Principles and Concepts of Social Research: A Critical Examination of Methodology, Methods and Analysis for Emerging Researchers 1032149671, 9781032149677

Citation preview

Principles and Concepts of Social Research

Principles and Concepts of Social Research is a text covering the foundations of social science research, outlining the history and core elements of Western social research. The text covers a variety of topics, ranging from the history of scientific beliefs from Ancient Greece to the contemporary world. It outlines the basics of the development of knowledge systems and logic, the definition of science and its processes, the progression of classifying humans, and research ethics, amongst other underlying elements of research. The book has three aims: (1) to develop the reader’s knowledge and understanding of social research through modes of social scientific enquiry and an evaluation of techniques of the social, cultural, and political context of its practice; (2) to increase readers’ intellectual competence through a critical examination of the social, cultural, and historical characteristics of research traditions; and (3) to improve the competence of social researchers through a critical evaluation of research strategies, the problematization of science and Western social research, the issues posed by social research, and the skills needed to formulate research outputs and engagement. This book will be of use to core research units and training programs that universities provide at postgraduate level, at doctoral level, and for early career post-​doctoral researchers, to develop greater understanding of issues surrounding research. In addition to its theory, the contents of the book will include questions for discussion in seminars and small group work. Simon Hayhoe is a reader in the Department of Education at the University of Bath, UK. He is also a centre associate of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics and the Scottish Sensory Centre at Edinburgh University.

Principles and Concepts of Social Research A Critical Examination of Methodology, Methods and Analysis for Emerging Researchers Simon Hayhoe

Designed cover image: © Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Simon Hayhoe The right of Simon Hayhoe to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Hayhoe, Simon, author. Title: Principles and concepts of social research : a critical examination of methodology, methods and analysis for emerging researchers / Simon Hayhoe. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022035775 (print) | LCCN 2022035776 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032149660 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032149677 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003241997 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Social sciences–Research. | Social sciences–History. Classification: LCC H62 .H347 2023 (print) | LCC H62 (ebook) | DDC 300.72–dc23/eng/20220809 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035775 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035776 ISBN: 9781032149660 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032149677 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003241997 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003241997 Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

Dedicated to the memory of Anthony Hayhoe and Margaret Hayhoe.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments 1 Introduction

Introduction  1 Terms and Phrases Used Throughout this Book  2 General Scientific Terms Examined in this Book  4 Chapter Summaries  12

x xi 1

SECTION I

Principles

15

2 Historical Principles of Science 1: From Ancient Greece Through to the Enlightenment

17

3 Historical Principles of Science 2: The Modern History of Western Science

40

Introduction  17 Principles Introduced Through this Chapter  18 Ancient Greece, Philosophy, and Methodology  22 The Medieval Period and the Renaissance  28 The Enlightenment, and an Understanding of Consciousness  33 Summary  39

Introduction  40 Principles Introduced Through this Chapter  41 The Era of Modern Western Science  44 Power, History, and the Development of Methodology  51 Summary  60

viii Contents

4 Contemporary Principles and Defining Science

61

5 From Principles to Practice

76

Introduction  61 Key Principles in this Chapter  61 General Statements on Western Science and Social Science  65 The Problem with Developing a Unified Understanding of Science  68 Summary  75 Introduction  76 Key Principles in this Chapter  76 The Construction of Objective Knowledge from Subjective Knowledge  79 Taxonomy and Reductionism in Western Social Science  84 The Effect of Western Social Scientific Classification on Society  90 Summary  93

SECTION II

Concepts

95

6 The Concept and Collection of Data

97

Introduction  97 Concepts Introduced Through this Chapter  98 What Is Data Generation, and Where Does It Fit Within the Testing of Theories?  100 Classifications of Data in the Social Sciences and Social Research  101 Case Study of a Data Collection Technique–​Observation  108 Summary  111

7 Analysis in the Social Sciences

113

8 The Role of Ethics in Western Social Research

129

Introduction  113 Concepts Introduced Through this Chapter  113 The Concept of Analysis  115 Taxonomies of Analysis  119 The Process of Analysis  122 Summary  128 Introduction  129 Concepts Introduced Through this Chapter  129 Critical Issues in Western Ethics  131 The Contemporary Study of Western Ethics  134 Summary  140

Contents  ix

9 Writing and Recording Research Outputs

142

10 Developing Impact and Public Involvement in Social Science

159

11 Conclusion

175

Introduction  142 Concepts Introduced Through this Chapter  142 The Concept of Western Scientific Outputs  146 Developing Research Outputs Using Standard Protocols  150 Publishing a Research Output  154 Summary  158

Introduction  159 Concepts Introduced Through this Chapter  159 Impact Through Public Engagement  163 A Case Study of Developing Participatory Impact Through the Three-​Ws Model  169 Summary  173 What Is Social Science, and How Is It Derived from a Broader Conceptualization of Science?  175 What Is Scientific Knowledge?  176 What Is the Way Forward for Social Science?  178

References Index

179 186

Illustrations

Figures 1.1 Agricultural Science in Relation to the Natural and Human or Social Sciences 2.1 Two Images of Scientific Progress 3.1 Split in the Debate on Western Science and Methodology 4.1 Statements on Science and Social Science as an Axis 4.2 The Development of a Research Positionality 6.1 The DIKW Model of Wisdom Hierarchy as a Pyramid 7.1 The Components of Analysis—​What Is the Difference Between Finding Things Out and Researching Systematically? 9.1 The Peer Review Process 9.2 A Typical Conference Structure 10.1 The Traditional Model of Academic Impact Development 10.2 The Impact-​Driven Model of Research Development 10.3 The Three-​Ws Model of Developing Public Engagement 10.4 Who to Engage 10.5 Where to Engage 10.6 Virtual Engagement 10.7 Physical Engagement 10.8 When to Engage 10.9 ARCHES—​Inclusive Technology in Museums

6 21 44 73 74 101 116 146 157 163 164 166 167 167 167 168 168 170

Table 4.1 Example Statements on Science by Scientists and Scientific Institutions, and Statements for Social Use by Users of Science

69

Acknowledgments

Most of all, I would like to acknowledge my very hard-​working editor, Hannah Shakespeare, at Routledge. I would also like to acknowledge the MRes students and staff at the University of Bath, and those from the GW4 (including the universities of Bristol, Exeter, and Bath) for their constructive and helpful discussions that stimulated and informed the contents of this book. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics for supporting my study of methodological theory over the past 12 years. The case study in chapter 10 received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nº 693229.

newgenprepdf

1 Introduction

Introduction This book introduces a critical examination of the historical and contemporary principles and concepts of Western social science, including: the history of beliefs, knowledge systems and the logic of science; the definition of science and the process by which science evolves; the process of classifying humans, their thinking and their behavior through scientific methodologies; the nature of data and analysis; the social scientific understanding of ethics; the development of research outputs to share methodologies and research findings; and, the nature of public engagement, knowledge exchange and impact. The book has three aims. The first aim is to develop the reader’s knowledge and understanding of social research through an exposition of the significance and rationales of alternative epistemological paradigms and modes of its social scientific enquiry and to evaluate the corresponding techniques of the social, cultural, and political context of its processes. The second aim is to increase readers’ intellectual competence through an examination of the social, cultural, and historical character of research traditions, how these traditions became established, the dimensions of research problems and the parameters, value and appropriateness of its techniques. The third aim is to improve the professional and practical competence of social researchers through a critical evaluation of research strategies, the problematization of research data, the issues posed by social research and the competence needed to formulate research proposals for external funding or theses. The intellectual position that this book takes is that science is not a natural activity, and so the principles of science are neither natural nor based in what is customarily termed natural logic. Thus, the principles and subsequent concepts of Western social science have evolved from the academic heritage of Western societies. Consequently, our understanding of the human world is social-​cultural and based on a biased intellectual development, which is founded in subjective social and cultural traditions and should be observed, analyzed, and understood as such before approaching and planning a research project. The text of this book is developed largely from research training programs taught on two continents and has evolved from teaching on core research DOI: 10.4324/9781003241997-1

2 Introduction units at postgraduate, undergraduate and doctoral level, and through providing training for early career researchers. Thus, the contents of this book are like numerous core units that universities teach at postgraduate and doctoral level, and occasionally introduce at final year undergraduate level. In addition to its theory, the contents of the book will include questions for discussion in seminars and small group work, as well as exercises within and between lectures, seminars, tutorials, or classes. This book was also developed to add to a debate on the cultural characteristics of Western social science, based on the following three questions: 1. What is Social Science, and how is it derived from a broader conceptualization of science? 2. What is scientific knowledge? It is “truthful” knowledge, how reliable is it really? 3. What is the way forward for social science? The objective of this book is unusual, in that it is the hope by the end of reading it you will realize that you know less about social science than you did when you started reading it. In other words, I would like you to realize that there is no simple understanding of social science and that social research cannot fit neatly into a box. Subsequently, at a minimum, after reading this book the reader should be able to understand a unique social scientific study published in a conference paper, journal article, book or thesis, and critically understand its value to society. At a minimum, the reader should also be able to: recognize the structure of a study; see where its methodology and its data collection methods fit into its outputs; understand why these methods and methodologies were chosen; consider whether it is a reliable study; and evaluate the nature of the analysis and findings of the study. Most of all, at the end of reading this book you should be able to critically analyze the process of Western social science as a whole and see where studies fit into the cannon of knowledge on human societies, cultures, and psychologies.

Terms and Phrases Used Throughout this Book One of the key features of this book is the definitions of principles in Section I and concepts in Section II, and these definitions are included near the top of each chapter. This series of definitions begins with the following general principles that go beyond science, but relate to the subject of this book. Importantly, this initial set of definitons attempts to unpick a number of important terms, and for greater ease of use splits them into two families: terms that are used in all sciences and social sciences; and those terms that are relevant to the social sciences in particular. In this initial set of terms and phrases, it is important to note that the definitions are only a starting point rather than a definitive understanding of general principles. Although at first defining these principles seems to be a

Introduction  3 straightforward activity, unpicking definitions of words or phrases used in the context of a social scientific text is more difficult than it first appears. In particular, the nature of basic terms has a messy history, and what are held as being general assumptions to be taught as definitive answers often have ambiguities and logical contradictions when examined closely. For example, in Western science there is a delineation between various forms of topic or subject, and it is assumed that each term is a discrete unit of analysis that can be rationalized on its own. This practice is arguably less logical than it is a habit that scientists have developed from their cultural traditions, and the needs of university departments, libraries, and publishing houses. However, even closely examining broad units of study, such as the human sciences, the borders of what exists within this unit is fuzzy and contradictory in many ways. In the human sciences, are scientists studying the body or the mind, and if we are talking about the mind, where is the line between the two? As the study of neurology shows, the human brain’s cells effect memory, conscious thought, and cognition, and therefore behavior, and by the same logic behavior will similarly influence the human body too. To take a single instance of this cycle, according to tradition most people who live in the cultural West remember to eat meals two or three times a day, remember what their favorite meals are and prefer some foods over others. Some people may also be adverse to some foods over others, or the food that they eat may be directly regulated by social trends, such as the use or overuse of sugar in foods; personal choices such as vegetarianism; or religious rites, such as the eating of fish on Friday by some Christians, the abstinence from pork by almost all Jews and Muslims, or the abstinence from any form of animal flesh or product by some Hindus or Buddhists. Subsequently, this food will change human bodies, as the proteins created in our body to create muscles, bones, and organs, such as the brain itself, are made of this food and the food choices that we make. The brain thus becomes an organ that both regulates and is regulated by the body. Scientists also face a dilemma when they study cultural traditions of food as a branch of anthropology, when this issue is also related to the study of the reaction of food on human bodies based on these traditions. Thus, this book starts with a contradiction, as scientists do not know whether to just study the body, the mind or culture when they study human diet, or whether they should work according to the protocols of natural, medical or social science, as they all relate to this topic. The issue of the study of the human diet becomes fuzzier and more complex when the questions, what is a human, and what is human nutrition, are asked. The latter question—​and it is now possible to spot a theme arising—​is also an issue for study, as in many societies, food is not simply nutrition and many of us eat beyond our dietary needs, many people eat to enhance social interaction, and of course people eat for pleasure. Thus, food is not necessarily seen by people as nutrition in the strictest biological sense, and nutrition, unlike oxygen and water, is not necessarily consumed to maintain life.

4 Introduction Consequently, it can be asked, what are humans as they are often seen by scientists as not just another species of animal. Yet, humans, like all other living organisms, are a united and cohesive unit of chemicals that can be studied by chemists; humans are atoms and molecules and can be studied by physicists; and, of course, for us as social scientists, humans are psychological, social and cultural beasts and again can be studied as such. Does that mean that when we study culture, we are ultimately studying atoms and molecules, or are we inventing something new as a unit of study, just as atoms and molecules have themselves been invented to explain a natural occurrence? Ultimately, we are our own invention, and anything we study is simply a convoluted development of this idea for the purpose of analysis and communication. Thus, any definition in the study of anything in science or other academic disciplines overlaps, tears at itself and other definitions, and develops more questions and problems than it answers, much as Popper (1979) states that science itself does. With this ambiguity of meaning in mind, the following definitions should be seen as being part of the context of social science and the broader study of the Western principles of science. If this book is being used as a source text for a class, these definitions should also be seen as starting points for further debates, debates that it is hoped will take these definitions and develop a better understanding or reject them as useful instruments for analyzing and evaluating the practice of science. Practically, when the definitions of words and phrases were being composed, a number of caveats and important notes were made that show issues that need further study or cannot be usefully defined at present. Importantly, these notes and caveats are issues that show anomalies in the logic of these definitions, show that there are ambiguities in the philosophical development of the principles and concepts of science and show that more work needs to be done to develop a cohesive narrative on what Western science is. Where these issues occur, they are highlighted by the word “CAVEAT” or “NOTE” in capitals, to allow the reader to understand that such an issue either exists or more needs to be examined on this topic. It should also be seen as a door that needs opening, rather than a problem that undermines what this book argues is being part of the culture of Western science.

General Scientific Terms Examined in this Book Nature/​the Natural World: In the context of this book, nature, natural science, and the natural world is defined as the perception, comprehension or understanding of everything that exists outside the realm of human control, or the parts of the world that humans did not invent. In this sense, the word “world” refers to elements of Planet Earth or the human population of the earth, depending on the context being referred to. This realm of the world includes plants and animals, atoms and energy, mountains and bodies of water, and the internal layers of the planet; or the term “world” refers to the human population of Planet Earth and where they exist in space, and the sum of its individual societies, civilizations, and cultures.

Introduction  5 CAVEAT: References to nature in the sciences do not necessarily mean that it is distinct or made of objects or sentient beings that are distinct from human beings themselves, as humans did not invent their beings or their definition and classification as human. Furthermore, there are large parts of our minds and our bodies that humans have no control over. Thus, scientifically speaking, humans are themselves simultaneously natural and social, and it is this dichotomy that has yet to be addressed by scientific methodologies. There are also areas in the definition of the natural world(s) that need further refinement, as they do not fit an even more complex natural, human, and social dichotomy comfortably. For example, we may talk about domestic animals, house plants or even the genetic manipulation of the genetic code of all these living things as a manipulation of nature, and thus not quite human and not quite natural or both, depending on an individual scientist’s point of view. However, in the context of the methodology of science, nature is generally referred to as the understanding of those objects or beings, or their study, when they are not controlled by humans. Thus, to describe the grey areas that exist in the humanly manipulated world, science often invents different forms of science that are not natural, human or social. For instance, if a scientist were to study the physiology of a cow as an animal in a non-​human environment, such as a wild forest or a wild pasture, they would be conducting a scientific study of nature. However, if a scientist studies how to prolong a cow’s gestation period so that she or he can affect its milk production for economic reasons, they are studying agricultural science, which is a third classification of science developed to solve a contradiction in such a unit of study; i.e., agricultural science can be said to be the manipulation of historically natural resources for human need, thus such a science represents an overlapping of the human or social and the natural sciences. Thus, agricultural science seeks to unite an understanding of elements of the natural world and the human or social world. Similarly, if a scientist chooses to study how to prolong a cow’s life for economic reasons, he or she could be said to be studying veterinary science, which it can be said is another science defined to rid science of another contradiction. All these sciences are animal sciences, or at least agricultural science includes animal sciences and crop sciences, but the scientist would be manipulating sentient beings in the process of their study and therefore trying to challenge nature. Thus, it can be argued that these non-​natural, non-​social sciences bridge a gap between understanding nature and human or societal existence, as illustrated in Figure 1.1. In another way, the same can be said to be true of medical or health science. For instance, those scientists studying the effect of a medicine or a vaccine on the human body can be said to be conducting a medical science study that manipulates the body but also influences an individual human, a human society, or a number of human societies. Similarly, scientists studying the effects of a certain diet on the body are conducting a study that can affect individual humans, societies or food cultures, and this form of study can be situated in

6 Introduction

Natural Science

Human or Social Science

Figure 1.1  Agricultural Science in Relation to the Natural and Human or Social Sciences.

contemporary or ancient history, such as the study of the diets of ancient tribes and its effects on their development.This is therefore one of the peculiarities of the logic of the sciences, as humans are manipulators, studiers and the studied simultaneously in the realm of many forms of science, and must try to unite this logical ambivalence through their scientific belief systems. NOTE: In a different way, it can also be said that the study of nature, natural science and the natural world is an understanding of the world outside human control whilst pretending that humans, as natural elements within this world, are somehow separate from it. This is a contradiction of Western science and academia in all its forms that needs further investigation and development if science is to work towards a more objective understanding of the world. Human/​Being Human: Humans are a species of animal that have a common ancestry with other living things, with our closest ancestors being animals.Thus, being human can simply be said to be the state of existence and consciousness shared by a species of animal called humans during a period of human life. Similarly, the human world, or what we can call the social realm, is the area of reality that is occupied by human consciousness and the product of this consciousness, whether these are physical or abstract concepts of human consciousness. For humans, life is the period from which consciousness is seen as being attained and then it is presumed that it is lost in relation to the body, although this is a topic of great debate, and it is far from clear exactly when we start becoming conscious and even when we lose our consciousness. NOTE: As stated in the definition of nature, scientifically speaking humans are also part of a greater system of living things, otherwise referred to as organisms.This greater system includes but is not restricted to plants and micro-​ organisms, which themselves have their own sub-​divisions, which are defined as genres, species, and strains. These subdivisions refer to a system of classifying living things that were invented by early natural philosophers in order to analyze their existence and behavior. Some orthodox religious sects disagree with this understanding that humans are part of a broader system of organisms, however for the purpose of this book, we will assume that there is a common

Introduction  7 ancestry to all living things, but that this common ancestry is itself invented, classified, and identified in the realms of human understanding.This assumption does not show any disrespect to these religious beliefs, but as the focus of this book is on Western science, it is important to acknowledge this belief system as central to the discussions within it. Life/​Being Alive: Life is perhaps the most difficult term to define in any realm of knowledge or thought, let alone the study of science, and to define life this book has to be deliberately ambiguous and disingenuous, as life can only be seen in relation to the state of not being alive. Thus, all that can truthfully be said in this book is that life is a process that defines a state of existing from a single point in time to another single point in time. Furthermore, the state of being alive is also seen in relation to being not dead and behaving in some way that is related to the thing’s environment, even if this behavior is not perceptible. NOTE: This definition of life is significantly different from those found in standard dictionaries, as these documents traditionally see the term life only in terms of the state of being organic, that is being biologically alive. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines life as: “The condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.” This OED definition arguably over-​compartmentalizes vastly complex subjects, as it takes no account of abstract notions of life, or the life of technologies developed or manufactured by animals themselves. For instance, science can discuss the life cycle of a battery or a car, or science can discuss the life cycle of a whole economy, a historical period or the usefulness of an idea, a theory, or an article. CAVEAT: The definition of life is itself a tautology, as being dead, inorganic, or inanimate is seen only in relation to being alive, thus any definition of being dead, inorganic, or inanimate must be mirrored in relation to being alive. As the topic of this book is social science, however, life and the principle of being alive is defined in the context of being a human and being a part of all forms of life to provide a focus. Importantly, in relation to analysis the term life needs to be seen as being dependent on the species as to how it is defined. For example, as far as we know a bacterium does not have a consciousness in the commonly used sense, in that it does not think consciously as a human or other type of animal does, but it does divide, reproduce, and behave in a particular way, thus some form of decision occurs. Similarly, as far as we know plants also do not have a consciousness in a human sense, and yet plants perceptibly react to the movement of light, take in food and water and reproduce through a system that either includes another plant or through the division of itself. However, we can only see these phenomena in human terms. Social Terms Examined in this Book Social/​the Social: Being social is the act of being part of a human network in the present or the past, where people share experiences, symbols, practical

8 Introduction objects, and some form of communication and information. Although it is not necessary to have historical or formal ties or shared objects to be part of a human network or to be part of a society, many people in human networks have formal ties and identify each other through either shared objects or aesthetic features—​ this will be discussed more in the chapters on social classification and analysis. Being social is also a state of being that can either be permanent or temporary, although it can be argued that human beings are instinctively social from birth until death, and our bonds and relationships define this need to be social. For instance, people’s membership of a family or a nation may be lifelong, whereas a person may just be part of an audience in a theatre fleetingly. However, whether life-​long or fleeting, each group has an agreed set of behaviors and communications. As with all definitions, however, there are ambiguities and grey areas that apply to the social sciences, demonstrating its subjective nature, with social behavior and social states being apparently observable in animal kingdoms, or at least we can interpret this animal behavior as social although this may be a case of projection by humans who wish to anthropomorphize this behavior. CAVEAT: To complicate this issue further, it is possible for humans and animals to form hybrid societies through relationships with pets or other domesticated animals. Again, it is possible that this can be seen as a form of anthropomorphizing of these relationships, and these relationships can be interpreted as more basic animal relationships, as we discussed above humans are a form of animal themselves. However, some form of social activity, whether human or animal, does occur between different species. Western/​the West: In the context of this book and in social science in general, the term Western pertains to an intellectual and academic culture that originated in an area that approximates to an area referred to as Europe and as a civilization known as Europeans. This is not just the physical geographical continent that we refer to as Europe, but it is also what is argued to be a culture of European-​ness, that is to say a common way of thinking, a common intellectual culture and a common set of beliefs. In reality, this culture is perhaps the most important aspect of Western-​ness, and it derives largely from a Christian civilization that evolved following the Roman Empire—​this is discussed further in Chapter 2. This Western thinking is now prevalent in the Americas, and other scattered former colonies of European empires in almost every contemporary region of the world. NOTE: It is important to understand that although the terms Western, the West, and Europe are geographical places in general terms, this notion that Europe is only a continent is relatively modern, and the concept of the area that Europe exists within is constantly changing and continues to evolve, i.e. there is no fixed area that has always been Europe (Cartwright 2018). As Wallendfeldt observes: Europa is a figure from Greek mythology who later gave her name to the continent of Europe. In one popular version of her story Europa was a

Introduction  9 Phoenician princess who was abducted by Zeus and whisked off to Crete; King Minos, he of the labyrinth and Minotaur fame, would be one of the results of Zeus’ rape. The legend of Europa, and particularly the search for her by her three brothers, may well reflect the historical colonisation of the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians from 1200 to 800 BCE. (Wallenfeldt 2022) In addition, the notion of continent itself is Western, and thus to adhere to the continent of Europe is to adhere to a Western idea. A Note on the Approach to Analyzing Principles and Concepts of Western Social Research: The focus of studying the principles and concepts of Western social research that underpin the following chapters is informed by the history and philosophy of science, and particularly the study of Western science and social science. Within this context, there are three important issues that need to be understood when analyzing the underlying principles and concepts of Western science and social science, although these issues relate to similar historical studies of philosophical concepts. First, what it is important to understand is that the study of society is an old cultural tradition, and one that sheds light on why we conduct our cultural practices, whether they are artistic or scientific. In terms of our understanding of the history of Western science as a series of principles and concepts, as a species of animal it important to understand that the human study of consciousness pre-​dates many of what are thought to be the “hard sciences.” It can also be argued that the study of activity or behavior has existed since the dawn of human life, when early cultures drew their practices on the walls of caves before language was written. Although it is unknown why early people did this, it is without doubt that these practices were important to those who recorded them. Consequently, the following two chapters outline the evolution of the most important principles that currently shape our thinking in Western science. Second, Western science did not just evolve on its own or in a vacuum in what is supposed to be “the West.” It is also far from being a peculiarly Western activity, in that it can be said to include many strands of thought from what Western culture calls the East (and later Asia) and what we now call Africa and was even reintroduced to what we now call Europe by Islamic and Jewish scholars from what is now called the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This being said, understanding the term Western as a non-​geographical but a fuzzy philosophical-​cultural concept is vital. That is to say, Western social science invented the concepts of “the West” and “western-​ness,” and so in discussing Western social science, we are discussing something that was created to be studied by a knowledge culture using the methodologies it created. Thus, it should be borne in mind that we can never leave the realm of “the West” in order to study “western-​ness.” Third, the principles and concepts discussed in this book need to be seen within the context in which they were developed or reintroduced, and thus

10 Introduction it should also be understood that the interpretation and presentation of these principles and concepts and their reciprocal historical evolution by following generations is also subjective and dependent on the context of its reinterpretation. In this sense, a history of the evolution of science must include intellectual and later academic activity; academic activity being a practice affecting what were traditionally called academies, and later evolved to become monasteries, seminaries, institutes, universities, research-​centered businesses, and Non-​Governmental Organizations (NGOs), think-​tanks, research centers, and colleges. For example, as we shall discuss in Chapter 4, the word science has a relatively recent etymology of hundreds of years. The word itself evolved in what we call Middle English, from around the English and French Middle Ages, and therefore does not include the study of material and abstract concepts discussed earlier in Ancient Greece, China, Rome, the Americas, Africa, India, and the rest of the world. Furthermore, the nature of human civilization was different in previous eras, and what we now refer to as Western is thought to originate in the physical area now called Europe, and particularly from what we call a class of humans now called Europeans, and thus colonization took this culture of thought to other areas of the world. More particularly, parts of the world that are now considered the Anglo-​sphere, such as North America and the Antipodes, are now amongst the most fertile areas of this Western science. However, as we show in the following section, the area we now call Europe was not Europe at the beginning of the philosophy of Western knowledge. Furthermore, the concept of continent and what we now call countries, nations, and ethnicities or races did not exist in these early philosophical and scientific eras. Thus, when in the two chapters on the history of theorists we discuss Ancient Greek, from the modern Island of Sicily, North Africa or what is now England, these are not descriptions of countries or ethnic communities of people, which even if they had existed at the time, would have had a different form. Instead, the theorists and the description of these people according to modern countries or continents only usually refers to a language group, a modern physical geography and what is often an imperial or tribal culture that has not existed for hundreds if not thousands of years. For instance, a person from modern Greece would be biologically, culturally, and linguistically different from a philosopher from Ancient Greece. There may be some similarities in language, and the symbols of modern Greece’s attempt to emulate the ancient symbols of the tribes that existed at the time—​the Parthenon, for example—​spawns many different imitators. However, Ancient Greeks may be said to have as much in common with modern Europeans (east and west, north and south), Iranians, Gulf Arabs, Turkish people, Israelis and North Africans, to name but a few. Similar diversity can be argued of Sicilians and the English of the Middle Ages, who had what would now be a mixture of influences from tribes and empires in geographical areas as diverse as what is now Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and even the Far East. Thus, when this book discusses the intellectual history of social science as a science, we are essentially talking about an activity that at the time was only seen

Introduction  11 as a broad intellectual culture. This is a culture that has constantly evolved and cannot be seen as the same culture or process as scientists and social scientists adhere to now. In addition, when we talk about different forms of science, such as social science, natural science, medical science, human science, gendering of science, ethnicity or race and science, and so forth, we need to understand that all these cultural classes of practice or people are not an amorphous principle. These issues need to be seen as indistinguishable from any other that we currently practice. Consequently, although it is important to study the principles and concepts of the past to understand the practices of the present, Williams suggests that the history of knowledge production should be seen as heavily contextualized and separate from our understanding of the modern environment of academic practice. If the history of science is to make any sense whatsoever, it is necessary to deal with the past on its own terms, and the fact is that for most of the history of science natural philosophers appealed to causes that would be summarily rejected by modern scientists. Spiritual and divine forces were accepted as both real and necessary until the end of the 18th century and, in areas such as biology, deep into the 19th century as well. (Williams 2018) CAVEAT: Gender can be said to be a partial anomaly in the study of the contextualized history of philosophy and science, as it does not fit the model of generational difference discussed above, and what can be called genetic gender, i.e. men and women, in the modern world—​although it is acknowledged that there is a current redefinition of non-​binary interpretations of gender that will affect future generations. However, biologically what we still traditionally call men and women are currently still genetically seen as men and women were socially, culturally, and biologically generations ago. What has changed in this understanding of men and women, however, is the cultural role and, more importantly, the identity of men and women. Thus, what cannot be overlooked is that all of the individuals discussed in the following two chapters are, with one exception, men. The reason for this absence in the historical narrative is that women have been, with very few exceptions, deliberately and actively excluded from the social scientific process until the last century, i.e., the twentieth century. NOTE: It is beyond the scope of this book to write a full and comprehensive history of Western science and social science, if such a book could ever be written anyway. Therefore, this chapter and the next chapter will concentrate on a small number of thinkers and the historical events that they inspired and that generated principles and concepts of what can now be considered as the core philosophy and practice of social science. If a history of science alone were to be written, it would have to include other important events and theorists, but these events would largely pertain to the natural sciences, on which most histories of science are written.

12 Introduction Therefore, this book should be considered as an introductory investigation into the principles, concepts, and history of the social sciences that can be expanded, and an introduction with areas that need to be examined in much greater detail in future histories. It is also a discussion that is designed to provide an important intellectual context and to stimulate a debate on the nature of Western social research and social scientific ideals and practices. This context begins in Ancient Greece, where the foundations of logic and observation were said to be conceived. This era is particularly important as it is a point at which theorists considered whether there were laws by which the world worked, or whether the world was not as it first appeared to the senses.

Chapter Summaries As stated, the text of this book has evolved out of a number of research training programs, which are themselves similar to other core units that similar universities teach to postgraduate and doctoral students, and occasionally introduce at an undergraduate level. As well as theory, the contents of the book will include questions for discussion in seminars and small group work, as well as exercises within and between lectures, seminars, tutorials, or classes. This book was derived from courses that included discussions on the principles, concepts, methodologies, methods, and application of social research, and as such this book is designed as a theoretical examination and as a course book, for units, courses, and programs at postgraduate and doctoral level. Beyond explicit training courses, many social science postgraduate degrees have an element of studying the principles and concepts of social science nowadays, and so each of these chapters can be seen as having an element of such courses and their units, although the concept chapters are also designed to be largely read by ambitious final year undergraduates. Beyond those studying social research and the social sciences, this book is designed to be read primarily by early-​stage researchers wanting to develop research projects, develop a portfolio of publications and develop an early academic career. Researchers practicing or wanting to develop their own research methodologies in their own research projects can particularly concentrate on Section I, on the principles of social science research. The sections and chapters of this book are set out as follows: •

Section I is on the principles of western social science, that is the elements of science and social science that make this a unique practice, with its own cultural traditions and beliefs. In this section: •

Chapter 2 examines influences of science from Ancient Greece to the enlightenment.This chapter examines key philosophical standpoints in the social sciences in Ancient Greece, what can be called the birth of Western science during the medieval period and the renaissance, and the development of a recognizable modern science in the enlightenment.

Introduction  13

•

•

•

•

In examining these eras, this chapter also scrutinizes the early history of research through sensory information and logic and criticisms of the manipulation of religious ideas as scientific truths—​this has led to a new reformation of philosophical ideology. Chapter 3 examines the modern history of social science, particularly the twentieth century and the emergence of a recognizable Western social science with a maturing set of methodologies. It focuses on the debate on the nature of mathematics and formal logic, including the  criticism of logical notation and mathematics as a natural language, the limits of language, statistics, hypotheses and measurement in social scientific analysis. It also examines issues related to power and positioning in the social sciences. Chapter 4 importantly examines the principles of belief, knowledge construction and paradigms in social scientific research. This chapter critically examines these core principles in the context of empiricism, the difference between methodology and methods in the social sciences and includes an examination of definitions in science and social science. This chapter also problematizes the demarcation of the sciences and social sciences, and what makes science, science. Chapter 5 examines how the principles of social science have affected its practice. More particularly, this chapter focuses on different ways of defining “laws” in science, the classification of humans, human cultures, and the perceived relationships between these groups of humans in research.This chapter problematizes these classifications and the resulting social problems that they lead to and asks whether the creation of these groups is often a case of divide and rule. This problematization is examined as a critical examination of Western society, and the imperialism of social scientific knowledge and ethics.

