4. Reduced to a crude linear continuum there are two extremes of thought in regard to the relationship between reality and appearance and, thus, to the nature of truth. At one end are the Materialists who, because they hold that matter is the only thing that can truly be said to exist, argue that all phenomena must be the result of the interaction of material things: real phenomena have single explanations and, therefore, a unified set of laws underlies nature.
Truth, from this perspective, is realisable in an independent, objective, single reality. At the other extreme are the thinkers who can broadly be categorised as Solipsists. They argue that there is no logical link between the mental and the physical because the only knowledge that we can be certain of is that contained in our own thoughts: this is summed up in Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ or, more eloquently in Coleridge’s description of Hamlet: ‘for ever occupied with the world within him, and abstracted from external things’
(cited in Akroyd, 2002, p.435). Under these conditions all we can do is infer the thoughts of others and hope to understand them by analogy with our own.
But, because knowledge requires greater justification than mere inference and analogy, knowledge of anything outside the mind is unjustified. This denial of a reality independent of the mind makes objectivity simply a ‘view from nowhere’ and subjectivity the key to the relative truths revealed in multiple constructed realities. Now, while scientific hypotheses are constructed so as to allow the possibility of refutation, the beauty of Materialism and Solipsism is that neither can logically be refuted.
1.2 ASSuMpTION
1. How are we to come to terms with these contradictions? The ancient Greeks tried ‘witnessing’. On special occasions accredited individuals witnessed events to later attest, in appropriate but awkwardly structured language, what had taken place:
We who now address you here, were there then, and we witnessed there then what we are about to tell you here now in order that you here and we here may all talk here now and in the future about how what happened there then affects us here.
(Schostak, 2006, p.14)
There can be no simple relationship between account and event for attempting to control adds to the sources of distortion by reducing the complexity of
what is being witnessed (Schostak, 2006). The same dilemma applies to closed system analysis in behavioural research. The methodological aim here is to isolate key variables by carefully defined and operationalised concepts.3 It also explains the variety of procedures to standardise interviews to facilitate comparison and quantification (Schostak, 2006).
Where, though, does this leave the researcher? Well, in the first instance, it means a willingness to refrain from reconciling contradiction but, instead, to seek the productiveness implicit in it. The exercise of doing so is akin to the realisation of one’s own error: it creates a space for new knowledge (Rowland, 2006). In the second it means acceptance that assumptions, mental models of the nature, limits and certainty of knowledge, will inform the kinds of research questions asked, the approaches adopted and the results produced (Greene & Caracelli, 2003). Assumptions about the nature of research account, for example, for the implied objective disengagement of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) preference for use of the past tense in research writing and for the subjectivity implicit in the Modern Languages Association’s (MLA) preference for the present tense.
What a thesis writer’s assumptions are, therefore, particularly in exegetic or qualitative theses, will need to be indicated in the introductory chapter:
‘While aware of postmodernist debate over issues of objectivity and historical realism, this thesis will balance skepticism with some confidence about an empirical approach to the past’ (Thompson, 2002, p.1).
Vocabulary
2. As has already become apparent assumptions also influence the terminology used in a thesis. Vocabulary is an important indicator of where researchers, consciously or otherwise, have positioned themselves theoretically. This is because language, like knowledge, is not simply ‘transparent’, reflecting an objective reality. It is, instead, as an inevitable consequence of its socially constructed, communicative function, a constitutive force reflecting a particular view of reality (Grubs, 2006). In a thesis an empirical researcher, for example, will use the term ‘investigator’ rather than the qualitative
‘explorer’. Empirical researchers will also use the term ‘literature review’
because it reflects the nomothetic tendency of empiricism: the researcher is able to come to the research question with an established body of generalisable knowledge situated in the existing literature. A qualitative researcher, however, might instead use the term ‘review of the discourses’
because it reflects the idiographic tendency of constructivism: literature is not a body of generalised knowledge but part of an ongoing, context specific debate joined as and when the needs of the research require it. Words might
also reveal a position in a thesis discussion long before that position has been made explicit: the use of ‘global warming’, for example, as opposed to
‘climate change’.
Nonlinearity
3. Based on the assumption events have causes the word ‘because’ is central to language. Do events have causes? They might for the concept is productive.
