Two different modes of knowing

Bruner (1986) has argued that human beings understand the world in two very different ways. He distinguished between a “paradigmatic mode” (also known as the “logico-scientific mode”) and a “narrative mode” of understanding. Although complementary, neither of the two modes of knowing is reducible to the other; each providing a distinctive way of ordering experience and constructing reality (Lyons & LaBoskey, 2002, p. 15). The paradigmatic

mode, focussed on the narrow epistemological question of ‘how to know the truth’, entails

comprehension of our experiences through tightly reasoned analyses, logical proof, and empirical observation. The narrative mode, focussed on the broader, more inclusive question of ‘the meaning of experiences’, entails concerns with human wants, needs, and goals. McAdams(1993) described the latter as “the mode of stories, wherein we deal with ‘the vicissitudes of human intention’ organized in time” (p. 29). Lyons and LaBoskey (2002) explained the difference as follows: “One seeks explications context free and universal, and the other context sensitive and particular” (p. 15).

Narrative inquiry is predicated on the narrative way of knowing (Kramp, 2004, p. 107), which distinguishes it from other more traditional research methods which are predicated on the paradigmatic (logico-scientific/mathematical) way of knowing. The main difference between the two ways of knowing revolves around issues of truth and validity/verifiability of the outcomes (Bruner, 1986; McAdams, 1993; Kramp, 2004). As Bruner (1986) explained:

A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude (p. 11).

Bruner (1986) described them as “two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality” (p. 11). He noted that the one cannot be reduced to the other; neither can the one be ignored at the expense of the other without failing to capture the rich diversity of thought (Bruner, 1986, p. 11). The following two subsections offer a more detailed, albeit brief, description of the differences between the two modes of knowing.

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3.3.1 Paradigmatic (logico-scientific/mathematical) knowing

According to Kramp (2004, p. 107), paradigmatic or logico-scientific/mathematical knowing searches for how we come to know the truth. It is based on positivist assumptions; driven by reasoned hypotheses; and, results in a rigid principle or a law; an abstraction or a generalization; that leads to a theory, information, or both that can be used to predict or control human behaviour of natural forces (p. 107). She further explained that “Paradigmatic thinking pursues empirical truth and requires logical proof” (p. 107). From this perspective, the researcher’s job is to eliminate ambiguity and uncertainty. In paradigmatic knowing “there cannot be two equally credible accounts” (p. 108). The researcher who seeks to explain or explicate the truth, only takes into account evidence that is observable through the senses. Paradigmatic knowing is typically expressed in denotative language, emphasizing definition, abstraction, conceptual analysis, evidence, and truth. As Giovannoli (2000) observed, “*I+n this perspective stories are analyzed for criteria that would place them in one or the other category and thus reinforce a hypothesis” (p. 34).

Similarly, Polkinghorne (2010, p. 395) noted that paradigmatic thinking structures experiences by identifying and categorizing them into concept groups; followed by causally relating these to other concept groups.

According to Bruner (1986) the paradigmatic or logico-scientific mode “attempts to fulfill (sic) the ideal of a formal, mathematical system of description and explanation. It employs categorization or conceptualization and the operations by which categories are established, instantiated, idealized, and related one to the other to form a system” (p. 12).

At a gross level then:

the logico-scientific mode deals in general causes, and in their establishment, and makes use of procedures to assure verifiable reference and to test for empirical truth. Its language is regulated by requirements of consistency and noncontradiction (sic). Its domain is defined not only by observables to which its basic statements relate, but also by the set of possible worlds that can be logically generated and tested against observables – that is it is driven by principled hypotheses (Bruner, 1986, p. 13).

In pondering the potential of the paradigmatic (logico-scientific/mathematical) mode of knowing to make sense of human experiences, McAdams (1993) wrote:

For all its power and precision, however, the paradigmatic mode is a strangely humbler form of thought than story making. It is not able to make much sense of human desire, goals, and social conduct. Human events are often ambiguous,

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and resistant to paradigmatic efforts to understand them (McAdams, 1993, p. 29).

A good story in the narrative mode, in contrast, is especially effective when it triggers presuppositions and generates many different meanings (McAdams, 1993, p. 30). For example, Atkinson and Delamont (2006), arguing for a degree of caution and methodological scepticism during narrative inquiry, wrote:

Our concern would not be whether a given testimonio is internally consistent or entirely accurate. Since we do not believe that any account simply mirrors some antecedent reality, but helps to create that very reality itself, we also believe that such performances cannot be held to give privileged access to a political ‘truth’...we must sustain a commitment to an analytic stance, and not a celebratory one. We need, therefore, to retain a degree of distance from the narrative materials we collect, analyse and reproduce (p. 169).

They explained that the political orientations of the inquirer “should not become an excuse for the uncritical celebration of particular kinds and sources of social acts, nor for the abandonment of obligations to treat them as social ‘facts’ susceptible to sustained analytic inspection” (p. 169).

