More Methodological Musings

I'm still balking at entering into a "methodology" that I believe in and that fits with this particular research question/subject. "Entering into" is the phrase I can grasp at this point because it seems that I have to declare my methodology as if it were like placing my foot into the proper size shoe. I almost wish it were a matter of recognition rather than declaration; I'd rather discover what I already know and think that rhetorically adjust my philosophical stance to fit the research situation. But it seems that research is a matter of rhetoric too, and I must undergo a good deal of invention before I am ready to deliver.

Creswell in his book Research Design says this about designing a research project: "the proposal developer needs to consider three framework elements: philosophical assumptions about what constitutes knowledge claims; general procedures or research called strategies of inquiry; and detailed procedures of data collection, analysis, and writing, called methods" (3). Methodologies and methods—that's what he is talking about and their relationship. What you believe makes for "knowledge claims" shapes everything! That means that you need a firm grounding in what you think is the nature of reality and how WE know reality. Here is where I get stumped. This question is a big—I mean BIG—one to tackle. Let me step back and see if perhaps I can't find a way to approach the question of knowledge claims by allowing that there are degrees of knowledge or kinds of knowledge. There isn't just ONE kind of valid knowledge claim. That makes me breath easier, but then I question what the heck "knowledge" is anyway. What does it mean "to know?" Does what it means "to know" change depending upon our situation and framework of experience? Do we "know" in different ways? And are these ways mutually exclusive?

I've been thinking about this question of methodology a lot, and I have two writers who I have turned to to help me in this dilemma. The first is from S. Zuboff's The Age of the Smart Machine. In the discussion of workers knowledge in a saw mill, she brings up the notion of a skill as "action-centered" where the "capacity 'to know' has been lodged in sentience and displayed in action." She goes on: "Certain knowledge was conveyed through the immediacy of their sensory experience. Instead of Descarte's 'I think therefore I am,' these workers might say, 'I see, I touch, I smell, I hear; therefore, I know.' …belief was a seamless extension of sensory experience." This kind of action-centered knowledge is often tacit and doesn't require that the knowledge be made explicit. The workers referred to the "artistry" of their skill and how they had a form of "felt sense" (my words) that constituted their knowledge. They couldn't say exactly how or what they know—they just knew it. This form of knowledge is an excellent example of the classical term of "techne," but I also think it stands for our everyday experience of the senses. We can "know" the temperature in a room is hot because we feel it—we can also measure it. We can quantify it. Close observation will provide us some "truth" about what we experience—right? For me, and most of the modern world, this form of perceiving "cause-effect" relationships within reality is a matter of experience and fact. We depend upon "knowing" these cause-effect relationships within our world in order to do just about everything we do. We "know" a lot this way.

Zuboff, though, describes another form of knowledge that confronted these saw mill workers when they began running their machine processes via a computer rather than by physical efforts. The automation run by the computer replaced their direct sensory experience with a symbolic representation of reality: "Immediate physical responses must be replaced by an abstract thought process in which options are considered, and choices are made and then translated into the terms of the information system." She says that this new form of knowledge required inferential and procedural reasoning where the worker has to "know" what the symbols within the information system mean in relation to each other PLUS what they mean to the outside world. She calls this an "intellective skill," (what Clare interestingly called "epistome"). She says that the workers struggled with these two starkly different forms of knowledge.

Zuboff makes this extremely interesting comment: "In a symbolic medium, meaning is not a given value; rather it must be constructed." She mentions that the linkage between symbol and experience (sign and signified) must be established over time, but that eventually this linkage becomes so tight that the original problematic (or unlikely) nature of the linkage becomes essentially invisible.

What Zuboff describes with "intellective skill" is a form of knowledge contained within symbols. Rather than direct knowledge of "reality" via the senses, this form of knowledge is many layers abstracted from "reality"—it is only a reference or stand in for reality. When I say the temperature is 32 degrees, the words "32 degrees" are a symbolic representation of the freezing temperature outside. By touching the word, I don't feel the cold. Not even by listening or looking at the word (except in our imagination).

Knowledge claims within a "symbolic medium" are different from knowledge claims within a physical environment. I suppose the key question is how far you go with what constitutes a "symbol," but common sense I think can guide us not to go overboard. Of course, all experience is "interpreted" by the consciousness of each individual, but the immediacy of sensory connections to "reality" provide a form of knowledge that is very powerful.

This idea of Zuboff about the linkage of symbol to reality brings me to my second author—I. A. Richards. Richards in his The Philosophy of Rhetoric presents the general principle that "Language and though are not—need I say?—one and the same" (13). No one-to-one relationship exists between language and thought. If I were to say "freezing," the word would not always generate the same thought for all people. No one-to-one relationship exists between language and thought. He calls this notion of an equation between language and thought the "Proper Meaning Superstition": "the common belief…that a word has a meaning of its own (ideally, only one) independent of and controlling its use and the purpose for which is should be uttered" (11). He mentions that this belief is a superstition when we forget "that the stability of the meaning of a word comes from the constancy of the contexts that give it its meaning" (11). I like that Richards acknowledges that though the linkage between sign and signified (word and reality, language and thought) is arbitrary and contrived there are strong stabilities of meaning for many words. He compares the stability of meaning between a word like knife and a word like mass. It seems that we can study these stabilities and instabilities of meanings.