Section II covers what are the most referred to concepts of Western social science, and critically examines the application of these concepts. In this section: •

•

•

Chapter 6 examines the properties of data, how data is collected, the differences between classifications of data, such as qualitative, visual and quantitative data, and examines how these forms of data differ from each other. In addition, this chapter examines the differences between primary and secondary source data in social scientific studies, and scientific studies using these devices. Chapter 7 examines the concept of analysis in social science, examines what analysis is in this context, and critically examines the pitfalls of social scientific analysis. This chapter also introduces examples of different analytical instruments used in social scientific methodology and scrutinizes why these different methodologies are needed. Chapter 8 examines the relatively recent concept of research ethics in social science, and examines its ancient deep-​seated roots. This chapter

14 Introduction

•

•

•

importantly criticizes the notion of ethical research, examines how researchers can design ethical research studies and examines the aspects of ethical dilemmas that social scientific researchers may face as they undergo research projects. Chapter 9 examines the concept of effectively, openly and efficiently disseminating the findings, theories and methodologies of research. This chapter critically examines communicating through writing peer-​ reviewed documents, such as books and journal articles, and on presenting the results of research at conferences, examines how to structure an academic argument, and the notion of referencing and developing citations. This chapter also examines the process of publishing academic research. Chapter 10 examines the concepts of developing impact in research and the practice of public engagement. This chapter particularly focuses on a model of public engagement, how this practice is linked to impact and the different classifications of impact. In addition, this chapter will examine participatory practice in contemporary Western social scientific research, and why the voice of the participant is particularly important in the development of a research project.

We conclude with a single chapter that comprises the contents of this book, and answers the questions introduced at the start of this chapter.

Section I

Principles

2 Historical Principles of Science 1 From Ancient Greece Through to the Enlightenment

Introduction This chapter is the first of two parts on what is often called Western knowledge development, how it effects the principles of what we now call Western society and by extension Western social science, and how social scientific research practice has evolved. This investigation begins with what is generally accepted to be the foundation of what we now call Western principles in Ancient Greece, including the role that a few named philosophers played in the foundation of modern Western empiricism. Although it should be borne in mind that this is a compact text to provide context, and so only a few influential theories and theorists are mentioned, for a greater depth of understanding it is important to read more specialist historical texts on specific epistemological eras. Following the examination of Ancient Greece, this chapter turns to a brief examination of medieval and renaissance sciences, and how they affected the development of modern science. Lastly, this chapter finishes with an investigation of what became an era known as the Enlightenment, and the development of what this book refers to as modern Western social science. This chapter has three aims: (1) to give you an overview of how knowledge and beliefs are created and developed, and in doing so finding evidence to support the hypothesis, that knowledge is a synthetic, human-​manufactured cultural phenomenon; (2) to develop an overview of the development of science, and how it came into existence from important philosophical principles, showing how outside features effect scientific study; (3) to add to seminar debates on the evolution of social science and individual social scientific subjects’ evolutions, in order to show that our principles of social scientific practice are often arbitrary and based on historical traditions rather than contemporary logic. The three questions that pose the theme for this chapter are: 1. What are the original principles of social science? 2. What is real social science, and does such a thing exist? 3. What are we studying when we research through social science?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003241997-3

18 Principles

Principles Introduced Through this Chapter Deductive Logic: Deductive logic in Western science can be said to be the belief that we can deduce reality initially through logical argument, reasoning, and discussion before systematically testing it through accepted methodologies. To put this another way, it has been hypothesized that “Relationships can most often provide the richest understanding of our human societies and cultures ...” (Hayhoe 2020, p. 1) This hypothesis was initially based on the personal experience of the author through working in this field, and therefore could be said to be unproven and therefore deductive. NOTE: There are two important aspects of this form of deductive logic that are vital to bear in mind when studying any form of social scientific investigation and the methodology it relies upon. The first aspect is that all Western social scientific studies are often reliant on a passage of time to prove a hypothesis through study, and this passage of time can itself effect the nature of data collection, the type of data that is collected, the reliability of this data and even the hypothesis that is generated to test this data; second, if the social scientist conducting or designing the study is a positivist, i.e. a person who believes that at least elements of knowledge, such as scientific laws, are a part of nature and unchangeable, then they believe in deductive logic as a form of what is termed historicism, i.e. the belief that there are rules to history and things will happen in the future just because they’ve also happened in the past (Popper 1999). For example, a pharmacologist might deduce that a drug might work on a form of disease because it has worked on a similar disease in the past. The pharmacologist might then conduct a drugs trial over a fixed number of years to see if this hypothesis is true. Predictive models, such as economic or weather forecasts, can also be said to use deductive logic, although they are not scientific as they cannot be proven until they are tested systematically. It is only when a predicted passage of time has finished, and a model’s predictions can be tested, that they can be said to be scientific. Thus, predictive models are merely deductive hypotheses before this future evidence can be collected to test the model. This chronological aspect of Western science is discussed in Chapter 3. Inductive Logic: Inductive logic in Western science is the philosophical belief that we can only create a theory or general hypothesis after data about the subject of study is collected. This form of logic also follows the belief that when interpreting these forms of study, if something cannot be observed, it cannot be understood as “real.” For instance, if a health scientist were to study thousands of people’s diets to find out what is most likely to cause a particular form of cancer, and she or he discovers that those who drink red wine and olive oil are much less likely to develop cancer, it could be reasonably hypothesized that these types of food generally decrease the risk of cancer. In other words, the hypothesis that drinking olive oil and red wine reduces the risk of cancer has been induced after a series of observations, where no assumptions are made before the start of the study.

Historical Principles of Science 1  19 Syllogism: Syllogism is an early type of formal logic that is based on a pattern of three very simple, related statements to develop a simple and logical answer, and was the first known systematic example of logic used in what we now call data analysis; to state this another way, syllogism is a structured cultural practice of conscious thinking that follows a set pattern to construct a meaningful “argument.” Syllogisms are important to understand as they are an example of an argument in which logical conditions do not simply describe what is immediately in front of us, but attempt to make logical inferences, and thus synthesize a crude abstract form of knowledge. NOTE: Syllogistic logic is based on the development of the three connected stages of abstract relationships with the following conditions: each must relate to a single subject; each has to be related to a category that the subject being hypothesized is said to belong to; and two conditions in the syllogism must be related, independent variables that links the subject to the category. That is to say, a syllogism can be expressed through the following expression: Subject A is related to Variable1, subjects who are members of the classification of Category A by Variable1 are also related to Variable2; thus, Subject A is related to Variable1 and Variable2 equally. For example, it can be said that Step 1: Subject A, called John, runs many miles a day, with Variable1 being the practice of running many miles a day; Step 2: Those who are members of the classification of Category A are subjects who run many miles a day, we can name Category A Healthy People, and thus all the subjects who are related by Variable1 are also Fit, with Variable2 being Fit; Step 3: As Subject A, John, is related to Variable1, he must also be related to Variable2, being Fit Admittedly, this is a highly complex way of describing syllogistic relationships, but it is necessary to see how variables, categories and subjects fit together to form synthetic knowledge, and how these three elements form contemporary scientific analysis. To put this into plain English: John runs a great deal, People who run a great deal are fit, Thus, John is fit For those who believe in syllogism as a natural form of logic, this simple expression can be applied to all situations. For instance: Simon has a six-​year-​old daughter People with six-​year-​old daughters are exhausted Thus, Simon is exhausted

20 Principles In this case, this statement is true! Materialism: Materialism is a cultural belief that everything in the universe can be described and analyzed in terms of measurable, often tangible, material substances, forces, or any other type of physical entity. Thus, even though not physical or material, social, cultural, and psychological ideas that are often regarded as intrinsically intangible, such as society, culture, language, and thought, can also be discussed, and analyzed, in relation to their physical existence. NOTE:Those who argue for materialism believe that these ideas are material because they do not and cannot exist beyond the physical entities that created them. For example, materialists might argue that thought and language are generated by the neurological process of chemical and physical activity in the brain, and the physical vibration of air or mechanical function of nerves cells and muscles to form spoken or written words. Similarly, what are felt on a surface level to be abstract emotions or behavior can be interpreted purely in terms of hormonal and neurological responses in response to external stimuli. For instance, emotions can be analyzed according to the body’s chemical and physical response to other humans’ behaviors, changes in location or even the change of other environmental stimuli such as temperature or light. NOTE: Materialism is often seen as a reliable way to scientifically study the world, because it can be categorized and measured with relative simplicity. For example, the amount of certain types of chemicals can be related to speed of thought, writing or speech, etc. as a simple equation, with the greater the presence of a certain chemicals in the brain, the faster the speed of writing, speech or thought. Metaphysics: In the context of science, metaphysics is the belief that there are intangible elements in the world that can be measured and studied. Those who study metaphysics also argue that there are abstract elements that only humans believe to exist, such as the meanings of words, ethics, the links that bond families, or the education that we experience—​although these subjects can exist in the animal kingdom, they are not defined as they are in the human world. Importantly, those who study metaphysics can discuss the physical manifestations that can also be recorded or measured as elements of science. For instance, those who study the effectiveness of hospital care or business profitability can use evaluation scales as a means of measuring this effectiveness. NOTE: Like many terms in Western science that are based on Ancient Greek etymology, it is important to understand that metaphysics is a relatively modern principle, originating as it does from the Renaissance. However, as this chapter discusses, the topic of metaphysics and the history of this principle dates to ancient times; and the study of abstract notions is thus one of the oldest traditions in both philosophy and science, if not the oldest tradition in the sciences.This is largely due to philosophical understandings of the universe, and the notion of humans in relation to the universe, God, many gods or a higher entity or plane of understanding. Within this early abstract tradition, it

Historical Principles of Science 1  21 was argued that material was simply the outcome of the metaphysical elements of the universe.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss an answer to the following question, and discuss why you feel that science progresses in the way you say it does. QUESTION: Is scientific development a straight line or circular, as illustrated in Figure 2.1, or something else? What this discussion hopefully raises in your groups is that some ideas appear and reappear in Western science and particularly social science, and whether there can be said to be the same progression in all instances of scientific study or discovery. For instance, if we take a theory such as Marxism, does this theory evolve in an even way or is it affected by outside influences, which means that during certain phases of history it is more accepted or rejected by certain societies.

Ancient Greece (Period1) Middle Ages (Period2) Enlightenment (Period3) Modern (Period4)

Medieval (Period2)

Ancient Greece (Period1)

Enlightenment (Period4)

Modern (Period3)

Figure 2.1 Two Images of Scientific Progress.

22 Principles

Ancient Greece, Philosophy, and Methodology It is in what we now refer to as Ancient Greece, approximately 2,500 years ago give or take two centuries either side of this figure, where the creation of the early notion of what Western scientists now understand as knowledge construction and belief was first discussed. If truth be told, historians have relatively little precise evidence of what was written in Ancient Greece at this time, and this should be understood as we discuss these issues. Although readers can now buy a paperback or download a PDF claiming to be the monograph of the famous philosophers of this period, the reality of this literature is that books as they are now known were only developed with the advent of the modern printing press. The only academic evidence we have from this period of Ancient Greece is from short pieces written on tablets, pieces of scroll, many of which have partly rotted or crumbled, and writing on wood or stones. More importantly, the theories written about in these texts have been passed on from what is now the Greek mainland to the Middle East, from the Middle East to North Africa and then Southern Europe to the north of Europe. Thus, these texts have subsequently been written and re-​written over the millennia in multiple languages and each time, the original texts have been re-​interpreted or have changed languages from their original texts or interpreted or compiled in a different way. Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that many texts have taken on something of their interpreters or the prejudices of the era when they were compiled and translated. Add to this confusion the reporting that many philosophers had followers who wrote texts in the style or name of their philosophical mentor, much as artists in the Renaissance would paint in their masters’ style, and it can be imagined that the theories of Ancient Greece are radically different from their origins. Thus, the modern paper or electronic documents used as reference sources for this book, and that can be obtained in physical and online libraries, must be seen in the context of being impure texts, torn from their original meaning. Pre-​Socratic Greek Philosophy With the subjectivity and reinterpretation of Ancient Greek culture in mind, this book turns to a time before possibly the most influential of social philosophers, Socrates. The pre-​Socratic philosophers, i.e., philosophers who were thought to exist before the Athenian philosopher Socrates taught philosophy, importantly provided the foundation of the knowledge system and provided the fundamental principle of Western social science. This knowledge system can be traced to Greater Ancient Greece, including areas such as parts of modern Italy, Macedonia and what is now Western Turkey more than 2,500 years ago. However, this approximate timeline also needs to be seen in the context of the Gregorian calendar that did not exist until around 2,000 years later. The early Ancient Greek colonies were significant trading ports with what became known as a part of the Near East, that is the land surrounding the east

Historical Principles of Science 1  23 of the Mediterranean. In approximately 600 BC tribesmen from an Ancient Greek colony referred to as the Milesians developed the foundation of what is now Western philosophy, by theorizing the nature of existence, life and what is now referred to as consciousness. These philosophers can be seen as akin to later Western and Middle Eastern religious figures, such as prophet teachers, and came to be known as Sophists, i.e., early itinerant teachers of philosophy who were said to live frugally and wandered between tribes and gained followers, sometimes referred to as disciples as they went, in common with their religious counterparts. These itinerant figures that we now call philosophers came from the same or related tribes in the area and shared a common language, a common intellectual culture, and common social interests. In the approximately 100 years between the Milesians and the rise of Socrates, many Sophists refused traditional religious ideologies, mathematics, and morals, and looked more towards the orient for inspiration in their conceptualization of the world. These disciples taught persuasion, i.e., the ability to argue eloquently, to illustrate intellectual positions that rejected the notion that there were universal truths, and argued instead that knowledge was a human not a pre-​ordained, solely divine creation. For example, Protagoras (estimated to have lived around 490–​420 BC ) and his followers stated, “Man (sic.) is the measure of all things.” Similarly, Sophists such as Heraclitus (estimated to have lived around 500 B C , although little is known about his life), from an Ancient Greek Ionian tribe, and his followers speculated that the world as it was known was constantly changing imperceptibly, beyond the senses and beyond the comprehension of the mind. This was a dangerous statement to make in a culture that was proscribed by gods, as it reduced the mind to a mechanistic organ, not merely a channel through which the gods imparted their ideology. To put this another way, what humans perceived through the senses may appear permanent to the conscious mind that interpreted the reality around it, but in real life this “reality” was transitory, and nothing could remain stagnant. Thus, modern interpreters state that Heraclitus or a follower or disciple of Heraclitus proposed that, “The world is in flux, you cannot step twice into the same river.” Following Protagoras and Heraclitus, Socrates (estimated to have lived around 470–​400 BC ) also followed in the culture of the early Sophists, caring little about material gains, and instead dedicating his life to philosophy and the teaching of philosophy. Many believe, given current academic methodology, we cannot know much about the life of Socrates, although academics generally believe in his existence even though descriptions of his early life, family, upbringing and even his teachings only come from a few followers, each of whom provide different, sometimes contradictory, narratives on his now famous dialogues and theories. It is also not known whether Socrates could write, as no written documents from this era have been attributed to him, although he was said to write poetry (Gottlieb 1997). So, given this scant data how did Socrates become the founder of such a large canon of modern Western philosophy?

24 Principles Socratian and Post-​Socratian Philosophy Arguably, the reason that Socrates’ teaching is so influential is largely due to his most famous student, Plato, who in turn was said to teach his most famous student, Aristotle, with these two philosophers contributing the institutional and social beliefs of much of Western knowledge construction. These beliefs were importantly developed through the Socratic method of synthesizing knowledge, which involved what we now call the dialectic, i.e., the methodology of developing a “truth” by questioning strongly held beliefs from at least two sides, arguing for and against in order to test the robustness of what we now call theories and data, in order to reach a more reliable “truth.” On this need to examine knowledge, his own beliefs, and the understanding that knowledge was a transient commodity that could only evolve through constant probing, Socrates stated, “the unexamined life is not worth living, for human beings.” It was this unexamined life that eventually led to Socrates’ demise, as his need for a dialectic led him to question the nature of “the gods” as sacrosanct and he was said to have been killed at 70 following a trial for corruption of minds – Socrates died after drinking hemlock whilst imprisoned. It is this dialectic that now forms the basis of scientific analysis, as well as Western politics, legal systems, and the academic arts. The Development of Systematic Analysis and Knowledge Systems The followers of Socrates, many of whom despite coming from what we now call upper-​class backgrounds, themselves became Sophists, and as stated above arguably the most influential of these disciples was Plato. Although there is more evidence of the written philosophy of Plato than Socrates, including documents said to be written by Plato himself, again relatively little is reliably known about the details of his life beyond these early dialogues and his formation of The Academy. The Academy was particularly important to the evolution of Athenian knowledge construction as it was the first institution that developed what we now refer to as a structured curriculum and served as the model for other Western scientific institutions. What we do know, however, is that Plato (estimated to have lived around 430–​350 BC ) was said to have been more influenced by Pythagorean philosophy and also influenced by a belief in little or never-​changing influences on life determined by the perfectionism of geometry and mathematics. In accordance with Socrates’ teaching, which linked knowledge and morality, i.e. the fallacy that to be knowledgeable was to be moral, Plato’s dialogues and teaching centered on the pursuit of knowledge as a virtuous activity. However, as was typical of Socrates’ disciples, much of this philosophy was linked to the hegemony of Plato’s life as an aristocrat, born into what would now be called an upper-​class family, and his role as a slave owner, and it is generally held that Plato thought it was his right to own slaves. On this issue, he believed in a slave class and a master class provided by the gods, where some were born to be slaves and others were born to rule and be warriors, a notion that arguably continued

Historical Principles of Science 1  25 to influence socio-​economic, academic, and scientific ideology throughout history. Furthermore, for Plato, Socrates’ examined life was less important than the pursuit of what was felt to be the perfect beauty, be it physical or metaphysical beauty, which for Plato was the highest form of virtue. Thus, Plato’s dialogues were later to influence Western systems of morality, later called ethics, with the pursuit of beauty and the study of the beautiful being amongst his most never-​ ending legacies, and most often realized in academia, the arts, and the media. On this subject, the pursuit of “beautiful” knowledge through the suppression of negative emotions that inhibited beauty and strength was how the examination of life through analysis and logic would achieve wisdom, with wisdom being the highest form of knowing. On this, Plato is said to have asked: [Do] you think that knowledge is a noble thing and fit to command man (sic.), which cannot be overcome and will not allow a man, if he only knows the good and the evil, to do anything which is contrary to what his knowledge bids him do, but that wisdom will have strength to help him? (Plato 1973, p. 57) Plato’s pursuit of the perfect society is perhaps best seen in what is now a set of dialogues known as The Republic, which Plato promoted as a blueprint for the perfect society. Within this pursuit of perfectionism, the contemporary principle of Paideia, the notion of physical, mental, and spiritual development through a holistic education became prominent. In this world, the social and political pursuit of perfectionism should recognize their place as pre-​ordained by the gods, with the pursuit of democracy as a “charming [but pernicious] form of government.” Another of Plato’s influences on later Western social knowledge systems was his Theory of Forms. This theory was a philosophy of what was at the time a religious conception of a human “essence,” otherwise known as “the esse,” a metaphysical principle that is most closely related to good and bad spirits, the soul, or the notion of the jinn in Islam, but for Plato was imagined as the perfect mathematical and geometric Form. Importantly, Plato linked this essence to epistemological questions of historical perfection, a perfection in which a distinction was drawn between the reality presented to humans through their senses and the form of that reality in the mind. For Plato, the Form was the architectural blueprint of all imperfect forms that followed it, it was an essence provided by the gods as the ultimate form of knowledge, and it was the nature which society was moving away from through its pursuit of immoral activities. In this way, the Theory of Forms represented a higher world that perceptual senses deceive, leaving humans to fight between their basic, immoral desires and the higher morality of mathematical and geometric perfectionism that was at the heart of the Form. Thus, socially and culturally, essence was conceived as a higher unchanging reality of the beautiful, and of goodness and justice. It also meant that philosophers should identify the essence of a metaphysical system or concept

26 Principles as a form of universal standard for a “good” life, as these Forms were said to be the ultimate and unadulterated truth that humans should strive to get back to. This essence was later described by Hegel, who is himself discussed at the end of this chapter, as the Eisse—​Essence as Spirit, or the core of the notion of his Phenomenology in the early nineteenth century. That the True is actually only as system, or that Substance is essentially Subject, is expressed in the representation of the Absolute as Spirit –​the most sublime Notion and the one which belongs to the modern age and its religion. The spiritual alone is the actual; it is essence, or that which has being in itself; it is that which relates itself to itself and is determinate, it is other-​being and being-​for-​self, and in this determinateness, or in its self-​ externality, abides within itself; in other words, it is in and for itself. (Hegel 1977, p. 14) Socially and psychologically, according to Plato the unphilosophical, immoral person was at the mercy of sense impressions, what we now call sensory perception, which fool our pure knowledge of the essence, our ability to reason, and thus the senses corrupted the perfect message of the gods. In his dialogues, Plato also argued that the notion of the civic society also has a Form based on mathematical perfection, intrinsically the perfection of The Republic, and the natural order of this Form is good. Thus, the further human societies move away from the perfect form of The Republic, i.e., the more societies change, the worse, the more immoral, the uglier, and the less perfect societies become. Just as the further individuals move away from the perfect form physically and mentally, the worse they supposedly become. Plato’s extreme views, taught through his Academy, were arguably due to his position in the aristocratic warrior class (Popper 1999). More particularly, Plato was writing and teaching in a time of wars, social unrest in the Ancient Greek tribes, and possible threats to the social order of Athenian society by tribal influences from further east that threatened this status. Therefore, contemporary criticism of Plato’s theories center on his defense of the upper classes and its subsequent theory of a “natural” order for slave and master, upper and lower classes, the highest being the Warrior Class, that was a reaction to the social upheaval from a position of extreme privilege. On this issue, Popper (1999) has argued that Plato’s laws and their reinterpretation by later philosophers of the enlightenment and post-​enlightenment lie at the roots of fascism in the twentieth century and the scientific theories that contributed to and were used to justify fascism from the nineteenth century. By contrast, although privileged himself, Plato’s student Aristotle (estimated to have lived around 385–​320 BC ) concentrated less on mathematical perfection, focusing instead on trying to learn about and interpret multiple subject areas, particularly the study of living organisms through systematic methodology. Consequently, Aristotle was said to have invented the notions and methods that we now see as science, including the many methods of social science and ethics.

Historical Principles of Science 1  27 His success in this field was so well respected that he became a personal tutor to the young prince who would become Alexander the Great in what is now the region of Macedonia. Aristotle is said to have developed a formal system for reasoning from the teaching of Socrates, the most important of which is now called syllogism, which although not named evolved from previous generations of sophism (Leroi 2014). Aristotle used this syllogistic logic to establish what we now call scientific work based on observation not logical reasoning alone, as Plato had done, and established a formal system for metaphysics and ethics, i.e., the study of things that are not material, such as logic, knowledge, and belief. Having himself studied at Plato’s Academy, Aristotle went on to found his own school, the Lyceum, in Athens, where he taught and trained formal Peripatetics, i.e. his disciples from the Lyceum trained in his set curriculum of what can be termed the earliest recognizable sciences. NOTE: The term peripatetic is still the name given to teachers not linked to a single location or institution, and who are often personal tutors to individual children. On his formalization of logic, Aristotle is said to have described syllogism as follows: A syllogism is discourse in which, certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so. I mean by the last phrase that they produce the consequence, and by this, that no further term is required from without in order to make the consequence necessary. I call that a perfect syllogism which needs nothing other than what has been stated to make plain what necessarily follows; a syllogism is imperfect, if it needs either one or more propositions, which are indeed the necessary consequences of the terms set down. (Aristotle 1994, Book 1, Part 1)

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss an answer to the following task. Identify syllogisms in your own topics and subjects, and it can be said that they can be created to describe topics in all subject areas. What do you think of syllogisms? Are they useful or harmful? Identify strengths and weaknesses of syllogisms. I will start you off—​from my own research: Blind people cannot see People who cannot see, cannot be taught visual concepts Blind people cannot be taught visual concepts Is this true, research suggests not (see for example, Hayhoe, Cohen, and Garcia-​Carrisoza 2019), why might this be so? Does this suggest a weakness in the principle of syllogism?

28 Principles

The Medieval Period and the Renaissance The Context of the Medieval Age After what is inaccurately called the “the dark ages,” i.e., a supposedly lawless period following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the rise of Northern European tribes followed by their colonization of what is now Europe northern and western Europe, a resurgence of Greek philosophy emerged. This resurgence led to a development of a distinctively medieval or Renaissance philosophy, one that became the basis of a fully recognizable modern Western scientific methodology.This methodology identified a distinctive cultural belief and knowledge construction that blended interpretations of Ancient Greek philosophy with Roman Catholic Christian theology. Thus, it can be argued that the Roman Catholic church was the first institution to attempt to control Western science. It is true to say that the philosophy of Ancient Greece had never disappeared from the consciousness of philosophy in one form or another. In addition, its discourses had continued to influence education, government, and religion in the Eastern Roman Empire, otherwise known as the Byzantine empire, and what are now known as the Middle East and North Africa. Furthermore, in what was to become modern Europe, at first an Ancient Greek concept that only referred to parts of its own empire, and the culture of “the West” it was later expressed as the cultural entity, the Holy Roman Empire. However, the loss of influence of the Roman empire prior to the thirteenth century and the subsequent divisions within Christianity led to a weakening of its theological idealism and its pursuit of objectivity. This distortion of early Christian principles had arguably begun with its adoption by the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century, where Christianity had become the political ideology of empire. In this malaise, Christian theology became increasingly dogmatic, and the pursuit of what was felt to be the magical elements of the bible and what can be regarded as the loosest, most authoritarian interpretations of the deductive philosophies of Plato-​dominated Western theology thrived. This more magical interpretation of Christianity was how the Holy Roman Empire became Western culture as we now recognize it, and what became the foundation of what we now consider to be the modern continent of Europe, i.e., the culture practiced in the Christian lands to the North of Africa. It should also be noted that the name Africa itself was the name given to the lands of the Roman Empire to the south of the Mediterranean, which largely constituted the lands to the north of the Sahara Desert. With the weakening of what was formerly the Roman Empire and following the rise of Islam in the lands largely equating to those regions around the Arabian/​Persian Gulf and the most easterly shores of the Mediterranean (the Middle East) from around what is now regarded as the seventh or eighth century, Islamic forces invaded and colonized much of what is now southern

Historical Principles of Science 1  29 Europe (South Europe). These colonies included the lands approximating to much of Ancient Greece and what is now large parts of southern Italy and Spain; Spain in particular became a significant part of the Islamic empire, and still contains significant architecture and artifacts from this era. In common with the theology of the Prophet Mohammad, the early Islamic rulers of the lands of South Europe were liberal and brought with them Islamic and Jewish scholars, i.e. scholars working within the Islamic and Jewish traditions from the Middle East (Heer 1963). Importantly, these scholars brought their new translations of Ancient Greek philosophy, with these translations of Ancient Greek often thought to be more reliable than those used in the Holy Roman Empire, as they derived from Alexander the Great’s invasion and Hellenization of much of their region: The decades that followed Alexander [the Great’s] death saw a gradual and unmistakable programme of Hellenization, as ideas, themes, and symbols from Ancient Greece were introduced to the east. The descendants of his generals remembered their Greek roots and actively emphasized them … The Greek language could be heard –​and seen –​all over Central Asia and the Indus Valley. (Frankopan 2015, pp. 6-​7) In addition, these Jewish and Arabic scholars engaged in what is now described as a liberal dialogue with Christian scholars on the nature of Ancient Greek philosophy.These dialogues shed new light on the inductive followed by the deductive logic of Aristotle and brought novel forms of understanding of this form of philosophy to Christian theology, an early university culture and an emergent modern Western science. This dialogue became more influential in what can now be regarded as the early years of the second millennium A D , when the influence on the Moorish kings of Spain by later North African tribesmen led to the ostracization of Jewish scholars in what is now Spain.These Jewish scholars subsequently moved further into what is now northern Europe, potently influencing a growing Western scholarship and led to an increased influence of Middle Eastern scholarship on all forms of knowledge construction in this region. The Western Interpretation of Aristotle Influenced by the philosophy of his mentor Robert Grosseteste at Oxford University and by the Aristotelian process of inductive logic followed by deductive logic, one of those most influenced by new thinking from what is now the Middle East and the Far East was Roger Bacon. He is estimated to have lived around 1215–​1295, although dates on his birth and death vary. Little is agreed about his early life, but it is known that he came from Somerset or Gloucester in the English West Country, he was a monk working in the Franciscan tradition, he came from a wealthy family, and he was educated

30 Principles in the classics, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy at the University of Paris. Bacon subsequently studied for a Doctor of Theology at Oxford University. It is also known that he later brought the process of making gunpowder from China during this period, and proposed the possibility of flying machines, motorized ships and carriages during his academic life. However, it was for his development of empiricism in the Christian tradition of Western scientific methodology that Bacon is perhaps best known for. As he stated about this process: [Without] experiment nothing can be sufficiently known. There are two ways of acquiring knowledge, one through reason, the other by experiment. Argument reaches a conclusion and compels us to admit it, but it neither makes us certain nor so annihilates doubt that the mind rests calm in the intuition of truth, unless it finds this certitude by way of experience. Thus, many have arguments toward attainable facts, but because they have not experienced them, they overlook them and neither avoid a harmful nor follow a beneficial course. (Bacon in Sidebotton 2013, p. 244) Through his writing and his practice as an educational reformer, Bacon was a proponent of systematic experimentation as a methodology of deriving sensory, inductive data followed by deductive reasoning in the style of Aristotle. Through this work he developed early treatises on optics, i.e. the understanding of the properties of light and the theory of mind related to the use of light, mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy. Bacon also proposed that the Earth was spherical, and it was said that he developed an early form of camera that projected an image through a pinhole that he used to observe solar eclipses. However, it was his experiment that involved passing light through glass beads and reflected in mirrors that was observed to be a natural and more importantly a reproducible phenomenon. This new form of study demonstrated that natural phenomena could be manipulated and controlled by humans as well as God. As the Catholic church closely controlled education and knowledge production at the time, Bacon wrote to Pope Clement IV, proposing enhancements to the scientific curricula and the installation of laboratory experimentation in the educational system. Eventually, and like Socrates over 1,000 years before, Bacon’s work made those in the hierarchies of the church suspicious, as his systematic development of knowledge challenged the place of God as the only source of data and knowledge, and the church as its mediator. As his teaching and writing was controversial, it is said that Bacon’s work was eventually bounded by a papal oath of secrecy to censure his beliefs, philosophies, and dissemination of his work, particularly his work on a universal encyclopedia of knowledge. This encyclopedia was a particularly dangerous suggestion, as the interpretation of such knowledge was closely guarded by religious authorities,

Historical Principles of Science 1  31 however despite this censure Bacon continued to write a three-​volume Latin encyclopedia on his scientific methodology: the Opus Majus (the Great Work), the Opus Minus (Lesser Work), and the Opus Tertium (Third Work). Later, Bacon added to this canon of work with his Communia Naturalium (General Principles of Natural Philosophy) and the Communia Mathematica (General Principles of Mathematical Science). Following publication of these latter documents Bacon was imprisoned, and it was during his imprisonment that he published criticism of what he saw as the corrupted authorities of the Roman Catholic church before he died. Born in Roccasecca, in the then pre-​European Kingdom of Sicily, the leading Dominican scholar of the medieval era, Thomas Aquinas (estimated to have lived around 1225–​1275), later Saint Thomas Aquinas, was influenced by the invasion of the Islamic empire of his homeland. Following the stabilization of what became known as the Holy Roman Empire, and what was referred to as Christendom by others, Aquinas also reinterpreted Athenian philosophies and was said to have reinterpreted Aristotelian and Platonic logic for what was emerging as a Western intellectual and academic culture (Brock 2007). Much of Aquinas’ theological writing was based on syllogistic logic, whose influences helped to form the notion of Western medieval science with an ethical, social, and cultural focus through his metaphysics of issues such as personality and the creation in his Summa Theologiae (Summary of Theology) and the Summa Contra Gentiles (On the Truth of the Catholic Faith Against Unbelievers). Thus, unlike the teaching of Bacon, Aquinas did much to link early Western science with the theology of a more traditional Catholic understanding of Plato’s essence, i.e. “the doctrine of the universal participation in being or existence, esse” (Brock 2007, p. 466), traditional views of God and conventional Catholic theology. Aquinas’ philosophy was one that can be said to have been more palatable to the strict control of the Vatican. Although this seems an abstract element of the philosophy of the Medieval period in a book on social science, it is a fundamentally important principle to understand. It was through Aquinas’ work on the esse that contemporary philosophies and then social sciences came to debate fundamental psychological, social, and cultural issues, such as consciousness and self-​awareness which, as discussed below, would become the foundation of the enlightenment. [It] is necessary, in the judgment of Plato and Aristotle, to posit another, higher [truth]. For since the first principle must be most simple, it must … be an existence itself. And since there can only be one subsistent existence, as has already been shown, all the other things, which are below it, must exist thus: as participants in existence. Hence in all things of this sort there must come about a certain common resolution, according to which each of them is resolved by the intellect into that which exists and its existence. (Aquinas in Brock 2007, pp. 466–​467)

32 Principles Following the early medieval period, the tensions of the late Medieval period, or what is now known as the Renaissance, i.e. the resurgence of Ancient Greek and Roman intellectual and artistic culture, persisted. Amongst the most influential voices of this period was Leonardo da Vinci (1452–​1519), who was born in the city state of Florence, now part of central Italy, and who was known primarily as an artist, but was also known for his work in science and engineering. Amongst this work was early writing on what can now recognizably be called a philosophy of Western science. For da Vinci, art and science overlapped and were a part of understanding God and nature, but in common with Bacon, he felt that these issues were not governed by God, i.e. humans had free will over their own creations. For instance, da Vinci’s sketches and cartoons on the study of anatomy bear testimony to this merging of art and medical sciences and led to a path from biomechanics to what we now refer to as hydraulics. These drawings not only influenced the modern discipline of engineering but demonstrated that elements of the mind and body could be synthesized by creative human thought and were thus under human control. In this respect, da Vinci staunchly defended the experimental empiricism of Bacon and the inductive followed by deductive methodology of Aristotle in his writing, criticizing the traditional Platonic philosophy of Aquinas and deductive scientific thought promoted by the Vatican. To me it seems that all sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, mother of all certainty, and that are not tested by Experience; that is to say, that do not at their origin, middle, or end, pass through any of the five senses. For, if we are doubtful about the certainty of things that pass through the senses how much more should we question the many things against which these senses rebel, such as the nature of God and the soul and the like, about which there are endless disputes and controversies. (da Vinci 2008, pp. 6–​7)

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, reflect on and report back on the following three questions: 1. Why do you think the medieval Catholic church approved of syllogism? 2. What effects of medieval syllogism do you think we may have today? 3. How has medieval syllogism effected modern institutions—​which institutions do you think may have derived from these medieval institutions and cultures?

