J.Newman (jne@gcal.ac.uk)
Sun, 24 Oct 1999 23:01:42 +0100 (BST)
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1999 23:01:42 +0100 (BST) From: "J.Newman" <jne@gcal.ac.uk> Subject: Anti-positivism
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Who exactly are these "Positivists", whom the Anti-positivists are
against?
Popper was explicitly against the Logical Positivists, even though he used
to go hiking with Carnap. Indeed the whole point of Popper's work in
the logic of science is to rebut the Logical Positivist dogma. If we
accept, with Popper, that the demarcation between science and non-science
is NOT as the Logical Positivists thought the same as the distinction
between meaning and nonsense/superstition, then it seems to me that most
of the objections of the so-called Anti-positivists don't get any grip.
(1) The theories that are employed by people whom we might choose to
study "scientifically" are a phenomenon like any other.
(2) Adopting (or I suppose we should really say "adapting") methods from
the natural sciences, when studying human affairs, is not "uncritical"
or "unreflective". Indeed there has been such a wave of hostility
towards scientific approaches to society, that I'm sure that nobody
could adopt a scientific approach without being acutely aware of
the issues. We need to distinguish between reflecting on our
practices as investigators, and regarding reflection as the high
road to understanding and knowledge of the world (in this case the
social world. Max Weber was, I think, spot on in saying that our
explanations of social phenomena must be adequate BOTH at the level
of causality and at the level of meaning. If not adequate at the
level of meaning, they willnot be about society. If not adequate at
the level of causality, we have no warrant for embracing them.
The decision to adopt a scientific or hypothetico-deductive approach,
is the attempt to find a way of ensuring that explanations are
adequate at the level of causality.
Scott Overmyer is right in saying that people often opt for something
weaker because this approach is so hard to do. And, I would say, so
resource-intensive!
Where I think we have to part company with Popper, is that he is
specifically concerned with Science, and yet if we are concerned with
professional practice then simply doing Science does not get to grips with
what needs to be a large part of our research agenda. The nice thing
about H A Simon is that he manages to criticise the Engineering schools
for having turned themselves into Science schools, yet he does not throw
out the Scientific baby with the bathwater.
Still and all, the pedagogical beauty of the Science model is that you can
present students with a recipe for generating research and writing it up;
but the standard model of the experimental paper does not transfer very
happily to reporting implementation-oriented research. My students will
be expected by their examiners to report their Dissertations in something
like the standard experimental form. I'm encouraging them to avoid
dreaming up "fake" hypotheses just to fill a slot, and to think about what
is the analytical instrument or procedure that will go in the middle of
their report in the place of "Results and Analysis". IMHO, a Design
Rationale can be a good solution to this dilemma in many cases.
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