Significantly, Richards states: "At present it is still Thought which is most accessible to study and accessible largely through Language" (13). Isn't that what I am studying—people's thoughts, the evolution of their thinking. I am studying reflective thinking by examining the linguistic acts of writers—the external, discursive acts.

Let me go on and mention Richard's important point about meaning. He asks, "How does a word mean?...How does an idea (or an image) mean what it does?" (15). Later he provides a series of questions to examine more deeply the functions of language: "What is the connection between the mind and the world by which events in the mind mean other events in the world? Or How does a thought come to be 'of' whatever it is that it is a thought of? Or What is the relation between a thing and its name?" (28). He is essentially asking, "What is knowledge?" (knowledge essentially being the same thing as "meaning"). He makes a very similar point about knowledge as Zuboff related to the physical world. Noting that we are responsive in many ways to the world, he uses the analogy of a thermometer to point out the nature of our responsiveness. A thermometer responds consistently to the present temperature, with no influence from what has happened in the past. He then explains how we are not responsive in the way a thermometer is responsive: "Do we ever respond to a stimulus in a way which is not influenced by the other things that happened to us when more or less similar stimuli struck us in the past?" (29-30). He goes on:

I can make the same point by denying that we have any sensations. That sounds drastic but it is almost certainly true if rightly understood. A sensation would be something that just was so, on its own, a datum; as such we have none. Instead we have perceptions, responses whose character comes to them from the past as well as the present occasion. A perception is never just of an it; perception takes whatever it perceives as a thing of a certain sort. All thinking from the lowest to the highest—whatever else it may be—is sorting. (30)

It seems that Richards adds a complexity to Zuboff's idea of "action-centered" skill, but I don't think he invalidates in this instance the close connection between sensation and reality. These workers through extensive past experience refine their senses connection to reality. It doesn't invalidate their form of knowledge; it only explains how it comes about.

Richards continues by noting the importance of context for words and their meanings. He refers to meaning as "delegated efficacy" especially through words "whose virtue is to be substitutes exerting the powers of what is not there. They do this as other signs do it, though in more complex fashions, through their contexts" (32). Context, though, is not a cut and dried term. We don't respond to present contexts like a thermometer. The traditional meaning of context is circumstance, situation, instance. But Richards gets at context from "considering those recurrences in nature which statements of causal laws are about" (33). He states the simple definition of a causal law: "a causal law may be taken as saying that, under certain conditions, of two events if one happens the other does" (33). This is common sense. He explains the messiness of cause and effect relationships and how we decide them to suit our purposes: "we distribute the titles of 'cause' and 'effects' as we please" (33). Richard's "causal theorem of meaning" is similar to Burke's "terministic screen" in saying that we select or privilege certain kinds of causal laws and don't select others. Speaking about language, he describes how for a context a word can "take over the duties of parts which can then be omitted from the recurrence. There is thus an abridgement of the context. …When this abridgement happens, what the sign or word—the item with these delegated powers—means is the missing parts of the context" (34). What a complicated way in which words relate to reality (context) and to our thought (meaning/knowledge) of that reality! Sensing the complexity of what he is talking about, Richards offers this simplified summary of his thinking: "It is enough for our purposes to say that what a word means is the missing parts of the contexts from which it draws its delegated efficacy" (35). Context, then,--that complex perception from the past and present of circumstance—is what constitutes the bedrock of meaning, and when we "mean" to each other though language if we are to have any "understanding" we must supply the context behind the words. This is hard to do, and as Richards says the source of most misunderstanding.

I've gotten side-tracked into philosophic explorations of the relationship between reality, language, and thought, but it seems I must have a firm grounding in how I believe these all relate before I can declare a methodology. Based upon my methodology (philosophical viewpoint on the world and the word!), I can THEN see how I will go about making my own "knowledge claims."

It seems that if I seek to find the stability of meaning(s) for words and experience related to reflection that I could use scientific methods—quantitative means like a survey. Can I explore how far consistencies of cause-effect relationships go from a given context? The crux seems to lie in how much consistency we provide to context. If we assert that context is so variable as to have no true consistency or uniformity, then we have no basis to assert any cause-effect relationships. Nothing usefully generalizable is generated. But could we step back and in a more general, big-picture way assert the consistency and uniformity of a context or activity (notice I am integrating the notion of action into context)? For instance, could I in general examine the influence of reflection on writing? Or examine the effect and what is generated when students are asked to reflect? What do they do? Is there any consistency in what is generated or what students do when they reflect as seen in their language.

I'm thinking more and more that I should not shy away from positivistic or post-positivistic "knowledge claims," but perhaps I could triangulate and contextualize some positivistic knowledge claims with qualitative analysis. So for instance I might do a content analysis of a ton of reflective writing pieces and generate some larger generalizations about what students say and do in reflection. I could even do an additional study that sought to link stated aims or goals for revision and actual revisions made by students. I could have two cohorts—one that did consistent reflection in-process and one that did not. Then examine the choices and changes make in revision between the two groups. Is there any difference?

I need to stop now. In a way, I’m left as confused as ever. Here is where I need to assistance of my professors to gain perspective. I think it will be my goal for this May and Summer to land on my methodology and the particular research project I will pursue for my dissertation research.