Historical Principles of Science 1  33

The Enlightenment, and an Understanding of Consciousness Theological Mysticism Versus Theological Proofs The enlightenment is said to be a historical period of rationalism that started in the seventeenth century, however as this chapter has shown above the path to this period started long before and is less certain and precise than is proposed. Despite the Aristotelian values of Roger Bacon and Leonardo da Vinci, resistance from the Vatican during the medieval period and the renaissance meant that scientific discovery, methodology and knowledge construction was still strictly controlled. Subsequently tensions occurred between those who wanted to maintain a mystical theological philosophy whilst others promoted experimental interpretations of theological beliefs, such as the religious nature of natural material, life, the stars, and what is now referred to as energy. In the early years of the enlightenment, the dichotomy between mystical and material theologies continued to be debated. However, the nature of the debate evolved from an understanding that experimentation was also an unassailable means of discovering and evaluating what were still felt to be natural laws.Thus, for the purposes of this book, it can be argued that the enlightenment was the period when the philosophy of Heraclitus and Aristotle, inductive followed by deductive reasoning in science, empirical scientific methodology and the study of perception came to be accepted by the prevailing intellectual cultures of a number of Western knowledge cultures. It can be argued that for the natural sciences, serious challenges to strongly-​ held mystical beliefs started with Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–​1543), the real name of whom was Mikołaj Kopernik, in the early sixteenth century, who suggested that the world was not the center of the universe. It can also be said to have started with Galileo Galilei (1564–​1642), who conducted very public experiments that supported the work of Copernicus in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. For social scientists, however, it is arguable that Renes Descartes (1596–​ 1650), who systematized the study of perception, consciousness, and its role in a human understanding of reality, is of principle importance. For Descartes, the examination of sensory data as material perception, developed an epistemological foundation for what is now referred to as cognition, behaviorism and the physical forms of the brain, i.e. brain physiology, neuro-​chemicals and neuro-​physics. Descartes was born in the Touraine region of France, his father was a lawyer who largely lived away from the family home, and his mother died when he was a baby, so Descartes subsequently grew up with an older generation of his family. Descartes first studied at a Jesuit school in La Flèche which instilled strong, spiritual Roman Catholic principles and later he taught in Paris. It is important to recognize that Descartes remained a devoted Roman Catholic throughout his life, at least he never renounced these principles, although when

34 Principles he later discussed evidence for the existence of God, he was critical of what he was taught at this Jesuit school. Descartes was primarily known as a mathematician, however this distinction is not as specialized as it is at present, as it was not unusual for academics in this era to write about numerous disciplines. Philosophy in this era was less siloed than the modern sciences are now. Thus, Descartes also wrote on and taught geometry, which at the time was separated from the study of “pure” mathematics. Descartes subsequently problematized the physical properties of light and optics, and the effect of light on visual perception and consciousness, proposing that light was like a blind man’s cane. This analogy of the angle of light as a cane opened the possibility that people who were blind could understand light through geometry, with the angle of the rays of light in hand and the vibrations caused by the tips of these canes along the ground providing vital non-​visual information. Through his theorization, Descartes also expressed physical theories of the mind, and in the early years of the seventeenth century Descartes proposed that light had physical properties that could be measured by angles of refraction, a radical notion at the time. He also proposed that, much like pre-​Socratic Greek philosophy, the only evidence that humans exist comes through the senses, yet as Plato suggested the senses themselves could not be trusted to provide the truth, or at least a true impression of the world that surrounds them. The understanding that senses were subjective left the possibility that our world was itself an illusion and the only evidence of human life was thought, leading to Descartes making the now famous statement, “Cogito, ergo sum” which translates approximately as “I think, therefore I know that I am.” Consequently, like Galileo, Copernicus and other scientists working in this era whose work challenged the theological status quo, Descartes was criticized by the Vatican for his theory of mind, left Paris for Amsterdam, and later left Amsterdam to teach in Gothenburg in Sweden, where he felt less under threat. However, it was Descartes’ conclusions on the duality of the mind and body, now known as the mind-​body problem, i.e. the mind is effected by the condition and the physical needs of the body to show emotions or cravings and regulated by and for the senses, that now influences the social sciences most. Although such basic thinking is nowadays taken for granted, in the seventeenth century this changed the academic notions of human existence beyond the metaphysical, with a free will that could manipulate these desires and that could be measured. In centuries to come, these theories became the foundation of phenomenology and other psychologies of the mind, psychoanalysis and, as above, the foundation of neurology, not to mention sociological and social psychological theories. As Descartes stated on perception: By means of these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, nature also teaches not merely that I am present to my body in the way a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am most tightly joined and, so to speak, commingled

Historical Principles of Science 1  35 with it, so much so that I and the body constitute one single thing … For clearly these sensations of thirst, hunger, pain, and so on are nothing but certain confused modes of thinking arising from the union and, as it were, the commingling of the mind with the body. (Descartes 1998, p. 98) John Locke (1632–​1704) was born in Somerset, in the West of England, and spent many of his formative years as a child of the English civil war. In addition to its political conflict, this first civil war represented a battle for supremacy between Protestant and Roman Catholic political theology in the British Isles, with Locke’s father fighting in the New Model Army alongside Cromwell. Locke was from a puritan family, i.e. a non-​conformist sect of orthodox Protestants, and this theology became an important influence on his philosophy; although Locke was not a puritan in adulthood his positionality guided his radical academic writing. It was also through his father’s Parliamentary connections that Locke was admitted to Westminster School, London, a prestigious private institution with a strong Protestant influence, around the age of 14. Following his time at Westminster School, he gained a place at Christ Church, Oxford University at the age of 20, where he remained during much of his academic career, primarily teaching Greek and Rhetoric. During his academic career Locke also trained as a medical doctor and, although he was offered the chance of becoming a cleric, rejected this career. Locke also became one of the early members of the English Royal Society in the early 1660s which became the first Western institution for scientists by those who practiced, wrote, and taught on science. Under its patronage of Parliament, the Royal Society was thus regarded as being at the core of British Protestant ideology and saw an emerging scientific methodology as being at the center of its philosophy. During his academic career, Locke argued that Aristotelian inductive followed by deductive philosophy was outdated, as it originally relied too much on Plato’s need for deductive reasoning over observations of the world, and the reliance on syllogism as a method of analysis.Taking much from the enlightened thinking of Descartes, Locke instead saw knowledge as being developed through human endeavor and learning not inherent on God-​given strategy. Thus, Locke’s criticism of induction followed by deduction stood apart from traditional Western philosophy in this era and its positivist interpretation of Ancient Greek philosophy. Consequently, Locke argued that humans were born Tabula Rasa, the interpretation of which is “as an empty slate,” with the individual truths and knowledge of the outside world drawn on this slate during life’s course, and each new experience drawing on and influencing new knowledge. Importantly, Locke’s more radical criticisms of positivist thinking laid the groundwork for questioning how the senses were learnt, were subjective, and were therefore not always a wholly reliable source of scientific observation.This

36 Principles led to a re-​evaluation of the belief that the senses were the only reliable channel of learning the truths about nature and the outside world, whether that truth was provided by God or through free will, which had remained the dominant force in continental European philosophy. Thus, Locke proposed: [The] truth is, ideas and notions are no more born in us than arts and sciences, though some of them indeed offer themselves to our faculties more readily than others and are therefore more generally received, though that too be according as the organs of our bodies and powers of our minds happen to be employed: God having fitted men with faculties and means to discover, receive, and retain truths, accordingly as they are employed. (Locke 2001, pp. 41–​42) On this topic, Locke engaged in a little publicized dialogue with Isaac Newton (1642–​1727), illustrating experiments on the senses by Newton on the nature of observation. Through this dialogue, Newton was critical of the Vatican, which arguably remained the most powerful political and academic power in Continental Europe, and Newton saw mysticism as a creature of its power through instruments such as idolatry and felt that visual ornamentation promoted objects of worship. As such, Newton conducted his own early psychological experiments which attempted to objectively challenge a belief in traditional metaphysical visions, focusing on the bible passage The Ancient of Days (Daniel, Chapter 7) as a theological hypothesis. The Ancient of Days described the supernatural angelic apparition from a bright light prophesying the life of Jesus. To test this hypothesis, Newton exposed himself to sunlight for long periods until he managed to produce his own hallucination, also creating an emotional and cognitive disorientation following an experiment whilst he recovered in a darkened room. Newton’s description of his disorientation was similar to those associated with mental health issues in contemporary society, and led to a further hallucination as he closed his eyes. Concluding these results, Newton emphasized a material rather than metaphysical nature of consciousness and imagination and challenged the traditional theological understanding of the primacy of visual observation alone. As Newton wrote in his letter to Locke: [The] cause of this phantasm involves another about the power of phansy which I must confess is hard to it too hard a knot for me to untie. To place this effect in a constant motion is hard because the sun ought then to appear perpetually. It seems rather to in a depression of the [senses] to move the imagination strongly & to be easily moved both by the imagination & by the light as often as bright objects are looked upon. (Letter from Isaac Newton to John Locke, dated the 30th January 1691. Found in the Correspondence of John Locke, The John Locke Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford University)

Historical Principles of Science 1  37

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, reflect on and report back on the following three questions: 1. Were those writers working in the enlightenment discovering scientific laws? 2. What was the effect of their writing on our current social sciences and our society? 3. In your own words, define the following terms in relation to social science: empirical, scientific investigation. In addition, find four or five other social science students, preferably from other social scientific disciplines. In this small group, give examples of what you have felt have been corruption of power in the sciences. In terms of power in our current society, pinpoint barriers that you may encounter or you have encountered during your own research.

Post-​enlightenment and Western Social Philosophy The enlightenment had focused on individual psychologies and the place of individuals within their societies, as well as seeing human consciousness being universally equal. This form of thinking had influenced religion, and had been the motivation for liberal political, theological, and socio-​cultural movements that would question traditional institutions and hierarchies. However, what was to come next was a further re-​interpretation of this consciousness, a re-​ interpretation that would take later forms of social science back into the realms of Platonic hierarchies, social stratification, and social positivism. Georg Hegel (1770–​1831) was born at the end of the enlightenment and had a mixed, often negative relationship with its philosophy, particularly the materialism of Descartes (Moggach and Lledman 1997). Hegel was from Stuttgart in what is now Germany, but at the time his region was a part of the Prussian empire, which was itself a part of what was at the time the Holy Roman Empire, and although culturally Roman Catholic this Holy Roman Empire was itself different from the Holy Roman Empire of early Europe. Unlike many of the other philosophers featured earlier in this chapter, Hegel was not from a powerful, influential, or wealthy family, although despite this he was given the opportunity to study philosophy and theology in Tübingen as a young man. Following his early studies, Hegel worked as a peripatetic teacher in Frankfurt and Bern, and then from the beginning of the nineteenth century he became an academic at the University of Jena. It was during this early academic career that, seemingly inspired by Plato, he began to publish his work on the

38 Principles spirit, the esse, and deductive logic. Following the invasion of Prussia by post-​ revolutionary France, Hegel worked as an editor of a newspaper and then as the equivalent of a secondary school teacher. Later, Hegel returned to academia, first at the University of Heidelberg and then the University of Berlin. It was during Hegel’s second academic career that he wrote the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences and published widely on religion and methodology for which he is perhaps best known. Much of this work also took the form of lecture notes and was published by his students. In terms of his contributions to contemporary social science on which he had a significant influence, Hegel is perhaps best known for reintroducing Socrates’ dialectic method which promoted two sides of an argument, with the argument determining one side of the argument being proven false, and the other being proven true. However, unlike Socrates, Hegel’s reinterpretation of the dialectic demonstrated his belief in absolute truth which, like his interpretation of esse, the essence, appeared to be inspired by Platonic philosophy. Hegel’s belief in a metaphysical, positivist esse, where the truth only needed to be discovered, would later be used to hypothesize a natural understanding of truth and a pre-​determined historical course for humanity. More importantly, Hegel regarded the dialectic as a method for analyzing historical social and cultural events. As he wrote on this issue: The one thing needed to achieve scientific progress … is the recognition of the logical principle that negation is equally positive, or that what is self-​ contradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content; or that such a negation is not just negation, but is the negation of the determined fact which is resolved, and is therefore determinate negation … it is the content in itself, the dialectic which it possesses within itself, which moves the subject matter forward. (Hegel 1977, p. 33) Hegel’s most controversial contribution to later social philosophy and later early social science, can nowadays be thought of as a racist hypothesis on the evolution of history, and what he felt was the progression of different civilizations or cultures that drove this evolution. On this topic, Hegel re-​ introduced another Platonic ideal that to understand a society the philosopher had to recognize both its history and how this history progressed from one culture to another, with one culture being superior and progressing at the expense of another. Consequently, according to Hegel cultures have evolved from what he felt were basic and primitive cultures in Africa to more sophisticated Asian and Middle Eastern cultures prior to the birth of Jesus. According to Hegel, from this point on societies became more complex and sophisticated as they became southern European cultures and then with the fall of the Roman Empire the highest form of culture was, perhaps unsurprisingly, Hegel’s own northern European,

Historical Principles of Science 1  39 Germanic culture. Although, to Hegel, this Germanic culture included what are now considered to be Nordic and Anglo-​Saxon cultures, including the British. Given this positionality, it is perhaps unsurprising that in addition to Karl Marx adopting his understanding of historical evolution and the positivist dialectic in the nineteenth century, Adolf Hitler later declared an admiration for Hegel in the twentieth century. As Hegel wrote on his hypothesis of historical evolution: In history in general there are indeed spiritual masses and individuals at play and influencing each other; but it is of the nature of spirit [the esse], in a much higher sense than it is of the character of living things, that it will not admit another originative (sic.) principle within itself, or that it will not let a cause continue to work its causality in it undisturbed but will rather interrupt and transmute it. (Hegel 2010, p. 496)

Summary This chapter has examined the demarcation of different belief systems in Ancient Greek, medieval, enlightenment and post-​enlightenment philosophy, and examined the effect of external social factors, particularly religion, on social sciences throughout this compact history. This chapter has also suggested a number of possible effects that this philosophy had on modern social movements, societies and institutions and the cultural practices of Western social scientific methodology and data collection methods, such as experimentation and observation. Moreover, this chapter has argued that when put together these different historical periods led to an acceptance of human learning and knowledge generation as psychological, social, and cultural phenomena. These different eras also led to the removal of the mystical elements in Western scientific analysis, methodology, and dissemination, and the growth of a “rational” explanation of natural and human existence, behavior, thought, and classification. However, this chapter has also argued that these historical eras left unresolved the philosophical contradictions of Platonic, Aristotelian, and pre-​Socratic ideas, and a legacy of Western intellectual activity devoid of systematically collected evidence and influenced by unregulated deductive and inductive logic. As such, what is now known as modern Western science, particularly social science, was unrecognizable as a coherent discipline. In the next chapter, this book will investigate the nature of language, and its effect on belief systems in Western philosophy, and an understanding of the historical “modern” philosophy of Western science and social science. In particular, the next chapter focuses on how subjective language became part of a debate that influenced scientific methodology, including a criticism of what were believed to be “natural languages,” and how language and knowledge creation have influenced power.

3 Historical Principles of Science 2 The Modern History of Western Science

Introduction This chapter examines the historical development of contemporary Western attitudes to data and logic in Western knowledge development, particularly as it relates to social science, as part of this book’s aim of outlining the most influential principles of Western social science. It also continues to critically analyze how these principles have come about throughout the twentieth century. This chapter also demonstrates how these principles are socially and, more importantly, culturally developed according to influences on the authors of its narrative. This chapter particularly focuses on criticism of the logic and fallibility of methodology in the early twentieth century, the questioning of the nature of the role of systematization and theory, the development of an understanding of power, and its place in the development of knowledge production. The three aims of this chapter are to: (1) support the readers’ understanding of the use and heritage of language, logic, and power in Western social scientific research, and how it affects the cultural practice of this research; (2) provide the reader with an overview of the debates and theories from the twentieth century, or what can be referred to as the modern era of social science, a period that broke away from the many traditional ideas of science and laid the ground for the development of a new social science; and (3) contribute to the debate on the fallibility of Western social scientific methodology and the divisions in the character of belief, knowledge construction, and methodology. The three questions that pose the theme for this chapter are as follows: 1. Are language and mathematics fallible in the context of Western social science? 2. Is the cultural practice of modern Western social science fallible, and if it is how is it fallible? 3. What role does power play in Western social science? DOI: 10.4324/9781003241997-4

Historical Principles of Science 2  41

Principles Introduced Through this Chapter Positivism: Positivism is the belief that there are underlying laws that govern our world, which are either defined or created by a concept such as “nature,” which itself is an intangible principle that binds these underlying laws together. One example of the belief in positivism is the belief in the physical law of gravity, and that this natural scientific law exists throughout the universe, and that the power of this force behaves according to a set of natural rules that can be quantified and predicted in future situations and in different environments. For example, on earth objects are pulled towards the center of the planet slower or faster depending on their density, thus a lump of lead pulled towards earth faster than a feather or indeed a bag of feathers will be pulled. NOTE:The origins of positivism are linked to a belief that there is a “higher” order than humanity and other forms of life, and that these “laws” have been constructed by a higher force or at least behave by the rules of a higher force. This higher force can take the form of God (the monotheistic belief in a single god), gods (the pantheistic belief in many gods, such as Zeus, Thor, Sheva or Rama) or the belief that there is a single entity called nature (as discussed in Chapter 1) that is responsible for defining and controlling these forces. The consequence of this belief is that science can discover what are “whole” or “total” truths, and that some or all concepts behave according to these pre-​ ordained rules. It can be argued that there are truths “out there,” and Western science can find and precisely define the reality of the situation. NOTE: Philosophically, bearing in mind that this is a book on Western social science and not philosophy per se, there is an issue with defining laws, in that according to positivist systems of belief, if a law is discovered there should be no need to develop this law further. That is to say, the law should then be set, and all that needs to be done is describe these laws better, and perhaps apply the law to different contexts or work in concert with other laws. For example, gravitational force can be slowed by the force of friction, thus an object of a given density will move slower through water than through air. To put the theory of positivism another way, if a law is discovered using positivist methodology, it should be assumed that this is the end of theoretical science on this law, with only its application, context or its behavior in relation to other laws needing further research. Critical Reality/​Critical Rationalism: Critical reality (Bhaskar 2008) and critical rationalism (Popper 1979) are two significant theories that hypothesize that the world is not and does not behave in the way that it appears through the senses or is processed by the mind. To explain these theories another way, we can never fully comprehend our personal reality as the senses are ambiguous and can be fooled, are unreliable, or are limited in what they can perceive. According to critical realist and critical rationalist theory, it can be said that “reality” is messy, as it does not naturally have a shape, a form or a function, although this assumes that there is a reality to be perceived and that we do not

42 Principles simply imagine the world from “something” that exists beyond the real world; i.e. we have a mind and a body, and do not just exist as a mind. As Descartes stated, the only thing that therefore can be said is, if we think there cannot be nothing, as thought itself is something. To scientists following critical realist or critical rationalist theory, what humans and possibly other living things perceive is an interpretation of the jumble which is given meaning by our mind, and possibly our human need to regularize chaos, to make it more understandable and pliable to our needs. NOTE: As discussed in this and later chapters, critical realists also believe that there is no natural form of classification, such as gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and so forth, as there are no natural classes or taxonomies of “things” or impressions of “things.” Thus, critical realist and critical rationalist theories propose that the senses, through transferring perceptual data to the mind, attempt to group what they see as like “items” or “characteristics” to simplify reality (Popper 1979). These categories become “things” that humans, at least, and possibly other living things, can make sense of through the generation and control of a common language via discussions and narrative, and pass on as knowledge. Another way in which the world external to human minds and senses can examine the notions of critical reality and critical rationalism is by examining their effect on society, an idea that is particularly relevant to Western social science. For instance, for critical realists society can be regarded as metaphysical, that is to say, unperceivable and intangible, as it does not exist as a “thing,” but as an imagined thing. Thus, it can be assumed that humans belonging to classes such as male or female share certain characteristics and are drawn together by human manufacture and cultural tribalism, not natural attraction or genetically encoded tribal instincts. Culture/​Being Cultural: A culture, or what is sometimes referred to more simply as culture, is a form of network that has a defined and shared bond, usually through a shared history, a shared ritual, and shared knowledge, arts, and/​ or a distinctive means of communication, which is usually symbolic language. Cultures also generally regard themselves as distinct from equivalent cultural communities. For instance, people who see themselves as Christian, Jewish or Muslim believe in a single God, the same God, and have many shared ethics and philosophies; however members of these religions often have a distinctive body of knowledge about God, have discrete cultural rituals to study or worship God, have a unique body of knowledge about God and the world around them which is often said to be scientific as well as philosophical, and even interpret God through different forms of language. Thus, it can be argued that each culture can be said to have a unique interpretation of God that is distinct from other religions. Similarly, although each religion has its own distinct society based on their individual cultural heritage, the management of their religious

Historical Principles of Science 2  43 culture and who controls the culture forms its governance and defines and controls its theology. Society/​Societies: Societies are distinct groups of two or more humans connected through a largely common form of communication, knowledge rules and behavior, purpose or distinction. For instance, a society can be a family, an institution, a nation, or an international group of nations with a common purpose. These groups don’t have to share values with other societies. For example, two families may have different moral values when it comes to their relationships, and incorporate a traditional family around the relationship of a couple, as in a married couple with children and extended family, or an unmarried couple who have decided to stay together long term.These societies can also be nested, so a national society can recognize different forms of family within its greater society. In contemporary societies, these rules are often formally encoded and agreed upon or imposed upon the group by a ruling class or powerful sub-​group. NOTE: A society can be seen as social or cultural, depending on its focus of study or how it is seen at any one time by its members or those outside of it. For example, a church may be trying to tackle social exclusion amongst its congregation through a social study but study its knowledge as a cultural phenomenon. Societies can also be roughly classified in different ways, such as through time or through space and place. With respect to time, a society can be one of three things: (a) A close network, such as membership of a school or university course or even a single lesson, a hospital ward during treatment, a high street people are passing through, a café where people stop to have a coffee in, even if this visit to the café is regular and represents the same time of day, the crowd in a sports stadium during a tournament or match, a theater during a play or concert, or a club or home during a party. (b) A geographical location that is lifelong or fleeting and that is enclosed by a boundary, whether that boundary is physical or metaphysical, such as being part of a school or university campus, a workplace, a town, a city, county or a nation, continent, or region of the world, such as the northern or southern hemisphere. (c) A distributed human web, where humans may or may not know all the other members of their web, or occasionally may not even know or meet any other members of the network directly at any point, as they may only know of their existence. For instance, humans can join with others on a Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp group sharing a common interest, such as a hobby or an interest, a shared sports team, or through the love of a favorite band. In this respect, it can be argued that societies have undergone a revolution in the past three decades, since the development of the public worldwide web and the Internet. Just as relationships changed in previous eras, such as the industrial revolution or world wars when communities were redefined, disbanded, or created overnight, the Internet has changed the way that humans communicate with each other. It can also be argued that the Internet has also redefined the way that human interests are shared and evolve in the contemporary world.

44 Principles

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss an answer to the following task: • •

Can you give extra instances of bad or skewed findings in the social sciences to show a finding in a particular way? How or why do you think this data was skewed, and why do you think the researcher skewed these findings?

The Era of Modern Western Science The enlightenment focused on perception and observation to criticize the mystical elements of religion and the authority of the church. By contrast, the modern era that represented the first half of the twentieth century focused on a critical appraisal of a belief in the essence (the esse), the related principle of positivism, and logical notation and mathematics as natural language. This questioning of what had previously been thought of as an essence in the form of Plato’s Theory of Forms led to two further debates on Western science and methodology: first, a debate on the nature of coding and the dissemination of scientific evidence and data; and second, a debate on what could and could not be proven through science, i.e. what was proof in social science. These were significant issues that had little attention paid to them since the rise of Athens but were shown to be central to the development of modern Western methodology and are illustrated in Figure 3.1. On this issue, it can be argued that Bertrand Russell (1872–​1970) was pivotal to this critical movement either as a theorist himself or as a facilitator of other theorists. Russell was an aristocrat in the style of Plato. He was born the third Earl Russell of Kingston Russell and was also Viscount Amberley of Amberley and of Ardsalla. Privately taught at home and isolated from other

Debate on the nature of coding evidence PostEnlightenment

Debate on the context of proof and “provability” Debate on the nature of power and bias

Figure 3.1 Split in the Debate on Western Science and Methodology.

Historical Principles of Science 2  45 children, Russell only really had a chance of regularly mixing with those from his own age group outside his own family when he studied at Cambridge University as a young adult. Subsequently, Russell became Professor of Philosophy and Logic at Cambridge, where he wrote mainly about the philosophy of mathematics and logic. In addition, Russel also wrote on social issues of the time, such as poverty and war, as well as ethics and education in common with many of the Western ruling classes since the time of Ancient Greece, and thus can be said to have contributed to the theory of Western social science. Following the traditional education of his own and previous eras, in his early years of studying philosophy Russell felt that logic was a monistic, single system of thinking, and that this single form of logic, Plato’s understanding of the esse, could be applied to all life’s issues. Thus, in the belief that it was a natural language that explained this single form of logic, mathematics was thought to be derived from a few simple axioms, had logically rigorous foundations and was comprised of nothing but a single essence of logic, otherwise referred to as logicism. In the early years of the twentieth century, Russell (1903) attempted to unify what had been treated as largely separate since Pythagoras, and develop a unified theory of geometry and mathematics into a universal principle of logic. This was a neo-​Platonic notion of a perfect essence, where a form of syllogism could be distilled into what can now be described as a unified theory of human existence encoded in this natural language. Later, Russell became more cynical about these ideas, arguing that this idea was akin to a mythological understanding of mathematics and geometry, and explained that his beliefs had been largely due to his isolated early education and life. This early isolated life consisted of disrupted personal relationships, which had skewed his emotional development and led him to rely on a form of ultra-​rationalism to make sense of his lonely early world view. As he stated on this period, “I disliked the real world and sought refuge in a timeless world, without change or decay or the will-​o’-​the-​wisp of progress” (Russell 2009, p. 228). One philosopher whose work had a significant influence on Russell’s change from that of a single view of logic to multiple forms of logic was one of Russell’s students at Cambridge University, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–​1951). Wittgenstein was an Austrian-​born philosopher from a wealthy Viennese family who was revered by what is known as the Viennese Circle of philosophers in the early decades of the twentieth century. During his studies at Cambridge Wittgenstein undermined what were then Russell’s great contributions to the philosophy of mathematics and persuaded his teacher that there were no “truths” of logic at all, and that logic consisted entirely of tautologies. Subsequently, Wittgenstein maintained it could be argued that truth was not guaranteed by eternal facts in the manner of Plato’s theory of forms, and that life was more in a state of constant movement with no certainties that could be spoken of. Thus, a human understanding of the

46 Principles universe, be it metaphysical or material, only lay in language and its relationship with perception and the senses. Russell became not so much important as a philosopher in his own right, but as a gatekeeper of philosophers and their philosophies (particularly central European philosophies) that performed an important role in transforming what became modern Western social science. In particular, it has been argued that Russell was exalted to the status of philosophy legend and that he felt the need to hand over the patrician mantle to a younger heir.When he met Wittgenstein in particular, he found ways in which to promote him as a genius (Edmonds and Eidinow 2002). Russell felt Wittgenstein was his rightful heir as the leading English-​speaking philosopher of the era, a role that Wittgenstein seemed to approve of. Given Russell’s approval, it is said that Wittgenstein was enabled to adapt Cambridge University’s strict rules to obtain his Doctor of Philosophy. For example, his improved academic prestige promoted acceptance of what would become his well-​known book Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus as his doctoral thesis. Russell and G. E. Moore … were Wittgenstein’s examiners in a process that could most generously be described as a sham. At the viva stage, when Wittgenstein had to be questioned on the arguments of his thesis, the three acquaintances sat for some time chatting, before Russell turned to Moore and said, ‘Go on, you’ve got to ask him some questions –​you’re the professor.’ A desultory discussion ensued, at the end of which Wittgenstein stood up, slapped his examiners on the shoulder, and said ‘Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.’ (Edmonds and Eidinow 2002, p. 36) Beyond these issues of unimaginable privilege, and buoyed by Russell’s benefaction, Wittgenstein provided a motive for the general principle of the fallibility of perception and cognition. What was most important for Wittgenstein was the way that the senses could be fooled by the ambiguity of representation, especially through the depiction of shapes, lines, and distances in images. It was in this ambiguity, he argued, that the brain was inconsistent and imperfect in its interpretation of the world around it, it was not pre-​programmed to uncover pre-​defined truths, but it developed truths according to imperfect sensory data, through imperfect organs, on an imperfect mind. As an example of this fallibility, Wittgenstein cited the duck-​ rabbit, an ambiguous two-​dimensional picture that could either be seen as a duck or a rabbit, but more importantly it could not be seen as both at the same time. To Wittgenstein, this demonstrated that the mind only had the capacity for imagining one interpretation of the world through analysis at a time, even though other, equally possible alternatives existed at the same time. Of equal importance to the ambiguity of perception in this era was the ambiguity of language, including mathematical and logical notation, which Wittgenstein argued had numerous contradictions that demonstrated that it

Historical Principles of Science 2  47 had not been created by or followed a single form of logic. The reason for this ambiguity, Wittgenstein argued, was the random historical development of language, which was a development that reflected a similarly randomly knowledge and ever expanded through dialects within these broader languages.These dialects themselves were said to evolve from colloquial language, and were not a part or a natural, higher form of logic, as had previously been supposed. In his earlier writing, Wittgenstein also identified cases of logical contradiction that lacked a single strand of reasoning in formal notation, that he referred to as the “P Problem.” This problem referred to a theoretical number P, and that could have a positive or negative value that could be written logically in numerous formats. Thus, if P by itself is taken as positive number, say for example P represented the number 1, then –​P, or -​1 in this case, would logically be seen as the opposite of P. However, as Wittgenstein argued, logically -​-​P should therefore be the same as P but is not seen as the same as P, just as -​-​-​P is not seen as being the same as –​P, or -​-​-​-​P is not seen as the same as P, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, each symbol of P represents a unique meaning, one that could be applied in a different way to its logical equivalent. Furthermore, for Wittgenstein the development of logic itself was a non-​positivist element of language development, one that could only be used to imperfectly capture the meaning of externally occurring phenomena. As he stated, Even at first sight it seems scarcely credible that there should follow from one fact p infinitely many others, namely ~~p, ~~~~p, etc. And it is no less remarkable that the infinite number of propositions of logic follow on from half a dozen ‘primitive propositions’. But in fact all the propositions of logic say the same thing, to wit nothing. Truth functions are not material functions. (Wittgenstein 1974, p. 44) In Wittgenstein’s discussion about the ambiguous development of language, he analogized the development of a language with the growth of a town by the construction of its buildings, streets, and infrastructure, that eventually become its suburbs, growing from the center. Subsequently, Wittgenstein argued that in this way even formal “natural” languages such as logical notation were simply the suburbs of these towns, with their own subjectivity and overlapping incoherent streets. As the city and their original suburbs evolve, further modern suburbs grow out of them as satellites and extensions, and in this way, solid communities grow out from each other, and develop their own centers and institutions that in turn work with each other. [Ask] yourself whether our language is complete –​whether it was before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were annexed to it, for these are, so to speak, the suburbs of our languages. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town becomes a

48 Principles town?) Our language can be seen as an old city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of modern sections with straight regular streets and uniform houses. (Wittgenstein 1952, p. 8) Also supported by Russell, the Austrian-​born physics teacher and one-​time cabinet maker Karl Popper (1902–​1994) was heavily critical of the traditional philosophical foundations of science, and what he saw as the bigotry of Plato and Hegel. Like Wittgenstein, Popper was Austrian born, was of part Jewish heritage and moved to the UK, although Popper also lived in New Zealand prior to moving to the UK. However, unlike Wittgenstein Popper did not come from a background that was as privileged as many of his Viennese peers, and he did not move for education but to flee Nazi rule in continental Europe. Nevertheless, because of their heritage, neither Popper nor Wittgenstein were effectively able to return to Austria until decades later. Following his move to the UK, Popper became a member of faculty at the London School of Economics (LSE), and founded the Center for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS), in the school’s department of Philosophy and Method. Popper advocated for what was referred to as critical rationalism in science and the promotion of what he called the Open Society, based on the extremes of both right-​and left-​wing politics he experienced and observed in Vienna. Popper theorized that after the time of Heraclitus, which as this book established in the previous chapter was prior to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, there was a debate on the nature of what we now call laws, that were divided into human laws and natural laws. Popper referred to these two forms of law respectively as: human “norms,” that is to say social habits or customs that were truths invented by humans; and “facts,” that is to say an interpretation of the natural world external to humans that were interpreted and then encoded in language by humans through scientific methodology. Popper called the difference between these human and natural laws critical dualism, and for him the confusion of these two laws was the foundation of the problem of the theorization of society. For Popper, social philosophers and later social scientists would understand humanly created classifications and practices, such as gender, ethnicity, disability, religion, human value, economy, and political beliefs as being subject to the same logic as natural facts. Importantly, Popper largely rejected Aristotle’s theory that inductive followed by deductive logic as a reliable way of determining facts or establishing human norms, or as an objective form of collecting data that can be analyzed through deductive logic. For Popper (1979), the belief in inductive followed by deductive objectivity suggested by Aristotle and the notion of tabula rasa by Locke led to a form of cognition that thought of the mind as an empty bucket, simply observing symmetrical units of perception that mirrored the outside world immaculately. This criticism is covered further in Chapter 5.

