Archive for 'Methodology'

Okay. Below the fold is the preliminary draft of the chapterised version of my post from the other day on indeterminacy as a form of determination (doesn’t that line make you wanna peek beneath the fold?). The last third of this chapter is still very undeveloped - basically, if you’re reading, once you get to the point where I start talking about the relationship of all of this to Hegel’s essence/appearance argument, the text from that point gets really sketchy and dubious. If it helps, I’m aware of this, but wanted to write at least a set of placeholder notes for things I want to discuss, when I’m able to revise that section properly. I may not be able to get back to this draft for some days, however, and so I thought I might as well toss it up in its current form. The main line of argument - which relates to how you can provide a socially-immanent explanation for certain categories that appear transhistorical in Marx’s work - is (I hope!!) sufficiently clearly developed for the moment. The points that remain undeveloped will always - in this chapter - be sort of foreshadows of material I can’t discuss in great detail until I’ve set up a few more layers of this argument.

Those who read the version of the previous chapter posted to the blog may notice that the transition at the end of the previous chapter draft doesn’t “work”. That’s because, partially in response to feedback received here, I significantly expanded the previous chapter - to the point that it got a little bit cancerous, and so I split it into two chapters, dividing off the programmatic bits, from the discussion of Marx’s relationship to Hegel, and adding more material to both of those discussions. So I suppose I can now say I’m working on the draft of the third chapter of my thesis. :-)

Usual caveats apply to the content below the fold - with the additional caveat that, for some reason, I’ve found sleep almost impossible for the past several days, and so I’m really not in the position where I can “hear” this text. I think it’s still okay, but it may be much rougher than I realise. :-) Here goes…

*sigh* This is awful. But I’m tired of looking at it, I need to move on now and write other things, and dumping it on the blog seems the best way to draw a bright, embarrassing line under it, and force myself to move on. Some version of this piece in the near future will be much better. It has to be. But that’s not going to happen this week. So below the fold this goes - a sort of framing mini-chapter, intended to do roughly the same work that the “Fragment on the Textual Strategy of Capital“ post did for the blog series on Capital, now that I’m finally ready (as I had mentioned wanting to do in the blog series) to outline this argument a bit more adequately, with reference to the work I’ve been doing on Hegel’s Science of Logic. My problem with this piece isn’t so much how it reworks these specific arguments - it’s more with everything else that somehow sneaked in along the way, with how many unintegrated layers this text seems to have acquired in its very brief life, and with the many sections where I know - please trust me, I know - I need to develop further what I have said, but where every time I add something, it just seems to make everything that much worse…

So below the fold it goes. Good riddance, for the moment at least…

I’ll try to write something substantive again later in the week - at the moment, I’m absolutely drowning in marking, which leaves me no time to have interesting thoughts, let alone pull them together into something others might want to read… For my own reference as much as anything else, I’ve tucked below the fold a sort of “Research Proposals for Dummies” piece I wrote this week for my quant methods students. It’s very, very, very simplistic - among other things, because it’s written for second-year undergrads, many of whom have no intention of going on to research careers - but some of my Research Strategies students also found the material helpful as a very basic breakdown and explanation of the strategic intent of the sections of a proposal. The piece might be useful for someone needing similar material for their own students, and not wanting to start utterly from scratch, but wanting to riff off of someone else’s basic structure.

Note that, because this piece was written in relation to a specific assessment, much of the material is obviously not relevant to a standard proposal (and I’m too lazy and too busy - hmm… can one be both? Evidently so… - to rewrite this as a more general piece right now). Note also that I wrote this at 3 a.m. - caveat emptor.

If anyone does convert this into something less assessment-specific - or improve it in all the various other ways it needs to improved - I’d consider it a great kindness if you’d share a copy of your revised version with me.

orange. continues to hold this blog’s methodology slam title, offering a new interpretation of what’s really going on, for all who have been confused by L Magee’s ontology-matching experiment: orange. suggests that it’s later than we think. What LM has been calling a “pre-alpha” software development phase is no such thing: in reality, the software is fully developed, and the experiment’s on us!!! The cat’s out of the bag now, LM: admit it - you’re just studying what academics do when you throw them out of their comfort zone, and place them in a state of confusion: do we bluff, nod sagely, and pretend that we know what’s going on? Do we lash out and start tossing citations? How confusing does the environment actually have to be, before we fess up and admit we have no idea what’s going on?

I know this is becoming a bit of a regular rant… but I was thinking again this afternoon about how common it is for methods courses and textbooks to start with some kind of introductory “theory chapter”, which generally informs students that, before they begin any kind of research design process, they must:

(1) know their epistemological and ontological stance; and

(2) be able to position themselves in relation to a wide range of theoretical debates.

This is so common that I’m beginning to get a bit worried about how counter-intuitive I find it to be. I mean, I love discussions of epistemology and ontology - probably a bit too much ;-P - and I’m quite happy to position myself away in theoretical debates of all sorts. But I think it’s fairly safe to say that I would never start a research design course or text with these issues. I think it’s also safe to say that these are not issues that arose - in this form, at least - early in my own engagement with either research or philosophy. Am I that much of an outlier?

Amusingly enough, my main objection to this approach is itself ontological: there’s something about formulating the issue in this way - as though the researcher is some kind of disembodied consciousness, floating around in The Matrix, saying, “I need Theory - lots of Theory!” - and then out roll the shelves of high-powered concepts from the aether, from which the disembodied consciousness then selects whatever approach makes it feel most secure. What about the relationship of the theory to the object of analysis? What about the relationship of all of this to some underlying question? How do students make sense of and understand their theoretical choices, when this is how theory is presented to them?

Then there’s the pedagogical issue: maybe I overcompensate, but I tend to assume that most students - most peers, for that matter - won’t be as interested in abstract theoretical discussions as I am… Unless forced to start with these issues because the students are confronting them in assigned texts, I tend to sidle my way up to terms like “epistemology” and “ontology”, because I think it takes a bit of intellectual grounding for students to be able to understand why someone would care about what appear, on their face, to be rather abstract concerns. My experience has been that students find the concepts terrifyingly fuzzy - and that their fear isn’t assuaged by the tendency of “theory chapters” in methodology texts to rush past a definition of these concepts, and into long lists of competing ontological and epistemological stances one could conceivably adopt - all lined up in a row, in neat boxes - sometimes with light bulbs flashing beside them - as though people make a common practice of dealing with significant ontological and epistemological questions by trundling their conceptual carts down the theoretical aisles in some vast grocery store of human knowledge…

I know I’ve said this before - recently enough that I shouldn’t still be ranting about this topic - but my impulse is to start with something much more grounded - much more solidly within students’ experiential frame: with what students are curious about, where their passions lie. From here, they can begin to ask questions - and those questions will then, eventually, give them the basis for finding ontological and epistemological questions meaningful - and for translating their interests into something that might fall within the boundaries of academic research.

I realise that textbooks don’t have the flexibility I have in the classroom, to build a discussion around students’ questions and dreams… But still… Wouldn’t it be possible, at least in principle, for a text to talk about curiosity as the origin point for a research process? To sketch some examples (which surely wouldn’t be any more misleading that the text box versions of theoretical positions these texts already supply) of how particular researchers found their way to problems, which then teased and thwarted them into methodological strategies - and then to unpack the concepts of epistemology and ontology from there?