that education should stimulate curiosity, but most often unfortunately curiosity doesn't play much of a role. Clinton's new program proposes to evaluate students on how much they've learned at a certain point. Its important that they have learned these things, but its more important that they should want to learn things beyond these things, and I don't know how to measure this."
I asked him if he could put these concerns in a more concrete form, and he offered his thoughts on the following example (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"If I had three students who were interested and 17 politely waiting for the class to be over, I would feel obliged to make the 17 feel the same way as the three, to make the kids want to know things because they would see that it was pleasurable to know them."
Motivation and curiosity seem to be intimately linked, and each enjoys a precarious place in formal education (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"I'm not sure why it happens but it does seem to be the case that there is a systematic destruction of curiosity that occurs in school.... Motivation should exist to inspire curiosity. There are lot of scientific things you need to learn to enjoy being a part of this world. If you can learn the infield fly rule, then you can learn the theory of relativity."
The necessity of schooling as a credentialing agent:
Pohl refuses to deny or underestimate the importance of educational credentialing in our contemporary society (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"Unfortunately, the pressures to be certified are real. Every person, sooner or later, has to make a living, and you cant do that easily without being certified."
He does not dismiss all testing and assessment, furthermore, as a power ploy on the part of schools. Schools need to be held accountable for what they are charged to do (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"I think we should not graduate kids from high school any more who cannot read and write. We need to get away from them having fake diplomas that do not represent anything. That is an immoral thing to do, and it is surely bad for the kids. I don't know how we can get away from grading people on what they accomplish, but I don't know how to grade the things that I think are more important."
What is the key to making students aware of the importance of these credentialing issues? Pohl turns again to thoughts on motivation (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"There is a minimum level of knowledge that everyone should acquire in order to survive. The question of motivation is what I keep coming back to. I can imagine students coming to me as a teacher and asking me why I have to learn all this crap? I'm not sure what the right answer is, but I might say something like you need to know it so that people wont think you are a dork. That’s not entirely true but it is true in many of the circles people are in."
Furthermore, there is a serious problem with equating credentialing with educating. People who are the best at what they do go far beyond credentialing (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"The 'big lie' is that education is the same as schooling. For example, I don’t think you can learn to be a physicist without taking courses. but I also think you can't become a very good physicist without wanting to know more than what is covered in those courses."
Educational bureaucracy:
Schools are complex sociological phenomena, and this point was not lost on Pohl (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"Institutions like schools often avoid complexity by trying to simplify things. But we live in a complex world and a student of any age should have a sense of how what he is learning at that point relates to the all the rest of the world. I don't know that this is easy to teach. A student needs to wonder about these things for himself and figure them out, otherwise you get into a situation where its too hard to be a teacher, because you have to know too many different things to be able to teach them all at once, and I don't think that there are too many people around who can do this."
Schools are supposed to help people find a place in society, but do we ask people to make these decisions too soon? (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"I'm sure that it is an important task for most people to find a place and for school to help them do that. I think a lot of people make bad commitments and then continue in them, because they have made an investment in them. I would recommend to any teenager to graduate from high school and then take a year or two off to figure out what the hell they really wanted to do when they got to college."
Why are schools so complicated, and why do they engage in so much assessment? Pohl sees assessment as at least partially a structural act (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"A lot of formality in education is quality control, they want to make sure that even the bad teachers are teaching something. But the bad teachers just turn off their hearing aids and read from the book."
The notion that we should make public schools more like universities as a possible solution to all the bureaucracy is just too simplistic for Pohl. He makes the following sage observation (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
"I'm not so sure that a university environment is that much different from high school and grammar school anymore. There was a time when at least some universities fostered the Oxford - Cambridge ideal that you were wont to learn for yourself with the help of tutors and so on, but most universities nowadays are pretty much result oriented and they measure results by giving you a test on facts. Facts are useful and I like knowing facts, but I can always look facts up. Its the understanding of processes that is hard to get and urgent to have."
Teaching math and science:
Pohl was particularly interested in initiative for helping students learn math and science. He talked at length, during each interview, about the efforts of Leon Lederman, the Nobel Laureate from Fermilab who had discovered the existence of the bottom quark, to help math and science teachers from inner city Chicago reach their students more effectively. The payoff, as he saw it, was tremendous (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"If you get kids interested in science and math, because they deal with problems that they can solve, you can get them interested in other things like history and English."
Teaching science, for Pohl, was all about teaching the scientific method (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"I think science is an organized method of learning things. In order to learn things, sometimes you need real big machines, but the machines is not the science, but the attempt to learn things."
Schools and society:
Pohl acknowledges that schools are an interdependent part of society, and that some school problems are better seen as social problems. Some of these social problems go far beyond the ability of the school to address them (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"It must be possible for people to work together, because some of them do so. There are some problems I don’t know how to solve in schools, especially those dealing with dysfunctional and abusive parents."
He also voiced a unique and unfortunately prophetic view about the growing difficulty in keeping students safe while in class (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"We need to make schools safer than they are now, it scares me to think of 9 year olds bringing rapid fire weapons to class. And I think that this is a problem that cannot be dealt with by the school, but has to be addressed by all of us as a society. And I think the best way is to take all the people in the NRA and reeducate them. The NRA is a clear example of a typical phenomenon that brings a certain amount of trouble into the world. People have special interests and hobbies, and they join organizations of fellow enthusiasts. Some peoples' hobby is to collect guns. But who do you then elect to represent you? You elect people who are really dedicated to this hobby, who are obsessed. And then you trust someone else to do your thinking for you on this matter. This kind of narrow and selfish thinking spills over from things like the NRA into trade unions and manufacturing organizations as well.... Everyone is selfish, but selfishness can take the form of recycling so the world won't smell so bad and trash dumps won't be so overflowing."
Saving the best and the brightest:
Finally, I could not resist asking Pohl how he would have dealt with himself, had he been a teacher or even a wise adult. In our first meeting he made the following pithy comment (Pohl: 14 March 1997):
1"I would tell alienated and disaffected bright students to get a library card and read a lot of books."
When I raised the question again in the second interview, he again displayed the balance and rationality that characterized his reflections as a whole, and these thoughts serve as a nice way to summarize his complex and thoughtful reflections on that curious part of society and the human condition we call education (Pohl: 28 July 1997):
"I would give a frustrated 16 year old potential school dropout pragmatic advice. Rule number one is that you need to tough it out and get the piece of paper you need if you want to get a job. Rule number two is that the stuff they are teaching you is often very interesting if you take an interest in it yourself. If you don’t find it too interesting in history class go get a novel and find out what things were like in that period. In this last decade of the twentieth century it is impossible to get a job without this piece of paper that says you are educated, even if you most likely are not."
What now?
As you reach the end of this segment of the lesson, you might feel that this account is a bit raw and unfinished. It doesn't seem to reach any particular conclusion. Part of that is due to reasons you will find out about in just a bit, but part of it is due to characteristics that are present in all forms of field research.
The primary question is one of order: how to find it and how to report it. Now that we have looked at some of the things that this natural educator has said, how is it put together into a field study? Have we done the right sorts of things? Did we do it the right way? Can we put everything we have collected into an efficient and meaningful form?
My first shameful secret:
I think it would be more useful to answer these concerns with a series of confessions. I carry around with myself three shameful secrets about field research.
Here is my first shameful secret: When I teach field methods, I teach people stuff they already know. I could dress it up in special language, and I could string together a list of prescriptions, but these would only obscure the simple fact that field research consists mainly of looking, talking, and remembering.
Even though field research uses skills that we already know, there is a craft to doing this sort of research. By and large, this craft develops over years of personal practice. There is really no shortcut to honing and sharpening these skills, but you can turn to the reflections of others to make sure that you do not overlook any crucial area of personal growth.
How do we know that we are good enough to do field research, though? Is there some magic time when we know we have arrived, and all the doubts and concerns go away? To get a glimpse of an answer, let us turn to my second shameful secret.
My second shameful secret:
Here in a nutshell is my second shameful secret: Doing field research makes me anxious. I worry about many things. Did I put fresh batteries in my tape recorder? What if there is so much ambient noise at the site that my tapes are worthless? Should I take notes? How many? How do I make sure my participants are relaxed and at ease? What if I just plain blow it?
The questions listed above, and their thousands of cousins, run through the minds of just about every field researcher. In a way, it is our version of stage fright. But these concerns can be eased to some degree in ways that are much easier than you might think. James Spradley, for instance, shared his basic strategies with us on interviewing (1979) and participant observation (1980). Leonard Schatzman teamed up with his long-time colleague Anselm Strauss (1973) to lay out one of the best nuts and bolts guides for doing such critical field activities as entering the site, listening, recording, analyzing, and generally organizing all these diverse efforts. Stake (1995) shares with us his insights from his decades of case study practice. If you can turn to first hand works like these and draw from the insights and practical wisdom within, without treating these works as field research "cookbooks," then you can allay at least some of the major practical fears that haunt the novice field researcher. Be aware, however, that some of these fears never vanish, even for veteran field researchers.
There is a deeper fear and source of anxiety however. How do I do justice to what I have found? Here, we need to turn to my last shameful secret.
My third shameful secret:
Now that we have talked and looked at some field work that I have personally struggled with and enjoyed simultaneously, it is time to reveal the third and final shameful secret: When I collect field data, I throw most of it away. Here we see the essential difference between being in the field and telling about what we did in the field.
The old naive notion that ethnographic writing is the straightforward account of what you find is long gone. There is a set of craft and tradition and ideology decisions that accompany any field writing project. Van Maanen (1988) provides one of the more useful guides for the writer to use to make basic decisions -- am I writing realistically, or confessionally, or in some other fashion? Clifford (1986) and Marcus (1986), among others, have raised important issues about the poetics of ethnographic writing. Richardson (1995) has written for some time on the basic notion that field writing is narrative in nature, and we can find examples of sub genres and particular ideological stances within any branch of field research.
How are we to approach this? I find the idea of using a particular pattern as a template to be too restrictive. I think the best strategy is first to write, and then to read one or more of these or other contemplative pieces regarding narrative and poetics issues. If any of these pieces speak to what you have tried to write, then by all means go back and hone your work using these points as a guide. Otherwise, I would trust my own conscience and sense of style. If you make a mistake, then someone will find it and most likely suggest to you how to change or eliminate it. At that point your task is simple: fix it and move on.
Reaching closure:
At this point I should talk about how to start work on a Natural Educators report. But the surprising truth is this: we have no need for closure at this point. Closure can be very useful in qualitative research, but it is equally important to know when to avoid it.
My work with Pohl has yielded, I hope, some new and fresh and important insights into how some natural educators operate in our culture. But I have nothing definitive to say about the concept of Natural Educators at this point. And this is not just because I haven’t gotten to Kelty yet. It is because the topic is just too big and too complex to be formulated yet.
So instead, I want to extend an invitation. Do you know of any Natural Educators that you could talk to and observe? How would you approach them, and how would you bring your insights and discoveries to the rest of us? How can we continue to build a growing and evolving picture of this phenomenon? This seems much more useful to me, than for us to craft some sort of pseudo-closure just for the sake of ending this section and ending this lesson.
If my idea is a good one, then the research will continue, build its own momentum, and find its own forum. If it is not very important, then it will fizzle out on its own. Part of the skill of field research is to know how to back away from the work at the end.
Fool or trickster?
Let me try to pull this all together by talking about a field research subject who most likely never existed. For nearly thirty years, Carlos Castaneda wrote about his "experiences" with a Yaqui brujo, or sorcerer, named don Juan Matus. There is good evidence that don Juan never really existed, and others have even questioned whether there was ever really a "Carlos Castaneda".
Nonetheless, Journey to Ixtlan (Castaneda, 1972), the third book in Castaneda's series on don Juan, has been an invaluable guide for me along my own personal precarious path of doing field research. The first two books of the series were, to my taste, overloaded with sensationalist material on peyote use, and the later books of the series got more and more involved in Castaneda's quirky read of Southwestern and Mexican mythology.
But Journey to Ixtlan, for me, was unique. Carlos was confronted by don Juan, at every turn and at every opportunity, to change his way of being in the world. Most of those changes advocated by don Juan also ring true for us field researchers as well.
Here is one such case. Don Juan has been teaching Carlos how to hunt. Carlos has had a successful hunt, where he catches, cleans, and roasts five quail. Meanwhile, as he eats, he tells don Juan about his disappointments with other people, especially a young woman whom he had loved.
Don Juan refuses to console or humor Carlos. He has something important to teach him; something about learning from being in the world. Don Juan would agree with us that the world of experience is a generous place. But if we act without confidence in that generosity, we then get greedy or tenuous. We follow the same old tracks, day after day, and then wonder why we cannot find anything new. Or else we harvest everything we find as soon as we find it, and then wonder later on why there is no more game or no more berries on the shrubs and vines. Don Juan boils this all down into the art of being inaccessible (Castaneda, 1972):
"'The art of the hunter is to be inaccessible,' he said....'To be inaccessible means that you touch the world around you sparingly. You don't eat five quail; you eat one. You don't damage the plants just to make a barbeque pit. You don't expose yourself to the power of the wind unless it is mandatory. You don't use and squeeze people until they have shriveled, especially the people you love....
"'To be unavailable means that you deliberately avoid exhausting yourself and others,' he continued. 'It means that you are not hungry and desperate, like the poor bastard who feels he will never eat again and devours all the food he can, all five quail!'
"Don Juan was definitely hitting me below the belt. I laughed and that seemed to please him. He touched my back lightly.
"'A hunter knows that he will lure game into his traps over and over again, so he doesn't worry. To worry is to become accessible, unwittingly accessible. And once you worry you cling to anything out of desperation; and once you cling you are bound to get exhausted or to exhaust whoever or whatever you are clinging to.'
"I told him that in my day-to-day life it was inconceivable to be inaccessible. My point was that in order to function I had to be within the reach of everyone that had something to do with me.
"'I've already told you to be inaccessible does not mean to hide or to be secretive,' he said calmly. 'It doesn't mean that you cannot deal with people, either. A hunter uses his world sparingly and with tenderness, regardless of whether the world might be things, or plants, or animals, or people, or power. A hunter deals intimately with his world and yet he is inaccessible to that same world.'
"'That's a contradiction,' I said. 'He cannot be inaccessible, if her is there in his world, hour after hour, day after day.'
"'You did not understand,' don Juan said patiently. 'He is inaccessible because he's not squeezing his world out of shape. He taps it lightly, stays for as long as he needs to, and then swiftly moves away leaving hardly a mark (pp. 79-80).'"
The Simple Point:
The world of experience is a generous place.
The Judgment:
Good researchers learn how to work with what they find.
Great researchers learn to find what no one else can find.