Historical Principles of Science 2  49 In common with Wittgenstein, Popper thus argued that the building blocks of inductive data, sensory perception and language were fallible, inconsistent, and subjective. Although, it should be noted that the two clashed intellectually and literally on many other issues (Edmonds and Eidinow 2002). On the study of methodology and knowledge synthesis in Western science, Popper also described the role of myths in the evolution and creation of theories. Most notably, in his thesis on the development and nature of scientific theories titled Conjectures and Refutations, Popper (1998) argued that myth making was a fundamental principle in the development of scientific theories and the development of knowledge construction. Subsequently, Popper suggested that the knowledge construction of Western science could be compared to the miracles of Christianity, or the sagas of ancient Greece, as a way that what is known in the world through culturally based analogy can be interpreted. Through this analogy, commonalties in greater beliefs and knowledge systems are not truly interpreted, but stories that make sense of a situation in a place and time, thought of as the experimental or empirically experienced moment, are concocted to make sense of a phenomenon or synthesized state. [Scientists] have dared … to create myths, or conjectures, or theories, which are in striking contrast to the everyday world of common experience … They have added to the facts of our everyday world the invisible air, the antipodes, the circulation of blood, the worlds of the telescope and the microscope, of electricity, and of tracer atoms showing us in detail the movements of matter within living bodies. All these things are far from being mere instruments: they are witnesses to the intellectual conquest of our world by our minds. (Popper 1998, p. 102) Given his rejection of pure induction followed by deduction and the analogy of theories with mythology, Popper suggested that all science could reliably prove was the falsification of existing ideas and the solving of specific problems through the application of scientific methodology. Thus, Popper suggested that the only genuine test of a scientific theory is an attempt to refute it through presenting counter evidence, as every scientific theory is prohibitive, with scientific practice simply stated as problem progression. Through problem progression, scientific hypotheses begin with an initial problem (P1), to which tentative theories (TT) are proposed, which must then be tested through a process of Error Elimination (EE), leading to empirical examination. This process in itself does not determine a concrete answer, but simply leads to a new problem (P2), which supposes more advanced theories and hypotheses, and the whole process starts again. Popper stated this problem predictability through the following formula: P1 → TT → EE → P2

50 Principles CAVEAT:There is a difficult if not contradictory issue with Popper’s rejection of inductive followed by deductive logic and his argument that we can only falsify existing theories through scientifically collecting inductively collected data and use it to falsify these theories for their inductiveness. Therefore, it should be noted that neither theorization nor falsifiability can be said to be infallible according to Popper’s theory.This said, context is important in Popper’s writing, thus theories that have a large amount of relevant evidence from different studies to support them have greater reliability in their application in a given context than other theories with lesser or contradictory inductive data. For Popper (1979), human knowledge could never be certain scientific knowledge, which was true or correct or even purely factual, and so a theory could only be thought of as righter than another theory.Thus, Popper suggested that all scientific discovery or knowledge synthesis should be seen on a scale of degrees of truthfulness and that scientific theorization was merely a practice in probability or predictability of what may happen in the future based on what happened in the past. Popper termed this predictive practice Scientific Prophecy, which was based on partly conditional prediction and systematically constructed statement, such as Aristotle’s syllogism. Popper stated this critical issue of the distortion of traditional inductive followed by deductive based science through the following formula. In this formula, a conditional prediction (CP) and what he termed an existential statement (ES) in the form of a deductive theory led to what Popper termed an unconditional prophecy (UP), which is more simply written as a post-​modernist or positivist theory or hypothesis: [CP +​ES] =​UP

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss an answer to the following task: •

•

Identify problems in your own fields that have been re-​defined as a first problem (P1), and second problem (P2), and even a third problem (P3), and so forth, as Popper argued occurred in his theory of science as problem solving. What do you think are other weaknesses in Popper’s arguments, apart from that noted in the caveat?

Can you give extra instances of bad or skewed findings in the social sciences?

Historical Principles of Science 2  51

Power, History, and the Development of Methodology Power and Scientific Practice Like Popper, the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922–​1996) understood the important linkage between the philosophy and history of Western science, belief, and the subjectivity of scientific practices according to broader social and cultural patterns. According to Kuhn (1996), scientific methodology and theorization changes slowly during socially established periods with fundamental rarely challenged systems of belief, or what may be termed epistemological paradigms. However, as these paradigms were based on outmoded knowledge, theory, and data, they were eventually superseded by a new era of knowledge and new beliefs.When this new era of knowledge, belief, theory, and law was synthesized, it was accompanied by new, previously unimagined data and methodologies of scientific practice, in what can be called a paradigmatic revolution. This did not happen when a small amount of evidence was established against the theories and beliefs of the old paradigm, but when large amounts of evidence amassed. To the historian, at least, it makes little sense to suggest that verification is establishing the agreement of fact with theory. All historically significant theories have agreed with the facts, but only more or less. (Kuhn 1996, p. 147) Like Popper’s problem development formula, Kuhn suggested that paradigms included their own internal puzzles that needed to be solved using evolving methodologies, data, and beliefs to develop a consensus amongst researchers. Thus, theories supported by this new evidence could be regarded as puzzle-​ solutions to support or “solve” the greater puzzle of its paradigm, which is itself evaluated by the scientific practices of the beliefs, data and methodologies of their eras, although as it is evaluated against its own belief, this belief cannot be superseded within its own paradigm, only by the new paradigm. However, even though Kuhn accepted the role of myth making in scientific evolution, in his thesis on scientific revolution Kuhn (1996) refuted the approach to characterizing scientific paradigm as mythology, and these myths as ultimately disprovable. Instead, Kuhn proposed that elements of scientific theories that appear truer than others in many contexts resist and can be absorbed into new paradigms.Thus, new paradigms cannot be regarded as unique, as they are founded on the traditions of the old ones. Subsequently, according to Kuhn, theories were not always wholly falsifiable but one could adapt these theories to develop more feasible ones through the process of scientific revolution. It is just the incompleteness and imperfection of the existing data-​theory fit that, at any time, define many of the puzzles that characterize normal

52 Principles science. If any and every failure to fit were ground for theory rejection, all theories ought to be rejected at all times. (Kuhn 1996, p. 146) Born in the same year as Kuhn but with different influences, Imre Lakatos (1922–​1974) was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, who was originally a Marxist and then a sceptic. As a younger man, Lakatos was persecuted by the Nazis in his home country because of his Jewish heritage and his stated Marxist beliefs, and then mistreated again by the Stalinist regime that followed it, and like Popper this experience influenced his work. During the 1950s, Lakatos moved to the UK, studied first at Cambridge, and was then a student of Popper at the LSE, where he later became a member of faculty. Although he was skeptical of positivist positions and the understanding of positivism in his writing, Lakatos came to argue for the place of scientific methodology and its role in systematizing knowledge. Although, like Popper, he was skeptical about what it could achieve, and in common with Kuhn Lakatos also felt that there was often progress in scientific theories. Subsequently, even if hypotheses could not explain or prove given laws, they could explain natural and social phenomena progressively. Similarly, refutations of scientific laws can help to improve scientific methodologies and data collection methods, which in turn can lead to the emergence of more accurate knowledge systems, i.e. scientific knowledge systems can be said to be the worst of all the knowledge systems, except for all the others. Therefore, for Lakatos, there was an issue of what was proof and what could be refuted through scientific practice, and thus mathematics as a measurement of cause not effect was not an intellectual enterprise. For Lakatos, induction followed by deduction could not develop novel facts or was mostly falsified, as in common with Popper’s thesis problems that were “solved” created a series of sub-​problems, some sub-​problems were solved, and others not, creating sub-​ sub-​problems, and so on ad infinitum. In this way, according to Lakatos, science progresses if the problems solved are more important than problems that were set out to be solved. However, there was a further problem with this process that needed addressing. In the inductive followed by deductive cycle, the deductions that were made from well-​defined premises are end-​points of evolutionary, dialectical process and can develop knowledge of worth for society. Subsequently, concepts that are initially ambiguous, become more precise through debate and thus should be regarded as proof-​generated concepts, with refutations of these proofs considered as counterexamples. Like Popper, Lakatos was also interested in the boundaries of what was thought to be science, what societies and authorities stated was true science and the power that established scientists had. Lakatos argued that demarcation in science, or what became known as the Generalized Demarcation Problem (GDP) addressed the single question, “When is one [scientific] theory better than another?” (Lakatos 1999, p. 20). Subsequently, Lakatos argued that

Historical Principles of Science 2  53 demarcation was fundamental to the understanding of traditional science, as it delineated what is called “proper Science” from “Pseudo Science,” and could be said to be at the heart of knowing science from other ways of knowing. For Lakatos, there were three schools of this scientific demarcation: (1) Militant Positivism, which as its name suggested stated what and what was not a law defined by nature or God, allowed strict boundary conditions to be set by scientists who “discovered” these laws, and to state rules as to what fit these laws and what did not; (2) Epistemological Anarchism, which was skeptical about all scientific knowledge and methodology, rejected all boundaries around the truth and thus saw all truth as asymmetrically relative; (3) Elitist Authoritarianism, which was perhaps the most powerful form of demarcation as it was judged by powerful individuals or authorities (such as, associations, governments, societies and institutions) within and outside science with no boundary conditions, but judged on individual bases according to the needs of individuals or authorities to preserve their power. Despite the dangers of the first two forms of demarcation, Lakatos saw Elitist Authoritarianism as particularly pernicious as it was driven by and led to the corruption of knowledge construction, dangerously manipulating science for the needs of the few. He provided two very different examples of this corruption: the Roman Catholic Church banning Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium in 1616, and the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party declaring Lysenko’s environmentalist theory superior to Mendelian genetics in 1949 (Lakatos 1999). Importantly, Elitist Authoritarianism ultimately undermined science, as it led to intellectual dishonesty feeling the short-​term needs of individuals or authorities.This dishonesty would ultimately be identified in different eras or different regions not adhering to these religious or political dogmas, thus bringing all science into question. To counteract the problems that demarcation provided, Lakatos proposed a theory of intellectual honesty, where both conditions of proof and disproof were simultaneously provided and constantly tested, with the most workable solution in each context being identified. [Intellectual] dishonesty means putting forward a theory without specifying the experimental conditions (sic.) under which it could be given up. I remember when back in my Popperian days I used to put this question to Marxists and Freudians: “Tell me, what specific historical or social events would have to occur in order for you to give up Marxism?” I remember that this was usually accompanied by either stunned silence or confusion. But I was very pleased with the effect. (Lakatos 1999, p. 26) In contrast, Paul Feyerabend (1924–​1994) argued for the consideration of methodological anarchy in the development of scientific knowledge construction. Feyerabend was an Austrian writer, who initially studied natural science at the University of Vienna, and then studied philosophy of science at the LSE

54 Principles under Popper and as a peer of Lakatos. He then became a member of faculty at the University of Bristol in the English West Country, and the University of California, Berkeley, in the USA. Lakatos argued that the irrevocable problem of Western science was that it was developed unreliably, and its knowledge held too much power in society as a whole; i.e. that humans tended to believe that science created truths and privileged certain strains of thought that it argued should be accepted without, or with little questioning. Feyerabend felt he should undermine science’s privileged position, as science continues as a standard of knowledge only because “the show has been rigged in its favour” (Feyerabend 1978, p. 102). In a time when it was felt that Western science was superior to all other forms of epistemological development, Feyerabend found himself in agreement with the French anthropologist Levi-​Strauss (1994) who argued against this all-​encompassing dogma. Instead, Feyerabend argued that what were felt to be primitive societies by arrogant Western intellectualism had their own methodologies of knowledge construction that although contrasting with scientific knowledge systems, created credible systems of truth. Thus, the practice of science did not uncover universal truths, but represented an ideology which has been accepted without ever having examined its advantages and its limits. More particularly, Feyerabend argued that because there is no infallible scientific method, science can threaten democracy and is incapable of acquiring reliable knowledge, thus in common with Popper he argued that science is much closer to myth than philosophy. Feyerabend’s answer to this issue was his theory of Methodological Anarchism to create a free society through epistemological justice, where the traditional ideal of the social aspects of democracy are met. As Feyerabend stated: There is no need to fear that the diminished concern for law and order in science and society that characterizes an anarchism of this kind will lead to chaos. The human nervous system is too well organized for that. There may, of course, come a time when it will be necessary to give reason a temporary advantage and when it will be wise to defend its rules to the exclusion of everything else. (Feyerabend 1993, p. 9)

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss an answer to the following task: •

Identify paradigms of competing thought in your own topic. If you find these paradigms, do you feel these paradigms have helped or hindered the process of research in this field? Do these paradigms encourage or stifle critical debate?

Historical Principles of Science 2  55 • •

Do you think it is more important to have an imperfect theory or accept that no theories can prove anything, and so all theories are equally poor? Is there a demarcation in your own social scientific subject area, can you identify an example of demarcation if this exists?

Power, Society, and Language Paul-​Michel Foucault (1926–​1984) was a French philosopher and historian who discussed notions of power within institutions, and critically examined questions of power and the responses they inspired, similar to concepts of hegemony (Gramsci 1971); i.e. what it means to rule through the implementation of power. In response, Foucault developed the theory of Governmentality, arguing that governments create standpoints to manage rather than listening to the population that it is charged with representing in a way that manipulates the beliefs, behaviors, and habits of this population. This manipulation is affected through a belief in and a promotion of a positivist truth which a ruling body or person itself defines. Thus, like hegemony human lives were affected by the power of leaders and their definition of “the truth” of the society being ruled. Foucault’s thesis on Governmentality was based on an analysis of the history of the enlightenment and what he felt was its neo-​Platonic societies. During this period, the emergent nation states of the seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​ century new continent of Europe created institutions and rules to optimize the minds and bodies of its human population. In particular, Foucault examined the effect of Descartes’ mind-​body problem on a belief in truth, which was discussed in the previous chapter, and the theory that the body and soul could be manipulated and reformed. Thus, in this new paradigm of philosophy, power could be seen as how the body and mind were ordered according to power which led to institutions that could form a power-​knowledge. Subsequently, for Foucault, knowledgeable truth was created using power as a mediator. In this respect, Foucault proposed that truth could be contrasted with scientific mythologies, as truth was seen as being produced by multiple constraints of power, such as the insecurity of a ruling elite to maintain power. As a result, governments regulate the truth through their societies’ institutions and are regulated by their own governmentalities. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth –​that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and its instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements … the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault 1977, p. 25) Foucault (1977) also argued that similar instances of the subjectivity of truth and logic are also discussed in its role as part of scientifically driven political culture. Thus, culturally subjective truths were an issue of systems and structures of social

56 Principles power in nation states and mechanisms of politics, which Foucault argued were the discourse of governance as being an instrument of ideology. Consequently, societies are manipulated to provide a pliant, orderly nation state. This was achieved through a political economy of truth. As Foucault stated on this issue: “Truth” is centered on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions that produce it; it is subject to constant economic and political incitement … it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses. (Foucault 1977, p. 26) Avram Noam Chomsky (1928–​ Present) is an American linguist and is regarded as the founder of what came to be called a cognitive revolution in our understanding of the human mind as a material principle. Furthermore, Chomsky is the founder of a form of political criticism of the misuse and manipulation of language by economic elites, domestic and international politicians, foreign policy proponents, and intellectual culture. Like Foucault, Chomsky has argued that the United States and similar nominally democratic countries realize that their human populations cannot be controlled by force, so employ more subtle methods of social and cultural propaganda. This propaganda is designed to control these populations through narratives of the truth that support the needs and aims of its economic, social, and cultural elites through information and knowledge synthesis. Furthermore, different forms of control require different forms of propaganda, where populations are led to believe that vesting economic control of society in the hands of a tiny minority of the population is to their benefit. In this regime of truth intellectuals and academics practicing science and social science are necessary for the process of maintaining power over the minority, as they are writers that control the epistemological narrative, and thus become a moral agent of the elite” to “elite - if not become the elite themselves. Similarly, writers collect, disseminate, and interpret political and economic information for the public, and in this role should consider themselves as having a responsibility for the accepted opinions, access issues and current debates. As Chomsky argues of these writers: The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. (Chomsky 1998) Power and Exclusion As discussed in this and the previous chapter, traditional debates on science and its construction of synthetic knowledge has focused on the practice of science, the use of science by elites and the constructions of societies based on a belief in the sciences as the truth. However, contemporary debates increasingly focused

Historical Principles of Science 2  57 on the personnel of science that has created this scientific practice, and its influence on who controls power in society as well as what power is in society. In reading (and indeed in the writing of) Chapters 2 and 3, it is obvious that women were not represented in the development of the principles of Western science. Although gender, as we will discuss in Chapter 4, is the most enduring social and cultural classification of human, more than half of the human species were actively excluded from the development of knowledge for millennia. In addition, it should be noted that many other social and cultural groups, from those of low social classes who were largely excluded from early let alone late education and people with certain disabilities have been actively excluded from the development of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, although as we have shown that those from the Middle East and Africa have influenced Western science, and human classifications of ethnicity are culturally subjective and change regularly, people who are considered “people of color” in current Western taxonomies are also ill represented. More recently this has been addressed in the study and methodology of science, and social science. Helen Elizabeth Longino (1944–​present) studied at Barnard College, USA, Sussex University, UK, and Johns Hopkins University, USA, is a feminist philosopher of science at Stanford University and was the vice president, and head of the division of Logic Methodology and Philosophy, for the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from 2016–​2019. In the new millennium, Longino also broke new ground as the first female President of the Philosophy of Science Association (Stanford University 2022). Through her writing, Longino examines the gendered development of scientific methodology, the epistemological biases of science being conducted as this chapter has shown almost exclusively by men, and the development of science as a social knowledge system. Her main work in this field is Science as Social Knowledge, published originally in 1990. Her writing remains distinctly anti-​positivist and, like Wittgenstein and Popper, she sees language as key to knowledge construction. In doing so, Longino identifies what are felt to be male biases in the development of and in the application of Western science. For Longino, the outcomes of science are socially constructed and are based on the values and power structures of society in general, and these structures have largely excluded women. Furthermore, Longino argues that it is not just the overt assertion of power that has influence over the knowledge construction of science, but it is also the nature of scientists’ use of gendered language that has led to the exclusion of women from scientific practices. This exclusion is largely due to the application of the construction, documentation and presentation of scientific knowledge disregarding those who are not party to the rules of science and its communication through what she terms a restricted jargon. It is also through this communication of scientific knowledge as findings and the promotion of these findings as truthful by scientific means of dissemination that scientists are largely complicit in perpetuating a myth of science as positivist factual knowledge. As Longino states:

58 Principles [The] belief that the job is to discover fixed relations of some sort, and that the application of observation, experiment and reason leads ineluctably to unifiable, if not unified, knowledge of an independent reality, is still with us … Even more, the scientific inquirer, and we with her, become passive observers, victims of the truth.The idea of a value-​free science is integral to this view of scientific inquiry. And if we reject that idea we can also reject our roles as passive onlookers, helpless to affect the course of knowledge. (Longino 1987, pp. 55–​56) Similarly, through critical race theory, Derrick Bell (1930–​2011) argued that the structures and hegemony of Western social knowledge systems largely excluded African Americans from society and knowledge development. Bell received a degree in law from the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and following these initial studies spent two years as an officer in the US Air Force before he first practiced as a lawyer. Bell then joined the faculty of law at Harvard University and was briefly dean of law at the University of Oregon on the West Coast of the USA, before returning to teach at Harvard University. Bell was also a visiting professor at New York University’s School of Law (Newburger 2012). Through his legal training, Bell observed racial inequalities first-​ hand in jurisprudence, the legal system, and the application of the law. As a result, he joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and worked in the civil rights division of the US Justice Department but resigned when he was asked to give up his membership of the NAACP. Bell then worked as assistant counsel for the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), and following this period he became the first tenured African American professor at Harvard Law School. At Harvard, Bell created a course in civil rights’ law and wrote the book, Race, Racism and American Law. In this post, in 1986 Bell staged a five-​day sit-​in in his office at Harvard after the college did not grant tenure to two theorists on critical race theory. In 1990, Bell followed this earlier protest by taking an unpaid leave of absence, until the faculty appointed a tenured African American woman. Through his writing, Bell developed the theory of Racial Realism and discussed the identify of being a racial realist, arguing that the development of numerous policies and many court decisions reproduced the attitudes and the racial background of those decision makers who were in power and who developed those laws. Through this theory, Bell took inspiration from an early pioneer of civil rights activism, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was also a lawyer and against legalistic formalism (Bell 1992a). Holmes’s earlier attack on judges’ decisions based on their conservative values and socially influenced beliefs, Bell argued, highlighted the hegemony of the legal system. As Bell stated, Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary “peaks of progress,” short-​lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial

Historical Principles of Science 2  59 patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-​to-​ accept act that all history verifies. (Bell 1992b, p. 12) Taking on this theme of exclusion, post-​humanists have argued that scientific change can only be enacted through the environment as a holistic principle, and that in this broader understanding of the environment, humans are only a single element of it. Thus, it is proposed that scientifically the human species is part of a system of all living, chemical and physical things, and therefore belongs to their environment rather than vice versa. For post-​humanists, humans are also always engaged in activity within this broader environment, and are not separate from the natural world, even when they feel they are behaving in a social or cultural way (Keeling and Nguyen Lehman 2018). Although, as a young philosophical field, there is arguably little consensus about how environmental inclusion is to be achieved in posthumanism, post-​humanists generally believe that humans cannot change the world alone, and therefore humans only participate in change. As Bolter states on this issue: [The theory of] posthumanism designates a series of breaks with foundational assumptions of modern Western culture: in particular, a new way of understanding the human subject in relationship to the natural world in general. Posthumanist theory claims to offer a new knowledge construction that is not anthropocentric and therefore not centered in Cartesian dualism. It seeks to undermine the traditional boundaries between the human, the animal, and the technological. (Bolter 2016, online) CAVEAT: If post-​humanists are to achieve this aim, however, it is arguable that posthumanism will have to address the contradiction of its practice, as to conduct post-​human studies researchers must work within the structures of the Western scientific culture that created it. More importantly, post-​humanists must develop a form of communication and develop new systems of knowledge as humans that can also be seen as non-​human.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss an answer to the following task: • • •

Define ways in which power has been asserted in your topic or field. Discuss whether beliefs, classes, or categories of human, such as gender, sexuality, disability, childhood, ageing, have been constructed to assert power. If beliefs, classes, or categories have been constructed to assert power, how has this power been asserted through science?

60 Principles

Summary This chapter has examined the development of science and scientific practice in what it has called the modern era, that is the early years of the twentieth century until the early years of the twenty-​first century by theorists such as Russell, Wittgenstein, and Popper. Importantly, this chapter conducted an examination of theories on the principles of logic and language in science in the first half of the twentieth century, how these principles were questioned and were shown to be fallible in the twentieth century, and how scientific methodology has adapted to understand science as knowledge construction and synthesis. Following this theorization of logic and language, this chapter examined how scientific methodology and knowledge construction was brought into question by a new generation of theorists, particularly by Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend. In addition, this chapter examined how theorists from this same generation of thinkers challenged the structures of power that both constructed subjective, hegemonic scientific knowledge, and used scientific power to manipulate and control society through writers such as Foucault and Chomsky. Finally, this chapter examined how socially and culturally defined groups have been excluded from scientific knowledge synthesis, and the affects that this exclusion has had on members of people classified as being part of these social and cultural groups, through writers such as Longino and Bell. In the next chapter, this book examines the principle of the definition of science, and shows how this definition is not as structured as it is thought to be.

4 Contemporary Principles and Defining Science

Introduction This chapter introduces and critically discusses the way that Western science and social science is defined by Western institutions and Western society. However, it should be admitted that the definitions discussed in this chapter are in English and so do not cover the full range of definitions of Western science, and this should be borne in mind when reading this chapter. In investigating the elusive all-​encompassing definition of science, this chapter discusses epistemological and methodological traditions in contemporary scientific research, the basic principles of social research design, and examples of policy issues surrounding the practice of social research. The aims of this chapter are: (1) to generate discussion on what we know about Western science and social science, and what we take for granted about these terms in general conversations and more formal documents; (2) to start a discussion on the usefulness, weaknesses, and strengths in our understanding of science and social science; (3) to critically examine the boundaries and frailties of Western science and social science and its uses.The questions that this chapter addresses are: 1. What is Western science in general and how is Western social science related to other Western sciences? 2. Is there such a thing as real Western science and social science, and what are we actually doing when we practice research through Western social science? 3. What is the point of Western science and social science?

Key Principles in this Chapter Ontology: Ontology is a system of beliefs (belief-​system) on which the construction and study of knowledge is based. Humans have spent the history of civilization trying to examine who they are, who created life, particularly human life, and who created everything that relates to life, including inorganic matter. Humans have also been interested in what the boundaries are between life and the “un-​living,” the material and the abstract or the metaphysical, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003241997-5

62 Principles what exists and what is imagined. The opinions that generated and drove these issues were promoted as human systems of belief and human “being,” and it is such issues that Western forms of science, philosophy, humanities, and the arts refer to when they discuss ontologies. NOTE: It is important to understand that ontologies originally referred to religious beliefs, which were themselves worldviews generated when there were two or more ontologies, and thus the beliefs that generated these ontologies needed to be distinguished. For example, the ontological difference between the Torah, Quran and Old Testament (the difference between the two is itself a telling ontology) plays a large part in the difference between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In addition, one ontological difference between Christianity and Islam is that Christianity believes Jesus is the son of God, whereas in Islam Jesus is a prophet. Thus, the message of Jesus has the same semantic meaning in Islam and Christianity, but the ontology of this meaning is different in both religions. NOTE: It is important to understand that the study of ontology in Western science is central to the study of social science because, as observed in the previous two chapters, ontology can be said to be the basis of all Western scientific knowledge, theories, and evidence. Without an ontological position, what shall be known as positionality throughout the rest of this book, researchers cannot design a system of study. Ontology defines Western scientific methodology, ontology guides the data that researchers collect (see Chapter 6), and ontology determines the form of analysis that researchers practice (see Chapter 7). It is also important to the study of science to understand that ontologies evolve over time, both across history and throughout history, as Hegel theorized, although as we discussed in Chapter 2 Hegel’s understanding of the natural order was exceedingly controversial. This positionality suggests two further issues within Western science: the first issue is that scientific ontology, although unique to individual scientists, is related to human cultures and societies; the second issue is that ontologies related to science and scientific theories are disparate, and as this book showed in the previous two chapters these disparate ontologies cause tensions in the process of social and cultural knowledge synthesis and development. Examples of such ontology in the social sciences are the construction of social classifications and the underlying belief that such social classes often exist as a part of nature or determinism by a higher authority. This will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapter, but these ontologies of classes include everything from gender and social class to sexuality and political belief (Hayhoe 2020). Epistemology: Traditionally, epistemology is simply the study of knowledge, and the study of the creation of knowledge, through an examination of the history of knowledge to a critical assessment about whether knowledge is subjective or objective (see for example, Popper 1979). The study of knowledge is classically conducted through subjects such as philosophy and anthropology which discuss epistemology and the cultural differences in epistemologies respectively. More recently, epistemology has also been the topic of critical debate in social sciences such as sociology and psychology, who have

Contemporary Principles and Defining Science  63 investigated knowledge production and development through topics such as power and theory of mind respectively. For scientists, it is important to understand and state which epistemological traditions they are working within, and as they work in an area that is so socially contentious and divisive, this is particularly important for social scientists. For example, are social scientists trying to construct knowledge about society through human relationships (sociology), human thought and behavior within society (psychology), the institutional knowledge transmissions of society (education), or the distribution of resources within society (economics). Paradigm: The word paradigm can have many meanings in different contexts. In science, a paradigm is an idea (alternatively thought of as a model, belief, or theory) that has credence or power in a given place over a given time and has followers that believe that this idea is truer over all other theories or hypotheses that stand in opposition or are thought to compete with it. For example, the paradigm of behaviorism gave way to cognitive paradigms in the study of Western psychology as the dominant paradigm of explaining the link between thought and behavior in the latter half of the twentieth century. Although behaviorism still exists, it only does so to explain certain specific problems in psychology. Similarly, the paradigm of experimentation has given way in the twentieth century to a series of beliefs that data can also be scientifically derived from interviews, focus groups and so forth. NOTE: As the paradigm defines the evidence that is collected to support it, there is a danger that paradigms also define the methodology and this becomes the focus of activity used to collect evidence, thus it can become self-​serving unless academic honesty is employed (Lakatos 1999). For example, if there is a belief in sociology that football supporters behave in such a way, methodologies are set up in such a way to observe this behavior, therefore data is collected only in this way, i.e. football violence is studied to the exclusion of other forms of violence, and every observation of this behavior reinforces this paradigm. For instance, if the paradigm is that football supporters are more likely to be violent, a methodology will be set up to observe violence, and each instance of violence will reinforce the paradigm that football supporters are violent. Furthermore, all other forms of behavior, such as football supporters are singers or football supporters follow clothing fashions, will be ignored, or used as variables to describe the nature of football-​related violence. Subsequently, the paradigm that football supporters are violent will develop epistemologies of violence that only relate to football supporters, such as the classifications of Ultras or Firms, further reinforcing that a form of violence is particular to supporting football. Thus, football violence becomes epistemologically self-​ perpetuating and eventually becomes its own topic or subject of study. Methodology: Put simply, a methodology is a system or a systematic approach to investigating, studying, or conducting research that is reproducible and can be used and reproduced by studies that follow it.Therefore, methodology is perhaps one of the most important words in science, as it can therefore be said that methodology is the principle that separates simple forms of searching for random, ad hoc data or information, from conducting scientific research.

