Ontological commitment
I was going to write up an account of my experience at the i-mean conference on identities I went to in Bristol in April. Rather than provide a full account, though, as a result of this conference I had a brain itch that has only just been scratched, and I thought I would share that instead.
This starts with one of the key-note papers, by Ben Rampton. He provided a very entertaining paper on linguistic practices of minorities in diverse parts of London (I think it was London). I don’t have the details on me but the conference details are here: http://www1.uwe.ac.uk/cahe/research/bristolcentreforlinguistics/i-mean/conferencedetails.aspx. His paper worked on a number of levels of analysis: sociolinguistics, phonetics – I will dig out the slides and update this post. It was about time, he said, that studies of language started to work at different levels and integrate better the achievements that have been made in the different sub-disciplines. He had time for one question, so I ask him: how integrated could this multidisciplinary approach be? Was he in fact searching for a “theory of everything”, the same kind of ToE that has escaped physicists and sociologists (for instance)? You won’t be surprised to read that he didn’t think he was falling foul of any such problems; but he thanked me for the “coruscating” question.
Since then I have been thinking about what it was that bothered me, and eventually managed to pin it down in expressible form. It’s something like this: the first trap for multidisciplinary research is the philosophical (be they epistemological or ontological) assumptions that the research methodologies commit you to. Where there is a fundamental conflict, i.e. at the philosophical level, you’re left with a set of approaches that won’t marry unless you successfully carry out some kind of complex operation on them. There are some ways around this. First, you can borrow tools in the bricoleur fashion. This requires that you don’t dig too much, but that you take things that you can think with. If you don’t get close to the foundation, it can work, but at the risk, I submit, of potentially losing depth or purchase. You can run different analysis in series, and consider their findings side-by-side, without attempting an integration. Or you can do the hard work and try to meld theories together that were originated with the intention that they would be completely discrete and self-sufficient. Typically, social researchers will try to marry so-called “macro” with “micro” approaches, in the assumption that is an all-encompassing way of dealing with social life. I currently think that all these ways are very difficult to carry out successfully.
My frustration is not that people try this but that the implications at a more fundamental level are rarely noted. More than anything else, whatever happened to a commitment to a philosophical position? Does it not matter that we cannot articulate a way of how we think the world works? I think it is good to find such a position, and certainly to know what they are and how they interact. We have all come across criticisms in the literature that work rhetorically by bringing things down to a philosophical basis; thus, whole research traditions will be addressed as if they can be undermined by bringing attention to their ‘monism’, ‘dualism’, ‘realism’, ’empiricism’ – not to mention ‘positivism’. I am not sure that I find this kind of rhetorical move convincing, as these terms act as a shorthand for all kinds of arguments that remain unexpressed. But the fact remains that this move is there for those who feel capable enough to reduce social science traditions to philosophical positions.
I have headed this post with the title “Ontological Commitment”, in the hope that it expressed what I wanted it to. Sadly, both it and its alternative, “epistemological commitment,” have both been take already and are quite specific existing philosophical terms (not entirely unrelated to what I have in mind, though). So the research goes on for a better terminology. I will try to write more on this in due course as I learn more. I would of course love to get responses to these ideas.
One last thing: early on in Winch’s “Idea of a Social Science”, he posits that no meaningful social science can be carried out unphilosophically; and no meaningful philosophy can ignore social phenomena. Reading this again brought me back to my undergraduate days, when I studies alongside a large number of mature students. Whenever we touched upon the foundations of social research, they would typically complain: we’re here to do sociology, not philosophy. For Winch and others, they are the same thing.
Magda, thanks for your response. I am glad it is not just me! Your experiences are not surprising to me, of course. They are indicative of the way that very attenuated “versions” are provided at every educational level before that of the professional. This is just one example of an elision but a particularly egregious one, I would suggest, seeing as practitioners can and frequently do get away with it as part of their professional activities. The logical end of my complaint would be, at the very least, that multidisciplinary projects would need to be overt about their scope, as I write in my third paragraph above. My preferred outcome, though, would be to introduce this kind of issue earlier and more strongly in all kinds of social studies.
I have just come across an interesting looking article that seems to presage some of these arguments co-written by my second supervisor, Wes Sharrock (Semiotica 1986), so I will report back when I have had more input.
Thanks Paul. I have also found myself getting repeatedly upset about the seemingly unproblematic lack of a visible ontological position some researchers have. It has happened to me as a lecturer at university that, whenever I have pointed out inconsistencies arising from this lack of articulation of a position, my colleagues have responded either with silence or by saying we (but meant as you, really) need to remember we are teaching at Masters not Doctoral level (so don’t let’s bother each other with these small issues, sort of). As if transparency and coherence in research were to do with level/degree. I find it very frustrating. I know your argument goes much deeper than this, and I also have some thoughts about how the issue impacts on analysis (from my own experience). But reading your reflections reminded me of this issue, that has made me increasingly quiet in lecturer discussion forums.