The Lass of Augrim sings Pangur Ban

2011-03-29T19:43:00.001-07:00

The inward light:
The simple point of this chapter is this: Interpretation matters. It is the inward light that illuminates the nature of something we find in the world of experience. But the notion of interpretation is anything but simple. Consider the plight of Gabriel Conroy in the following example.
Gretta on the Stairway:
Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta are preparing to leave a party at the house of his elderly maiden aunts. A visiting musician is singing a simple Irish air as Gabriel is saying his good-byes. It is late December in Dublin, and the weather is cold. We are in the middle of the last story of Dubliners, by James Joyce. The story itself is a long and famous piece called "The Dead."
In my current paperback edition of Dubliners (1914/1999), the scene starts on page 180. Here we see Gabriel as he watches Gretta, who herself stands at the top of the shadowy stair landing and strains to hear the voice of the singer:
"Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall staring up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terra-cotta and salmon-pink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on the piano and a few notes of a man's voice singing (p. 180)."
Gretta is pensive, and Gabriel teases her. When they finally get back to their hotel room, Gretta reveals to her husband that when she was a mere girl, she had fallen in love with a frail lad by the name of Michael Furey. She was sent off that fall to convent for her education, but on the night before she left, Michael stood outside her window in the pouring rain and sang "The Lass of Augrim" to proclaim his love for her. She found out, soon after she left for the home, that he died of pneumonia caught perhaps on that very evening.
It is as if Gabriel’s world is completely reoriented by this long-hidden revelation. As Gretta drifts into sleep, Gabriel stares at her (Joyce, 1914/1999: 190):
“Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So, she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think what a poor part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long on her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful but he knew it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.”
And finally, as Gabriel turns to look out the window , Joyce finishes the story and the epiphany (Joyce, 1916/1966: pp. 191-192):
“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His souls swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Epiphanies:
Joyce himself said that his writing was about epiphanies, and this is certainly true about the last 12 pages of "The Dead." Gabriel Conroy is at first astounded, and then transformed, by what he comes to learn on this fateful night.
What is an epiphany? The concept is first grounded in Greek tragedy, as the moment when a heavenly messenger arrives and informs the audience which Olympian myth is being played out by the drama on-stage. As a Christian term, it refers to the experience of the Three Wise Men, or the Three Kings from the East, after they made their pilgrimage to Bethlehem and the crib of the baby Jesus. The Feast of the Epiphany, celebrated on the 6th of January, commemorates this arrival.
So what did the Wise Men find they came upon the crib in the manger? At one level, they found a perfectly ordinary scene. A newborn infant was asleep in a crib lined with hay, tucked in a manger alongside sheep and donkeys and other livestock. Had they been in a hurry, they might well have walked by and bothered to peer inside. After all, what would they see there, that they could not see in countless other villages and hamlets scattered about the area?
But they were not in a hurry. They were looking for something special. And according to biblical legend, they found it. They found nothing less than the Cosmic and the Universal, shining like a bright light through the mundane trappings of the nativity scene. This experience of seeing the cosmic, the divine, or the universal in the fleeting passage of the ordinary, is what Joyce meant by an epiphany.
Joyce lays out a stunning epiphany in the final pages of "The Dead." When I finally finish reading the passage to my class, there is an inevitable and powerful silence. My students are almost afraid to speak, to break the extraordinary spell that Joyce's words have woven upon us. He does not merely bring us to look at an epiphany. He locates us within it, so that we take it on and feel its power for ourselves.
Epiphanies and other meanings:
But it is not our purpose, however pleasant or significant it might be, to seek out insight, spiritual or otherwise, from works of literary genius. After all, we are empirical researchers and we are striving to learn qualitative empirical methods.
Therefore, we need to link our efforts to procedures for the systematic empirical inquiry into meaning. Currently, there are three broad models for dealing with meaning in qualitative research. Let us take a brief look at each.
Becoming a meaning maker:
Here we find various forms and shades of constructivism (von Glaserfeld, 1984), social constructionism (Gergen, 1994), social constructivism (Duffy & Cunningham, 1996), cultural psychology (Vygotsky, 1934/1987, Cole, 1996), and the like. Most models of constructivism operate by taking a stand towared one or both of two fundamental assumptions.
The first fundamental constructivist assumption is that the world is meaning poor. By this, they mean that there is no meaning per se in the world. As a consequence, any system of meaning that we have for ourselves is constructed. We, as people living in the world, must then get our meaning from other sources. We either do the constructing ourselves, or we let other people make our meaning for us.
The second fundamental assumption is that meaning is always derived from what we take as knowledge. In other words, meaning is an act we finally use to organize a body of knowledge. In fact, we cannot really say that we have knowledge until we have this larger meaning frame in place. For this reason, many constructivists essentially use the concepts of knowledge and meaning as if they were interchangeable. As with meaning, the question is who does our constructing of knowledge? Do we passively accept the knowledge claims and systems of others, or do we construct our own?
One extremely common mistake we make, according to many constructivists (e.g., Duffy & Cunningham, 1996), is thinking that any piece of knowledge should be sought for as part of some predetermined body of knowledge. This piece of knowledge or even body of knowledge can then be transmitted via some act of instruction or by some instructor, to us. We then assimilate this transmitted knowledge into our existing picture of the world.
The preferred alternative, and the basis for the existence of constructivist approaches, is the notion that we should construct our own knowledge, and thereby our own systems of meaning. In this way, we are not dependent upon the whims or agendas or motives of others, when it comes to making sense of the world. And because the world itself is meaning poor, the only other systems of meaning we have to deal with are those created by other persons or institutions. So we do not really have to worry about our own system of meaning clashing with any "natural" meaning system.
Very few constructivists, however, argue that this sort of knowledge acquisition as meaning making is strictly a private or individual act. Instead, they talk about the "co-construction" of meaning.
Constructivists look upon the action of creating meaning as a form of research. In other words, the meaning making is the research. Sometimes, though, they are also interested in how to make the meaning making process more effective and/or more efficient. In that case, they would pay attention to conditions and factors that affect the meaning making process. Finally, they might also focus on the consequences of particular acts of meaning making. Predicting or documenting these consequences then becomes part of the research process.
Becoming a meaning accountant:
Here we find approaches like grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1990), discourse analysis (Silverman, 1993), content analysis (Krippendorf, 1980), and the like. The basic assumption of these models is that circumstances and interactions contain meanings that are organized and related in systematic ways. The role of research then becomes to uncover these relations and patterns, document them, and demonstrate how these parts of meaning are organized into a larger and more comprehensive picture.
It is really not important to meaning accountants to explain how meanings are formed, or what their basic natures are. Those issues do not really impact the methods used. In a sense, these methods are neutral toward the ultimate source of meanings. Are they constructed or do they exist in the world? It really does not matter, so long as they can be shown to be present in certain documents or interactions. These methods, then, deal with how meanings are used, and not so much with what they are.
We have a two stage process. First, we find meaning units. Meanings are assumed to be present in discrete self-contained quanta called meaning units. If the research is being done on, say, a transcript, then the researcher reads the transcript carefully and brackets each and every meaning unit. Importantly, once the meaning unit identification process is completed, each and every word of the transcript must, in principle, be shown to belong to one, and only one, meaning unit. Whether or not the assignment to meaning units is actually done with this sort of thoroughness depends on the method, and the reasons for doing the research. But it is important to remember that, even if a particular text is not broken down completely, the methods allow for the possibility that it could be, if such a total process were needed.
Different forms of accountancy research deal with meaning units in different ways. Content analysis and conversation analysis apply the calculus of their respective methods to the meaning units, to determine what sorts of meanings they are. Paulos (1998) in an interesting turn in this direction, has argued for the analysis of mathematical patterns in stories and other forms of narrative.
Becoming a meaning reader:
Here we find the various shapes and forms of hermeneutical methods. The term "hermeneutics" comes from the name of Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods. Hermes, who was known as Mercury to the Romans, was famed for his fleet winged feet and the quickness of his mind and his wit. Not always serious, he was a distant cousin in that regard to the Norse god Loki, and even that quintessential trickster from Native American lore, Coyote.
For most practitioners, though, hermeneutics is fairly serious business. We only see its playful side when we look upon contemporary postmodern hermeneutic variations such as deconstruction. We will look at these sorts of postmodern initiatives in one of our final lessons, but for now we need to retreat a bit historically.
For all intents and purposes, hermeneutic inquiry was born in biblical study. Biblical scholars believe that these religious texts were given to us as an act of direct revelation from God. Since they were revelation, then by definition they must be true. But here is the rub. Sometimes, these texts don't seem to make that much sense, or even at times they seem to have been contradicted by history.
To someone who views biblical text from a strictly historical perspective, the presence of historical error, for example, is easily explained. The Bible turned out to be wrong. It got its facts wrong, or it made predictions that did not come true.
For a scholar who believes in the revelatory character of the Bible, however, the task at hand in the face of such contradiction is much different. As early as the fifth century AD, we have Augustine turning his formidable intellect to this problem. Augustine argued that all reading involved four simultaneous processes -- we read literally, we read allegorically, we read morally, and we read anagogically (or, in such a way as to lead to the salvation of our souls). When a text appears to be erroneous, it is only so literally. We must then assume that the text was never meant to deliver its message of revelation in a literal fashion. We are instead to look at its content from an allegorical, or a moral, or a spiritual perspective. Often, these messages were "tucked away" beneath the apparently simple surface of the literal message, and their true depth and significance did not appear until the careful reader worked his or her way through these surface meanings to the core underneath.
The allegorical reading tradition, in particular, had a rich history for Augustine to draw upon. Scholars from the Hellenistic era of Alexandria and its surrounds in the second century AD, and in particular such thinkers as Origen and Philo, honed their allegorical reading skills to a fine art. And, as a later scholar such as Augustine might argue, did not Jesus himself reveal his deepest and most profound truths not as prescriptions, but as parables?
Contemporary hermeneutical scholarship has evolved quite a distance from its biblical roots. At the outset of the modern era, things still look pretty much as they have for centuries (Grondin, 1991/1994):
"Since its emergence in the seventeenth century, the word hermeneutics has referred to the science or art of interpretation. Until the end of the nineteenth century, it usually took the form of a theory that promised to lay out the rules governing the discipline of interpretation. Its purpose was predominantly normative, even technical. Hermeneutics limited itself to giving methodological directions to the specifically interpretive sciences, with the end of avoiding arbitrariness in interpretation as far as possible(p. 1)."
With the onset of the modern era, and in particular the phenomenology of Heidegger, we have the emergence of modern hermeneutics. In Dilthey and Schliermacher early on, and in Gadamer and Ricouer later, we have a shift in the focus and purpose of hermeneutics. Gadamer, the most important contemporary voice in hermeneutics, took the following stance against method per se and especially propositional thinking in favor of the "natural" power of language (Grondin, 1991/1994):
"The privileging of method is clearly connected to the privileging of propositions in Western and especially modern consciousness, for the idea of method draws its power from the fact that certain objects and processes can be experimentally isolated and thereby controlled. Such isolation does violence to language, however. Specifically, understanding what is said cannot be reduced to a cognizing subject's intellectual comprehension of an objectivizable, isolable content; understanding results just as much from belonging to an ongoing, continuing tradition -- that is, to a dialogue in the context of which everything that is said becomes meaningful and logical for us. In his observations on language, Gadamer brings to a climax the objections against modernity's privileging of method which he had first problematized in the context of the human sciences. This privilege is perfectly obvious because method promises the domination of things that it has isolated, made repeatable and reusable, and thus put to our disposal. It is an open question, however, whether such isolation every succeeds in the case of language or one's own understanding. Do we understand if and to what extent we control? Isn't this a case of finitude explaining itself away? The hermeneut answers that we understand, rather, because something speaks to us from a tradition to which we -- more or less loosely -- belong (pp. 118-119)."
Grappling with these sorts of issues, of the relation of meaning to language and tradition and method, cannot be really accomplished without taking at least a cursory look at phenomenology. Gadamer explicitly draws upon Heidegger, for instance, and the issues of language and consciousness and history via tradition cut to the heart of phenomenological thinking.
The canvas of phenomenology:
One of the most confusing things for a budding qualitative researcher is that the term "phenomenology" and "phenomenological" seems to be tossed around fairly regularly, but there does not seem to be any clear sense to what it really means.
For instance, each of the three approaches discussed above have been described as being "phenomenological." How right and how wrong are those characterizations? Is there some broader sense of the term that we can talk about, and then see how it applies to the various ways it is used in the field of qualitative research?