64 Principles Methodology also incorporates engaging evidence in a process of analysis, and as such it is an active cultural practice of developing or synthesizing knowledge from what can be called the raw materials of knowledge, i.e. data, language, and logic. Methodology is also appropriate to the form of research that is being conducted and the beliefs of the researcher that is conducting the research. The main aspect of any methodology is that it standardizes a system of practice that can be taught to others, making it reproducible, communicable, and the practice or the research findings that can be evaluated or verified. NOTE: Methodology exists beyond scientific research, does not rely on the practice of research, and does not have to involve finding new information or knowledge. For instance, engineers may develop a new methodology of building a bridge or an artist, plumber or electrician have methodologies for plying their trade by learning a methodology and improving on it through practice. Similarly, during medical practice, a methodology can be used to develop new ways of communicating different realms of therapy or strategies for working with patients, and business administrators and accountants have a methodology of gathering data and attempting to inform industries or individual companies about others in their fields or related fields. Likewise, students may research literature for an essay or assignment using a regular system of gathering the literature through online databases designed for just such methodologies and exploring the contents of the literature. Methodology can also be regarded as demonstrations or simulations of scientific experiments to teach science, although in this case, it is debatable whether the use of methodology in this context is actually scientific, as no new or unique data is collected or analyzed in a spirit of discovery or innovation, i.e. used in this way, methodology can be a way of passing on existing information or knowledge in a new form, and thus does not involve developing new information, new knowledge, and thus new epistemologies.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss an answer to the following task. In terms of the demarcation problem discussed in the previous chapter, pinpoint barriers that you may encounter during studies: • •

Can any investigations be considered true science, and why? So, what can we say about knowing something scientifically?

Find other people who study or have studied different social scientific subjects, then in your own words, define the terms: • •

Empirical/​empiricism Investigation/​scientific investigation

Contemporary Principles and Defining Science  65

General Statements on Western Science and Social Science The Peculiarities of Western Science So far, this book has suggested that both knowledge about and within human societies is subjective, develops over time and approximates to what occurs beyond human perception rather than reflects reality through the senses and the mind (Nagel 2012). Thus, the best that can be said of the individual human understanding of reality is that it is messy and can only be interpreted by imposing perceptual and cognitive patterns onto it, much as humans can see an unraveled ball of wool as an aesthetic shape with an underlying form after a period of observation. At first, it may be difficult to observe how all the strands of wool are connected, but then the threads exist not as disparate threads but as a whole shape or entity. However, when a single thread of wool is pulled the whole unraveled ball changes, colors alter, and a new form of reality appears. Although it can be said that there are different cultures of science beyond the Western culture studied in this book, it is the position of Western science to gather data and form an image of this ball of wool in its own peculiar, unique way. So, what is unique about Western science and why is this term used so liberally throughout this book? To address this question, it is important to understand the issues with this phrase, and to address the misuse of the word Western used in this context because, although the word Western denotes a place, Western science is now known, molded, and shaped on every continent on earth. The proof of this acceptance of Western science is the academic theses, journal articles, conference papers and academic books that come from every part of the globe. Thus, “Western” does not denote west of anywhere, and the ambiguity of the phrase Western science raises two caveats. CAVEAT 1: Western science can be regarded as an ambiguous, chicken-​ and-​egg type phrase, in that science was first named as such in what we nowadays call the West (as stated in Chapter 2, the West was historically meant to more or less denote the Western Christian Roman Empire) and is therefore a possibly exclusive activity that is practiced by people who think in a Western-​style or a Western-​way.Thus, the modern idea of the West is largely mythological. However, the reality nowadays is that the phrases “Western science,” “Western social science,” and “Western research” are convenient phrases to describe a discipline of interpreting reality and the world within it and around it using a particular cultural style of thought. Consequently, Geography is an unhelpful way of unpacking and understanding science, one that fails logically, and one that does not account for the diversity of humanity. CAVEAT 2: As shown in the following chapters, words matter and what they represent matters even more: they can change lives, restrict

66 Principles opportunities, and start wars. The term “West” has been used to make populations believe in the superiority of one mode of thought over another, and thus a class of Western thinker over another, even when people have non-​Western thoughts to the west of the mythological line. However, as this book showed in Chapter 2, the truth is Western thinking did not historically originate in the Western Christian Roman Empire, even though this is where the word Western points to. Although it is only a word, Western is arguably the product of a lie by the Holy Roman Empire, an empire that used knowledge, academia, and morality as a weapon to suppress its populations within and outside its boundaries and is thus a pejorative term to suppress an open society (Popper 1999). Given these caveats, how should science as practiced in Western culture be defined? Three Ways of Defining Science For those who examine the definition of science, the word science is often a relatively simple principle to state, which although it may have been seen in different ways by broader society, in academia it has been regarded as the systematic generation of knowledge. For many science writers, this generation contrives a simple practice of constructing useful knowledge through enquiry, observation, or simple testing. This development of useful data is followed by a process of standardized analysis and then the simple matter of dissemination to a public and group of institutions all of which have a desire for such knowledge. For instance, as Butler-​Adam states: Science is one of hundreds of thousands of words in English that has an extraordinarily long etymological history. Its popular meaning has changed, century by century, and sometimes even more rapidly than that. Yet even among those words there are core meanings that have remained consistent … It originally came from the Latin word scientia which meant knowledge, a knowing, expertness, or experience. By the late 14th century, science meant, in English, collective knowledge. But it has consistently carried the meaning of being a socially embedded activity: people seeking, systematizing, and sharing knowledge. (Butler-​Adam 2015) There is a problem with this definition, however, as it encompasses such a broad range of academic and non-​academic activities as to render all forms of systematic study scientific. Subsequently, this leaves no activity that requires thought or processes unscientific. It also does not consider what Lakatos would refer to as

Contemporary Principles and Defining Science  67 boundary conditions as suggested in the General Demarcation Problem, which was discussed in the previous chapter. For example, if an author sits and writes a non-​fiction book or paper on a single topic, they are following a system or format, from philosophy to cookery, gardening, or home maintenance. Similarly, all journalists and skilled photographers employ systematic practices of investigating and constructing news stories or social narratives, and may argue convincingly that their stories, following what is traditionally thought of as non-​scientific analysis, are a form of knowledge. Thus, such definitions of science rely on the cultural traditions of academia for the reader, viewer or listener to discount what are traditionally thought of as non-​scientific practices—​either for arguably socio-​economic or other prejudiced reasons, which are based on tradition. Alternatively, for anarchic philosophers of science, such as Feyerabend, describing all these activities as science would not necessarily be a problem. Alternatively, it is arguable that a definition that allows all these practices to be called science devalues the robustness, usage, or value of scientific knowledge that has developed to further the deeper elements of society through a highly regulated system of systems. Thus, for science writers such as Cassimally, an editor for the Nature suite of journals, the problem with defining science is that the purpose of science contains so many elements, dimensions, and caveats that its challenge is to encompass all these issues in a definition. As he suggests, rather than defining science and trying to find a way in which all forms of science can fit this definition, it may be simpler to study all sciences and discover unique aspects they all have in common, or at least imperfectly define enough shared practice that they conduct. In view of the enormity of the science enterprise, an appropriate tactic to formulate a definition is to target similarities between the various fields of scientific study. What a definition can aim to do is to create a link between the similarities of the various fields of scientific study and attribute this link to all of science. The link will be what characterizes the various fields as one-​as science. With this tactic in mind, an appropriate definition of science would adequately characterize fields of scientific study based on a similarity that is as universal as possible. (Cassimally 2011) A brief survey of definitions and descriptions of science, what we shall call statements about science, shows that there are three main ways of characterizing science: statements whose role it is to construct statements for social usage, statements by scientists themselves in essays or lectures on methodology, and statements by scientific institutions. Statements for social use are by far the most numerous and range from those written in dictionaries for general consumption, to legal definitions that need to define science not just for court cases, but for law makers, regulators, and commercial interests.

68 Principles Statements by scientists tend to be written from the point of view of each scientist’s individual disciplines, with each favoring their own methodologies and ontological positions. Lastly, statements by scientific institutions are equally diverse, although many famous institutions such as the Royal Society in the UK or the National Academy of Science in the USA seem to be shy about pinpointing the activity after which they are named or represent. When science is defined by organizations, it appears to be written largely to determine their own positions as appointed regulatory bodies of science, or scientific bodies. These scientific bodies include those who are directly linked to government, those who see their role as defining the rules of science in general or their own discipline in particular, and those bodies that hold extreme power as they distribute funding. A sample of these statements is written in Table 4.1.

The Problem with Developing a Unified Understanding of Science As these statements on science show, there is significant ambiguity and difference by institutions, scientists and those who use science, and between those statements that that are supposed to denote the same usage. Thus, it can be inferred that there is no form of agreement as to what science is, or what its function, practice, and purpose is. Science therefore remains ontologically ambiguous, and its practice often differs according to whether it is being defined according to professional cultural differences or by those institutions who say they represent the rules of science. For instance, legal statements on science, although possibly useful in judicial contexts, could not be used in the teaching of science or to form guidelines as to the boundaries of science, particularly as they tend to become logically autologous, i.e. their definition is circular as they claim to be what they are named. Thus, in the legal statements presented above it is said that: “Scientific knowledge refers to knowledge of a person that must be based on the methods and procedures of science,” i.e. scientific knowledge comes from science, and if we call a method scientific it is a scientific method. Equally ambiguously, the Black’s legal dictionary states, “[Science is] knowledge that is comprised of verifiable and measurable facts that have been acquired by the application of a scientific method,” i.e. science can only be practiced by practicing scientific method, which again is a method that calls itself scientific and thus becomes scientific. It should be borne in mind that given a practice that in effect has no single meaning, as Feyerabend argues, the law must somehow cover itself and provide definitions that can be applied to such a range of practices and settings as to be interpreted in many ways by individual judges. Or, to put this another way, the law often attempts to find a workable definition that can be used in court cases and abridged to inform non-​experts, and at the same time allows complex issues to be reduced to simple explanations. However, in abridging and reducing its statements about science, it can be argued that the core meaning of

Contemporary Principles and Defining Science 69 Table 4.1 Example Statements on Science by Scientists and Scientific Institutions, and Statements for Social Use by Users of Science Source

Definition

Social Use: Dictionary Definitions Oxford English Dictionary Noun [mass noun] the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment: the world of science and technology a particular area of science: veterinary science | [count noun]: the agricultural sciences • a systematically organized body of knowledge on a particular subject: the science of criminology archaic knowledge of any kind: his rare science and his practical skill Meriman Dictionary 1: the state of knowing: knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding 2 a: a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study the science of theology b: something (such as a sport or technique) that may be studied or learned like systematized knowledge have it down to a science … 3 a: knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method b: such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena: NATURAL SCIENCE 4: a system or method reconciling practical ends with scientific laws cooking is both a science and an art” Cambridge University Noun. The systematic study of the structure and Dictionary behavior of the natural and physical world, or knowledge obtained about the world by watching it carefully and experimenting: … Advances in medical science mean that people are living longer … She shows a talent for math and science Sciences are also particular areas of science, such as biology, chemistry, and physics Science also refers to subjects which are studied like a science: … political/​computer science … the careful study of the structure and behavior of the world, especially by doing experiments Social Use: Legal Definition Robert Billet Promotions, Inc. v. IMI Cornelius, Inc., Civil Action No. 95-​1376 (E.D. Pa. Oct. 13, 1998)

Scientific knowledge refers to knowledge of a person that must be based on the methods and procedures of science rather than on subjective belief or unsupported speculation. The person must have good grounds for his/​her belief (continued)

70 Principles Table 4.1 Cont. Source

Definition

Black’s Law Dictionary

[Science is] knowledge that is comprised of verifiable and measurable facts that have been acquired by the application of a scientific method

Definitions by Scientists Paul Feyerabend

Richard Feynman

Science is neither a single tradition, nor the best tradition there is, except for people who have become accustomed to its presence, its benefits, and its disadvantages. In a democracy it should be separated from the state just as churches are now separated from the state … The word ‘science’ may be a single word—​but there is no single entity that corresponds to that word (Feyerabend 1993, p. 238) In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment of experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with the experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science (Feynman in Gribbin and Gribbin 1997, pp. 235–​236)

Scientific Body Definitions: All Science The Science Council, UK Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence … Scientific methodology includes the following: Objective observation: Measurement and data (possibly although not necessarily using mathematics as a tool) Evidence Experiment and/​or observation as benchmarks for testing hypotheses Induction: reasoning to establish general rules or conclusions drawn from facts or examples Repetition Critical analysis Verification and testing: critical exposure to scrutiny, peer review and assessment

Contemporary Principles and Defining Science 71 Table 4.1 Cont. Source

Definition

National Center for Science Education

Science uses specialized terms that have different meanings than everyday usage … [For example:] Fact: In science, an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as “true” … Hypothesis: A tentative statement about the natural world leading to deductions that can be tested … Law: A descriptive generalization about how some aspect of the natural world behaves under stated circumstances Theory: In science, a well-​substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses (National Center for Science Education 2016) Scientific Body Definitions: Social Science The British Academy Social science is the scientific study of human beings … What distinguishes the social sciences from the humanities is not so much subject-​matter as techniques The divide is not hard and fast … [The] key difference is that humanities are (mostly) interested in the unique; social sciences are (mostly) interested in the general. Social statistics cannot predict how I will vote in the next election, but they can help to predict what most people like me will do. In economics and psychology, the core scientific methods are no different to those used by our ‘hard’ science [colleagues] Economics and Social Social science is, in its broadest sense, the study of Research Council, UK society and the manner in which people behave and influence the world around us Social science tells us about the world beyond our immediate experience, and can help explain how our own society works—​from the causes of unemployment or what helps economic growth, to how and why people vote, or what makes people happy. It provides vital information for governments and policymakers, local authorities, non-​governmental organizations and others

its statements must become semantically empty so as not to be caught out by counter arguments. By contrast, statements on science by scientific institutions and scientists themselves seem to focus on the broader context and purpose of the cultural practice of doing science. For instance, in their statements scientists often appear to propose that the practice of science is not just the bland implementation

72 Principles of a self-​defining method or methodology as a means of generating data, but a practice that is either right or wrong or synthesizes rights and wrongs. In Feyerabend’s definition above, this is only wrongs. Thus, the two definitions chosen as extremes of this range of definitions include the highly critical view of Feyerabend that science can never exist as a single practice, to Feynman’s simple equation that sees the scientist generally speaking as a formalist practice and little more, i.e. a professional who must behave in a particular way, with science itself often becoming a simple (although not simplified), reductionist practice. Thus, according to Feynman to practice science one must generally perform the following routine to synthesize scientific knowledge: Guess → Compute Consequences → Compare (Experiment, Experience, Observe) There are also noticeable epistemological approaches to the statements by institutions who attempt to define social science alone and those institutions who make statements about all science. For example, institutions working in the field of social science alone often focus on data, methodology and analysis in their statements, and try to draw a delineation or boundary between the arts, humanities, and social sciences, which are often thought to be close cousins. For example, the British Academy distinguishes between social science and the humanities by focus of study and in doing so alludes to methodologies. By contrast, those institutions which make statements about science in general, and state that they are institutions that cover a wide range of sciences, often tend towards a more orthodox belief that scientific practice can be controlled by a single, legitimate process and is thus self-​validating, i.e. these institutions often argue that science does not need to compare itself to other disciplines, science is just what it is. However, in common with the statements of scientists and the social use statements on all science, statements about social science are often equally changeable, and agree rarely. Thus, arguably the central principle of science and social science is that there is a fatal contradiction that cannot be escaped at the center of science: the problem with statements that attempt to encapsulate all that science or social science is are all too vague, and vague is precisely what science or social science is not supposed to be. Moreover, a closer examination of a range of definitions from a range of sources suggests that there is no single authority or single agreement as to what constitutes scientific culture or practice, and no agreement as to what its boundaries should be, despite the view of those who view science as outsiders who feel that science is stable and knows what it is. Furthermore, some definitions defy their own logic and have so little meaning as to make science look fragile, epistemologically vulnerable, and ontologically illogical. Thus, at best all that can be said is that science is an ongoing project of systematizing data to create a certain type of synthetic knowledge that may never come to an end.

Contemporary Principles and Defining Science  73

Orthodox understanding of science

Looser understanding of scientific data, but orthodox methodology

Diverse scientific methodologies and data collection

Moderate, diverse understanding of science

Figure 4.1 Statements on Science and Social Science as an Axis.

Figure 4.1 illustrates this broad and contradictory axis of statements on science, from highly orthodox ways of defining and describing science to very moderate or liberal ways that see science and social sciences as moving and changeable.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss an answer to the following questions: • • •

What do these definitions tell you about how others see social science? (By others, I mean natural scientists or members of the public.) Given these definitions, what do you think social scientists think of their own subject? Leading question: Do you think that social scientists think of themselves as empirical and rigorous as “natural” or “medical” science?

Scientific Research as Evolving Social Practice Given the vagueness and evolving understanding of science, how can social scientists approach the design and development of research studies from underlying principles that can bring coherence to research practice? One possible answer to this question is that as social science is not a single thing with a single set of rules, social scientific research can be more open, more creative, and arguably somewhat of an art form just like any other trade that establishes a body of knowledge. Within the realm of social science, this would correspond with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) understanding of research and development (R&D) as creative and systematic work undertaken in order to increase the stock of knowledge –​including knowledge of humankind, culture and society –​ and to devise new applications of available knowledge …

74 Principles A set of common features identifies R&D activities that aim to achieve either specific or general objectives, even if these are carried out by different performers. For an activity to be an R&D activity, it must satisfy five core criteria. The activity must be: • • • • •

novel creative uncertain systematic transferable and/​or reproducible. (OECD 2015, p. 28)

Within this framework of social research as creative practice, the OECD also distinguishes three forms of social research that can act as starting principles for social research, these are: basic research, which investigates social phenomena that can have an effect on a range of situations and may have broader applications beyond a single research project; applied research, which is developed to address a problem or find a solution to a problem at a particular point in time and in a given context; or experimental research, which is designed to test a predetermined hypothesis either developed by the research deductively or previously devised and tested in another context, environment or time, the purpose of which is to test the validity of this hypothesis.

Ontology

Epistemology

Paradigms

Methodology

• Developing positionality about a given situation that it is felt needs research. • For instance, it may be felt that poverty is an important issue to address, and the researcher must contribute to a way of eleveating it. • The knowledge base that relates to the ontological position of the researcher, or to put it simply, it can be where in the library the writing on this issue wants to be. • For instance, the researcher may believe there is a social reason for poverty addressed through sociology or economics. • The paradigm necessarily flows from the epistemology, with the researcher deciding they may want to choose a monetrist, Keynsian or Marxist approach in their sociological or economic study of poverty. • This epistemological or paradigmatic stance will lead to a logical methodology that fits its positionality. • For instance, a researcher may choose a laboratory experiment to test a positivist hypothesis, an ethnography or grounded theory study to explore social cultural phenomena, or action research as a part of an applied research project.

Figure 4.2 The Development of a Research Positionality.

Contemporary Principles and Defining Science  75 As with other creative activities, the guiding principle of initiating, designing, and developing a research project that chooses one of these approaches is to state an ontological, epistemological, and paradigmatic position, i.e. a stated research positionality. This social scientific positionality allows other social scientists and broader society to evaluate the point that the research is trying to make and allows them to evaluate its impact and value. Furthermore, this positionality also allows the researcher to practically choose their methodology, or creatively devise their own or adapt an existing methodology that logically fits their positionality in a given context, in a given space and in a given time. This whole process is illustrated in Figure 4.2.

Summary This chapter has critically addressed the definitions of Western science and social science, scientists, and research methodology in the study of humans and their societies. The chapter also discussed the results of a survey on the statements about science, and observed that these statements could be classified as those written by: (1) non-​scientists attempting to develop a socially useful statement for lay people in order to promote a social use for science, such as the use of science by the law; (2) scientists themselves in order to focus and define their practice, although these definitions often reflect the individual scientific subject or topic of these scientists; (3) institutions that claim to develop or define the rules of science, or an individual field of science, although it is also observed that these scientific institutions are often shy about coming up with their own definitions of their own cultural practice. This chapter has also observed that despite attempts to develop an all-​ encompassing, precise definition of science, statements about science more often have little scientific meaning or fail to distinguish the difference between scientific practice and artistic, engineering or crafts-​based practice, which have their own languages and their own systematic cultural practices. This suggests that it is hard to define Western science and social science as a single thing or a single practice that has a solid set of principles at its heart. Therefore, this chapter proposes that science should ignore its desire to develop a unified understanding of science and social science, and instead understand science as an evolving, changeable culture of creative practice that has no right to stand above other cultural practices. In addition, this chapter proposes that like other subjective cultural practices, scientists always need to state ontological, epistemological, and paradigmatic positions, which we termed positionality, and then logically develop or choose methods based on this positionality. In the next chapter, this book presents a critical examination of the problem with classification as a form of social scientific knowledge development, and the understanding that there are underlying natural and social laws that act as the principles of social science.

5 From Principles to Practice

Introduction This is the final chapter on the principles of Western social science, and it examines the most influential principle of Western social science, the artificial construction and analysis of classes of human groups and activities. In doing so, this chapter examines how the process of Western social research can damage our understanding of society and human capacity and examines how these classifications effect the lives of individuals and communities. This chapter has three aims to: (1) inform a debate on the ontology and cultural influences of taxonomies; (2) begin a debate on the principles of investigation in Western social research and encourage readers to consider their influence on the ideological and biased synthesis of knowledge, and its effects on the real lives of others; (3) inform the development of more sophisticated methodologies and ethical strategies of human classification. In the process of developing its analysis, the chapter is framed by the following questions: 1. Has contemporary Western social scientific methodology created a useful understanding of humans, their societies, and their cultures? 2. How has Western social science addressed issues such as the development of social consciousness, politics, power, exclusion, and inclusion? 3. Has the synthesis of knowledge by Western social research led to dangerous precedents being set by institutions, societies, and cultures?

Key Principles in this Chapter To Classify/​Classification: Classification is a system by which humans psychologically, culturally, and socially group living and non-​ living things, behaviors, actions, beliefs, and so forth according to what are deemed to be common characteristics. These common characteristics, as this chapter shows below, are defined in a specific culture and in a specific era, although some characteristics are more commonly held than others, and are more eternal. By extension, a taxonomy is primarily seen as the formal intellectual or academic group of physical or abstract things that is being classified. DOI: 10.4324/9781003241997-6

From Principles to Practice  77 NOTE: Human classifications of what are considered to be other humans have been linked to what are perceived to be physical characteristics and behaviors by groups and sub-​groups of humans and have on many occasions had a harmful effect on the understanding of human societies. As Friere (1996) notes, in some instances this has led to what is termed the de-​humanization of some humans by other humans. For example, the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) attempts to create workable definitions that synthesize classifications and sub-​ classifications of what are felt to be diseases, i.e. groups of symptoms often found and classified together, and create what can arguably be called arbitrary hierarchies of physical and intellectual impairments or disabilities in generic social and cultural settings. These have led to issues such as different laws or customs in some countries for the time after which even fetuses can be treated differently to others from before birth because of gender, disability or neurodiversity. This is discussed further below. Taxonomy: In the twentieth century, taxonomy became an academic subject, was studied in academic departments, contemporaneously developed a formal scientific methodology of classification, and grew to have its own statistical terminology and logic (Sneath and Sokal 1973). Subsequently, the word taxonomy is also now often used in this new form of academic subject to refer to a single group that has been classified using the science of taxonomy. For example, an academic can refer to a species of plant or a genre of literature as a single taxonomy based on a system of ontologically defined characteristics. NOTE: Throughout this book, related common characteristics will be referred to as natural or social scientific classes in Western social science, and the characteristics that bind taxonomies together will be called variables or Ordinary Taxonomic Units (OTUs). It is also important to understand that the classification of human beings is arguably the most significant and most dangerous principle of all the principles and concepts discussed in this book or by any element of society. These classifications have been the cause of holocausts and eugenics, wars, torture, and murder, to name but a few atrocities. Objectivity/​Objective Knowledge: Objectivity can be said to be information that many people agree on for a prolonged period, and consequently is generally held to be true or at least truer than opinion or knowledge that is not supported by proof. For example, at present it is objectively known that infections are caused by bacteria and viruses, sunlight can be captured as energy because it is a form of energy, and that children learn simple tasks through practicing the same routine over and over. There may be variations in this objective knowledge that is caused by the coding of knowledge in language and the inability of the human body or mind to capture reality exactly as it is, as shown in Chapters 2 and 3. Thus, objective knowledge or objectivity can only be measured according to degrees of truth, with even the most widely held knowledge carrying a degree of incertitude that will eventually lead to disproof of the knowledge (Popper 1979).

78 Principles NOTE: For learners, it is also argued that knowledge with low ambiguity is believed to be more objective knowledge, and this knowledge is felt to be easier to apply in learning tasks (Doyle 1979, 1983). In this instance, what are traditionally thought of as mathematical or engineering tasks are felt to be highly structured and low in ambiguity, whereas artistic, philosophical, and other creative tasks are felt to be highly ambiguous and thus lacking objectivity. For example, the performance of a mathematical equation when given its components or drawing any geometrical shape such as a square or triangle is felt to be more objective as an academic task and provides less risk to the student when having the tasks judged as truthful or good. Conversely, developing a new way of presenting an image of an object or writing a critical essay on a topical issue is felt to be ambiguous, and thus is less objective as a finding or a given truth. CAVEAT: Objective truths can be thought of as less true over a long period of time, when language and ways of expressing knowledge move on and a better, more sophisticated, and more developed form of discovering and analyzing is invented or comes to prominence. In addition, discoveries in parallel fields or on parallel topics can shed new light on other areas of knowledge and can lead to the changing classification of knowledge as objective or subjective, or true or false. For instance, in science the generally held, objective knowledge that the world was not round was held for millennia, and when Copernicus first made the suggestion that the earth travelled around the sun not vice versa, his knowledge was felt to be unobjective. However, with improved methods of measuring the rotation of planets and the moon, and with the development of a theory of gravity or the discovery of the law of gravity depending on the readers’ beliefs, the view that the world was a sphere was generally held to be more objective. Of course, nowadays, given space travel, satellites, telescopes, electronic cameras, and so forth, it is taken for granted that the earth is a sphere and rotates around the sun. Subjectivity/​Subjective Knowledge: Given the definition of objectivity above, it is generally held that subjectivity is the exact opposite of objectivity, subjective knowledge is the opposite of objective knowledge, and subjective ideas are based on pure opinion and are thus unproven. However, this traditional definition fails to acknowledge personal preference as subjective (Nagel 1991). For instance, a person’s favorite football team or colour, their social beliefs or tastes in clothes, art or culture are all subjective ideas and are thus subject to individualism. NOTE: The incorrect belief that subjective opinion is simply the opposite of objectivity can generate its own dangerous problems in social science and society more broadly. For instance, given Socrates’ stance that intelligence and morality are linked as discussed in Chapter 2, certain moral beliefs are often linked with lack of intelligence and lack of intelligence is often linked with certain moral beliefs.

From Principles to Practice  79 More dangerously, linking political or religious beliefs with objectivity rather than subjectivity has led to the persecution of less powerful minorities, and is observable throughout human society. In the West, as shall be shown below, this form of thinking has been institutionalized and has led to issues of eugenics, exclusion from reproduction and the exclusion of certain philosophical, theological, and cultural groups from mainstream social environments. NOTE: There is also another issue raised by philosophers such as Descartes and Newton discussed in Chapter 2 and more latterly Wittgenstein and Popper as discussed in Chapter 3, are human perceptions subjective? Is Descartes right in believing that all we can say about human reality is that if you think you exist, you exist? It is not even possible to say this with absolute certainty, as the world may be entirely imagined and thus it is possible only the thought may exist in a different dimension to that we have previously imagined. If this is true, then all that humans can actually say about knowledge as they believe it exists, is that: (1) subjective knowledge is more important to understand than objective knowledge as it effects the human understanding of the world around us; (2) subjective knowledge lies at the basis of all thinking, which can only be understood from a distinctly personal point of view.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss your own objective beliefs and subjective beliefs. Are there overlaps between these objective and subjective beliefs, for example do you have a political or religious belief that is both subjective or objective? QUESTION: Is knowledge more fluid or constant. Or is there knowledge that remains unchanged or unchangeable?