But how do we know when we have a cause? Does the statement ‘X always follows Y’ mean Y causes X? Not necessarily. Does day cause night? The statement ‘X must be followed by Y’ means only that we observe and, therefore, infer that X must follow Y. Inference is not, though, an empirical concept so the question must be ‘under what conditions is it plausible to infer that an observed relationship is causal?’ (Punch, 2006, p.49). In an experiment variables might be controlled in order to identify single causes.
But confounding variables, as in any social setting, will exert an influence.
Because it is not possible, in any setting, to possess all relevant information the possible causes of any event are infinite (Taleb, 2007). ‘History is opaque.
You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events’
(Taleb, 2007, p.8). The problem here is butterflies. One flapping its wings might cause a tornado on the other side of the world.4 But this only makes sense if all other variables are excluded. Attempting to trace the cause of a tornado back to the butterfly illustrates the difficulty. The mathematician Henri Poincaré was the first to introduce the concept ‘nonlinearity’: small effects can have significant consequences. This, and because all factors work together, is the reason why it is not possible to take all possible causes of an event into account (Taleb, 2007). The word ‘because’, therefore, is no more than an inference arbitrarily splitting and falsifying the infinitely rich flux of events (Blackburn, 2005).
Measurement
4. Nonetheless, despite Poincaré’s insights, linearity remains in some contexts a viable concept. If the laws of motion were nonlinear, no sane astronaut would be willing to be blasted into space (Lewin, 2001). This is at least one of the reasons explaining why in the sciences natural phenomena are usually more amenable to categorisation and measurement than is human behaviour. There are also others:
…biological structure transforms over millennia and eons, and is thus sufficiently stable to lend itself to the assumptions of analytic science. By contrast, other
phe-nomena, such as a culture’s symbolic tools, not only evolve more quickly, but are also subject to very different sets of influences. Analytic methods are not just inadequate, but inappropriate for making sense of such dispersed, rapidly changing, and intri-cately entangled sets of phenomena.
(Davis, 2008, p.57)
It is for this reason that students in the sciences often consider the role of assumption in research as mere distraction. Let’s, therefore, first establish a point of principle. Can we doubt the assumption that it is possible to measure precisely the quantity of a tangible substance or the length of a visible object? Well, consider the length of the hypotenuse of a right-angled isosceles triangle. If the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the opposite sides then, where these sides are each one unit in length, √2 is the length of the hypotenuse. (Together with pi the first of the irrational numbers to be discovered, √2 expressed as a fraction is one followed by an infinite number of decimal places.) This means that although apparently amenable on paper to objective measurement, no one can ever claim to have measured precisely the length of the hypotenuse of such a triangle. Even bearing in mind that it is we who impose the structure of the number system5 on objects we wish to measure, the assumption that it is possible to measure precisely the quantity of a tangible substance or the length of a visible object is incorrect.
5. Now it is readily acknowledged that this example is double-edged: while illustrating the limits of objective measurement the example also implies these limits are utterly inconsequential. Ipso facto the entire debate about the role of assumption on an individual’s ability to perceive an objective reality is also inconsequential and, thus, irrelevant to the natural sciences. But wait, the mere measurement of tangible quantities and lengths or operationally defined concepts are not what constitute science; measurements are only part of a much more elaborate process. What is considered important to measure, what—consciously or subconsciously—is ignored or assumed, how results are reconstituted and given meaning are what constitutes science.
The foundational theories of contemporary evolutionary biology which until recently have given primacy to the role of DNA in the evolutionary process are, for example, being shaken by a reassessment of the relatively minor role until recently attributed to RNA. New perspectives are changing long-held assumptions about what ought to be researched and how it ought to be researched. Thus, while numbers register support for or departure from theory ‘with an authority and finesse that no qualitative technique can duplicate’ (Sharrock & Read, 2002, p.180) they are also unavoidably interpretive figures as they are produced through theoretical understandings
of what is to be counted (Schoenberger, 2001). This is the meaning behind Einstein’s apocryphal statement: ‘Everything that’s countable doesn’t necessarily count; what counts isn’t necessarily countable’ (cited in Rowland, 2006, p.119).