In an earlier lesson we compared phenomenology to Impressionist painting, in order to contrast it with positivism. Now, let us dig deeper into that metaphor to see if we can tease out the major strands of phenomenological thought that inform contemporary qualitative inquiry.
Consider the Impressionist revolution in art. Impressionists, from Cezanne to Van Gogh, were wrestling with the same problem. The science of their times told them that we do not see objects directly. Instead, we see the play of light upon those same objects. So, as painters, they were interested in capturing on their canvases, this very same representation of light on the surfaces of things. In other words, they were abandoning the task of painting Things for the more subtle yet more experiential task of painting Light upon Things.
It is a very short step from the notion of Light upon Things in art, to the notion of Consciousness upon Things in phenomenology. That is, the phenomenologist, from Husserl to today, has realized that our experiences are experiences of the play of our consciousness (and for other thinkers, the consciousness of others) upon the "objects" of the world.
Husserl, who was the founder of phenomenology, was committed to the notion of the Thing beneath the Play of Consciousness, which he called the "thing in itself" or the "transcendental object." For Husserl, phenomenology was a method based on acknowledging the ubiquitous presence of the play of consciousness, but which further strived to "bracket" or hold still that conscious perception by an ongoing act of introspection. All of these procedures were seen as a means to an end, namely, of being able finally to come into contact with the Thing in Itself.
Heidegger was the second major force in phenomenological thinking. Let me say at the outset that I am quite aware of the controversy that swirls around Heidegger to this day. His refusal to quit the Nazi party during the 1930's and 1940's has stained his personal reputation possibly beyond repair. My personal take is that I suspect Heidegger's stance toward Nazism was due as much to his personal political indifference as it was to anything else, but of course I respect the views of those who claim otherwise.
Heidegger moved phenomenology away from a technical method to a means for living and understanding one's life. He agreed with Duns Scotus that the essence of existence is being qua being. For us human beings, it means that we experience our lives as if we are thrown into an existence that is already in full swing and running by its own rules. When have a choice, then: we can choose to live inauthentically, or to live authentically. When we live inauthentically, we go along with the crowd, or avoid serious questions, or immerse ourselves in the minutae of everyday life and lose sight of the bigger picture. Only when we exercise our fundamental freedom and choose to try to find our relation to things in themselves, are we being truly authentic. In a sense, Heidegger took Husserl's model for inquiry and made it into a model for the conduct of the thoughtful life.
Other phenomologists wanted to get beyond the personal and psychological and introspective dimensions of phenomenology, and to use the basic tenets of the method in a more scientific way to understand the play of consciousness as an objective fact in the world. Alfred Schutz, as we saw earlier, was committed to this perspective, and his legacy was picked up and extended by such psychological phenomenologists as Giorgi and Moustakas. Mousakas (1994) describes this process succinctly:
"The empirical phenomenological approach involves a return to experience in order to obtain comprehensive descriptions that provide the basis for a reflective structural analysis that portrays the essences of the experience.... The human scientist determines the underlying structures of an experience by interpreting the originally given descriptions of the situation in which the experience occurs (p. 13)."
Sometimes, it looks as if interpretation is all about the creation and exchange of ideas from one set of minds to another. But there are definitely physical dimensions to interpretation. To see this clearly, let us wander off to a completely different cultural milieu.
Singing the Songlines:
In the last chapter, I looked at Carlos Castaneda. In this lesson I'm about to use Bruce Chatwin. Do I have something against serious field researchers? Do I have some personal predilection for controversial and, arguably, off base cultural chroniclers? I hope not. I want to remind you not to accept each and every thing that Castaneda or Chatwin says as the gospel truth. In fact, one of the reasons that I want to use Chatwin here is because his work is an example, in an important way, of something you should not do. See if you can figure out what I mean as you read over his account.
Now that I have warned you about Chatwin, who was he anyway? Bruce Chatwin was not an anthropologist or sociologist. He was not really a journalist, or even a travel writer. He was a restless soul, and his restless appetites eventually brought about his early demise. But in his short lifetime, he managed to craft several unique accounts of places Far Away. My personal favorite was his uneven but fascinating look at the Songlines of Australia (Chatwin, 1987).
Chatwin tells his story through the eyes of Arkady Volchok, a 30 year old Australian citizen and son of a Cossack. Volchok had the task of mapping Aboriginal sacred sites for the railroad. He lived alone, even though he was married and had a family, and often wandered "out bush" like the peoples he was trying to represent.
In one early meeting, Chatwin confesses that he has come to Australia to learn firsthand about the fabled Songlines. He and Volchok struggle to comprehend what soon become alien notions:
"A man's 'own country', even an empty stretch of spinifex, was itself a sacred ikon that must remain unscarred.
"'Unscarred, you mean, by roads or mines or railways?'
"'To wound the earth,' he answered earnestly, 'is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth, they are wounding you. The land should be left untouched: as it was in the Dreamtime when the Ancestors sang the world into existence (p. 11)."
When the Ancestors sang the world into existence, they started the process of creating the Songlines:
"To get to grips with the concept of the Dreamtime, he said, you had to understand it as an Aboriginal equivalent of the first two chapters of Genesis -- with one significant difference.
"In Genesis, God first created the 'living things' and then fashioned Father Adam from clay. Here in Australia, the Ancestors created themselves from clay, hundreds and thousands of them, one for each totemic species.
"'So when an Aboriginal tells you ,"I have a Wallaby Dreaming,' he means, 'My totem is Wallaby. I am a member of the Wallaby clan.'
"'So a Dreaming is a clan emblem? A badge to distinguish 'us' from 'them'? 'Our country' from 'their country'?
"'Much more than that,' he said.
"Every Wallaby Man believes he was descended from a universal Wallaby Father, who was the ancestor of all other Wallaby Men and of all living wallabies. Wallabies, therefore, were his brothers. To kill one for food was both fratricide and cannibalism (p. 12)."
So far, what we have is fairly straightforward anthropology. But the scenario starts to grow a bit stranger:
"'Any species.' he said, 'can be a Dreaming. A virus can be a Dreaming. You can have a chickenpox Dreaming, a rain Dreaming, a desert-orange Dreaming, a lice Dreaming. In the Kimberleys they've now got a money Dreaming....'
"He went on to explain how each totemic ancestor, while traveling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as 'ways' of communication between the most far-flung tribes (pp. 12-13)."
Chatwin now takes us deeper into this exotic view of the world. All of a sudden, what at first seemed to be fairly innocuous descriptions of totems and tribal identity markers take on genuine practical dimensions. That is, these patterns of interpretations draw from the physical world, and in turn play on that same world to allow the Aborigines to accomplish feats that would defy our culture:
"'A song,' he said, 'was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.'
"'And would a man on 'walkabout' always be traveling down one of the Songlines?'
"'In the old days, yes,' he agreed. 'Nowadays, they go by train or car.'
"'Suppose the main strayed from his Songline?'
"'He would be trespassing. He might get speared for it.'
"'But as long as he stuck to the track, he'd always find people who shared his Dreaming? Who were, in fact, his brothers?'
"'Yes.'
"'From whom he could expect hospitality?'
"'And vice versa (p. 13).'"
Just how powerful and effective a means of communication these Songlines could be, Chatwin found out later on from a former Benedictine priest named Flynn:
"The next point, he said, was to understand that every song-cycle went leap-frogging through language barriers, regardless of tribe or frontier. A Dreaming-track might start in the north-west, near Broome; thread its way through twenty languages or more,; and go on to hit the sea near Adelaide.
"'And yet,' I said, 'it's still the same song,'
"'Our people' Flynn said, 'say they recognize a song by its 'taste' or 'smell'... by which, of course, they mean the 'tune.' The tune always stays the same, from the opening bars to the finale.'
"'Words may change,' Arkady interrupted again, 'but the melody lingers on.'
"'Does that mean,' I asked, 'that a young man on Walkabout could sing his way across Australia providing he could hum the right tune?'
"'In theory, yes,' Flynn agreed ( pp. 58-59)."
Given the potential importance of the Songlines and the Dreaming-lines for any form of communication or trade, Chatwin was not surprised to find just how ubiquitous these lays were in ordinary life:
"In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or a creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualize the Songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every 'episode' was readable in terms of geology.
"'By episode, ' I asked, 'you mean 'sacred site?''
"'I do.'
"'The kind of site you're surveying for the railway? ...'
"'And the distance between two such sites can be measured as a stretch of song?'
"That,' said Arkady, 'is the cause of all my troubles with the railway people (pp. 13-14).'"
The railway people were trying to find the best route to lay track without disturbing sacred sites in the process. But they carried with them the Western interpretation of "sacred site." For them, a sacred site was a church or a graveyard or a place where some religious significant event had occurred. How was Arkady to bridge the vast gulf of interpretation between the two cultures, especially when that very gulf fostered types of communication for the Aborigines that had no parallel to the West?
"It was one thing to persuade a surveyor that a heap of boulders were the eggs of the Rainbow Snake, or a lump of reddish sandstone was the liver of a speared kangaroo. It was something else to convince him that a featureless stretch of gravel was the musical equivalent of Beethoven's Opus 111 (p. 14)."
So we have the interesting of two cultures who can achieve things in the physical world that the other cannot, because of the differences in the ways that the cultures interpret that same world. We take leave of Chatwin and Volchok as they explore the consequences of this puzzling state of affairs:
"By singing the world into existence, he said, the Ancestors had been poets in the original sense of poesis, meaning 'creation.' No Aboriginal could conceive that the created world was in any way imperfect. His religious life had a single aim: to keep the land the way it was and should be. The man who went 'Walkabout' was making a ritual journey. He trod in the footsteps of his Ancestor. He sang the Ancestor's stanzas without changing a word or note -- and so recreated the Creation....
"Aboriginals could not believe the country existed until they could see it and sing it -- just as, in the Dreamtime, the country had not existed until the Ancestors had sung it.
"'So the land,' I said, 'must first exist as a concept in the mind? Then it must be sung? Only then can it be said to exist?'
"'Yes....'
"'Then I suppose these three hundred miles of steel, slicing through innumerable songs, are bound to upset your 'old men's' mental balance?'
"'Yes and no,' he said. 'They're very tough, emotionally, and very pragmatic. Besides, they've seen far worse than a railway.'
"Aboriginals believed that all the 'living things' had been made in secret beneath the earth's crust, as well as all the white man's gear -- his aeroplanes, his guns, his Toyota Land Cruisers -- and every invention that will ever be invented; slumbering below the surface, waiting their turn to be called.
"'Perhaps,' I suggested, 'they could sing the railway back into the created world of God?'
"'You bet,' said Arkady (pp. 14-15)."
What Chatwin did wrong:
Chatwin spends a great deal of time introducing us to the way that the aboriginal people have created and developed the songlines. We can see a culture which seems to zig everywhere our own culture zags, and which looks at meaning not as some mental phenomenon, but as part and parcel of the apparently empty and featureless landscape of the Outback.
So what did Chatwin do wrong? Through this whole complex introductory exposition, he forgets to talk to any real actual native aboriginals. He is filtering everything he presents through the words of Volchok and Flynn. How do we know that these two second-layer informants really do understand what the aboriginals mean by songlines? And if they do, how can we be sure that Chatwin himself got their stories straight? Chatwin tells a fascinating story, but how much of it can we believe? Believing primary informants is sometimes risky, but setting your stock in informants of informants is exponentially more hazardous.
Since Chatwin was a journalist and not an anthropologist, I suppose he could excuse his method by saying that he was really doing a story about Arkady Volchok and not the songlines, even though The Songlines is the title of his book. But as field researchers, we would have no such excuse. Our informants are not the people who know about the people we are interested in, but the people we are interested in themselves. We can go to folks like Arkady as a check to see if we, as Westerners, are seeing things the way a Westerner who is more used to the situation would see it. But that is no substitute for direct experience and direct information. Don't try to interpret interpreted data.
Lest we feel superior, and say smugly that we would never fall into this sort of trap, let me ask you a question. When you get interested in a method or approach to research, do you go to the primary sources to see what the creators of the method have to say, or do you rely on what someone else has to say? I'm glad you are reading this book, and I hope it helps you build a framework for understanding. But what I have to say about, say, phenomenology or grounded theory or hermeneutics or even Castaneda and Chatwin, for that matter, is second hand stuff filtered through my way of thinking and understanding. If a method of interpretation or research really resonates with your purposes, run, don't walk, to the primary sources.
A cat named Pangur Ban:
The complexity that surrounds interpretation seems almost too much to interpret itself. As researchers, we need to make commitments to directions for interpretation, and to honestly and openly share those commitments with others as we do and describe our work.
In fairness, then, let me begin with myself. My favorite strategy for interpretation combines the quest for epiphany as heralded by Joyce with the careful attention to actual detail that characterized the travelers along the Australian songlines. In one apparently simple piece on stalking and fulfillment, I would like to display my favorite model of the interpreter in the empirical world.
I am speaking of the nameless Irish monk who was the master of Pangur Ban. Pangur Ban, which is Welsh for "white cat" is the subject of one of the most famous poems in early medieval history. As near as we know, it was written sometime in the 9th century, which makes it a contemporary of that other masterpiece penned by an anonymous Irish monk, namely Beowulf.
First, courtesy of that ubiquitous medieval codicologist, James Marchand (20 March 1996, private communicaton), we have Pangur Ban transliterated from its original Gaelic (sh = s with a dot over it, / = virgule = long mark):

"Messe ocus Pangur Ba/n

Messe ocus Pangur ba/n,
cechtar nathar fria shainda/n:
bi/th a menmasam fri seilgg,
mu menma ce/in im shaincheirdd.