The Construction of Objective Knowledge from Subjective Knowledge As discussed in Chapter 3, in his examination of the nature of knowledge Popper (1979) criticized the positivist belief that knowledge and truth exist in an external, natural world waiting to be discovered, which he referred to as the common-​sense theory of knowledge. These conservative philosophies, Popper felt, regard positivist objective knowledge as unwavering and was knowledge obtained directly through the senses as a collection of physical units of thought, cognition and imagination. This manner of obtaining knowledge he called the empty bucket theory of knowledge as it proposed that there was only a single world of knowledge (the bucket) that we can all discover and share. For Popper, the principle of critical realism and critical reality renders the empty bucket theory of knowledge incorrect, and instead he proposed that

80 Principles there were three worlds of knowledge and two sets of boundary conditions that explained different ways that knowledge can be synthesized and used. In this book, Popper’s theory will be referred to as the three-​world model, and within this model Popper recognized that the development of cognition and perception followed by consciousness and language was significant in the development of civilizations and science. Popper suggested that the first world in his three-​world model was the knowledge gained from subjective experience and was largely in common with other simpler living animals, as it was not moderated or mediated by consciousness or language. Moreover, this first world is derived from the life lived by an individual as experienced through their perceptions, the relationships they cultivate and the personal awareness that they develop in this private existence. In this first world, there is also a form of cognitive abstraction of this personal knowledge derived from the real, external world of chaos that is constantly in flux and subsequently the mind applies a form of stability on this world to make sense of it. Popper regarded the second world of knowledge as a world of conscious intellectual thought and the products of this conscious thought by the individual person. Thus, the boundary conditions that lay between the first and second worlds included the journey to conscious perception from the first world by human beings and other “advanced” animals and the “naturalistic” interpretation of what is going on around individual humans. Socially and culturally, Popper regarded this second world as a perceptual awareness of the world and its impression on human memories and intellectual life encoded in language, other forms of symbolism and images that enabled human communication. The second world of knowledge can therefore be said to be the assumptions and the common-​sense world we learn through discourse and provides the second set of boundary conditions between it and the third world. The third world of objective knowledge is the accumulation of knowledge by cultures, societies, institutions and so forth that is encoded in books, oral histories and sound recordings, videos and films, and in images and art works in three dimensions and two dimensions.This knowledge is abstracted not only by its distance from the first world of unconscious lived reality by human perception and cognition, but also abstracted by forces of history, common languages of academic and professional disciplines, and existing theories. As Popper stated on these three worlds of knowledge: [We] may distinguish the following three worlds or universes: first, the world of physical objects or of physical states; secondly, the world of states or consciousness, or mental states, or perhaps behavioural dispositions to act; and thirdly, the world of objective contents of thought, especially of scientific and poetic thoughts and of works of art. (Popper 1979, p. 106)

From Principles to Practice  81 In one way, Popper’s three-​world model attempted to psychologically chart the progression through what may be different aspects of what is regarded as knowledge from subjective to objective knowledge. In another way, Popper’s three-​ world model arguably highlighted the overlap and ambiguities of subjective and objective knowledge. In this overlap, the origins of thought are created from the single moment of perception and cognition in the first world to the ambiguous personal knowledge of the second world. Therefore, subjective knowledge impinges only fleetingly on the second world of knowledge and becomes the realm of the individual’s interpretation of objective knowledge. To illustrate the purpose of his framework, Popper presented two experimental scenarios: Experiment I and Experiment II. In Experiment I, technology is gotten rid of, and all subjective knowledge from world one is lost or forgotten, however books and artworks remain, as does the conscious ability to learn. Given this experiment, after a long period of time Popper suggests that the world could re-​learn its use of technologies. CAVEAT: It should be borne in mind that this experiment could not happen psychologically, as it was well established that the conscious ability to learn was based in the unconscious and vice vera even when Popper devised his experiment (McShane 1991). For instance, even in the 1960s Miller suggested that the ability to learn languages was akin to a cognitive process of swapping information back and forth between unconscious and conscious memories numerous times until a pattern is developed in the mind. As Miller stated: [Imagine] an English-​ speaking student of the French language who undertakes to memorize a new section of French Vocabulary. What he [or she] will try to do is to learn the meanings of French words; for a beginning student, learning the meanings involves learning what English words he would say, or think of, when he sees the French words. He will go over his list several times, each looking at the French stimulus, making his English response, and checking to see if he is right. (Miller 1966, pp. 213–​214) Subsequently, in Experiment I the ability to consciously learn from world two, and libraries and collections of art from world three provides the ability to learn afresh only hypothetically as they survive. Although Popper does not state this explicitly, it can also be assumed that the ability to read itself remains intact (which as Miller points out above, involves the subconscious and the conscious), as it exists in the boundary between worlds two and three. It should also be remembered that Popper wrote about these two experiments in the 1970s when there was no Internet, thus re-​examining Experiment I now, it should be assumed that the Internet also exists as it is both a technology and a source of literature and art. According to Popper, Experiment II is the same as Experiment I in that all technologies, books and artworks are lost (and in the modern world addition,

82 Principles the Internet is lost too). However, in Experiment II, books, artworks, symbolic representation, and the Internet are lost, and the hypothetically human objective, conscious ability to learn and read and books, art works, symbolic representation and the Internet are also forgotten completely. Thus, the ability to reproduce and use old technologies as well as develop and evolve new technologies is lost for a longer period, until the ability to subconsciously learn again evolves. As Popper suggests: If you think about these two experiments, the reality, significance, and degree of autonomy of the third world … may perhaps become a little clearer to you. For in the second case, there will be no re-​emergence of our civilization for many millennia. (Popper 1979, p. 108) Thus, the second world of knowledge can be said to acts as an epistemological mediator between the first and third worlds of knowledge. The second world exists as a pivotal and vital part of Popper’s two experiments discussed above as it connects human action, subjective knowledge and behavior, and without the conscious reasoning of observation, objective knowledge fails to be synthesized. In terms of the development of objective knowledge, Popper proposes that traditional social scientific epistemologies discussed in the previous chapter are created in relation to the third world of existent knowledge.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss your own views of Popper’s three-​world model, and discuss other instances of his philosophical experiments or create your own experiments, that could possibly exist in different contexts, such as scientific methodology rather than the use of technology. QUESTION: Can you think of other worlds of knowledge beyond Popper’s three worlds? For example, has the third world of knowledge changed and become a fourth world of knowledge since the invention of the Internet, or is the Internet part of the third world of knowledge? According to Popper’s three world model, scientific theories are the result of a collection of subjective discourses, events, replicable experiments, observations, teaching demonstrations and so forth and the researcher acts within a cultural and historical framework. Systematically, the social scientist as researcher exists in the second world, and attempts to minimize his or her connection with the first world through verification and guidance from the third world. Subsequently,

From Principles to Practice  83 she or he gets what she or he perceives to be her or his connection with the third world through what he or she has been taught previously. What he or she is studying are existing problems, from which he or she creates new problems not solutions. Although this process of knowledge can be thought of as imperfect, the principle of generating objective knowledge through Western science and social science is at the root of the research process and thus can be said to be restricted by it in its analysis. In addition, the role of science and social science is to understand and use chronological interplay between what can be described as these three worlds of knowledge, with the endpoint being the construction of a world of knowledge that is useful to the world and allows it to develop. For instance, we can analogize the synthesis of social scientific knowledge with navigating a maze. In this analogy, a person who must negotiate a maze does so in the first world. However, the skill of the person in being able to negotiate the pathway in the maze may be based on past experiences of mazes or simply knowing that mazes exist in the second world, and she or he will know that they must thus approach this maze in a certain way. Somewhere in a library, on the Internet or in a collection of images or artworks, there will be a map of the maze that exists in the third world of knowledge, and this design of the maze will be based on other mazes whose design exists in the third world of knowledge. Furthermore, those designers of previous and present mazes are aware that mazes exist and have existed for centuries, and know the methodologies used to design and build these structures. Thus, there is a process of moving between subjective and objective, or at least more objective knowledge, as synthesis occurs between the second and third worlds of knowledge. In addition, the point at which the second and third worlds of knowledge overlap becomes an epistemological moment in history that can itself be recorded and studied by other maze designers, those who enjoy using mazes, and those who study mazes. CAVEAT: There are different ways of interpreting Popper’s three-​world model that highlight issues with this way of examining objective knowledge. For example, as discussed in Chapter 3 Foucault argued that the creation of knowledge involves power structures that manipulate and take ownership of knowledge, weaponizing knowledge to coerce and manipulate the broader population.This would suggest a further layer or world of knowledge, in which the knowledge that is controlled as an instrument of hegemony by institutions, needs to be considered. CAVEAT: Popper’s three-​ world model appears to be neutral to such influences of power and sees the construction of objective knowledge from a process derived from subjective knowledge as a benign psychological process. Thus, the three-​world model does not imagine that there is a hierarchy of influence that an individual has over the creation and acceptance of knowledge in the third world of knowledge. A professor is a professor, and a cattle herder is a cattle herder, after all. In each period of history, a cattle herder’s book on cattle will be seen as holding lesser value on the topic of farming than a professor’s,

84 Principles even though the cattle herder’s book may relate to an aspect of day-​to-​day milk production that sustains agriculture. CAVEAT: Popper’s model does not accommodate Kuhn’s suggestion that knowledge is constructed through a series of paradigmatic revolutions, or that two paradigms of arguably objective knowledge in parallel worlds can coexist. These paradigms themselves also depend on an enormous build-​up of evidence against counter-​theories and therefore a wave-​like to-​and-​fro of argument in the process of knowledge construction that can take the shape of a dialectic whether right or wrong. Thus, if Kuhn’s interpretation of paradigmatic knowledge is to be accepted, the process of synthesizing objective knowledge is not a continual evolution in a relatively cohesive world of knowledge of technology that Popper’s hypothetical experiments seem to suggest. Instead, the boundaries between the second and third worlds of knowledge need to be seen as multi-​ dimensional, complex, and ever changing in these dimensions. So how can the development of objective knowledge generated by social research be interpreted through these three worlds of knowledge?

Taxonomy and Reductionism in Western Social Science When trying to classify natural existence through a reductionist, unified theory of objective knowledge, it is argued that Western science has created an increasingly simplistic understanding of intrinsically complex social and cultural systems. Subsequently, it has been argued that the truth about such matters is not a phenomenon that exists in nature but one that has occurred because of a human need to simplify, as the mind is incapable of grasping the world as it truly exists (Popper 1998, 2010). Similarly, it is argued that reductionism is a mental process practiced through a cultural behavior that is unique to overlapping human communities and is coded through the internalization of a combination of thought through language (Vygotsky 1978). To put it in a different way, the ability to think or talk to ourselves is the basis of knowledge construction, and this knowledge construction cannot happen without the language of our culture, with all its biases, restrictions, and social histories. Thus,Vygotsky states: [Internalization] of cultural forms of behaviour involves the reconstruction of psychological activity on the basis of sign operations [N.B. a sign is a symbol that represents a thing (an idea, object, form of behaviour, etc.) but is not like it in appearance, for instance, the word “cat” representing the actual object of a cat. Thus, when Vygotsky refers to a “sign process” he is discussing a process of constructing a sign to represent the thing that it represents]. Psychological processes as they appear in animals actually cease to exist; they are incorporated into this system of [behaviour] and are culturally reconstituted and developed to form a new psychological entity. The use of external signs is also radically reconstructed. The developmental changes in sign operations are akin to those that occur in language … The internalisation of socially

From Principles to Practice  85 rooted and historically developed activities is the distinguishing feature of human psychology, the basis of the qualitative leap from animal to human psychology. (Vygotsky 1978, p. 85) In the process of creating objective knowledge, therefore, it has been argued that Western science and particularly social science creates social-​cultural taxonomies of human beings that are part of a greater, self-​fulfilling institutional arrangement of intellectual power seeking. To put this another way, as per Plato the ruling classes of Western communities arguably weaponize classifications of humans that they have created, such as ethnicity, race, religion, gender, and disability, to play divide and rule over the broader population of their community (Hayhoe 2017). These human classifications can be roughly summarized as: bio-​classes (e.g. childhood, adulthood, gender, disability), socio-​classes (e.g. social class, professional classes, sexual classes) and cultural-​classes (e.g. racial classes, ethnic classes, religious classes). Each class and taxonomy has its own form of logic, which varies according to its own classification, therefore these classes overlap with each other, and sometimes one class becomes a sub-​set of another, for example social, gender and sexual classes form their own cultures. Consequently, it is argued that these social-​cultural taxonomies epistemologically and mythologically reduce people to uniform groups that are said to behave, think, and moralize in a similar manner (Hayhoe 2012). Bio-​classes or a bio-​class—​Taxonomies that are related to the biological function of the human body according to social cultural logic. These taxonomies include classes such as disability and gender, where people are classified externally through organic or non-body factors and cultural behavior, including economic and sexual behavior and the moral values that drive them. This perception of behavior then leads to rituals and further belief systems based on these taxonomies, and overlap with the following two classifications. Thus, women and men are classified as a bio-​class according to body parts that relate to sex and consequently sexual reproduction, and in most countries, marriage is still based on this understanding of gender, sex, and reproduction, as well as socio-​economic function—​see the following class. NOTE: Although bio-​classes seem to be the most rigid taxonomies, i.e. humans belong definitely to one group or another as men or women or disabled or non-​disabled, these classifications are arguably fluid, as they allow for medical or aesthetic transference between like social-​cultural groups during life-​course that cause tensions and contradictions in the definitions of these classes. For instance, humans can have impairments later in life: people may walk slower, see, or hear less than before, or are unable to hold objects. Equally, humans can change gender by having surgery to change gender. However, Western culture cannot determine a single point at which a person becomes disabled because of these impairments. Similarly,Western cultures cannot psychologically determine

86 Principles whether a person identifies themselves as disabled or as a gender they were not born to, only individuals can do this. NOTE: Humans can be forced into what can be called a bio-​social identity that they feel uncomfortable with or are forced to behave like another bio-​ class of human than one they psychologically identify with. For instance, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some people with impairments were taught to act as able-​bodied people, such as in the case of the teaching of congenitally deaf people to speak as hearing people (Padden 2005). Similarly, some people choose to become transgendered as a result of feelings of unhappiness with the body they are born with (Carroll 2006; Rotondia 2012). Socio-​classes or a socio-​class—​Taxonomies that are related to economic, non-​biological behavioral and social functions according to socio-​cultural logic: These socio-​classes of humans include variables such as nationality (e.g. defined by passport, heritage or residence), social class (e.g. working class, middle class and upper class or aristocratic classes), and sexual classes (e.g. heterosexual, gay or bisexual classes), where people develop social beliefs according to different mannerisms, practical usages, economic production, social behavior and dress, often within broader culturally defined groups, such as national and political identities. NOTE: These socio-classes were relatively plastic classes of people in contemporary societies, and the transformation between these classes occurred frequently during life. However, tradition often governed that many people stayed within the group they were raised in and had emotional ties with (see for example Lipset and Bendix 1991; Hogg, Adelman, and Blagg 2010). Cultural-​classes or a cultural-​class—​Taxonomies that are related to cultural, philosophical, and moral functions according to socio-​cultural logic: These cultural classes of human include different racial or ethnic groups, which can be classified by a combination of biological aesthetics such as skin color and hair type, and a belief that this biological aesthetic changes social or cultural practice or belief. For example, there is a primitive belief that people from Africa and their descendants are naturally better at sports or more musical. These beliefs are largely premised on cultural heritage from a time where local cultures played a much stronger role in defining and controlling socio-​classes and bio-​classes and there was less scientific understanding of biology and genetics. NOTE: These classes are often reinforced by an internal logic that maintains the human classification through the traditions of the professed cultural-​class. For example, traditionally socio-​cultural classes who define themselves and/​ or were classed as by others the same race or ethnicity have tended to have relationships within their own groups to support the determination of their classification (see for example McPherson, Smith-​Lovin, and Cook 2001; Field, Kimuna, and Straus 2013). NOTE: Generally speaking, cultural-​classes are the least fluid of these three socio-​cultural classes of humans, and humans tend to stay within their own cultural-​classes more rigidly throughout their lives. Furthermore, humans from

From Principles to Practice  87 single socio-​cultural classes largely disallow movement between like cultural-​ classes. For instance, if a person is born Caucasian Christian American or African-​American Christian, they are likely to be seen as Caucasian Christian American or African-​American Christian by others and think of themselves as such throughout life. For example, unlike bio-​classes, you will be unlikely to change cultural-​class through gaining an impairment or having surgery; unlike socio-​class, you will be unlikely to change cultural class through education, moving professions or choosing different sexual partners. CAVEAT:Although people change cultural classifications less often, there are exceptions to this rule where biological aesthetics are involved less in defining a cultural-​class. For instance, people can change religion by changing belief or losing religious belief and this can be displayed through a change of clothes and different social habits such as being educated in a particular type of school or college. Similarly, people may choose to change their sports team or acquire a new sports team during life course, and this will be displayed by the choice of sports shirt they wear or the sports events they attend.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the difference between your own identities and the social-​cultural classes that you are called by the society you are in or by other societies. Discuss if and how you change your own social-​cultural identities during life course based on these social-​cultural classifications or discuss whether you have numerous identities that have changed. QUESTION: How have bio-​classes and socio-​classes become their own cultural-​classes? So, what issues do these social-​cultural classifications cause in our understanding of societies through social science? The Concept of the Closed and Open Societies in Social Science In his philosophical analysis of the most significant social and cultural problems of the twentieth century, Popper argued that prejudice and numerous inequalities were at least in part due to the favoring of knowledge that represented the Closed Society over the Open Society (Popper 1999). In this Closed Society, knowledge was relatively unexposed to critical analysis, and debate was restricted to all but close confines, as Chomsky (1998) also later argued. After his own experience of political extremism in the uncertain era of Vienna in the 1930s, Popper observed Closed Societies are essentially a problem of critical dualism and critical proof. Consequently, his thesis on the Open Society

88 Principles examined the ontology and epistemology of historical facts that needed to exist in democratic political cultures, or what he termed the Open Society. At the root of the Closed Society, a concept that Popper argued was the antithesis of a progressive democracy, was Plato’s notion of the Republic, which symbolized what Plato proposed was an ideal society, formulated to achieve a perfect morality from its past (Plato 1955). In Plato’s Republic, instead of a democratic consciousness Popper argued that Plato proposed a natural order of society, one in which his own aristocratic political Master Class felt that they had an inherent right to rule as an elite over a subordinate Slave Class (Popper 1999). Popper argued that Plato’s Republic was akin to a Closed Society, that is a society that favored individual officials who made decisions at the expense of those whose rights they rhetorically stated they were defending. In doing so, these officials often tried to convince those in broader society that they were putting the rights of what they felt was a subordinate class above their own, however in reality they were weaponizing cultural concepts such as intellect and morality to rule over a closed-​in population. By contrast, the Open Society was one in which those who made decisions and put the rights and activities of those they were charged with securing ahead of their own through genuine service and a belief in an accessible, true democracy. The Open Society was thus a political culture that was genuinely self-​less, and one in which the power as well as the value of morality and intellect of the ruling and the subordinate classes could not be distinguished. According to Popper, the views of Plato can be contrasted with those of Heraclitus, who as this book observed in Chapter 2 felt that reality was inherently unstructured, constantly changing, and it was only the human mind that could not observe these micro-​changes. Popper (1999) problematized his argument in the same way, summarizing Plato’s unwillingness to differentiate between the ontology of laws, and Plato’s belief that natural laws are a priori valid. In a reinterpretation of this ontological pillar of Western philosophy and later Western science and social science, Popper proposed that Plato’s laws should be seen as a dichotomy: those laws within and inside human comprehension and those laws outside human comprehension. Popper termed this dichotomy critical duality. In common with the definition of nature from Chapter 1, the subdivision of Popper’s critical duality can also be defined as per the facts explained through the world inside and outside human control: the world outside being nature and the world within being the social and cultural world. To put this theory in another way, critical duality can also be said to be the events that humans can control through engineering perception, thought, cognition, and language (the social and cultural world) versus events outside human control that can only be observed and analyzed (the natural world). Popper referred to these states as natural laws and normative laws. Natural laws were those that natural science may now call its general laws, such as

From Principles to Practice  89 the laws of gravity, or Einstein’s law of general relativity, which are events that can be predicted to a large degree of reliability and occur throughout the world if not the universe. By contrast, normative laws are laws guided by cultural ontologies, rituals and behavior, and morals, such as national and international criminal laws, religious morals and ethics, customs, scientific methodology and analysis and the taxonomy of the human species discussed above (Popper 1999) Philosophically, the differences between the natural and normative laws are usually clear in scientific analysis, however, these laws also have grey areas that lead to significant issues and logical contradiction (Popper 1999, 1979). These grey areas are either created through human belief or a human need to categorize and promote sociological rules as natural to regularize belief and problems of logic, when in matter of fact these beliefs are synthesized to mythologize convenient social and cultural truths. As Popper stated on this issue: It was first in animals and children, but later also in adults, that I observed the immensely powerful need for regularity –​the need which makes them seek for regularities; which makes them sometimes experience regularities even where there are none. (Popper 1979, p. 23) Those who developed these social norms, what can be termed in this book as grey normative laws, and the knowledge that forms modern social scientific education, still exploit what Popper saw as these grey areas of belief (Popper 1999). Subsequently, in the process of developing knowledge for social scientific education through social research, this need to regulate social-​cultural knowledge evolved into a need to institutionalize, to classify and to formalize. To put this another way, it is a human need to create ontological systems and group individuals according to these ontologies and the social groupings and classifications that occur because these grey normative laws can lead to hegemony, manipulation, discrimination, and exclusion (see for example Hayhoe 2015). Similarly, social and cultural taxonomies can also be said to be based on a combination of shared mythological characteristics defined by institutional needs and thus their importance or meaning can be said to be a cultural mythology and un-​natural. These mythological characteristics can also include biological or cultural appearance, behavior, prowess, and political or religious philosophies. Likewise, human classifications are not designed uniformly, do not use their own internal logic or depend on the type of social taxonomy that is being mythologized, and in these taxonomies more emphasis is placed on single characteristics over others as part of an overall cultural narrative (see for example the discussions on cultural narratives by Barthes 2000).

90 Principles

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss elements of the Closed Society and the Open Society in your own countries and within your own social-​cultural classes. Discuss instances where Open and Closed societies are as dangerous or potentially dangerous. Identify issues that led to the Closed Society that existed in different places and at different times and social and cultural mythologies they have supported. QUESTION: Does the Open Society and the Closed Society exist in social research and social scientific methodology?

The Effect of Western Social Scientific Classification on Society In his analysis of cultural differences in knowledge construction, Geertz (1983) criticized artificial cultural classifications that lead to assumptions about epistemologies as common-​sense, and identified anomalies between what are considered to be the most widely held taxonomies. For example, on the common-​sense belief in two natural genders, i.e. not the self-​identification of a person as a gender but the general cultural belief that humans are born one gender or another before deciding to assign themselves to a gender. On this issue, Geertz discussed the different cultural reactions to and ontologies about hermaphroditism, and the subsequent institutional problems that this caused, such as which toilet was appropriate and could a person with both sex organs marry a male or female. Anomalies such as hermaphroditism also exist in grey normative laws constructed by Western social scientists, have led to significant issues in Western societies and has resulted in arguably Platonic attitudes towards mythologized social-​ cultural classes resurfacing. For example, in the twentieth century Western racial classifications traditionally emphasized physical prowess and strength over perceived intelligence, resulting in racialized IQ testing and artificially classified intelligence performance according to mythologized attributes (see for example Seigel’s (2017) critique of the study by Herrnstein and Murray (2010)). Similarly, in the nineteenth century intelligence and ethics were linked with the ability to see, hear and speak formal language, or participate in education or acts of worship, consequently people who were deaf and blind were thought to be less intelligent and immoral (Hayhoe 2015, 2016). Similarly, the mythologized narrative on grey normative laws has been prominent in Western civil law and government policy based on narratives constructed by research taxonomies that have no basis in fact but in the subjective belief of social scientists. For instance, disability is defined as per the World Health Organization, which is contemporaneously referred to in numerous laws on social inclusion (Hayhoe 2015). This definition has changed regularly with social trends from the 1980s until the twenty-​first century and

From Principles to Practice  91 now seems to focus on the social and cultural outcomes of impairment, rather than the physical and psychological impairments that lead to disability as it did originally: Disabilities is an umbrella term, covering impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions. An impairment is a problem in body function or structure; an activity limitation is a difficulty encountered by an individual in executing a task or action; while a participation restriction is a problem experienced by an individual in involvement in life situations. (WHO 2016, p. 1) NOTE: Until relatively recently some US states legally classified people as African American according to systems such as Jim Crow Law, even if their African heritage was a minimal part of their ancestry. For example, a person could be up to seven eighths or nine sixteenths from other “races” and be legally classified as African American (Hickman 1997; Khanna 2010). Similarly subjective distinctions were also applied to people who were identified as American Indians (Weaver 1997; Garroutte 2001), and thus to these American institutions, it was arguable that it was the African Americaness or American Indianess of the person that held value in legal decisions.This classification of race differs to that in parts of Latin America, for example Telles observes: [George W Bush Jnr.] asked the president of Brazil, “Do you have blacks, too?” Unbeknownst to President Bush and many other North Americans, that South American country currently has more than three times as many inhabitants of at least partial African origin as the United States … In Brazil, large numbers of persons who are classified and identify themselves as white (branco) have African ancestors, not to mention the brown (pardo, moreno), mixed race (mestiço, mulato), and black (preto, negro) populations. Unlike in the United States, race in Brazil refers mostly to skin color or physical appearance rather than to ancestry. (Telles 2014, p. 1) Consequently, in the exclusion of mythologized groups, the construction of power over and manipulation of populations can be said to be largely the result of two significant issues. These issues inform the synthesis of grey normative cultural laws, and these elements are used unwisely in social science. So, the power held by social scientists influences the creation of what is considered to be objective knowledge about social taxonomies and can be a result of objective knowledge about these social classes. What is felt to be objective knowledge informs power and its application of knowledge. NOTE: Grey normative laws are not only created by people from one social-​cultural class of human about people from another social-​cultural class. Grey normative laws can also be created by people from a social-​cultural class to describe what they see as others within their own social-​cultural class who they regard as having lesser value than themselves. For instance, historically

92 Principles European and American liberal intellectuals with disabilities from the upper-​ middle classes thought they had the right to exclude and separately morally educate people who were disabled from what were thought to be low social classes (Hayhoe 2015, 2016). There was no financial profit involved in excluding people who were disabled from society, it could even be argued that it was quite the opposite as charitable monies had to be raised over a number of years to exclude people in asylums. Similarly, the liberal philanthropic groups and societies who formed asylums, often liberals who were influenced by higher-​class intellectual liberals with disabilities, supported similar causes such as anti-​slavery, and felt that they were taking the moral high ground by developing equality. So, does the intellectual linking of perceptual and learning impairments and moral ability observed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still exist in twenty-​first century Western society? NOTE: In the UK in 2008, an investigation was held into the beating to death of a one-​year-​old child in London by what was described as the ill-​educated boyfriend of the child’s mother. In the following parliamentary debate, the then leader of the government’s opposition and later the Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron, seemed to link the offending boyfriend’s learning impairment, which left him unable to read well, with his immoral violent behavior. It was this immoral behavior, according to Cameron during a Commons debate with the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, that led to the murder of the baby. The murder of this baby is admittedly a significantly different context to the intellectual history of the asylum movement, and the boyfriend was independently found guilty of this heinous act based on his actions and evidence in court. However, Cameron’s reduction and conflation of complex issues such as learning disabilities and immorality during a national debate by senior politicians based on what he felt was objective knowledge arguably illustrates grey normative laws in contemporary life. As Cameron stated at the time: Let’s be honest. This is a story about a 17-​year-​old girl… who had no idea how to bring up a child. It’s about a boyfriend who couldn’t read but could beat a child and it’s about a social services department that gets £100m a year and can’t look after children. (Sparrow and Glendinning 2008)

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the possible dangers you have observed in social-​cultural classifications by social researchers, or those used by social scientists. For instance, you can discuss how social researchers link morality and certain types of social behaviors and disease in health studies. Similarly, you can discuss how

From Principles to Practice  93 crime and health and social research links socio-​economic or ethnic groups and certain behaviors. QUESTION: How have the conflation of different taxonomies, ontologies and behaviors affected social policies?

Summary This chapter has examined the principle of classification, taxonomies and human values that derive from these classes in the social sciences, and it has examined ways forward in the understanding of human classes that have been mythologized by Western culture. In doing so, this chapter has argued that human classifications of their own social-​cultural classes can themselves be classified into three broad taxonomies: bio-​classes, socio-​classes, and cultural-​ classes. These classes overlap, and it is observed that bio-​classes and socio-​classes can form their own cultural-​classes. Theoretically, this chapter has examined Popper’s theory that objective knowledge is not an accurate reflection of universal truths, but the development of a continuum of problems and evolves from subjective knowledge. This chapter has also examined Popper’s theory of critical duality, and examined how humans need to regularize the world by reducing nature to simple classes, and how humans often confuse natural laws with social-​cultural normative laws, and introduced the concept of grey normative laws. Importantly, this chapter has argued that social research and social science is guilty of reductionism that has led to exclusion and bigotry. In addition, this chapter has discussed the random construction of definitions of social-​cultural classes that are affected by and affect normative laws, such as the classification of African Americans and American Indians by random percentage values of their genetic or cultural heritage. This system of Western taxonomy has shown that Western systems of knowledge synthesis merely reflects a biased system of scientific epistemology based on these taxonomies by thinking in terms of ring-​ fenced characteristics. In the following section, this book examines the concepts of social research that have evolved out of the principles of Western science and social science discussed in this section. In particular, it examines the process of synthesizing knowledge from data through analysis, and then engaging with other academics through publication and the public through non-​traditional means of communication and dialogue.

Section II

Concepts

6 The Concept and Collection of Data

Introduction As its title suggests, this chapter examines the nature and collection of data in social research. The chapter begins with a discussion of what data is, and an examination of data in the context of other elements of “knowing,” including information, knowledge, and wisdom. This chapter then considers the most debated classifications of data, including quantitative, qualitative, and visual data, and the nature of some of the most common data collection methods, including a case study of the method of observation and the difference between participant and non-​participant observations. The aims of this chapter are: (1) to understand the nature of data and its use in social research; (2) to identify the major differences between different classifications of data, how they can be combined and when it is appropriate and inappropriate to use them; (3) to appreciate that there is no such thing as a pure form of data, and all forms of data have their issues; (4) to recognize how data is collected efficiently in different contexts, and the fallibility of these data collection methods. The questions that pose the theme for this chapter are: 1. What can the data tell us about the “real” world beyond our senses? 2. How is, and can, data be turned into knowledge? 3. What are the current ways of collecting data to develop knowledge? CAVEAT: It should also be recognized that there are restrictions to what this chapter can achieve, these restrictions include: (1) data gathering is a broad subject, and the intricacies and dimensions of data equally is broad; (2) to discuss the majority of methods and types of data collection techniques, the sophistication of each class of data would take a book in itself. Consequently, this chapter covers the broad issues of what data is, how it is converted into something potentially “of use,” and some examples of the most common ways of gathering this data. When the reader eventually chooses specific forms of data collection for their research, they are advised to find a specialist journal article, book or chapter that covers their more detailed needs.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003241997-8

98 Concepts

Concepts Introduced Through this Chapter Data: Data is the representation of material, abstract or metaphysical properties of measurable, definable, or describable objects, events, practices, and environments. For instance, data can be a person’s name, their age, where they live or exist, the behavior they display in an environment when given certain stimuli or exercises, or simply whether a person or object is present or not. Data is also seen as a product of sensory observation, such as vision, hearing, or touch, or gathered as a form of symbolism, such as formal or informal language. Thus, data can be imagined as the raw material of the sciences and social sciences and is the atomic level of the synthesis of knowledge, an issue that will be discussed further below. CAVEAT: In research, data is thought to be of no use until it is encoded, or in the case of symbolism, re-​encoded, in a way that it can have relevance or use in practice or theory. Importantly, the difference between data and information is felt to be functional and not structural (Rowley 2006). To put this another way, data has no value in and of itself, it is only its use that gives it value as well as meaning; this is discussed in greater detail below. Information: Information can be defined in relation to data, in that information contains data, but does so in a meaningful connected, systematic, and coherent way, that has some use to humans within a given context, thus information is inferred from data. For example, if a person buys a bag of chips from a shop, the packet may tell them that the contents of the packet is chips, the flavour, the ingredients, and the nutritional information about the chips that allows the buyer to decide to eat them. This information is thus meaningful to the person who wants to eat chips, is systematic as the purchaser knows roughly where to find each piece of information and knows what it means to them, and the information is coherent as it is only about the chips in the packet. Subsequently, it can also be said that information is contained in descriptions, or in the responses to questions that begin who, what, when and how many. CAVEAT: Null information, that is the absence of information, such as a blank cell in a spreadsheet, is still classified as information. For instance, in the case of flavor in the example above, even no flavor on a packet, meaning it has no flavor added, is a flavor. Consequently, no flavor or null flavor is thus information. NOTE: Information stored electronically is often misreferred to as pure data, not information.This is misclassification because as soon as information is given a context in a database and related or abstractly connected to another piece of data, it becomes both data and information. For instance, if someone sees a pure datafile of seemingly meaningless ones and noughts, this can be construed as only data. However, as soon as it is stored in some form of databank or database and becomes searchable, it is seen as information. The two, as discussed in the main body of the chapter below, should not be misconstrued.

The Concept and Collection of Data  99 NOTE: The systematic nature of information, generated and stored in a searchable, electronic information system is becoming increasingly important in social research. In particular, the use of banks of publicly accessible, open access information stored in spreadsheets or relational databases that generate, store, retrieve, and process information and that can be searched have made literature searches easier, more efficient and more international. This form of information has generated its own research methods or at least adapted older collection methods to develop new forms of understanding. Theory/​to Theorize: In Western social sciences, theories are systems of related deductive ideas, and represent a testable belief or a series of related ontologies that can be measured by information in a highly targeted way. On one level, these ontologies are based on underlying principles, such as materialism, abstract notions or metaphysics, and are informed by an epistemology, i.e. they exist within a broad base of knowledge. On another level, theories also have some applied level in what can be called the real world, and either tell us something about how this world works or develops a new function that can be applied in this world practically. NOTE: Theories also have elements that can be described or measured or simply proven or disproven by information although as discussed earlier, these terms are misleading. Academically, theories are important as they are ideas that can be taught scientifically as the basis of concepts, and then principles, i.e. they can be seen as the molecular level of scientific thinking. The importance of this scientific thinking is because theories can be regarded as connected individual ideas that can be measured according to their related data points within patterns or records of information. For instance, the theory of gravity can be described by contemporary sciences as an ontologically materialist theory. This theory states that there is an invisible force pulling all objects towards the center of the earth or towards the center of an astral body, such as the sun. Epistemologically, the theory also exists in a great pantheon of physical theories that there are natural forces in the universe that either are matter or control matter. It could also be argued that this epistemology is part of a larger theory, although each individual theory within this pantheon has a different way of measuring or discussing each force in a unique way. CAVEAT: At our current point in time, it is arguable that there are ideas and notions that cannot be tested, because they are not a part of the understandable world. For example, underlying religious beliefs, such as whether God or gods exist cannot be tested, as this belief is an article of faith rather than a theory that can be measured. Thus, in these circumstances, there is nothing to measure or test, and we must either accept or refute God or gods as existing based on a personal emotional feeling. Of course, this does not mean that all aspects of religion are untestable or non-​scientific. As this book showed in Chapter 2, philosophers such as Isaac

100 Concepts Newton have attempted to show that what were previously described as miracles or visions can be reproduced under controlled conditions. Therefore, it is arguable that science and social science can be used to advance religious knowledge and the nature of belief. However, again it can equally be argued that the underlying principles of religion, such as the existence of God or gods, is presently beyond measurement.