3.3.2 Narrative knowing

Polkinghorne (2010) argued that narrative thinking is more closely attuned to expressing human experience than paradigmatic thinking. As Bruner (1986), explained:

The imaginative application of the narrative mode leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily “true”) historical accounts. It deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place (p. 13).

According to Kramp (2004, p. 108), narrative knowing asks two questions: “How do we come to endow experience with meaning?” and “What is the meaning of experience?” In narrative knowing the answers to both these questions lie in a story. As Marlett and Emes (2010) pointed out:

Stories are used in research because meaning is created in conversation as stories are told and explored. There is no established truth that we are trying to find, no theory about what is right... Meaning, in a narrative approach, is contained in stories about events, relationships, emotions, and thoughts. In narrative research, we look for stories to provide information (p. 132).

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The narrative inquirer interprets the experiences and events as told by the story teller and this gives them meaning. Leggo (2008) wrote: “I am not sure that narrative bestows meaning as much as it recognizes some of the possibilities of meaning that lie always in the seemingly tangled messiness of lived experience” (p. 5). As Kramp (2004) explained:

The researcher understands that each story has a point of view that will differ, depending on who is telling the story, who is being told, as well as when and where the story is told. Consequently, verisimilitude – the appearance or likelihood that something is or could be true or real – is a more appropriate criterion for narrative knowing that verification or proof of truth. What the story teller ‘tells’ is what is significant for the researcher, who desires to understand the meaning of a particular phenomenon rather than to gather information about it (p. 108).

She continues that narrative knowing is best expressed in connotative language: revealing effective causal thinking; creating order; revealing intentionality; and, structuring human experience; so that “*c+lear accounts of an experience, typically jargon-free, are structured in story form, constituting a meaningful story, sometimes not known to the storyteller until it is told” (Kramp, 2004, p. 108).

Polkinghorne (1988), noting that people ordinarily explain their own actions, and that of others, by means of a plot, suggested that this is because: “In the narrative schema for organizing information, an event is understood to have been explained when its role and significance in relation to a human project is identified” (p. 21). He further comments that this way of explaining differs from the logico-mathematical way of explaining where understanding is thought to occur when an event is identified as a particular instance of and established law, pattern, or relationship among categories; noting that explanation through narrative is contextually bound and therefore differs in form from formal scientific explanations. Making sense of a human event is not dependent upon whether a person can place it into the proper category or not; rather making sense depends upon whether a person is able to integrate it into a plot and understand it in the context of what has happened (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 21). Usually human events are explained in the narrative mode rather than the categorical mode. Narrative explanation answers questions by:

[C]onfiguring a set of events into a story-like causal nexus... focussing on the events in an individual’s life history that have an effect on a particular action, including the projected future goals the action is to achieve... explains an event by tracing its intrinsic relations to other events and locating it in its historical

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context... narratives exhibit an explanation rather than demonstrating it (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 21).

Narrative explanation breaks the characteristic symmetry between explanation and prediction exhibited by logico-mathematical reasoning. It does so by refusing to subsume events under laws; instead explaining it by clarifying their significance retrospectively on the basis of their subsequent outcomes (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 21).

Dhunpath (2000, p. 544) coined the term “narradigm” to describe how, in a “post- paradigmatic age” that actively sponsors the “long-absent” voices of teachers, teacher- educators, and learners, “narrative research enables us to reconceptualise our studies of teaching and curriculum in fundamentally different ways” (p. 544). She explained that: “The notion of a ‘Narradigm’ affirms the reality that our lives are intrinsically narrative in quality. We experience the world and re-present our experience narratively” (Dhunpath, 2000, pp. 544-545). Explaining how this is different from traditional positivistic approaches, she wrote:

Traditionally, research has tended to present an archetypal image of teachers, by using positivistic approaches aimed at quantifying teaching performance. These positivistic approaches strip research of the rich tapestry of human experience and emotion. They attempt to make sense of pieces of teachers’ lives without understanding the narrative wholes in which the pieces are embedded (Dhunpath, 2000, p. 548).

In summary, the difference between the positivistic “paradigmatic” (logico-scientific/ mathematical) mode and the “narrative mode”, as Polkinghorne (1988, p. 17) suggested, is that the paradigmatic mode searches for universal truth, whereas the narrative mode searches for connections between events. Moreover, “different kinds of knowledge require different kinds of evidence and argument to convince readers that the claim is valid” (Polkinghorne, 2007, p. 4). Bamberg (2012) argued that narrative knowing is centred “around the particularity and specificity of what occurred and the involvement (and accountability or responsibility) of human agents in bringing about these specific and incidental events” (p. 79). He added that: “The term narrative as method implies a general approach that views individuals within their social environments as actively conferring meaning onto objects in the world, including others and selves; the way this happens in everyday situations as well as in interviews or surveys, is necessarily subjective and interpretive” (pp. 79-80). As Keltchtermans (1993) pointed out, human behaviour is the result of such meaningful interaction with the environment or the context (social, cultural,

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material, and institutional). Moreover, meanings are construed throughout interactions with, especially, the social and cultural environment. In the following section, the readers will be introduced to narrative inquiry, a research methodology that is based on the narrative mode of knowing.