Caraimse fos, ferr cach clu/
oc mu lebra/n, le/ir ingnu;
ni/ foirmtech frimm Pangur ba/n:
caraid cesin a maccda/n.

O/ ru biam, sce/l cen sci/s,
innar tegdais, ar n-o/endi/s,
ta/ithiunn, di/chri/chide clius,
ni/ fris tarddam ar n-a/thius.

Gna/th, hu/araib, ar gressaib gal
glenaid luch inna li/nsam;
os me/, du-fuit im li/n che/in
dliged ndoraid cu ndronche/ill.

Fu/achaidsem fri frega fa/l
a rosc, a ngle/se comla/n;
fu/achimm che/in fri fe/gi fis
mu rosc re/il, cesu imdis.

Fa/elidsem cu nde/ne dul
hi nglen luch inna ge/rchrub;
hi tucu cheist ndoraid ndil
os me/ chene am fa/elid.

Cia beimmi a-min nach re/
ni/ derban ca/ch a che/le:
maith la cechtar na/r a da/n;
subaigthius a o/enura/n.

He/ fesin as choimsid da/u
in muid du-ngni/ cach o/enla/u;
du thabairt doraid du gle/
for mu mud ce/in am messe."

As musical as the Gaelic is phonetically, its meaning is completely mysterious to me. Given that I have absolutely no skills or knowledge when it comes to medieval Gaelic, I am again indebted to Jim for the following literal translation (Marchand, 20 March 1996, personal communication):

"The Scholar and his Cat

I and White Pangur, each of us in his special craft. His mind is set on
hunting; my mind is on my special subject.

I love resting (better than any fame) at my book, with diligent
understanding; White Pangur is not envious of me; he loves his childish craft.

When we are (tale without tiredness), in our house, being alone, we have an endless sport, a thing to which we may apply our skill.

It is usual, at times, by feats of valor, that a mouse sticks in his net.
As for me, there falls into my net, a difficult rule with hard meaning.

He points fiercely against an enclosing wall his eye, bright, perfect. I
myself direct against the keenness of knowledge my sharp eye, though it be quite weak.

He is happy with swiftness of movement upon a mouse sticking in his sharp paws. Which I understand a difficult pleasant problem, as for me, I am happy, too.

Though we may be indeed (like this) at any time, neither disturbs his
partner; good to each of us is his art, each rejoices in them.

He himself is master of it, the work which he does every day. To bring clarity to difficulty, I am at my own work."

The mysterious scribe:
Absolutely nothing of a personal historical nature is known about the anonymous 9th century Irish monk who was the author of this poem. He was, however, almost certainly one of the Vagrantes, or wandering Irish monks from the turn of the previous millennium who had helped keep the works of Western civilization alive during those times.
His poem was found in the margins of a manuscript in a monastery in Austria. I like to think that he had finished his copying task, which usually involved writing as the original manuscript was being read in the scriptorium by the master of the scribes, and he jotted down this poem as he waited for his less nimble fellow copyists to finish writing their renditions.
The most popular modern English version of Pangur Ban, and the one that best captures the musical lyricism of the original Gaelic, is the Robin Flowers translation (Murphy & MacKillop, 1987, pp. 22-23):
"I, and Pangur Ban, my cat,
‘Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.

‘Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light."

Seven messages from Pangur Ban:
True to the spirit of the author, we will turn to this poem as a source of "messages" about the art of stalking meaning in the world. These messages about interpretation are, of course, themselves interpretations. We will use a version of the poem which was translated from the original Gaelic by W.H. Auden, and was used as the lyrics for Samuel Barber, op. 29, Hermit’s Song VIII. A Monk and His Cat (1980):
Pangur, white Pangur, how happy we are
Alone together, scholar and cat
Each has his own work to do daily;
For you it is hunting, for me study.
Your shining eye watches the wall;
My feeble eye is fixed on a book.
You rejoice, when your claws entrap a mouse;
I rejoice, when my mind fathoms a problem.
Pleased with his own art, neither hinders the other;
Thus we live ever without tedium and envy.
Message #1: Searching the margins:
Our first message is derived from a historical and cultural look at the poem. We know very little about this work, which is arguably the most beloved poem of medieval Irish literature. We do know that it was “found in a miscellany of notes on grammar, astronomy, and Latin poetry in the monastery of St. Paul.... (Murphy & MacKillop, 1987; p. 22).” The copy was apparently made in this monastery in Carinthia in southern Austria sometime in either the Eighth or Ninth Century AD.
According to Walsh (1942), the author was most likely a wandering Irishman. These wanderers, or Hibernici exules, played an important role in the dissemination of learning throughout Europe during this period (Walsh, 1942; pp. 40-41). As Murphy & MacKillop (1987) further point out, “the monk-poet must have been a kindred spirit to the monk-scribe whose playful white cats arrest their own mice on the Chi-Rho page of the Book of Kells (p. 22).” Pangur is a Welsh name, and Ban is Welsh for white. This is all we know of the author and his Celtic roots.
The copying of manuscripts was a major activity for many medieval monasteries. As LeClercq (1961) pointed out, the scriptorium was a central place in the medieval monastery not just for its intellectual, but also for its spiritual role: “The task of the copyist was an authentic form of aestheticism....It was work that was both manual and intellectual (p. 122).”
Often in these copied documents, we find extensive marginal notes. Writing in the margins was a common act for medieval scribes. There were two primary forms of marginalia. The first consisted of glosses. These are similar to the margin notes that many members of the scholarly community employ to this day in their own books. But Pangur Ban was most likely the second kind of marginalia. While there is no hard evidence to support the following claim, it makes some sense to think that this second form of marginalia was composed by copyists who were working in group copying sessions.
In these group sessions, an older and senior copyist would “lecture” (from the Latin lectio, meaning to read), that is, read the main text, while the other scribes would make copies from the oral rendition. It stands to reason that the smartest and most adept copyists would often wait for their slower comrades to catch up. Was our Hibernici exule one of these bright copyists who, while waiting for the others, composed the poem as a subtle tribute to his homeland and as a way to describe himself as a scholar and a person with a thirst for learning and understanding?
If so, then can we allow the whole poem to stand as an allegory for all those learners who sit and wait for others to catch up and who, in their thirst to know and understand, reflect upon their lives and their intellectual desires?
Does this long dead monk speak to the bored and disaffected student of today who, having grasped the snail’s-paced curricular lessons, sits in his or her desk and dreams of what it would be like to be able to really learn, to stalk learning and ideas like Pangur Ban, instead of waiting in a desk for someone to dole out bits of learning that are not only approved by a curricular process, but which the student must absolutely demonstrate a grasp and learning of under penalty of bad grades and the removal of social privileges that attend to good grades?
How well does the margins of a medieval manuscript speak to the student who is marginalized by his or her own brightness and lack of interest in playing the curriculum game?
Now, I want to move to the lines from the poem itself. I would like to couch the following messages as answers to questions raised by our active reflection upon the lines.
Message #2: “Pangur, white Pangur, how happy we are...”
What sort of world was the medieval world of the mind? How could they have been happy there? What can we learn from this about our ways of understanding research?
The monk says that he and Pangur are happy. This is a much different sense of happiness than we are accustomed to nowadays. What makes the scholar of today happy? In short, to have support for his/her work. That support comes in the form of grant money, release time, space in the journals to publish his/her work, time to read papers at conventions and meetings, book contracts, invitations to lecture, fellowships, consulting contracts, or even just a steady academic position, hopefully with tenure. In the pursuit of any and all of these forms of support, the contemporary academic finds himself/herself in competition with other scholars. All of the resources listed above are scarce resources, and the academic must compete with others for these resources. At stake are all of the rewards of the academic system. More often than not, in order to succeed the academic has to view his/her work as a commodity whose value needs to be enhanced in the academic and larger marketplace. The happy academic of today is the extremely lucky individual who finds that his/her work is viewed as a hot commodity, and that he/she can just go about doing his/her work without worrying about how to market it or package it so that things like jobs, grants, promotions, tenure, contracts, and fellowships are forthcoming. Such an academic would find himself/herself quite at piece with this age.
Our medieval scholar is quite different in his happiness. Promotion of himself or his ideas are the farthest thing from his mind. Instead, he sees himself as part of a chain of scholars, reaching back to classical Athens itself. His happiness is more of a contentment. He is working as a scholar and a monk because that is his role to play in his society. As a copyist, he is working to preserve ideas that can be preserved in no other way. The ongoing existence of the ideas that ground his culture are maintained by monks such as himself. But it is more than just maintenance. Within the boundaries of preserving the structure of culture, these medieval scholars were quite prolific. Medieval monks wrote a variety of original materials, from the treatises in logic and philosophy of an Aquinas to the epic Beowulf, which was apparently written by an Irish monk of the Tenth Century AD.
Message #3: “Alone together, scholar and cat...”
What is the sense of kinship that the monk felt with the cat? How is this a metaphor for the life of a researcher?
Our monk celebrates the time he has to himself to pursue his learning, keeping company with only his cat. Does this mean our monk is a recluse? Probably not. Instead, like all contemplatives, he relishes the time he can spend away from the demands of others, to seek out his interior voice. Interior guidance was incredibly important for medieval scholars, since they held their work accountable to moral, as well as intellectual, standards. That is, a work of scholarship was not only a repository of information and a theoretical account of nature or culture, but also a guide for understanding the meaning of life and a lesson for how to refine and improve one’s own life.
The presence of moral imperatives such as these in scholarly works make us nervous today, since most moral guides we see are either exclusionary, or puritanical, or both. Such was not the case for the medieval scholar. These scholars were inclusive and humanistic in their outlooks. An excellent example of this can be found in the Gesta Romanorum (Swan & Hooper, 1876/1959). These tales collected from the Mediterranean, India, Persia, the Middle East, Scandinavia, and elsewhere, and they tell tales of kings, queens, magicians, thieves, and countless others. At the end of each tale, no matter how entertaining or apparently worldly, the allegorical elements were explicated and a moral lesson was drawn. In the end, it was perfectly acceptable for an act of scholarship to delight and inform the reader, but it was held as especially important for the scholar to offer a path for moral guidance.
Message #4: “ Each has his own work to do daily; For you it is hunting, for me study...”
How can using the act of hunting serve as a useful metaphor for understanding the act of research?
Cronin (1941) argues that the role of inquiry into the natural world by the medieval scholar has been seriously misunderstood by those of us today. When we think of the Middle Ages as being a time of theological, or at best perhaps logic al, inquiry, we assume that the medieval scholar is not interested in the natural world per se. Cronin counters this claim:
"They... were not intent upon losing sight of this world in order to gain an understanding of the next; rather, it was their problem to acquire an
understanding of the next world through the proper interpretation of the
present visible world. The centuries from the sixth to the twelfth may have been dark for the history of scientific observation, but it is a mistake to interpret this fact as evidence of contempt for the content of science (p. 194)."
The medieval researcher was just as likely to look inwardly as outwardly for guidance in understanding the natural world. These directions were seen as complementary, and not in competition with each other. Therefore, it is perfectly legitimate, in his view, to focus upon the ins and outs of the act of hunting, not for itself, but to act as a way to illuminate and discover aspects of learning that might not be as apparent from another perspective.
Message #5: “ Your shining eye watches the wall; My feeble eye is fixed on a book...”
Why does the monk draw a keen distinction between Pangur’s keen eye and prowess, and his own feeble senses?
Animals played an important symbolic role to the medieval scholar; witness the incredible importance of bestiaries and the like. In this poem, the symbolism of Pangur Ban the hunter is meant to be drawn out clearly to the reader. As Rowland (1973) points out, animal symbolism is a crucial aspect of exegesis, precisely because of its universal appeal and power:
While many of today's symbols are strictly contemporary and some are
esoteric, relying on a private code which only the initiated can interpret, most animal symbols are traditional, belonging to the mythology of everyone, eternally present in the collective unconscious memory and in the dream world where everything is a symbol (p. xviii).
Symbolism for the medieval scholar is not a matter of ornamentation. The drawing out of the hunting metaphor by the poet was not a literary conceit. Instead, as Ladner (1979) illustrates, the physical skill of the feline hunter is meant not to stand as a contrast to the intellectual skill of the human hunter, but these skills are meant to illuminate each other:
(For the Middle Ages) ...the universe was an exemplarist and anagogical as well as analogical, a hierarchical as well as a gradualistic multiverse; it was in no way a structure of irreducible opposites (p.230).
Therefore, Pangur Ban and the monk are not in any sort of competition with each other, but each are manifesting his own way of being in the world, to the advantage of each. And neither should envy the other; instead, they serve as models for proper conduct, be they feline or intellectual.
Message #6: “You rejoice, when your claws entrap a mouse; I rejoice, when my mind fathoms a problem...”
What is the role of joy in research? How can this inform us?
The joy of research was part of the joy, commonly felt by medieval scholars, of stalking hidden meanings and occluded symbol systems for the sake of the greater cultural good. These scholars looked upon their efforts as part of the collective consciousness of their age, as Ladner (1979) documents:
It was one of the fundamental character traits of the early Christian and medieval mentalities that the signifying, symbolizing, and allegorizing
function was anything but arbitrary or subjective; symbols were believed to represent objectively and to express faithfully various aspects of a universe that was perceived as widely and deeply meaningful (p. 227).
There is a common misconception that the people of the Middle Ages saw their human lot as one of suffering and dismay, and that their efforts were strictly channeled into the task of setting themselves up for the next world. Actually, this is a modernist misreading of the medieval world view. In fact, this treatment of human experience as a product to be refined for heavenly acceptability is far more a modernist than a medieval concept. As our monk scholar plainly tells us, the pursuit of learning and knowledge was not just something done as a means to an end, but something which gave him great pleasure as an end in itself. This joy of learning was fostered partially by the pursuit of knowledge itself, and partially by the fact that the scholar knew that he was doing something, and living a life, which had a clear and meaningful place in his culture.
Message #7: “ Pleased with his own art, neither hinders the other; Thus we live ever without tedium and envy.”
How is the life of a researcher a life affirming task? How can blend our models of research with the need to live a rich and fulfilling life? How can our lives as researchers be at one time a calling, and at another time a part of a larger project to move our cultural understanding further along?
I think these questions deserve to stand alone, to be addressed by each of us in our own ways.