What Is Data Generation, and Where Does It Fit Within the Testing of Theories? In information science, data is conceptualized in relation to its place within information, and more contentiously knowledge and wisdom. In the philosophy of information science, data is rationalized in particular as what can be referred to as the atomic element in a ‘Knowledge Hierarchy’ or ‘Knowledge Pyramid’ (Ackoff 1989). This model is otherwise known as the slightly less aesthetic Data Information Knowledge and Wisdom (DIKW) model of information systems by computer scientists (Rowley 2006). In this chapter, we will refer to this system as the DIKW model to reduce confusion. In the DIKW model, data is a component of information, information a component of knowledge and knowledge a component of wisdom in this hierarchical order, one without independent meaning, and one that is simply a practical value or description, thus, “[Each of the layers of the hierarchy] includes the categories that fall below it.” (Ackoff 1989 p. 3). In this pyramid, large amounts of data collected in the sciences is said to produce a smaller amount of information, and this amount of information produces an even smaller amount of knowledge, with wisdom arguably being the smallest component that rests at the top and feeding off knowledge. It can also be said that knowledge is developed through nesting data and information, much like the structure of a Russian doll, with the origins of this notion coming from T.S. Elliot’s poem, ‘The Rock’ (Rowley 2006), where it is written, “Where is the wisdom that we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge that we have lost in information?” (Elliot 1934). This imagined pyramid model of the DIKW model is illustrated in Figure 6.1. NOTE: The DIKW model is a widely-​used framework in information science as it remains a simple way of representing the basis of analysis and synthesis, and it allows each step back from the top to be defined according to the layers below. However, there is little consensus on the process by which elements of the hierarchy are generated, based as it is on the assumption that data alone can be used to create information, and even more contentiously that information can be used to create knowledge and wisdom (Floridi 2003; Frické 2009). CAVEAT: It should be noted that knowledge is more difficult to quantify than data or information. For instance, the number of information records that are held in a database can be counted, and the number of items of data that comprise each piece of information can similarly be counted, whereas as we

The Concept and Collection of Data  101

Wisdom Knowledge Information Data

Figure 6.1 The DIKW Model of Wisdom Hierarchy as a Pyramid.

discussed in the previous section, knowledge is subjective and objective. There is also no general agreement on the definitions of individual terms used in this model, let alone a broad agreement of the terms. For example, even in the context of information science and the computational use of information, there is no consensus on the meaning of ­information even in individual contexts. For example, Floridi states on the role of information in electronic systems, “Of our mundane and technical concepts information is currently one of the most important, most widely used and least understood” (Floridi 2012, p. 3540). There also appears to be a limited discussion of the ontology of the DIKW hierarchy itself, particularly its meaning and contribution to our understanding of wisdom. For instance, this book discussed in Chapter 2 that Socrates argued that wisdom can be an understanding that people don’t understand enough or have enough knowledge in order to be able to understand. Thus, wisdom can be the realization of a lack of knowledge. Similarly, the DIKW model provides a limited understanding of wisdom as an ontology in its own right or the process that contributes to its cultivation. For instance, as Rowley herself states, this lack of knowledge on wisdom itself is the most significant weakness of the model, If the purpose of information systems and knowledge management initiatives is to provide a basis for appropriate individual and organizational actions and behaviour more researchers and practitioners need to engage with the debate about the nature of individual and organizational wisdom. (Rowley 2006, p. 178)

Classifications of Data in the Social Sciences and Social Research Beyond envisioning the place of data in developing knowledge, conceptually data can be classified as a concept in three taxonomies: the first taxonomy

102 Concepts classifies data according to the type of its collection; the second taxonomy classifies data according to the type of its encoding and presentation; the third taxonomy classifies data according to when and by whom it is collected for use in scientific analysis. However, it should be borne in mind that none of these classifications is an end in itself, and data classifications can overlap, i.e. data can belong to different classes within a taxonomy and between taxonomies according to how it is used. For this book, taxonomies of data will be discussed as if they are discrete concepts, as it is more practical to think about data this way when developing a social scientific study. Classifying Data According to the Form of Its Collection Put simply, data can be seen as either symbolic or sensory according to the way it is collected. Symbolic data can be regarded as a form of object or image collected to represent a human phenomenon, such as a belief, property, process, or behavior. These symbols can range from what is termed the icon that represents a human phenomenon precisely, to a sign that is completely disassociated from the human phenomenon which it represents (de Saussure 1972). Although icons are commonly used in older forms of social and cultural research, such as archaeology or anthropology where objects from historical eras are collected about different cultures at different times, they are less often used in contemporary social research. By contrast, signs are arguably the most common form of data in all contemporary social research. For instance, a researcher studying the development of human food preparation in a particular location in a given year may collect and study cooking instruments as icons, i.e. actual cooking tools. The research may perhaps study the shape, style, and size of these tools from that place and era to formulate a hypothesis about different forms of cooking or the socioeconomic nature of the tools. Similarly, a researcher studying the human geography of a city in a particular era, may collect photos from people who used to live in the city to study how people interacted with their environment and where they travel to in the environment. These photos can be seen as icons representing the events and behaviors of the humans that make up the population of the city in that slice of time. By contrast, social researchers studying the health of a given nation in a given era may collect data from secondary source databases, such as census data or government health or mortality statistics or compare data from two different eras from these same sources. Similarly, social researchers studying the nature of Internet usage may study databases automatically generated by webservers, which contain the number of hits and views different types of website may have. Another instance of this form of data collection may be the systematic review of a genre of literature on the social effects of a disease, such as COVID 19 or cancer on work patterns. In these studies, these forms of data can be said

The Concept and Collection of Data  103 to be signs, as these researchers have defined and measured or described communities and populations according to symbols that are abstracted from what they represent. Sensory data includes data collected directly from vision, sound, taste, smell, touch and so forth with no symbolic interference until the data is encoded, such as observations of behavior, experimentation, and photographs of environments or recordings of the sounds of cities, towns or villages or the real-​life conversations or the levels of sound in a city, town or village. Sensory data cannot be secondhand data that has been encoded, such as photographs by that other than a researcher, or the reporting of an event, behavior or an opinion in an interview, as these are not firsthand recordings of the phenomena actually occurring in the given moment of the research. For instance, a social researcher can observe a meeting in a given time and place and take notes on the interactions between different individuals in that meeting they see, where that meeting has taken place and the number of people in the meeting. Similarly, social researchers can walk along a given street at a given time and record the number of pieces of certain types of litter and even the smells that are on that street qualitatively and the textures of surfaces that haven’t been cleaned, or possibly count the number of broken and unbroken windows and the prevalence of graffiti; this is a form of sensory data. NOTE: Both sensory and symbolic data and data collection methods are dependent on the methodology proscribed in the research project, as they rely on an ontological position that is taken in the study as to whether it is believed that one type of data is better or more reliable. For instance, counting the occurrences of a certain practice may be based on the belief that what is being counted is always a particular practice. CAVEAT: As discussed in Chapter 3, trusting either form of data alone can be unreliable. The human mind processes sensory data subjectively, and can be fooled into thinking that reality is wholly as it is sensed as Wittgenstein (1974) and Popper (1979) observed. Similarly, and until humans invent time travel, apart from historical studies data represented by symbols is unreliable as it can never be truly verified. People can lie in surveys or interviews, data can be manipulated post hoc or simply be estimated (Spiegelhalter 2020) or the accuracy of people’s memories can simply vary despite their confidence in these memories (Odinot and Wolters 2006). Therefore, we have to take all forms of data on a certain amount of trust, and nothing can be said to be truly real. NOTE: Although we cannot truly trust data, this does not mean we cannot largely trust the reliability of any data, even if the world exists only in a single person’s head, as for this person this data will still represent their individual reality. Therefore, taking it on trust that the world exists, researchers have to trust data to a certain extent, just as humans trust their senses and their ability to communicate with language to complete everyday tasks when these are repeated on a periodic basis.

104 Concepts

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss when you have used numbers to develop an argument in an essay or words to calculate part of a problem. Following this discussion, address the following questions: QUESTION: Is there a true difference between the meaning of numbers, words, and images, and if there is, what is it?

Classifying Data According to the Type of Its Encoding and Presentation Put simply, data can be classified four ways according to its coding and use: qualitative data, quantitative data, oral data, and visual data. Qualitative data is encoded as words or other forms of sign, contains little or no value when comparing two or more things together, and contains no calculations. This form of data is generally but not always used in small-​scale research, such as small surveys or interviews with less than 100 people, that are designed to be analyzed in depth. This form of data is also best for contemplative, reflective data analysis, which can be collected through diaries or personal biographies. Qualitative data can also be encoded in contemporary electronic media as relationships, Boolean search terms and keywords, and can be used as descriptive introductions as well as in-​depth analysis. For instance, qualitative data can be used to set the scene for later analysis, by describing the ontology of a topic. For instance, it is said of qualitative interviews: [They] do not use the natural science language of ‘variables’, ‘control’, ‘standardization’, and so on, but see the interview as an opportunity to delve and explore precisely those subjective meanings that positivists seek to strip away. Qualitative research is generally not so much concerned with obtaining accurate replies to closed ended questions, as with obtaining full and sincere responses to relatively open-​ended enquiries. (O’Connell Davidson & Layder 1994, p. 121) NOTE: Theoretically, qualitative data is said to remove all value from data and instead is expansive, and is more concerned with relationships, processes, and descriptions that can then be analyzed and synthesized as theories. Moreover, qualitative data is concerned with the cause element in studies focusing on both cause and effect, as it probes not so much how often something happens but why it happens, the decision behind the process and the motivations for behavior, i.e. literally, what causes something to happen. By contrast, quantitative data is merely concerned with the value of a material or metaphysical class of objects, behaviors or other countable forms

The Concept and Collection of Data  105 of occurrence, for example it may try to describe whether person A is taller than person B or process C is faster than process D. Quantitative data is largely presented and analyzed as statistics or graphs, and thus can be said to overlap with visual data in research and it is focused on how much something happens, how powerful that thing may be, the value an event has on a human or community, and so forth. NOTE: In studies examining both cause and effect, quantitative data is interested in the effect of an event. For instance, in the study of a tennis match quantitative data is used to count the number of points scored, serves missed, balls hit out and so forth rather than what causes all of these points to happen. Thus, it can be said that quantitative data points the way to describing something that has happened. Consequently, quantitative studies are generally speaking large-​scale surveys, tally counts, standardized large-​scale observations that involve a number of observers and economic surveys of whole systems, although they can be used in experiments with single human participants. CAVEAT: It is arguable that quantitative data is not always numerical value based and qualitative data is not always descriptive, i.e. each one has an element of the cause or the effect, thus there are grey areas in the distinction between qualitative and quantitative data. Numbers can be used qualitatively, especially when they are used to list or to order a group of things randomly, or to describe classes. For instance, the first group of women arrived at 8pm, whilst the first group of men arrived at 12am. Similarly, you can give a sports player a number to identify them. Conversely, words and other forms of sign, such as arrows, can be written as a form of qualitative math to formulate a relationship between cause and effect, and vice versa. As Glaser describes of the peculiarities of qualitative and quantitative math in social research: The definition of qualitative math[s]‌is circular… (1) there was no qualitative hypothesis or concept that could not have a mathematical concept developed for it and (2) … most mathematical formulas, particularly statistical can be stated qualitatively. (Glaser 1998, p. 22) Visual data is, arguably, one of the earliest forms of data, and predates science as a mode of analyzing and representing human society and the natural world, as it is said to represent a form of primaeval consciousness (Gombrich 1992). From cave painting to botanical, anatomical and zoological illustration, imagery has been used to understand the world, and has played an important role in early medical and natural science. As stated above, visual images such as graphic pictograms that compare a combination of representation and value, can show meaning more effectively than words or numbers ever could. NOTE: With the advent of modern social science, imagery has played a role in capturing the relationships between metaphysical concepts, such as behavior and the value of an object, including its social or financial value. Visual data collecting methods are therefore rising in importance following the

106 Concepts development of photographic and video technologies, that have allowed people to record natural and social behaviors and environments quickly and easily. For example, photographic studies can capture home environments and domestic objects in situ, people’s movements in town and city centers, workplaces, and institutional spaces such as schools and hospitals. NOTE: New forms of software and ways of presenting data have also enabled visual data to be presented and analyzed in complex ways, and the Internet, with its video and social media platforms, has allowed imagery and vignettes of videos to communicate social scientific analysis in new and innovative ways. For instance, ethnographic video studies and photovoice projects such as Li’s (2022) video of Ikea shoppers makes social studies approachable to those who do not specialize in Western social science, and can present a more easily communicable form of study. In addition, videos are now often classified as academic documents with their own DOI numbers for citation. See for example, SAGE Case Methods, which presents videos of different methodologies and which are aimed at emerging and experienced social scientific researchers. Although not as often used in contemporary research as the data classes above, oral data is also one of the oldest methods of data collection, presentation, and analysis. Perhaps the best-​known forms of oral data are oral histories, in which dying languages or firsthand accounts of memories are recorded for posterity, using accents, inflexion and timbre that cannot be written or quantified in any other way. Similarly, sounds of social environments such as community environment or street scenes can form a richer understanding of the description of an environment, and can be used as evidence of what is often called intangible culture (Kim, Whitford, et. al. 2019). Furthermore, the memories of older people who remember events in history as one of the last survivors of an event provide final opportunities to hear firsthand descriptions in their own voice, capturing their emotions, before all the witnesses to these events pass away. NOTE: With the advent of multimedia, the increasing capacity of computer memory and more creative ways of presenting social scientific analysis, oral data is again seen as a way of analyzing and presenting data in conjunction with other forms of data or on its own. For example, research analysis software such as NVivo now has the capacity to store small vignettes of sound recordings that can be compared to other vignettes as qualitative relationships, thus providing a hybrid form of data. Classifying Data According to When and By Whom It Is Collected for Use in Scientific Analysis Data can be classified as one of three taxonomies according to when and by whom it was collected, which is otherwise referred to as harvested. These three classes are: primary source data; secondary source data; tertiary source data. Primary source data is collected through data collection methods conducted by a field researcher, such as observation, interview, survey or photography by

The Concept and Collection of Data  107 the social researcher. It can also include analysis of texts, and firsthand, unique reviews of policies and laws, from local organization or company policy—​such as a policy relating to web usage by employees—​to national and international policies and laws—​such as international laws relating to the conduct of war or the application of human rights. NOTE: Primary source data is arguably the most reliable source of data in many research studies, particularly small-​scale research studies, and more particularly qualitative studies, because: primary source data has the provenance of the person who collected it; it has not been mixed with data collected by different means; and the collector of the data usually takes responsibility for its objectivity and quality. In research studies, it is usually associated with those who are going to use the data for analysis, often referred to as a primary source study, and it is thus collected for a specific form of analysis. Secondary source data is data collected prior to a study beginning, often by another researcher, group of researchers, government or institution and is made available for use by other researchers on a data set. This form of data is available in many forms and has often undergone little or no analysis or processing prior to secondary analysis, and is thus available as a resource for researchers to interpret and analyze in different ways according to their own unique needs. NOTE: Secondary source data is either bought from the data collector or it is open access, i.e. the collector of the data has previously been sponsored to collect the data for the use of everyone or they have made their data available free, often for altruistic reasons. Secondary source data can include large data sets, which are usually quantitative and collected by large organizations, such as governmental offices or central government ministries or they are collected by international organizations such as the United Nations and its agencies. NOTE: Perhaps the best-​known forms of secondary source data are census data, crime statistics made available by national or local governments and health statistics released by institutions such as the World Health Organization. Photographic libraries of images including scenes, communities, symbols, cultural objects, environments and so forth and which are published by organizations such as national libraries or museums are also examples of secondary source data. Tertiary source data is data that has been extensively processed, analyzed, and then published or disseminated in an alternative way prior to being re-​read and analyzed by later researchers and then used in a different way. Tertiary source data is most commonly literature used in a formal review of literature or policy analysis, including systematic peer-​reviewed topical or periodical reviews, with these reviews having their own methodology and their own search techniques. Tertiary source data is commonly used in literature and then used in a formal, systematic review or language analysis in essays, discussions or even literature review sections of academic articles, books or theses. Examples of tertiary source data are the findings section of a peer-​reviewed paper or the highly-​processed data from a report. The quality of the tertiary source data is therefore often judged on whether it is from a peer-​reviewed article from a

108 Concepts journal with provenance, or whether it has been published by a recognized or respected organization. NOTE: Reviews of others’ work, including book reviews of academic texts and reference work, to responses and critical essays setting out ontological and epistemological positions based on the literature can also be regarded as tertiary source data.These reviews can include expositions on a number of critical issues to expose important themes in current social scientific debates or to provide an entry point to the field for scholars starting to study the topic. CAVEAT: There is some ambiguity or a lack of clarity about whether certain forms of data are primary, secondary or tertiary source data according to the context of their use, which highlights the lack of precision in the scientific conceptualization of data. For example, if social researchers conduct a systematic literature review, is the literature itself always tertiary or can the fact that individual documents can be counted and systematized make it primary source? In this instance, is the data search itself a primary source data collection method according to the use of the literature? Similarly, it can also be argued that there is ambiguity and unclearness between secondary and tertiary source data, as secondary source data can be published as a document and therefore requires reentry into a different piece of software to be processed. A possible solution to this ambiguity is that science could possibly recognize the contradiction of data as extrinsic to its value during analysis and depending on its context and the way it is meant to be seen in the period of research, much as Wittgenstein (1974) felt about the duck-​rabbit.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science discuss possible solutions to the following dilemma: If researchers study a policy that is based on a report, which itself is based on the collection of primary and/​or secondary source data, is this data secondary or tertiary source data; i.e. are the researchers reinterpreting a reinterpretation or simply generating a new interpretation based on this existing data?

Case Study of a Data Collection Technique–​Observation Standard data collection methods that form the basis of primary data studies must be understood before using any form of data, even if the researcher never has to use them themselves. For instance, if a social researcher uses two sets of secondary census data from two different countries in a secondary data source study, they must be able to compare the efficacy and methods of data collection in order to ensure they are comparing like with like or high-​quality data. One of the most commonly used examples of data collection methods in

The Concept and Collection of Data  109 Western social research is observation, and this data collection method can be classified according to whether it is participant observation or non-​participant observation. Participant observation started as a qualitative anthropological method; i.e. the study of the culture, society and development of humans, and was a way of learning about other people’s cultures firsthand with the social researcher living within the community they were studying, and socializing as the community did. Using this data collection method, the researcher would record sensory and symbolic data by recording the actions, behavior and communication of rituals, document the communities’ belief systems, and often observe an individual’s behavior in certain daily tasks, such as eating and working (Peacock 1986). For instance, Berreman finds that participant observation is: [The] practice of living among the people one studies, coming to know them, their language and their lifeways through intense and nearly continuous interaction with them in their daily lives. (Berreman 1968, p. 28) During participant observations, Western social researchers observe and record participants’ opinions and attitudes to their surroundings and life, and issues such as emotional responses during tasks or discussions. Participant observation can also focus on the objects used in rituals or everyday practices to illustrate a process of artisanship, or on the artworks produced in small communities, and the development or comparison of these objects as a process of creativity (see for example Hayhoe 2008). Social researchers using participant observation also often note the environments that people live or work in without their community present, and how this environment relates to their beliefs and philosophical guidelines. NOTE: In the latter stages of the twentieth century, participant observation was also re-​worked, introduced into different forms of psychological and sociological research, and Western social researchers tailored this form of data collection for studies of behavior and attitudes of their own communities. This new form of participant observation changed the dynamic of this research method to one of a quasi-​political method, and one that analyzed the role of power in sub-​communities and under-​represented groups, such as people with disabilities and people who were LGBTQ+​(Hayhoe 2012). NOTE: For practical reasons participant observation is often conducted in a small geographical area and is designed to discuss a small, unique community that would generally know each other, such as a residents of a street in a city, the ward of a hospital or an academic department in a university. However, it has been argued that participant observation does not simply have to be restricted to a small area of an institution, or a set of rituals, routines or behaviors, but could refer to a group of like-​minded, geographically diverse institutions (Goffman 1991). By contrast, non-​participant observation studies are observations conducted from afar, with minimal or no interaction with the community being observed,

110 Concepts and in some cases the observer is not even present in the community at the time of the observation with data being recorded on video. The earliest forms of non-​participant observation were mainly associated with industrial time-​ and-​motion and language studies, where during the latter speech was recorded and analyzed for dialect and discourse. With the advent of photography and film as a means of data collection, non-​ participant observation was introduced to other forms of cultural study, and used to gather qualitative and quantitative data. For instance, non-​participant observation has been used to describe or measure how people interacted in cultural environments such as parks or museums to analyze how viewers examine public art, the nature of physical access to different types of building and the movement around buildings or urban spaces. NOTE: As a more formal data collection method used in the latter half of the twentieth century, non-​participant observation was often used in management studies in institutions such as factories, hospitals, and schools to judge what was felt to be the efficiency of the work. For example, in educational studies participant observation was used to quantify pre-​set categories of social and cultural behavior using a quantitative scale called the Flanders’ Interactive Category (FIAC) system. Using this scale, social researchers simply looked at a given class, student or teacher at short intervals, usually from ten seconds to half a minute, to record the interaction they saw in that short slice of time. Examples of these interactions included: • • •

[Teacher] Accepts feeling. Accepts and clarifies an attitude or the feeling tone of a pupil in a non-​threatening manner. Feelings may be positive or negative. Predicting and recalling feelings are included … Pupil-​talk-​response. Talk by pupils in response to teacher. Teacher initiates the contact or solicits pupil statement or structures the situation. Freedom to express ideas is limited … Silence or confusion. Pauses, short periods of silence and periods of confusion in which communication cannot be understood by the observer. (Flanders 1970, p. 34)

FIAC and similar systems were a simple way for social researchers, particularly teams of researchers who could standardize their observations, to analyze tangible, visible behavior and record a number of issues, such as the amount of time spent on a particular task. This system thus simplified data collection, although these observations also required structured training in each system, as categories could be hard to follow and were largely unessential (Amatari 2015).

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following questions:

The Concept and Collection of Data  111 QUESTION: What data can observations miss, gather imperfectly and develop inaccurately? How can the data from observations misrepresent the truth?

Summary This chapter has looked at the place of data within Western social science and social research. It has examined the DIKW model, and examined how data is seen as a component of information, which is a component of knowledge, which is itself supposedly an element of wisdom, with a large amount of data in this model being needed to develop even a little wisdom or knowledge. This chapter has also discussed criticisms of the DIKW model by information scientists, particularly of the ability to quantify knowledge and wisdom, and the nature of wisdom. This chapter has also discussed three models and means of classifying data according to the way that data is generated, the way that data is encoded, and the way that data is used in analysis. First, data was seen to be created through the senses or through symbolism, although it was noted that sensory data has to be encoded at some point, just as symbolic data must be sensed. Second, data was seen as being quantitative, visual, oral, or qualitative according to its encoding, although again there are ambiguities in this classification as, for example, qualitative, visual and oral data can represent values, which is also the purpose of quantitative data. Third, this chapter discussed data as being primary, secondary or tertiary, although again these classes are fluid as there is ambiguity about whether even tertiary data can be seen as primary if it is being used in a particular context. Thus, in this summary it should be understood that there are issues with classifying data as types that should be recognized. Importantly, creating taxonomies of data is a highly reductionist way of understanding the composition of data, and relies on a belief that the complex understanding of data can be interpreted solely according to brain functions, that themselves rely solely on perception and language, different quantifying and qualifying data or seeing data as being of a higher or less reliable form simply because it is a stage away from its collector and analysis. Furthermore, critically data processed through the senses and cognition is highly unreliable and should be seen as fallible, leading to an understanding that social research data comes with a reliability warning and should only be seen within the context within which it is gathered. In addition, if the principle of the subjectivity of even formal languages is true, as outlined in Chapter 3, then language data can also be seen as subjective and also intrinsically fallible, susceptible to propaganda or changed into propaganda. Therefore, even starting from the point of view that reality is presented largely as the human senses show humans it is, then social research must rely on the validation of data in a number of forms to increase the reliability of data.

112 Concepts Lastly, this chapter discussed a case study of data collection, to illustrate a method of developing a simple and common form of data, as it is important for researchers to understand how their data is generated even if they are using secondary or tertiary data. Within this case study, two different classifications of observations were introduced: non-​participant and participant observations, with participant observation allowing the social researcher to freely navigate the environment they wish to observe, and non-​participant observation obliging the social researcher to stay aloof with in or remove themselves entirely from the research environment. In the discussion of non-​participant observation, the Flanders Interactive Category System was introduced and discussed. However, scientists and social scientists need to stay aware of the fallibility and falsifiability of observational data as the raw material of social scientific analysis, and thus the frailties of this information, knowledge and wisdom too. In the following chapter, this book introduces the next important concept in the research process, the way in which data is taken, processed, and analyzed during Western social research.

7 Analysis in the Social Sciences

Introduction This chapter discusses the nature of analysis in Western social research, the issues with the process of analysis, the general forms of analysis in social scientific studies, the way that analysis can be classified by its ontology, and the logical basis of the analytical process. This chapter also identifies the elements of synthesis which develops and constitutes many traditional Western academic arguments. In addition, this chapter also presents an interpretation of a model of conducting analysis in Western social sciences using an uncomplicated dialectical discourse and a simple case study of its use. The aims of the chapter are: (1) to introduce and critically discuss analytical traditions in social research; (2) to advise the reader on the basic principles of social scientific analysis; (3) to identify the issues surrounding, the pitfalls of and the restrictions to analysis in the Western social sciences and social research.The questions that pose the theme for this chapter are: 1. What are social researchers doing when they analyze social scientific data? 2. Are there different ways of analyzing data, and by extension are there different types of analysis? 3. How accurate is analysis in Western social sciences, and what can these sciences not promise?

Concepts Introduced Through this Chapter Logic: Logic is a system of thinking that aspires to coherence and attempts to minimize contradictions. In developing a scientific analysis, it can be seen as the relationships that connect different forms of data, information and knowledge to make a workable discourse or practice. It can be said that logic is also a formal version of reasoning, something that humans and arguably animals do cognitively when making rational decisions in everyday situations, including moral or ethical decisions. CAVEAT: There are different forms of thinking logically that are dependent on life situations and contexts, and these can lead to instances of short-​term DOI: 10.4324/9781003241997-9

114 Concepts and long-​term logic being applied. For instance, if a situation presents itself and demands immediate action to preserve relationships or the continuation of a “profitable” outcome, a logical decision may be to act in such a way that would not be logical in the long term, and vice versa. These differences can be dependent on competing situations and life needs, such as the need to fit in socially. One such example of logical difference could be the dietary logic of Person A, who usually eats healthily, avoiding sugary and fatty food, but is one day offered a cake in a social situation with co-​workers or friends. In this situation, long-​term dietary health concerns are put on hold, as Person A may feel it is more important to temporarily compromise her or his dietary logic, to use short-​term social logic to maintain or strengthen his or her friendship or camaraderie with colleagues. Other logical compromises can include moral logic either taking precedence or second place to a situation where other forms of logic fulfil a different form of goal. One such instance is when Person B may decide normally to not act in an aggressive way towards others as a general logical principle, as this may cause serious harm or death. However, given a situation in which his or her safety is under threat, Person B may compromise this principle to physically survive an attack. In this situation, it may be felt that to survive in the long term, and therefore apply the moral principle of non-​aggression, it is more important to accept another person’s milder violence or aggression in the short term to achieve survival. Variable/​Variables: Scientifically, a variable is a characteristic of the category of “things” being studied, whether that thing is material, metaphysical or abstract. During scientific research, it is important that the characteristic can be defined, identified, and measured or described or represented by some other means. However, as this book has shown in Chapter 5, it can be argued that this is where one of the main issues in Western social science exists. Furthermore, as this book has discussed in Chapter 3, this is where power and issues relating to power, such as exploitation, exclusion, and hegemony, are applied by Western social scientists and those who use social science to further their personal beliefs and aims For example, as this book showed in Chapter 5, Western science tends to divide humans into groups either by what are felt to be biological characteristics or what are felt to be human behavior and beliefs, and these groups include gender, social class, disability, and ethnicity or race. Scientists then assign attributes of further behavioral, cognitive, emotional or moral traits to these categories, and moreover a number of these characteristics are conflated to suit hegemonic purposes, such as the linking of intelligence and morality, or morality and certain types of behavior. However, as this book also showed in Chapter 5, these traits and the conflation of these traits are often based on researchers’ and policymakers’ prejudices as they design their studies. Hypothesis/​to Hypothesize: Put simply, a hypothesis is a detailed statement that is either based on a theory or features a theory and contains measurable

Analysis in the Social Sciences  115 variables and a distinct argument that can be supported through data and information and tested against evidence. Consequently, it can be said that the purpose of a hypothesis is to establish a point of the study where something can be tested or measured effectively against a scale or value. Scientifically, hypotheses also define the context of a study and the variables that are to be studied and compared. Thus, hypotheses usually establish a main variable that is to be the focus of a social scientific research study, such as socio-​economic groups or gender, and relates other variables to it. NOTE: Hypotheses used in social scientific studies are also generally related to a broad research question, and shorter hypotheses can be turned into these broad research questions by simply adding terms such as How, Are, When, Who, Why or What and re-​adjusting later terms. For example, take the hypothesis: “Men in carriage A on the 8:15 am train from Keynsham to Trowbridge on Mondays in July 2022 will be more likely to read the Times newspaper than the Guardian newspaper.” By adding “Are” and removing the phrase “will be”, this hypothesis can be turned into the following research question: “Are Men in carriage A on the 8:15 train from Keynsham to Trowbridge on the Mondays of July 2022 more likely to read the Times newspaper than the Guardian newspaper?”

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss hypotheses that have previously presented either in journal articles or books, or statements that have been presented as hypotheses in newspapers or magazines. QUESTION: Can you turn these hypotheses into research questions? Are there hypotheses that cannot be turned into research questions, and what makes these hypotheses different?

The Concept of Analysis In line with the discussion on the transformation of data into wisdom in Chapter 6, the purpose of analysis in this process is to create information from data, and then some form of knowledge or understanding from information that can inform or become part of an epistemology. In this case, epistemology is a substitute for wisdom and is a better fit for social scientific research, as this knowledge then sits in a library or database and eventually have some form of social or cultural use. This process of analysis can thus be referred to simply as synthesizing data and information to make it meaningful, either for a direct purpose or simply to contribute to a general stock of knowledge. Subsequently, the atomic level of analysis can be said be to create an explanation of cause and effect, i.e. the measurement of the effect of an event in reality to

116 Concepts show it is different from any other event and to explain why it happens, which is the transformation of information to knowledge. This analysis can be said to design and develop what may be a more objective truth, one that can possibly be replicated or one that uncovers a previously unconsidered element of human life. Thus, it can be said that Western social scientific analysis is made up of a number of components that separates finding things out from Western scientific analysis, such as: the development of new knowledge from existing ideas and/​ or developing brand new ideas; the development of some form of objectivity in the knowledge that is synthesized; the use of standard techniques and software to analyze and replicate the analysis; the ability to present the findings in a way that shows data has undergone a systematic process of development from raw data to knowledge, i.e. a methodology; and, as stated in the previous chapter, the use of standardized data from standardized methods to increase reproducibility or validity. These components of analysis are illustrated in Figure 7.1. NOTE: It can be said that in Western scientific research analysis begins before the researcher plans their data collection. In the first chapter, the difference between methodology and method were defined, with methodology being seen as the overall philosophy of the research project, and the method being seen as the way researchers go about collecting data to fulfil their research project. Thus, the methodology should be decided and developed before the data collection methods are decided, as methodology determines the nature of the data collection undertaken, whereas data collection methods should never determine the methodology being used. This being said, in reality no analysis is done in a vacuum and these components alone cannot derive objective knowledge, as the external factors discussed in the last section can subjectify this knowledge, based on the prejudices of the needs of the authors of knowledge. Thus, as Foucault argued,

New Knowledge brand new ideas or existing ideas in new settings

Data Collection – structured methods of collecting data

Research

Presentation of Findings accessible and acceptable to your peers

Working Towards Objectivity – doing things the same as others

Analyzing Data – using standard techniques and software

Figure 7.1 The Components of Analysis—​What Is the Difference Between Finding Things Out and Researching Systematically?

Analysis in the Social Sciences  117 all analysis is based on the history of theory, knowledge and the social and cultural tradition of the subject and even new topics and subjects are identified according to previous ontologies and epistemologies, such as subjects, variables and processes. Consequently, when they are first introduced theories often turn out to be unproven as they are based on subjective beliefs that have inaccurate data developed to support them, yet evolve to become a more accurate representation of what appears to be happening. For example, the subject of genetics evolved from a belief that each limb of the body contained spores that held information about the reproduction of that limb alone (Giovannelli 1999). Later, the monk Mendel discovered that plants had different characteristics according to cross-​pollination of plants with other characteristics, and Darwin proposed that species evolved according to the laws of natural selection.This theorization culminated in the discovery of DNA, and our current understanding of how all living things reproduce, however at each stage the precise description of each hypothesis has been criticized and has been effected by the subjective belief of the author (Harper 2008). This process of criticism is discussed further in the case study below. It is arguable that Western science itself has developed continually over the course of history as a result of its authors’ subjective beliefs and prejudices, and as discussed in Chapter 5 the prejudices of broader societies.This subjectivity is further complicated by the need for all theories and knowledge to be coded through at least one layer of language, which is either quantitative, qualitative, oral or visual according to the paradigm that the author of knowledge is working within. Therefore, the synthesis of knowledge creates new ways of imagining reality according to the influences but also the needs of broader society and carefully controlled by a specific system of knowledge and theories. Subsequently, no analysis creates brand new knowledge, it is only knowledge within an existing system, although at different points in time these theories are refuted, lost or reintroduced, suggesting that our understanding of subjects undergo different phases of understanding, with relatively little cohesion. This evolution continues in a relatively steady form until the discovery of one large radical event, such as the discovery or change in mindset caused by a political, social or cultural revolution.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss hypotheses that have previously been presented either in journal articles or books, or statements that have been presented as hypotheses in newspapers or magazines. QUESTION: Can you turn these hypotheses into research questions? Are there hypotheses that cannot be turned into research questions, and what makes these hypotheses different?