The Simple Point:
Interpretation matters.
The Judgment:
Good researchers learn how to make the strange familiar.
Great researchers learn how to make the familiar strange.

The Six Blind Men Finally See

2011-03-29T19:41:00.001-07:00

Those six blind guys and that ubiquitous elephant:
I want to start this chapter with a tale that I'm sure most of us have heard used to make any number of points -- the story of the six blind men and the elephant. Frankly, I had gotten to the point where I never wanted to hear it again, so it is somewhat amusing that I'm using it to frame this lesson. Such are the little ironies of life.
The story was first told in ancient China about three blind men, but by the time it migrated to India and became part of the Jainist folk tradition, the blind men had doubled to six. John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) wrote the following piece of doggerel which has since passed not only into the public domain, but has also graced countless bulletin boards, mimeograph machines, fax lines, word processors, web pages, and so on:

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against the broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me, but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"

The Second, feeling of the tusk
Cried, "Ho! what have we here,
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 'tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!"

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up he spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!"

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee:
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he;
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!"

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!"

The sixth no longer had begun
About the beast to grope,
Then, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a rope!"

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

Six speakers talk about the six blind men
How are we to understand this little parable? One way to have a bit of fun at its expense. Let us suppose we are at a research conference somewhere, and we manage to bring together a panel of six people who have agreed to be discussants for this poem. They draw straws to determine the order of presentation, so there is nothing systematic about the order of their comments.
The first discussant:
"Why do we assume in this poem that blind people are stupid? What person, blind or otherwise, would hang onto any of these beliefs about elephants based on so little input? Is this really just a little story to tell us not to be as stupid as these blind men were, but told to make their stupidity so blatant that the story can be pretty shallow about a lot of things and the reader can still see its point?
"In other words, is this a story for the ordinarily stupid to congratulate themselves for not being extraordinarily stupid? I cannot imagine that any moderately reflective person can learn anything new from this story at the level of its stated moral.
"So, we must assume that when research teachers and other keepers of civilization drag out this little fable for our inspection, they are insisting that we dig deeper below this patently obvious surface. Or else we must assume that the level of wisdom in our field is pretty darn low."
The second discussant:
"What is this poem is saying about the nature of truth in the world? It is very easy to misread this fable as saying that there are many truths in the world. It is actually saying the exact opposite -- there is only one truth about the Elephant. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, an Elephant is an Elephant is an Elephant. Gertrude's rose has petals and stems and thorns, and we have to take all those things together when we have a rose. But we still must realize that we have a rose, not just an aggregation of stems and petals and thorns.
"Likewise, elephants have ears and tusks and tails and so on. But these things, taken apart, do not convey a sense of identity to the Elephant. Instead, once we know what an Elephant is, we can derive the pieces from our understanding of the whole. In other words, once we know the Master Plan, then we can show how the parts fit together."
The third discussant:
"Some of us are nervous with what was just said. In order to conclude that all the blind men are ultimately wrong, we have to be in some privileged position where we get to see the whole Elephant. If you can see the whole elephant, from what Hilary Putnam deridingly called a 'God's eye' position, then your perspective and your view are exactly equivalent to the truth.
"Here is the problem, however. Most of the time, we cannot see the whole. We do not have access to his special God's eye view. Maybe such a view does not exist, and maybe it cannot ever exist.
"Our task as inquirers, from this perspective, is to sew together some kind of elephant quilt. Each blind man brings his square, and the group convenes and tries to sew these pieces together to get some kind of more inclusive and holistic picture.
"So far, the emerging elephant quilt has a fan piece, and a snake piece, and a rope piece, and a wall piece, and a tree piece, and finally a spear piece. If our resultant quilt does not have the kind of satisfying depth we need in order to account for our expectations about elephants, then we need more quilters and more pieces in the project. In other words, if we have twelve blind men instead of six, our final picture would necessarily be richer.
"But how do we know we have enough squares? And if we think we have enough squares, have we just then re-invited the God's eye position for ourselves?"
The fourth discussant:
"We need to ask -- why these six blind men? Do they represent the sum total of blind men in this region? If they do not, why were they chosen over other blind men? Why, for example, were there no blind women? Would that have made a difference? How would the picture be different, if we were allowed to hear the voices of the other blind people who were not invited to participate in this exercise?
"Where do you draw the line in insisting on inclusion? Is it enough to include both men and women? Don't racial and ethic minorities have something to contribute? As a left-hander, I feel that my take on the world is much different from someone who is right-handed. Do we explore that dimension? At what point do we say, we have enough? And is this ever anything other than a political decision?"

The fifth discussant:
"The blind men failed because they could not properly measure what they needed to measure. Blindness, from this point of view, is relative. Good measuring skills compensate for the lack of being able to see the whole picture directly with their eyes. When these particular blind men used their sense of touch, they did so very haphazardly. Had they touched more carefully, and allowed their touch to linger, they would have been able to easily see, for instance, that the elephant's side had a different feel from a wall. It was warmer and moister to the touch than a wall would be, and this careful attention to detail, using the measuring system that was available, should have been enough to allow that particular blind man to rule out his first conclusion.
"But does this perspective still lock us into measuring what we can already measure, instead of looking for that which we may or may not be able to measure, and dealing with those consequences in a tactical way?"
The sixth discussant:
"Let us take the blind man who felt the elephant's knee and concluded that an elephant is like a tree. Why should he doubt this conclusion? What does it hurt him, to go through life thinking that an elephant is like a tree? Unless, of course, he decides at some point to try to cut down an elephant for firewood."
The pragmatic solution:
I have a confession to make. The sixth discussant is actually me. And since I still have the floor, I want to build upon these pragmatic comments as a means to enter into a discussion of the role of logic in qualitative research. So how is this poem about the six blind men an exercise in logic? And have we actually done justice to the real logic-in-use that most of us as inquirers would actually use in situations like this one?
My brief comments as a discussant were based on the basic points of a branch of philosophy known as Pragmatism. We have to be careful when we talk of Pragmatism, since there are so many variants (Mounce, 1997; Haack, 1998). In this lesson, and in subsequent lessons, we will use the term to refer to the founding branch of Pragmatism. This branch was developed by our old friend, C.S. Peirce (1955, 1992, 1998).
Peirce felt that Pragmatism was about meaning. Why do we pursue meaning in the world? Simply enough, meanings are what we use to build, maintain, support, and change our beliefs. Peirce acknowledged that we do not change our beliefs unless we are forced to do so.
What would make our blind man change his belief about the nature of elephants? Suppose, after one of the blind men touched the elephant, he returned to his hut only to find that his supply of firewood was dangerously low. So, he grabs his handy axe and sets off to find a tree to chop down and trim into firewood. It is a long walk to the forest, but the elephant is close by. Since the elephant is like a tree, why not cut it down and save himself a long and arduous walk?
I leave the consequences of the blind man's folly to your imagination. Let us be charitable and suppose that he manages to survive his mistake relatively intact. As he walks back to his hut, he realizes that he was wrong about the nature of elephants. More accurately, his belief about elephants was extended far beyond its original range of application. You can say that an elephant is like a tree in certain limited ways, but you cannot go from there to say that an elephant is equivalent to a tree.
We have learned previously that the world of experience is a generous place. Here is yet another example of that generosity. The blind man was walking around believing that elephants were equivalent to trees. All of his limited experience told him so. He was so sure of that belief that he confidently based his actions in the world of experience on that belief. But, because that belief was ultimately not true, it betrayed him when he put it into action. Sooner or later, said Peirce, all such beliefs will betray us. And we should feel grateful for this betrayal, since it at least points us away from previous error.
Genuine doubt:
The blind man did not feel all that grateful to the world of experience, however. He was in a state that Peirce called "genuine doubt". The blind man was sure he knew the score on elephants. But when he acted on his beliefs, they let him down. Now, he did not know what to believe.
Peirce rightly says that genuine doubt is unpleasant. I remember how unpleasant it was for me to realize that there were big, nasty-looking fish swimming in the apparently harmless pond in the Mameyes River in the Puerto Rican rainforest.
When we find ourselves in genuine doubt, all our instincts tell us to get out of that state and back to a state where things make sense again. It has been said that nature abhors a vacuum; in similar fashion, the human mind abhors a meaning vacuum. Peirce laid out four basic strategies to move from genuine doubt to a state of belief again. He called this procedure "the fixation of belief" (Peirce, 1955).
Fixing our beliefs:
The first and most primitive, and unfortunately one of the most common, strategies for fixing beliefs is the method of tenacity. Here, we get out of our state of genuine doubt by tenaciously hanging onto our original belief, and explaining away the doubt. In most cases, this act of explaining away has a future as well as a present dimension. That is, if we find ourselves in a circumstance where we are in a state of genuine doubt, and we tenaciously cling to our original belief and explain away the doubt, then we are careful in the future to avoid the sort of circumstances that led us into genuine doubt in the first place.
The second method for the fixation of belief Peirce called the method of authority. Here, we no longer depend on ourselves as the arbiters of belief. We turn instead to some collective understanding; one that we respect and upon which we are willing to trust our doubts. This is a better method, acknowledges Peirce, but it also has its share of problems. For one, there is no guarantee that an authority is legitimate. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that an authority, even if it is legitimate, is not acting in a conscious or unconscious self-serving manner. Finally, even if both of these concerns are allayed, there is no guarantee that an authority will be consistent. Authoritative claims tend to be claims resolving specific issues. Often, this sort of procedure loses sight of the larger need to be consistent.
What, then, is the best type of authority? One that responds to all issues in a consistent fashion. Furthermore, that fashion should be predictable by understanding the fundamental tenets of the authority. For this reason, Peirce called this third method the a priori method. As you can see, this insistence on consistency removes the problem of potential contradictions. But, says Peirce, it is possible for there to be any number of consistent a priori systems of thought to explain the basic nature of reality. For instance, there is Realism, and Nominalism, and Cartesianism, and Idealism, and any number of other perfectly nice Isms. How do you choose which one to pursue? Stephen Pepper(1942), in his landmark book World Hypotheses, holds that there are at least four adequately developed basic systems of thought, and that none of these four is strong enough to eliminate any of the other three. So, if we prefer this method of fixing belief, our choice of method will finally depend on our taste. Do we like the feel of Realism best, or are we more comfortable thinking Constructivist or Idealist or Nominalist thoughts?
Peirce held up the last method to be the best, and in fact the only valid, method for fixing belief. He called it the method of experiment, but it is probably better understood in today's terminology as the method of experience.
In the method of experience we have a very simple process -- we hold onto our beliefs as long as they serve us in the conduct of our lives. But we lead our lives so that we do not protect our beliefs from the test of experience. Any belief that is not true will, according to Peirce, eventually betray us in practice. When that happens, we will be in genuine doubt, and then we must modify our beliefs based on what our practice has shown us.

Back to the blind men:
So how does this method of experience apply to our six blind men? First of all, we need to accept them within the larger community of inquirers. According to Peirce, all genuine inquiry is collective, both socially and over time. No one person has the chance or the time to test each and every single belief by practice.
We can see this in relation to the blind men. Each has made a mistake about the physical nature of the elephant, but those mistakes will not show up until, or if, they betray some future practice the blind men engage in. So we must be patient, and allow the corrective nature of experience to work its "magic" on its own terms. If we push the blind men out of our community because we do not agree with them, then we lose the potential for modifying our beliefs according to their empirical experiences.
Second of all, we need to take the role of beliefs seriously in empirical inquiry. Too often, we have relegated belief to the category of opinion, or superstition, or bias, or some such impediment to real empirical inquiry. But if we commit ourselves to the method of experience, then we realize that our beliefs not only play a role in empirical inquiry, but that they are an absolutely necessary component of that process. Here is where Peirce attacked Descartes’ method of doubt, that Descartes used to build his famous "Cogito ergo sum." Peirce said that Descartes was dealing only in play doubt, or doubts that he raised in order to make his points. So what that Descartes claimed to doubt the reality of this senses, or even of the world? Descartes did not stop until he rebuilt each and every belief that he pretended to doubt. This is cleverness, but not empirical inquiry. Empirical inquiry deals with genuine doubts.
Finally, we need to understand how beliefs relate first to truth claims and then to formal principles of certainty. All three of the factors, namely beliefs, truths, and formal principles, are integral parts of any act of empirical inquiry. Furthermore, we need to learn how to orchestrate and maneuver these three dimensions when we do our own empirical inquiry. The art of such orchestrating and manuvering is precisely what we mean when we talk about logic.
Meaning is not truth and truth is not meaning:
Try this little experiment. Read several treatises on the foundations of empirical inquiry. Take note how often the terms "knowledge" and "meaning" are used interchangeably. Even more so, take note of how the verbs "knowing" and "understanding" are used as synonyms. But we cannot have a valid vision of qualitative inquiry if we insist on putting knowing and understanding together as equivalent concepts.
But, you might argue, aren't the acts of knowing and understanding inexorably linked in empirical inquiry? Yes, but they are not linked by any sort of equivalence. They are necessary parts of a greater process. This greater process is called intelligibility.
Intelligibility:
We can say that some empirical phenomenon is intelligible when; 1) we know its true aspects and any true consequences of its presence; 2) we understand why it is the way it is, on its own terms, and the significance of its nature, aspects and consequences and; 3) we can discern any necessary foundations or preconditions that need to be present for the phenomenon to exist in the first place.
Intelligibility has three irreducible dimensions, but, like the blind men and their elephant, we often try to reduce intelligibility to only one of these dimensions. When we wrestle solely with knowing and truth claims, then we are attempting to reduce intelligibility to epistemology. When we struggle with issues of understanding and significance, then we are in the realm of such meaning-oriented forms of inquiry as semantics, semiotics, and even qualitative inquiry. When we attempt to only discern foundational claims, then we approaching the matter of intelligibility as a form of ontology.
But how do we engage in the larger process of intelligibility? How do we avoid reducing intelligibility to either epistemology, ontology, or semantics? Once again, we can turn to Peirce. Peirce felt that the ideal, and in fact the only, tool for coordinating all these threads and initiatives into intelligibility was logic. But not the narrow version of logic we have come to expect in our day. He envisioned a form of logic where the issues of truth and certainty and meaning would require different sorts of logic, but where these different sorts were systematically related to one overall and overarching vision of logic as the tool of the seeker of intelligibility as a whole.
To see what Peirce meant, let us take a little stroll through some fairly unfamiliar woods.
A walk in the logical woods:
Let us suppose that one of our blind men decides to become an elephant researcher, and so he wants to make sure that we can finally come to a totally intelligible grasp of the nature and consequences of elephants.
His first step is to acknowledge that every time he makes a judgment about the way that something is, he is taking a step along the path of understanding. So, for example, he touches the elephant's knee and says that the elephant is like a tree. What is the nature of that claim? Is it a truth claim?
Not at all. The blind man is actually saying that he believes that an elephant is like a tree. Furthermore, why should he either abandon or modify that belief? Most likely, he will never be that close to an elephant again. That is, elephants are not going to play that much of a role in his day to day life, and so he can afford to hold unto what we know as an incomplete and inaccurate belief.
The alternative is to put in the effort he would need to find out what an elephant is really like. Before you condemn him for not putting in this effort, stop and think about how much effort he would really have to make to get to this point. For that matter, if we look at the most knowledgeable zoologist and world's expert on Indian elephants, she would be the first to admit that she is far from knowing what an elephant is really like.
So, what does our zoologist have that our blind man does not have? First, she has many more beliefs. These beliefs are based on her greater and more extensive access to experiences, both hers and others, regarding elephants. Some of those beliefs are so well established, and have held up for so many years and over so many circumstances, that she feels confident in considering them to be truth claims.
Truth claims carry a certain insistence to them that makes them appear to be more powerful to empirical inquirers. For instance, the claim that female elephants gestate for nearly two years is not an opinion. There is so much evidence, and that evidence has been so consistent for so many years, that it would be silly to argue against this claim just for the sake of argument. The burden of proof would be on you to find some thread of evidence that had not previously surfaced, which would change the way we look at gestation in elephants. I am not saying that such evidence does not exist; I am saying that you have to find it and bring it to the table before you can argue for its existence.
Not every claim is subject to alteration by further evidence, however. There are some claims that are necessarily true. That is, if these were not true each and every time they are employed, then inquiry and even life as we know it cannot function. These claims are called self-evident, in that their very existence is proof enough that they are true.
Logic consists of that set of procedures we can use to maneuver through the world of beliefs, truth claims, and certainties.
Sometimes, we need to see whether or not a certain belief can also stand as a truth claim. Sometimes, we need to see if a truth claim is capable of being seen as a certainty. But, just as often, we need to evaluate beliefs, truth claims, and certainties at their own levels.
How likely is a certain truth claim true? Or is it just merely true-looking? Once we are sure that a certainty is indeed certain, what are some of the implications of that certainty? And, most interestingly for us qualitative researchers, how do our given sets of beliefs approximate the sort of rich belief sets we would need to understand the world at greater and greater depth? Or are our collective beliefs too shallow to move us along other directions instead of the well-worn conceptual paths we are used to traveling?

The tapestry of logic:
When we start looking at beliefs, truth claims, and certainties, we start to realize that there is an interweaving of logical perspectives and logical procedures. Certainties require a logic of implication to help us figure out valid vs. invalid implications to draw from these self evident claims. Truth claims require a logic of verification to help us determine whether a claim is likely, probably, or unlikely to be true. Finally, beliefs require a logic of meaning to help us understand how to move from genuine doubt to belief in ways that serve our genuine attempts to understand the world in greater depth.
In other words, there is a logic to research, but there is also a logic of implication, a logic of verification, and a logic of meaning. Each of these logics have been worked out historically, and each has a fundamental strategy for dealing with the world of experience.
What is the Formal Logic of Qualitative Inquiry?
By now we see that qualitative inquiry is based not only on a new and unique vision but also on a new and different philosophical foundation. But our efforts, while nearly complete, are not quite done. Qualitative inquiry is also unique logically. This might actually be the most important part of this whole grounding process for those of us who are interested in the actual practice of qualitative research.
Every change in the way we do empirical inquiry is preceded by a change in logic. We will see that, during the era of natural philosophy, only deductive reasoning was considered valid. Crucial work in the Middle Ages set the stage for acknowledging that induction was also valid within a set of constraints and assumptions. Without induction, there would not be the Scientific Method or hypothesis testing as we understand it. Now, we are in the midst of understanding a third type of logic that has its own domain of legitimacy and use.
As we look at the history of the development of logical foundations for various modes of empirical inquiry, we can argue that there are three architects of the logic of inquiry in Western thought. Each person has started with a different set of assumptions, and has foregrounded a different type of logic. Among them, we can locate the major themes that have oriented our use of logic as empirical researchers.
The logic of implication:
The architect of the logic of implication was our old friend Aristotle (Adler, 1978; Robinson, 1995). We looked at his work earlier as the foundation for the type of moderate realism that served as the basis for speculative inquiry and natural philosophy. Now we are looking at him as the father of formal logic in Western thought.
For Aristotle, logic was much more than a tool for valid reasoning. The nature of logic was tied inextricably with the nature of reality. The weakest way to express this notion is to hold that an idea is true when it corresponds completely with reality. But Aristotle held that logic does more than establish such correspondences; it goes further to uncover implications that necessarily follow from what we already know about reality.
Aristotle was not just a reasoner about reality; he was an exemplary empirical inquirer and explorer. He advocated two processes for arriving at basic claims about empirical reality. First of all, he was an advocate of observation. Secondly, he held that we need to continue raising and answering important questions that arise from such acts of observation. As Adler (1978) puts it, in his discussion of Aristotle’s approach to inquiry in general:
"Philosophical thought began with the asking of questions -- questions that can be answered on the basis of our ordinary, everyday experience and with some reflection about that experience that results in a sharpening and refinement of our common sense (p. 4)."
Aristotle was not interested in developing an understanding of the empirical world unless it started with the obvious things that we all see and experience about the world -- the green grass, the blue sky, the compositions and natures of plants, animals, and ourselves.
But such commonsense observation must be enhanced with careful involvement in discovering the not so obvious. Sometimes the not so obvious is the unfamiliar -- the wondrous. Aristotle himself was the recipient of many such wonders and specimens from his most famous student, Alexander the Great.
However, even with adding the wondrous to the ordinary, he was still not willing to confine empirical inquiry just to the collection, the classification, and the labeling of phenomena. He understood that there were more general principles that were manifest particularly in ordinary and collective experience, and that these principles, once discovered, could be examined logically to deduce further facts and implications.
These derived implications were more often than not invisible to the ordinary gaze, since they were most often about general aspects of reality. These general aspects were not revealed in the observation of any single phenomenon, or even collection of phenomena, but only came out when more general principles were first ascertained.
How do we know when such general principles about the empirical world are indeed true? According to Aristotle, we first gather evidence that suggests that we are talking about something that does in fact exist. For instance, we cannot have an empirical inquiry into unicorns, since unicorns do not in fact exist. Once we have good evidence that something does indeed exist, then this evidence is organized via accepted principles of classification, so that we can be sure that we are dealing with something that is not in itself unique. But most importantly beyond this, we identify relevant self-evident claims.
For Aristotle, “self-evident” did not mean “obvious.” A self-evident claim is instead a claim that provides its own evidence for being true, since if we should hold that it were not true, then we would find ourselves inescapably making some form of error about the nature of reality. One example of a self-evident claim is the claim that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. What would it be like if this were not true? We cannot even offer an example of an experience to the contrary, or even what such an experience would be like. Therefore, we have no choice but to conclude that it is true. That is, once we can show that a claim is self-evident, then it is necessarily true.
Aristotle held that the role of logic in empirical inquiry was to derive true implications from true principles about the world. We start with self-evident claims based on observations about the empirical world. These serve as the major premises in Aristotle’s system. Once we have such general claims, then we can pair them with accurate observations that are explicitly linked to the major premises. We call such a claim a minor premise. If we have stated both the major and minor premises correctly, and they are both true in the ways that each can be true, then we can deduce a conclusion that not only is true, but is necessarily and certainly true. Here is a famous example:

All men are mortal;
Socrates is a man;
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

So, the manifestation of empirical inquiry, using this logical foundation, was to develop a systematic empirical inquiry into implication. So long as we have an accepted body of self-evident claims, then the art of empirical inquiry is to make relevant observations and deduce previously unknown implications by reasoning through the appropriate self-evident premises. Aristotle himself produced a number of such treatises; one of the most representative is his Parts of Animals.
In addition, Aristotelian empirical inquiry is fueled by realist philosophy as well as the deductive syllogistic reasoning procedures just described. It is realist because it holds that self-evident principles exist over and above their manifestation in any particular case. That is, Aristotle holds that major premises are not just likely or probable, but that they are necessarily true because they are real as universal principles about nature. Once we agree that these premises are real as principles and not just as labels for observed regularities, then we can hold that they are necessarily true. Something whose claim to reality is only based on its regular presence can at most be considered as being only contingently real, and its truth status is then a question of probability rather than certainty.
Aristotle became lost to Western thought for centuries, but when his works were rediscovered around the 12th century, he had as much impact on subsequent Medieval thought as he had had upon Classical inquirers. While, ironically enough, Aristotle himself was an atheist, his system fit perfectly with both theological and empirical thinkers in the Middle Ages. St. Thomas Aquinas was largely responsible for "Christianizing" the thought of Aristotle.
The use of categorical thinking and self-evident principles were particularly welcome. It is a simple adjustment to use biblical revelation as the basis for a particular claim to be self-evident, and so the Medieval inquirer was much more accustomed to looking to Scripture and similar treatises as a starting point for all inquiry -- including empirical inquiry. This is not because medieval empirical inquirers were lazy, or stupid, or too brainwashed by the Bible to do otherwise. It was because they needed self-evident principles to initiate an inquiry that would lead to the certainty they desired and expected, and from their logical perspective mere observation alone and the regularity of occurrence could not usually be trusted to do the job.
For centuries, empirical inquiry proceeded in an Aristotelian fashion. Suffice to say, the bulk of inquiry in the middle ages was not empirical. First of all, this was a period of theological interest primarily. Pressing issues on the nature of the life hereafter took precedence of research into everyday empirical phenomena. Second of all, self-evident principles are harder to identify and establish in the empirical realm. The body of evidence in revelation that is empirical is far less than the facts and claims about theological matters. Also, there are very few things that can be discerned by observation along that do not at least have some contingent dimension to them. We can claim that all people are mortal, for instance, but this claim is at least in part contingent on the fact that we have never directly observed any immortal people. Even if we have strong evidence that there are processes that occur that make it nearly impossible for any given human being not to die eventually, we have no way of knowing that these processes are indeed certainly the cause of mortality in every possible case, or that these processes operate in every human that has, or ever will, exist.
Therefore, it is no surprise that, as Western culture became more interested in the empirical world on its own terms, it became equally interested in a logical shift to support that interest that worked better than the prevailing Aristotelian model.
The logic of verification:
The search for the architect of the logic of verification is a bit more problematic . There are a number of valid candidates for that honor.
First of all, Roger Bacon deserves serious consideration. He was one of the first Western inquirers to call for experimentation as a way to determine empirical truth. He was also an early explorer of the nature and role of induction. Francis Bacon, with his work on systematizing induction and developing it as a logical standard for scientific inquiry, is also an excellent choice.
In the works of John Stuart Mill (1843/1988), however, we see the first real formation of a complete systematic empirical inquiry into truth qua verification. He proposed a model of the logic of empirical inquiry that is not only based on induction but also was explicitly designed to replace the deductive approach first articulated by Aristotle. In addition, he established the definitive role of the nature and role of causality as the conceptual aspect of verification in scientific inquiry.
For Mill, truth is an empirical claim that can be verified according to some level of probable certainty. It is also linked quite explicitly to the notion of causality.
Mill proposed five consequences that we can use to establish if a cause-effect relationship does indeed exist between two phenomena. Sahakian (1968) describes them as the five canons that Mill proposes to allow us to discriminate between a superstitious understanding of the world, which boldly enough implicitly includes all of Aristotle’s claims about nature and the empirical world, and real knowledge of causes that are themselves possible because of the sorts of uniformities that we can observe at every turn in nature. These methods address: 1) ascertaining whether or not two separate instances of a phenomenon share a particular prior circumstance in common (the method of agreement); 2) determining that the difference between whether or not a phenomenon is present or not can be traced to the presence or absence of some other phenomenon (the method of difference); 3) the intersection of the first two circumstances, which in effect show the operation of presence and absence systematically (the joint method of agreement and difference); 4) taking away a known antecedent to the current situation to see what the role of other antecedents are, causally (the method of residues); and finally; 5) determining that a variation in one variable, which reliably is matched with a variation in another variable, is due either to a causal relation or that the two are caused by some other common variable (the method of concomitant variations).
Mill’s work on linking induction and causality literally opened the way for modern science. Without this logical link, then induction will always lag behind deduction in terms of its practical applicability. But Mill put teeth into the concept of inductive reasoning by fashioning a model of causal reasoning, and by extension, causal modeling.
Finally, Mill combined his work on logic with Comte’s ideas on positivism, creating a universe that is held together by external cause -- effect relationships, and which is described theoretically by inductively verified experimental findings.
Contemporary physical science has abandoned this version of scientific modeling for the relativistic and quantum approaches, but contemporary social science is still strongly influenced by this blend of Comptean positivism and Mill’s vision of inductively delineated causal relationships among simple variables.
Peirce and the Logic of Meaning:
The architect for the logic of meaning is that seemingly ubiquitous presence among these chapters, namely Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce, as we have already seen, was a formidable philosopher. He also spent much of his life as a working scientist, and the only book he even published dealt with his long term research efforts in geodesics. But he always considered himself first and foremost a logician, and he saw his work in pragmatism and semiotics, for example, as an explicit development from his inquiries into the nature of logic.
Peirce’s work in logic was linked with his thoughts on the role of meaning in inquiry. The other key underlying dynamic in Peirce’s thought was the tendency which he himself labeled his “triadomania,” or his penchant to understand and describe everything in terms of multiples of threes.
Triadomania and the three categories:
Let us start with his triadomania. It manifests itself in his first major work, completed in 1867 when he was 28 years old, and presented to the New York Academy of Science. This paper is entitled “On a new list of categories.”
He begins by wondering how it is that all of the complex inputs from experience, and all the equally complex modifications of experience by perceptions and memory, should be reduced in consciousness to this over-riding feeling of the unity of experience which characterizes our day to day existence. He claims that this reconciliation occurs because of the interplay of three, and only three, categories of being.
The first category, which he calls Firstness, deals with pure quality, pure potentiality, or pure possibility. An example of Firstness is “the color red, before there was every any actual thing that was red in the universe.”
The second category, which he called Secondness, deals with unmediated, or brute, experience. An example of Secondness is any pure effect, regardless of our understanding or even awareness of its cause. For example, our sudden reaction to a loud sound in the night, which awakens us, before we can even attempt to make any attribution of cause or source of that sound, is an example of Secondness. Peirce claims that we, as inquirers, are required to have concepts which are grounded in some fashion in experience. This means that there is an aspect of Secondness to every concept, regardless how abstract or general.
The third category deals with relation, and Peirce called this Thirdness. Any habit or rule, or any sign, whether natural or conventional, is an example of Thirdness. Any human language, for instance, is an example of Thirdness. A word stands for its object only because there is a convention that makes it so. That is, there is nothing inherently in the sound "tree" that makes us think of those tall leafy branching plants we see in the world.
Note that there cannot be Secondness without Firstness, since there cannot be, for example, any sudden sound without the prior possibility of that sound. Likewise, there cannot be any Thirdness without Secondness, for reasons that Peirce addresses in some detail but which are too complex to go into here.
While it is important to note the interdependence of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, it is equally important to realize that Secondness cannot be reduced to Firstness, and Thirdness cannot be reduced to Secondness or some combination of Secondness and Firstness. We have to take each level of being seriously on its own terms.
The necessity of semiotics:
When Peirce realized that all things manifest these three categories to some degree, he needed a model of “threeness” to capture the inter-related nature of these categories for any identifiable thing. Here is where we find the notion of the sign and the theory of semiotics to describe and explain signs and sign action.
Contemporary semiotic theory was born twice, on two different continents, with two different orientations. Once you finally begin to understand semiotics you realize that it is an ancient way of understanding the world, but that fact is not at all apparent in its two contemporary forms.
The first father of semiotics, or the branch that we commonly call semiology, was a Swiss linguist named Ferdinand de Saussure (1959). Saussure, working in Europe in the early part of the 20th century (he died at the age of 56 in 1913), revolutionized the science of linguistics. Before Saussure, the orientation of linguistics was historical. How are various languages related? What are their common ancestors? How have they evolved and changed over time? As important and interesting as these questions are, Saussure realized that they addressed only part of the situation of language. He was much more interested, not in where languages came from, but in how they were structured. What did all languages have in common? How do languages communicate meaning? What roles do languages play in life and culture?
To tackle the nature of language, Saussure needed a concept that was larger than language. Here is where the notion of semiology was born. Language, to Saussure, was perhaps the best single example of a system of signs. But it was certainly not the only such system. Each and every human culture was permeated by sign systems of various types and natures. Each of these sign systems allowed for the codification and communication of experience. Furthermore, the best way for us humans to understand such codes is to draw upon the wealth of understanding we possess about our primary code; that is, our native language. And so, by way of this process of codification and decoding, we begin to look for various “languages” within cultures. We have the language of dress, and the language of zoning, and the language of pop music, and the language of urban legends, and the language of academic dress and conduct, and on and on. It is the role of the semiologist to look upon a given culture as a vast interconnected series of texts, and to understand what each text is saying and how these texts impinge and interact with one another to communicate and represent rich and subtle markings and understandings about that culture. It is interesting to note that Saussure died before he could encapsulate his work into a definitive text of its own. His book, Course in general linguistics (1959), is actually a compendium of class notes put together by his students as a posthumous way to capture and preserve his genius. His influence has been enormous over the past 80 years. Some of his chief descendants and developers include Claude Levi-Strauss, Sir Edmund Leach, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Hlemslev, Roman Jakobson, Paul Riceour, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Umberto Eco. In short, everywhere we see the notion of the sign as a code, and semiotics as the reading of that code, we find the hand of Saussure in some fashion.
The second trunk of contemporary semiotics is that branch that took root, not in Europe, but in America. Its founder was Charles Sanders Peirce, whom we have considered in some detail before. As you may remember, Peirce was first and foremost a logician. So it comes as no surprise that his understanding of semiotics is logical in nature. In fact, Peirce makes the startling claim that logic itself is just another name for semiotics, or the quasi-necessary doctrine of signs.
What did Peirce mean by saying that logic and semiotics are equivalent? Many things, actually. First of all, he sees that meaning is not so much a creation of the human mind, but something that is part and parcel of the reality of a given phenomenon. That is, meaning is a logical consequence of something being the way it is, where it is, at the time that it exists. This, in itself, has a number of important implications. First of all, this leads us to reject the notion that an event or phenomenon is devoid of meaning unless we put it there. Second, it also requires us to reject the position that the world is a meaning-sparse venue. To the contrary, the world is rich in actual and potential meaning; so much so, that the effort to understand the meaning of some event or phenomenon definitively and exhaustively is doomed to failure at the outset. Thirdly, we reject the notion that meaning is inherently and always a subjective imposition on the world by us. It is true that we can and do interpret the world as we find it, but that interpretation is less subjective and less free form than we might suppose. That is, we might be quite free at the outset, but once we engage in an inquiry into meaning using the conditions we establish at the outset, the consequences will be anything but arbitrary. This is because there is a logic to meaning, and a logic that drives interpretation. All of this is due to the fact that there are systematic ways that things operate as signs, and systematic consequences of these operations.
What is the fundamental logical nature of a sign? Here, in simplified form, is what Peirce says. A sign consists of three parts. The first part is the object, or what the sign stands for. The object is always implicit; if it were explicit, then we would have a different and simpler relationship. The second part is the sign proper, which is explicit. But, even though it is explicit, it always points away from itself and toward the object. That is, the role of the sign is to make the unseen object present in some fashion. Finally, we have the interpretant. The interpretant is the consequence of the sign acting as a sign. Sometimes, the interpretant is an interpretation on the part of some reader of the sign. Sometimes, it is just an aspect of the nature of the reality of a particular situation.
Consider the following equation as another way to say what we have said above. If we have an object, and a sign representing that object, then we have some kind of effect that we call the interpretant. Or:

If Object, by Sign, then Interpretant.

What happens if we drop the sign out of this equation? We are then left with a simple “if-then” statement, where the object is the antecedent and the interpretant is the consequent. But in the semiotic equation, we rule out any direct link between the object and the interpretant. In this case, the object is a type of antecedent, but it is an antecedent that can never be directly involved in the interaction. It is only involved by the mediating action of the sign. Since the sign exists, it has its own set of properties and its own nature. Part of the potential of this thing, however, is the fact that it can act as a sign. As such, it represents, but is not equivalent to, the object. That is, it brings the object to bear, but only in a mediated way. If the object were actually there, it would bring about its own and different effect. Finally, we see that the interpretant is a mediated consequent. It is the consequence that comes about because the object is brought to bear through the presence of the sign, and not in and of itself.
While the process described above sounds inordinately complex, it describes a whole variety of ordinary phenomena on their own terms, and as simply as they can legitimately be understood. Furthermore, it implies that the world is not a place full of abstract facts that have a certain truth functional status. Instead, it says that the world is, in Peirce’s term, “perfused” with signs. Everywhere we look, we see these mediated phenomena. We have special names for them in the empirical world. We call them clues, or omens, or symptoms, or patterns, or stories, or fables, or epiphanies, or synchronicities, or what have you. They are the fabric and building blocks of meaning, and without them we would have no inquiry at all.
I would like to make the following bold claim: it is impossible to understand qualitative research, or to do it properly, without engaging in semiotic concepts and methods. Rather than making a long-winded defense of this claim, I would like to prove it by illustration. That is, I want to talk about the family of signs that are possible in the empirical world, and to demonstrate that this family is fundamental and essential to a genuine qualitative inquiry. Furthermore, they show that semiotic theory functions as the proper foundation for building a comprehensive qualitative perspective, a perspective that the field currently does not have and so desperately needs.
The interplay of being and logic in inquiry:
The end result of all of this discussion is the notion that our categories of understanding, since they are affected by states of being, incorporate the dynamics of possibility, existence, and order at every turn. Everything that we can experience or even imagine consists in some fashion of this dynamic interplay. This interplay is what we mean by signs, and semiosis.
Can we turn this interplay to our understanding of the use of logic in empirical inquiry? Of course we can, and when we do, we discover some interesting new aspects to this enterprise.
Making room for abduction:
As a matter of fact, it opens up an explicit understanding of a third type of logical reasoning, necessitated by the notion of three irreducible modes of being, which had never been systematized or even identified prior to Peirce.
We have already argued that deduction is the logic of implication. We can further claim that deduction foregrounds our ideas of Thirdness, since implication is by definition formal and relational. Here we are speaking of perfect Thirdnesses. A perfect Thirdness has to be true by its own nature. The order it provides is irreplaceable. If this is true of some perfect Thirdness, then it has to be true. Therefore, any implication that we can derive from it, so long as that implication is deductively valid, will also have to be true. Remember, this project of implication from perfect Thirds (or self evident claims) is not something we do anymore in contemporary empirical inquiry. Instead, we approximate by making deductive implications from very, very, very likely claims.
When we return to the logic of verification, or induction, we can now see that induction foregrounds Secondness. Induction starts with the observation, which has as its starting point the notion of unmediated brute fact. That is, inductive research, as best typified by scientific inquiry, does not lock in a theory and then force the facts to fit the theory. It looks carefully at each and every fact to see if there is some previously unexplained, or in a sense "brute" aspect to that fact. If there is, the scientist puts that fact outside of the theory in question, and starts to look for other facts that might be grouped with this new and unexplained observation. Also, this mode of reasoning pays homage to Secondness in its awareness that any theory, or Thirdness, should be discarded if there is enough renegade evidence, or unexplained Secondness, associated with it.
But what sort of reasoning foregrounds Firstness? If Peirce is right about the interplay of possibility and existence and order, then we need to find some previously undiscovered but now necessary mode of reasoning.
Rules of reasoning:
To understand this new and undiscovered mode of reasoning, we need to talk about the two more familiar modes in a more systematic fashion. Peirce himself does so with the following comparative example. Suppose we have a bag of beans. Suppose, furthermore, that we have conclusively established that each and every bean in this bag is white. Now, consider the following cases. First of all:

Rule: All the beans in this bag are white.
Case: This bean is from the bag.
Result: This bean is white.

This is a deduction. In fact, we can deduce that this bean must be white, or is necessarily white, so long as the rule and the case are true.
Now, let us consider the next example:

Case: This bean is from the bag.
Result: This bean is white.
Rule: All the beans in the bag are white.

Here, we have an inductive conclusion. Notice that the result is more properly understood as a judgment about some observable property of the case; in this situation, that it is white. From this, we induce the following contingent rule, that all the beans in the bag are white. Is this rule necessarily true, or even certain in this case? Of course not. At best, it is probably true. Its likelihood increases as we sample more and more cases, and they continue to uphold the rule.
Finally, we have the third example, the one that Peirce uncovered:

Result: This bean is white.
Rule: All the beans in the bag are white.
Case: This bean is from the bag.

Here we have an example of what Peirce called abductive reasoning. At first blush, it looks like nothing more than an erroneous induction. But on more careful examination, it reveals a bit more of its unusual nature to us. First of all, it starts with the result. In this case, the result is really nothing more than a suspicion that the observation we see before us has an unrevealed aspect to its nature that causes us to misunderstand it in some fundamental way. The most obvious form of misunderstanding is doubt caused by the unexpected presence or nature of the result. In and of itself, we do not understand it, or else our understanding of it is too truncated for comfort. What do we do in such a case? We start looking for some necessary or contingent rule to address this lack of understanding more directly. In this case, we do not know what to make of the fact that the bean is white. Are we really understanding all we need to understand about the bean? But, lo, we happen to remember or find out that all the beans in the bag are white. So, from these pieces, we abduce that the bean is possibility, or perhaps plausibly, from the bag. In other words, this bean is not some unique white bean existing somewhere in the world, but is possibly better understood if we hypothesize that it came from this bag of white beans. What have we gained from such an endeavor? Simply put, we now have a richer possibility map when thinking about the bean. We are in no way certain that the bean came from the bag, or even that it is likely that the bean came from the bag. Rather, we conclude that it is meaningful to suppose that the bean might have come from the bag. Here we have the beginnings of an inquiry into meaning on its own terms.
The ten classes of signs and the six modes of abduction:
One of the key theorems that Peirce proved, regarding semiotic theory, is that there are ten, and only ten, classes of signs. This is not too terribly difficult to prove, but the proof is time-consuming and requires the addition and consideration of a number of concepts that we need not address for our purposes. Therefore, I ask you to simply accept the proof as true for the time being, so that we can consider its consequences.
We can best understand these ten classes as being spread across three different families of signs; the Open family, the Actual family, and the Necessary family. The Open family is the biggest, in that it encompasses six of the ten sign classes. The Actual family deals with three sign classes, and the Necessary has only one, but one very important, sign class member.
Interwoven within the three Families are three Tribes, and finally three Natures. The three tribes are the Iconic tribe, the Indexical tribe, and the Symbolic tribe. The Open family makes a place for all three tribes, the Actual family has room for only the Indexical and Symbolic tribes, and the Necessary family excludes all but the Symbolic tribe. The three natures are the Tone nature, the Token nature, and the Type nature. Again, the Open family has a place for all three natures, the Actual family only has room for signs that have Token and Type natures, and the Necessary family only allows for signs that are Types by nature.
Now we get to the exciting part. Each of these ten sign classes corresponds, in empirical inquiry, to an outcome of a certain type of inquiry activity. By looking at all ten classes, we have a comprehensive model of empirical inquiry in practice.
But we are not going to be that ambitious here. Instead, we will concentrate on the six classes that we call the Open family. We will argue that these classes encompass the sorts of activities we do when we engage in an empirical inquiry into meaning. Furthermore, this breakdown will allow us to see how these aspects of an inquiry into meaning not only relate to each other, but how they can relate and feed into an empirical inquiry into truth and into necessary implication.
Let us start by giving each member of the Open family its own name. We have: 1) the Open Iconic Tone; 2) the Open Iconic Token; 3) the Open Iconic Type; 4) the Open Indexical Token; 5) the Open Indexical Type; and 6) the Open Symbolic Type. More importantly, what does each of these sign classes capture about the meaningfulness of the world, and the way that empirical inquirers approach and wrestle with that meaning? Let us take each class in turn.
The hunch:
First we have the Open Iconic Tone. Any time we have an Open sign, we do not have a specific object in mind, but instead a domain of possible objects. A sign is a member of the Iconic tribe when it stands for an object by resembling that object in some fashion. A sign has a tone nature when the consequence is never an actual consequence, but only the possibility of a consequence. Putting all of this together, we get, when we have an Open Iconic Tone, the possibility of a possibility of a resemblance. What sort of inference is this? It is precisely the sort of inference that is at the heart of the type of act of empirical inquiry that we call a “hunch.” We are not pinpointing any particular object in reality; we are instead exploring the possibility of what such an object might be like, if it were involved. When we explore hunches, we are laying out the broad framework of our inquiry. Is it possible to do this explicitly and systematically? Only if we understand the nature of the process. This is why it is important to articulate these classes of inference, not only to show their natures, but to suggest how they can be related systematically to other modes of meaningful inference.
The omen:
What do we have when we have an Open Iconic Token? Again, we are still in the realm of a possible, rather than an actual, object. Again, we are claiming that the manifest sign is linked to a possible object via resemblance of some form. But now, we are claiming that something we see here and now is fruitfully considered to be the consequence of some possible sign relation. That is, unlike the hunch where we are not even willing to say that we actually have a sign, in this case we have something in empirical reality that we start with. Does it resemble something else, and if it does, does that act of resemblance indicate a sign? Here we have the inferential process that underlies the act of empirical inquiry that underlies the reconciliation of meaning via the reading of omens. Like a hunch, the sign is pushed into the future, but unlike the hunch, there is something that is present here and now that explicitly triggers the process. It may be the entrails of a sheep, or it may be a strange fluctuation in the price of a particular stock. Either way, it just may be pointing to something down the line.
The metaphor:
The third and last member of the Iconic tribe in the Open family is the Open Iconic Type. When we are dealing with a Type, then we are considering a phenomenon in the world of experience not for its nature hear and now, but in terms of its more abstract nature. In the case of resemblance, we are dealing with an almost law-like set of consequences when this particular resemblance is considered in relation to a possible object. This is precisely the sort of reasoning we engage in when we consider a particular class of phenomena as being a metaphor for something else. That is, what sorts of insights and understandings do we foreground and bring to awareness when we consider one thing to be a metaphor for another thing? Note that we do not think that there is any actual relation between the metaphor and the process metaphorized. We are simply exploiting a possible resemblance to uncover aspects of the thing metaphorized that we could not explore in any other way.
The clue:
What is the nature of the Open Indexical Token? Like the Open Iconic Token, we have something that is actually in experience that suggests that it might be a sign. This time, the sign points to its object by virtue of the impact of the object on the sign. The problem is that we do not know exactly what object the sign signifies. Here, we have the inferential process that underlies such phenomena as clues, or symptoms. In the case of a symptom, the object, while hidden, exists here and now, and with the clue, the object is in the past. Either way, we look on the thing or event in experience in a new light. The ancient and venerable acts of empirical inquiry known as diagnosis and detection center around the inquiry into meaning which involves the study of clues and symptoms.
The pattern:
What is the nature of the Open Indexical Type? Again, when we deal with types, we are moving away from the particular event or phenomenon to some larger and more abstract picture. What do we get when we do this with a bunch of clues or symptoms? Simply out, we are reasoning to a pattern. This is an extremely important type of inference in empirical inquiry, but one which we have previously assumed, along with such skills as making good hunches and seeing fruitful metaphors, to be part of the experiential “craft” of research and not a domain of inference in its own right. What is the difference between a pattern and a hypothesis in empirical inquiry? Simply put, a pattern is an exercise in meaningful plausibility that either helps us frame the domain of meaning that we can later explore by verification by using a hypothesis, or else where understanding is necessary but no verification can be made. We can see examples of the latter in the exploration of the roles of fables and folklore and urban legends in culture. All of these phenomena come under the general heading of myths, which are themselves accounts whose historical veracity is irrelevant to the nature and importance of the account.
The explanation:
Finally, we have the last, and most abstract, form of Open inference. What is the nature of the Open Symbolic Type? Here, we have the abductive equivalent to the hypothesis in scientific research and the categorical syllogism in speculative research. We come up with open symbolic types when we reason to an explanation. I will not dwell on this point very long, except to point out that there is an inherent structural affinity between the explanation, which is in the realm of meaning, and the hypothesis, which is grounded ultimately in the realm of verification. In is in the interface between these two that the only possibility for a legitimate mix between meaning research and verification research can exist.

Mixing and matching abductive reasoning tools:
These six classes of signs are the building blocks of any empirical inquiry into meaning. Furthermore, by understanding their natures, and their relations not only to each other but to the other four classes which we have not described but which in fact deal with the logic of verification and the logic of implication, we have the first comprehensive model of the nature of inferences available for any model of empirical inquiry in use. And finally, by laying out three important but independent families, we have made a place for qualitative, quantitative, and speculative inquirers to work without fighting needless and counterproductive turf wars. And as you have seen, at least with the Open family, this work is not just classificatory and abstract, but practical and capable of guiding the inquirer in new and insightful ways.
Prove me right!
When I finally finished the chapter above, I almost abandoned it. This is too technical and too hard to include. You just might stop reading here and toss up your hands in despair.
So I thought maybe I could tone it down. You know, simplify it by changing points to make them easier to understand. The problem is this: all of these issues are related. If you change one, or eliminate another, you change the whole meaning of the system.
Therefore, in the end, I decided to leave the chapter as it is. It is, of course, the most intellectually challenging chapter in the whole book. But there are a few ways that you can improve your understanding of this material:
• Go first to the abductive reasoning exercises, and try them. Create a few metaphors, look for some omens, and juxtapose a few unrelated concepts. Get a tangible feel for this process, and then go back and re-read the discussion of these types of phenomena.
• Don't despair when we read something and you don't get it right away. Some ideas are just so different that you need time to allow them to incubate and percolate. For instance, it took me years to understand what Peirce meant when he called semiotics the "quasi-necessary doctrine of signs.' Why quasi-necessary? What did that even mean? He meant that if we took the doctrine of signs to be "necessary" then we just had another name for foundationalism, like Aristotle's work, but if we just called it "a doctrine of signs" then we lost track of the important notion that our understanding of signs is shaped by watching them in action in the world of experience, and we run the risk of letting the doctrine of signs be just a "creation" of our minds which we could then lay upon the world. He struck a perfect balance with the phrase "quasi-necessary" and once I finally understood it, the understanding was worth all the fretting and hard mental work.
• It is important to work together. Draw diagrams, compare notes, argue, read further, and ask questions. One person may grasp one point, where another might see another subtle little turn. If you put our thoughts together, you can avoid the blind man and the elephant trap, at least to some degree.
• Finally, have fun. We live in an anti-intellectual age, but that does not mean that you have to buy into that set of assumptions. A good friend of mine once defined an intellectual as someone who had lots of friends, where some of those friends were ideas. Make friends and play with the ideas of signs, and logic, and abduction. Who knows where it might take you?
The Simple Point:
Logic matters, too.
The Judgment:
Good researchers learn to master logical reasoning.
Great researchers look for any reason to reason.