118 Concepts Focus in Analysis In the basic process of research design, it is important to determine the focus of a given social research project, from the central theme of the research, such as the study of inflation on a national economy or the social understanding of climate change. From this focus, the social researcher can then: (a) determine their own ontology and epistemology; (b) decide on a methodology by which to address a hypothesis or answer a research question and then decide upon and develop fieldwork; (c) analyze the data derived from the fieldwork and verify these findings through comparing them to other findings; (d) present and publish these research findings, which is part of the sub-​process of what is termed knowledge transfer in academia, a concept that will be discussed in Chapter 10. To determine the focus of this research, it is thus necessary to separate the focus on this research that will form its analysis from all the other possible causes that may have an effect on the central theme. In the philosophy of natural science, for instance, it is hypothesized that a series of small, random natural phenomena in different areas of the world cause exponential chain reactions, accumulating to cause a phenomena in other parts of the world. For example, it is said that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could affect a storm in the USA (Gleick 1997). Similarly, in social research it has been argued that seemingly unrelated political and social events lead to disruptions in the behavior and subsequently the process of institutions (see for example, Foucault 1977, 1979; Hayhoe 2015). Consequently, the events that can effect the collection of individual humans being studied can themselves be affected at least as much by their home lives as the temporal events that are being measured. For instance, a person can express anger at another person because of a comment that they have made. However, this anger can be the expression or at least be effected by a different temporal event that happened in the observed person’s recent social history, even an event that happened that same day. Thus, like chaos being the driver of a natural event, social and cultural events need to be interpreted through a compromise of three dimensions: the time an event happened; the observation of a phenomenon during this event; and the place that this event occurs in, even if this event happens online and is therefore in a definable virtual space. These dimensions can be expressed as the When, What, Where of the cause and effect of an event. However, as Lott observes, although social and cultural events appear to be easy to discuss, the causes are the issues that are more difficult to pin down. I was taught at school that the First World War was caused by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo and it wasn’t until I studied it at university that it occurred to me how fantastically complex and mysterious the cause of any event, let alone a world war, is.

Analysis in the Social Sciences  119 The way we imagine causality is central to who we are personally, politically, economically –​in fact, in every way possible. And yet our understanding of the subject is often extraordinarily crude… Causes, even of the simplest event, are so complicated that they are, in fact, philosophically impossible to describe. (Lott 2003, p. 13) Consequently, and as this book established in the previous section, it is arguable that analysis is not finding a truth, as even broadly held laws are subject to change and re-​definition during different eras of history, but simply developing a feasible explanation within a given context. Thus, even those who argue for structuralism in scientific methodology accept that this is an imperfect means of developing knowledge, and that in Western science we are not discovering answers or solutions, we are merely creating new problems or evolutions of problems (Popper 1979). As Spiegelhalter suggests: Causation is a deeply contested subject, which is perhaps surprising as it seems rather simple in real life: we do something, and that leads to something else. I jammed my thumb in the car door, and now it hurts. But how do I know my thumb would not have hurt anyway? … We have ignored the possibility that any observed relationship is not causal at all, but simply the result of chance. Most drugs on the market have only moderate effects, and only help a minority of people who take them, and their overall benefit can only be detected by [trials after the fact]. (Spiegelhalter 2019, pp. 97–​104)

Taxonomies of Analysis It can be argued that analysis is a way in which information is manufactured from the chaos of disparate phenomena that humans are always surrounded by, to make meaning from data and information in new formats and patterns that Western culture describes as knowledge. However, as with the other principles and concepts discussed in this book, there are different ways in which the process of analysis can be classified, and this chapter discusses two of these ways: the classification of ontologies of analysis and the classification of the use of data in analysis. Classifying According to Ontology In the first ontology, analysis can be seen as a way of identifying set patterns that nature, cultures, and societies have defined as positivists believe; in the second ontology, anti-​positivists argue that analysis is the synthetic construction of meaning by humans. This taxonomy can also be seen as a way of classifying forms of analysis according to the construction of epistemologies, as the knowledge both taxonomies create is unique to their ontology.

120 Concepts As this book discussed in Chapter 5, positivism is the belief that there are underlying universal, unwavering principles and concepts in nature, and the belief that these concepts and principles can be articulated universally as laws even in different languages. Positivists also believe that variables can be controlled in laboratory settings in order to determine or verify rules, and that these rules can be encoded quantitatively. Positivism is also usually associated with a universal, naturalistic language such as mathematics that can represent a number of social concepts that are universal. This belief leads to a logical conclusion that nature is not only real but also somehow conscious and determines its laws, as we discussed of Russell (1903) in Chapter 3.Thus, it follows that these laws can be observed objectively, and elements of nature, social, and cultural life can be explained with precision. For instance, it is believed that Einstein’s laws of general relativity in all their complexity can be described as single equation such as E =​MC2. By contrast, and as we have discussed earlier in this chapter, anti-​positivism is the belief that analysis can never furnish humans with the truth, which humans can never know exists anyway and thus have to understand that their only bridge between reality and conscious is the senses. This form of anti-​positivism is often represented by ontologies such as critical rationalism, critical realism, and social constructionism. Researchers working within the ontology of anti-​positivism know that they are merely interpreting things through a medium that is fallible at best and lying to the mind at its worst. As discussed in Chapter 2, this anti-​positivist ontology was recognized in Descartes’ philosophy that all a human knows is that they are alive because they think, but has existed as early as Heraclitus and other Ionian philosophers. Anti-​positivist ontology also suggests that what can be observed by humans in one place at a single point in time is not necessarily the same thing that will occur in all places at all times, and in social research anti-​positivists also suggest that human relationships are not set forever. Anti-​positivists also believe that because they are not set or in a natural sense real, theories evolve and only describe things that are observable approximately or via a statement of chance. To put this simply, social research is a best guess. Furthermore, anti-​positivist ontology suggests that all data and existing theories are equal, and knowledge generation can exist on a spectrum. On this spectrum, the poles range from the orthodox generation of knowledge using strict methodology, to the belief that even studies in existing refereed journals have equality with data freshly collected in the field or unreviewed, loose systematic studies (Hayhoe 2020). Consequently, an anti-​ positivist ontology also suggests that the objectivity of social research studies are less hierarchical than positivist studies, and thus social researchers’ experiences are valuable and should be discussed as a possible effect on the study’s objectivity. Similarly, the definition and not just the use of variables is important in anti-​positivist ontologies. In this ontology, variables change or are subjective in different cultures and societies, as this book

Analysis in the Social Sciences  121 discussed in Chapter 5 when it focused on classifications such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability. Therefore, anti-​positivist social research studies are more commonly conducted and can only make conclusions about small communities with rigorously defined contexts and this need largely results in qualitative studies. Classifying According to the Use of Data There are two ways of categorizing analysis according to the use of data: (a) case study analysis in which individual instances of one or more phenomena such as people, institutions, communities or events are either analyzed individually to test a case or compared to each other; (b) thematic analysis in which data and information from a number of selected phenomena or events are pooled and analyzed as a group to discover or test underlying patterns that affect this sample as a whole. Case studies are used when a focused form of analysis that looks at a single phenomenon or event needs to be studied in great depth. During case study analysis, the detail of the phenomena or event is pulled apart to test a single idea or because the data has several dimensions, such as life course or a behavior practice or skill undertaken by the case study. For example, during a social health investigation a case study of an individual’s cigarette smoking behavior may be undertaken to determine how they began smoking, why they continue to smoke and what effect smoking has on their everyday life. NOTE: Generally speaking, case studies try to do one of three things, and these forms of case study are valid in both positivist and anti-​positivist analyses: 1. The use of narrative discussion or description of a case study that can be extrapolated out to illustrate taxonomies of behavior, beliefs, and so forth. Positivist social or cultural case studies used in this way can aim to show that if a small number of cases behaving according to a law exists that these cases can be extrapolated out to cover all humans; alternatively, anti-​ positivist case studies used in this way can use a case study or cases to show that trends exists in certain communities. 2. Case studies can also exist to prove that theories are incorrect, such as the use of a “black swan” to disprove the hypothesis that all swans are white. Again, these cases can be used by positivists to show a previously assumed law does not exist, and therefore the pursuit of the correct description of that law has not finished. By contrast, anti-​positivists can use a case study to show a previous hypothesis needs to be updated, or to explore the nature of a newly discovered human role, such as a profession that has recently come into existence. 3. A case study can simply show that something happens in a particular time and a particular place, and it does not have to be connected to anything else in the real world as it simply exists as a thing in itself. For example, a painting or a person’s biography can just be seen as a curiosity that represents an

122 Concepts interest to someone else, but is not seen as effecting the world around it or having extrinsic value to others. Thematic analysis is the practice of discovering or synthesizing recurring themes in observations, academic literature, interviews, diaries, images and so forth, by identifying underlying issues that either stand out or recur frequently.Therefore, thematic analysis focuses more on the pattern analysis and the relationships between data points and variables rather than phenomenon-​or event-​focused analysis. As thematic analysis concentrates on finding the relationships that exist between data points, these relationships rather than the description or discussion of the individual data point alone becomes the most important element of new knowledge. For example, thematic analysis may find the underlying trends in a systematic literature search of published peer-​reviewed articles, or it may observe the fashions or trends that are being written about in a given topic such as the use of a new technology in a health care or retail setting.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss an answer to the following question and the issues involved with establishing a focus of research. QUESTION: What is the following analysis telling us about gender? Establish the other variables that each statement is using and explain how to shift the conclusions about gender stated as a single variable: • • • •

“There are still very few female billionaires. Just 244 out of the 2,208 billionaires listed on Forbes magazine’s rich list are female.” The Guardian, October 18, 2018 “Between 2000 and 2018 the unemployment rate for women in the United Kingdom has been consistently lower than that of men.” Statista.com, August 9, 2019 “Seven of the current members of the Cabinet (30%) are women, including the Prime Minister.” www.par​liam​ent.uk, September 25, 2019 “The total number … sleeping rough on a single night was 4,677 … 14% of the people recorded sleeping rough were women, the same as in 2017.” HM Government, February 25, 2019

The Process of Analysis Scientific analysis is not merely describing what exists by arranging data as information, such as this basket has three eggs, or this person makes a large amount

Analysis in the Social Sciences  123 of money and is therefore rich, whilst this person makes a little amount of money and is therefore poor. Scientific analysis is also not about finding evidence to support a political, theological, moral or any other form of belief or opinion. This latter form of analysis only establishes a subjective truth and is designed for practices such as persuasion rather than developing a more reasonable explanation about a cause and effect. The first aim of analysis in Western social science is to develop reliable, systematized and if possible reproducible knowledge or a new theory from data and information that can possibly explain what may or may not happen in future given a similar situation. The second aim of analysis is to make this knowledge or theory acceptable and more believable to society as a whole or to those with power who can use its findings by developing a balanced analysis where alternative scenarios are measured, tested, accepted or rejected. This second aim relates to the principle of critical discussion that this book examined in Chapter 2, when it introduced Socrates’ examined life and Hegel’s dialectic. These aims can be conducted through three discrete phases using a simple model of analysis. Phase One of analysis is the establishment of the focus of analysis, which can simply be described as the Where, When and What (the three Ws) of any given social research study: •

•

•

The Where defines the space and place that the data exists in, and can include work spaces, social spaces, family spaces, eating spaces, administrative spaces, leisure and relaxation spaces, contact and network spaces, non-​ contact and isolated spaces or travelling spaces. These spaces and places can exist physically in the real world or online in virtual spaces. The When defines the point in time that the data exists within, as it is important to the context of the analysis to distinguish the data at time of collection compared to data collected in another historical era, even if this era is short. The researcher also needs to specify whether the data will be historical or real-​time data, i.e. data collected as it occurs. In doing so the social researcher needs to define the precise length of time of data collection, such as an hour, a day, a year, or the period of a set function, such as a surgical operation, a lesson, a football match, a working day, or a given journey. The What defines the causal, theoretical focus of analysis, identifies and is identified by the ontology of the study and places the study within its broader epistemology, i.e. other knowledge that informs and is informed by the analysis. The What also establishes what the significant or most significant variables are, which are vital to establish the theoretical nature of what is being discussed through analysis.

For instance, studies can be stated as follows: (a) the gender study of nineteenth-​ century women in New York during the working day undertaken through a Feminist lens; (b) a study of ethnicity in present-​day Singapore and Seoul during

124 Concepts Sunday leisure periods through the theoretical lens of critical race studies; (c) a study of homelessness over the period of a year in London and Paris through the lens of socio-​economic status. In each of these instances, the studies may have the same variables, such as gender, ethnicity or social-​economic status or social class, but each study will give significance to different variables. Phase Two of the process is the establishment of relationships between different forms of data and data points known as coding. In a previous book, it was established that coding can define relationships that can most often provide the richest understanding of our human societies and cultures (Hayhoe 2020). Most importantly, these relationships are the relationships formed between people, communities, institutions, epistemologies or forms of learning. However, in addition to real-​world relationships, analysis can also focus on relationships between data, categories of data and the underlying relationships that underpin similarities or differences between these data and categories. From this establishment of relationships systematic logic can be applied. This systematic logic can be coded either through plain language, traditionally through formal logical notation, as discussed in Chapter 3 (Russell 2009), through mathematics, a diagram or simply by critically discussing an issue through prose. For instance, the language of formal logic can be used to discuss the ideas of Hume on conscious learning in the eighteenth century versus Turing on human and machine understanding in the early twentieth century in the following way. The researcher can first define the elements both academics discussed and give them an abbreviation that can be formulated. For instance, in Hume and Turing’s case we can state the following definitions of variables: U =​understanding, M =​medium of thought, S =​sensory perception, L =​language, I =​intelligence, A =​artificial /​artificialness /​artificiality. This could then be encoded as follows: •

•

Hume: U0 → MS → I → U1 i.e. for Hume, a human starts with no understanding (U0), through the medium (M) of sensory perception (S) develops a level of intelligence (I) that can lead to some form of understanding greater than no understanding (U1) Turing: U0 → ML +​MP → AI → U1 i.e. for Turing, a human starts with no understanding (U0), however, this time through the mediums of language (L) and sensory perception (P) that develops a different understanding of intelligence (I) that is artificial (A) and subsequently leads to some form of understanding greater than no understanding (U1) by a machine.

Phase Three of the process is the statement of the alternative forms of analysis, from triangulation to what Lakatos (1999) referred to as intellectual honesty. In this phase the social researcher either verifies the encoding of relationships and data from Phase Two or states a set of validations or verifications against alternative forms or sets of data, i.e. the checking of research analysis to at least partly test that the data and hypothesis is reliable.

Analysis in the Social Sciences  125 The foundation of this verification should begin before analysis with different forms of data collected to provide sources of data verification, with the most currently established method being triangulation, i.e. the checking of data three ways. It is possible to combine different forms of triangulation, and some argue that the more ways a researcher combines different forms of triangulation, the more verifiable the data is. For instance, Janesick suggests combining the following strategies of triangulation, 1. Data triangulation: the use of a variety of data sources in a study. 2. Investigator triangulation: the use of several different researchers or evaluators. 3. Theory triangulation: the use of multiple perspectives to interpret a single set of data. 4. Methodological triangulation: the use of multiple methods to study a single problem. (Janesick 1998, p. 46) CAVEAT:The assumption that three data points tell us something reliable is itself not a scientifically established theory, i.e. it does not pretend to be a law of verification, instead it is a tradition based on the assumption of three data points providing a strong analysis. The term is said to derive from trig points used in surveying or physical geography, which assumes the concept that three data points of a line diagram establishes the geometric straightness of a given line. Of the different forms of triangulation, it is arguable that because triangulation is a simple, culturally borrowed instrument of verification, any three elements of analysis logically related and combinable by three can serve as triangulation, as (Janesick 1998). An Example of Analysis: A Study of the Cultural Influences on Charles Darwin’s Evolutionary Theory Through the Law of NATURAL SELECTION Form of analysis: Case study, as it concentrates on a single instance. Ontology: Critical rationalism, as it is assumed that there is no natural law and that the law of natural selection was Darwin’s creation rather than the discovery of a natural law. It is also assumed that the result of analysis will lead to another problem to be solved. Epistemology: This is a cultural historical study of scientific analysis, it exists within the broader subjects of the history of science and the philosophy of science. Phase One: The definition of the field using the three Ws—​Charles Darwin (1809–​1882) was from a socially and academically influential family in England, and lived during a time when one who studied living organisms was called a natural philosopher. Using the methodology Novum Organum by the earlier English philosopher Francis Bacon, Darwin hypothesized that there was a law of natural selection after sailing on the royal naval ship, HMS Beagle, for her voyage around the southern hemisphere from 1831 until 1836 (Ayala 2009).

126 Concepts The study that resulted from this voyage was published in his works On the Origin of Species (Darwin 1859) and later, after further study on the origins of humans, The Descent of Man (Darwin 1871). It can be argued that both works changed Western conceptions of nature and humanity’s place within it, and since Darwin’s work on the theory of evolution, the theory has been applied to everything from nature to finances, geology to chemistry, technology to human thought. Phase Two: A discussion of the general cultural field and encoding this discussion in regular language—​Darwin’s voyage on HMS Beagle and subsequent writing was set in a time about changing beliefs about how natural reproduction and natural diversity continued to proliferate in the Western world that would later lead to the discovery of genes and the principle of genetic inheritance. For example, Gregor Mendel (1822–​1884), a Moravian monk from Switzerland, developed a method of breeding plants, and developed experimental evidence to suggest that peas had characteristics that did not change simply because of the environment. Developing the Narrative by Discussing the Broader Picture and its Outcomes: The characteristics that Mendel discussed included the method by which the seeds form in a predictable way by some medium of inheritance (what were later called genes). This medium of inheritance seemed to remain intact and its information was independent of the growth of the peas. Subsequently, if this medium existed in other living things it could be controlled and bred for food more efficiently, as crops with the best characteristics, such as height and pea production, could be reproduced over and over. However, and possibly because he was a monk and with strong religious beliefs, Mendel did not make the link to inheritance in humans. At the time, it was felt that humans were superior to all other living things, that they were beyond animals, i.e. they were not thought of as animals, or they were thought to be a special species of animal. Phase Three: As this analysis is an examination of a historical theory, triangulation is not applicable, therefore the discussion establishes the counter argument to Darwin’s theories for the sake of intellectual honesty. At the time of Darwin and for some today, humanity is thought to be at the center of the world of understanding and animals are considered to have been designed by God, therefore it was not the place of humans to interfere with this design. Human and animal life is generally regarded as static, i.e. changing little, or at least evolving little because of its environment. In addition, it was also thought at the time of Darwin that Western humans were the epitome of humanity, and there was a science of appraising human skulls to prove that God meant those descended from Europeans were themselves a higher form of human. For instance, as Wong notes: [While] a young Darwin was making his momentous voyage on the Beagle, a movement was underway to promote the idea that the various modern human groups around the globe –​races –​had separate origins.To build the case for polygenism … scientists such as Samuel Morton in Philadelphia collected skulls from people across the world and measured their sizes and

Analysis in the Social Sciences  127 shapes, falsely believing those attributes to be proxies to intelligence.When they ranked the specimens from superior to inferior, Europeans would conveniently come on top and Africans on the bottom [echoing Hegel’s earlier writing]. (Wong 2021, p. 6) What Is Disputed and What Is Agreed Upon: Elements that are generally agreed upon by almost all following the era of Darwin and Mendel, is that plants and simpler animals can change with their environment, for instance animals may be able to develop thicker fur or wool in response to the environment getting colder. Controversial Issues: Darwin’s theory challenged the way we regarded humans as special animals, as he stated that humans and chimpanzees had the same ancestors, thus by demonstrating this link he challenged the belief humans were special or non-​animals. Thus, the counter argument is still that humans are necessarily separate from the animal kingdom, and humans are possibly an everlasting species, with evidence for this thesis being the possible proof of a traditional deity, if this can exist. Establishing Its Place Within an Epistemology: To conclude this analysis, whether right or wrong, Darwin’s theory of evolution and law of natural selection has led to challenges to power. Darwin’s theory, most controversially, challenged traditional scientific and religious power that was based on the belief that humans were an exceptional species, and the normal laws of life did not apply to them. If humans evolve like animals and plants do, then perhaps they were not created in seven days, and this further challenges notions that the Bible in its entirety is true, although if a deity is proven then this changes Darwin’s thesis. However, even if Darwin is proven rather than destroying religion it allows Christianity, which is still the dominant religion of the West, and other religions to develop a new understanding of religious documentation. Darwin’s theory therefore also gives rise to the possibility of a new paradigm of how humans understand their spiritual life and contributes to a different epistemology.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss answers to the following questions. QUESTION: What are we trying to show about Darwinism in this analysis? What is the new knowledge formed by this analysis and what are the conclusions we can draw in this piece? Does this analysis generate synthesis? N.B. As discussions on Darwin are common, it may be best to think of these as hypothetical questions, and assume Darwin was only lightly studied.

128 Concepts

Summary This chapter has examined two different taxonomies of analysis, including the process of analysis as thematic and case study, and ontologies of analysis as positivist and anti-​positivist analysis. This chapter also examined what the different structures of analysis are, and the place of theories, hypothesis and data in analysis, as well as reintroducing the important concepts of variables and logic. This chapter has also examined different ways in which we can classify analysis according to different forms of data, ontology and epistemology, the different ways social research can present or visualize data during analysis and according to how analysis is conducted. It also examined how to conduct basic data analysis, introduced methods to show the nature of basic forms of analysis, and the possible pitfalls of Western social scientific analysis. In the chapter that follows, this book examines ethics, its recent research recently in relation to its history, and its development in the social sciences and social research.

8 The Role of Ethics in Western Social Research

Introduction This chapter discusses the concept and development of ethics in Western social science and examines the original context of contemporary Western scientific ethics, introduces the different forms of ethical guidelines and discusses criticisms of the development of these guidelines and ethical terms used in Western social research. This chapter also examines the cultural context of beliefs about ethics, universalism in ethical systems, and the objectivity and subjectivity of ethics. The aims of this chapter are to: (1) examine how ethics are agreed upon by all Western communities of humans, are governed by local or cultural issues, or governed by different contexts and different forms of logic according to topic or subject; (2) develop a greater understanding of ethical dilemmas that social researchers face in real-​world situations, and to start readers thinking about ethical situations they may come across themselves; (3) consider the foundations and the nature of ethics and metaethics, i.e. the concepts and philosophies that underpin ethics. The questions that pose the theme for this chapter are: 1. What are ethics, why are they important, and how do they effect Western social research? 2. Are ethics applicable to all situations in Western social science? 3. Are broad ethical codes and guidelines in their current form useful or a hindrance in social research?

Concepts Introduced Through this Chapter Morals/​Moral Judgements: Moral judgments are beliefs and statements of a person’s feelings or attitudes towards themselves, their environment, other humans or organisms. According to Aristotle (2009), from whom we take much of our contemporary understanding of the philosophy of ethics, morals are good habits that we acquire and reflect the character of a person as they move through their life and develop a role in their society. Aristotle also felt that ethics helped humans regulate their emotions, with most virtues falling at the mean DOI: 10.4324/9781003241997-10

130 Concepts between more extreme character traits. In this fashion, the common Athenian belief was that ethics were a part of nature, were provided by gods and they were common to all humans. NOTE: As this book established in Chapter 2, Ancient Greece was responsible for the philosophy of what Western ethics often were, i.e. the underlying concept that ethics existed and had an effect on beliefs and behavior, and that the morals that formed these ethics were from an existential source. Western culture and science in particular is heavily influenced by Abrahamic monotheistic religions, Christianity in particular, with many contemporary social and cultural morals being rooted in these religions, particularly as all forms of education and science were controlled by organized religion (Heer 1963; Boyd 1928). Subjectivism/​Moral Subjectivism: Those who believe in moral subjectivism believe that moral judgments are nothing more than statements of a person’s feelings or attitudes, and that ethical statements do not contain factual truths about good or bad beliefs or behavior. In particular, subjectivists feel that moral statements are about human feelings, attitudes and emotions, and when a person says something is good or bad they are saying something about their own positive or negative feelings alone. For instance, according to the philosophy of moral subjectivism if someone says that stealing is wrong, they are making a statement about their own disapproval of stealing alone. This assumes the person’s statements about his or her beliefs are true: these statements are subjectively true if the person making the statement holds the appropriate attitude or has the appropriate feelings towards that statement; but these statements are subjectively false if they do not believe in their own statement. For example, someone may say they are against stealing but are subjectively false because they do not believe in what they have said, whereas the statement will be subjectively true if the person holds this conviction. NOTE: Subjectivity in Western philosophies of ethics can largely be traced back to Ionian philosophers, who believed in an ant-​positivist, more cultural understanding or reality, thus subjectivity is not a new concept in history. For instance, the Ionian philosopher Herodotus, who was credited with applying methodology to the study of history, discussed cultural traditions about the treatment of the dead that were different between what we now call Oriental cultures. This statement suggested that morals were thought of differently in diverse traditions and customs. Herodotus himself was said to have taken much from philosophers such as Heraclitus (discussed in Chapter 2), suggesting that philosophies that are similar to critical realism and social constructivism have existed for millennia (Blanco and Roberts 1992). Moral Objectivism/​Moral Absolutism: Moral objectivism, sometimes called moral realism, is based on the notion that there are objective moral facts or truths that are the same in all cultures all the time. Similarly, moral absolutism argues that there are some moral rules that are always applied to everyone, and

Ethics in Western Social Research  131 there are immoral acts, behaviors and beliefs that break these moral rules and are absolutely and always wrong, regardless of their circumstances or consequences. NOTE: Moral absolutism takes a universal view of humanity, taking the position that there is one set of rules for everyone that can be applied globally, such as the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights, thus moral absolutists argue that moral statements provide facts and truths about all human morals. For instance, as this book observed in Chapter 5, Popper claimed that Plato believed in a natural social order, subsequently creating a biased understanding of social norms, or what can be called a biased dichotomy applied to moral laws, or what Popper (1999) referred to as ethical positivism. Virtue Ethics: Virtue ethics is a branch of philosophy concerned with the moral character of human beings and this character is a non-​material possession that leads humans to search for the source of right and wrong in their own consciousness.Virtue ethics is however unsure whether it is possible to devise a satisfactory and complete theory of ethics that explains and can be applied to all moral values. Consequently, those who study virtue ethics find that ethics lead people not to decisions rather than end points in their understanding of their own beliefs, thus ethics can be said to be limited to clarifying what is at stake about ethical problems (Palmer and Forrester-​Jones 2018).

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following questions. QUESTION: Who gets to decide universal values in the modern world? Is it hard to define universal values, or are some ethical positions eternal and global?

Critical Issues in Western Ethics Defining Ethics in Relation to Morals The Western concept of ethics stems from the Greek word ethos, which can loosely be defined as customs or habits, and at its origins relate to character or disposition as a cultural issue that depends on the agreement of normalized behavior within a community. Philosophically, ethics is now also regarded as a coordinated, systematic taxonomy of moral principles that has its own form of logic and affects how people make decisions and lead their lives. Thus, with respect to Western society, ethics take the role of a group of coordinated cultural moral rules that is considered to be good for individuals and society, and that can be described as a systematic moral philosophy, such

132 Concepts as human rights and responsibilities, or religious sins. Ethics also includes that which is felt to be physically harmful to humans and other animals, such as drugs or violence, and therefore includes animal rights as well as human rights. Subsequently, ethics is or can be seen to be a moral map that shows humans the direction to end goals, such as earning a secure place in an after-​life or earthly happiness, health, satisfaction or a feeling of superiority over what they feel are the immoral. As morality can be personal and understood as virtue ethics, moral issues can be thought of as contentious or extreme. Morals can also negatively affect the lives of others personally, such as the promotion of violence or harm to others, the exploitation of others for money, or the sterilization of what are considered to be weaker, inefficient members of society. These subjective negative morals can also include the view that people who are very different from the norms of a cultural group should have fewer ethical rights or are less in need of ethical values or protection. Conversely, ethical rules and principles can enable humans to take a more rational view of moral problems. Counterintuitively, ethics can also be said to give different answers to the same issues, and cause tensions between individuals within and between given communities or different nations or ethnic groups. For example, the United Nations, individual nations and political unions discuss and encode international systems of policies or laws on moral issues from codes of war to the handling of money between borders to the treatment of illnesses to reduce harm to life. CAVEAT: These policies or laws can encourage subjective interpretation and when different nations commit war crimes they may see them as justifiable to achieve what they consider to be a more important moral political end point. For instance, at the time of writing the current war crimes being identified in the Ukrainian war are being justified by the Russian government because the opposition are said to be Nazis, and are thus intrinsically immoral. However, there appears to be no evidence that the Ukrainian government has undertaken Nazi policies, thus systems of ethics can clash according to the self-​needs of those who promote them. Ethics as a Force for Good Despite the selfish needs of people to use ethics to promote their own wants, many people find moral ambiguity hard to live with, and feel that they genuinely want to do the right thing. In other cases, there may not be one right answer, there may be several right answers or just some least worst answers. For post-​humanists, ethics can be seen as existent beyond the human realm and applicable to the animal kingdom, i.e. other animals also have a sense of morality and ethics, and many humans feel a sense of moral and ethical responsibility for animals. For example, a person may own a dog that they love and feel protective towards, but the dog may develop a terminal illness and be in pain. Subsequently, the owner may find it moral to put the dog down and therefore remove the

Ethics in Western Social Research  133 pain from the dog at the cost of their own emotional well-​being. Some people may also feel that it is wrong to eat animals as much as it is wrong to eat other humans, even though they may enjoy eating meat. Thus, moral ambiguity can force people to take responsibility for their own choices and actions for other sentient beings, without falling back on convenient rules and customs. NOTE: This being the case, it can be said that at the heart of many human morals sits a concern about something other than desires and self-​interest, and a philosophical ideal of a better world where all or at least the majority of people have enough to eat or have peace and stability. Thus, ethics is concerned with the interests of society, ultimate goals, a cleaner, safer environment, and so forth. So, when humans consider ethics they may feel they are giving at least some thought to something beyond themselves.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, answer the following question. QUESTION: How do research ethics link to human: • • • •

principles? morals? rules? values?

CAVEAT: Context is important in the study of ethics, and always relates to the question as to what level of basic human physical and psychological needs such as homes, food and water are rights, and what rights are a part of a greater cultural system. For instance, if a person lives on an island where the island and sea is owned by another person, and this other person does not consent to the inhabitant from taking wild rabbits or fish from this land and sea, then not being able to hunt or fish threatens the person’s life. However, a person stealing a tin of tuna in a society where financial support is available might be considered to be non-​essential to the person’s life. NOTE: There are tensions and ambiguities in forms of logic that govern human existence, how decisions are made or the beliefs held by individuals or developed within communities that lie between universalism and moral relativism. For instance, someone might state that they are passionately against stealing because of their subjective religious beliefs or because they have been a victim of theft. However, a law against theft may try to objectify a broad range of people’s experiences from someone having to steal to eat, as above, to those who are the victims of theft. These beliefs relate to a number of Western cultural beliefs, from the right to own and keep ownership of material and non-​material things, such as jewelry,

134 Concepts pictures or even data about another human. It may also relate to a question whether non-​material commodities such as data are as important as material ones, and whether a person’s data and identity can also be thought of as an ownable commodity at all. In the West, the moral notion of theft can be said to be based on the ten commandments of the Old Testament or Tora. It also appears as a moral stance in a number of other religions such as Islam, which is itself Abrahamic, and belief systems and non-​monotheistic religions, such as the Hindu religion and Buddhism. It is also an ethic agreed upon by many atheists for numerous social and cultural reasons, and these reasons may relate back to being brought up with a cultural memory of religious cultural heritage, to simply valuing the ownership of material goods to promote social status.

The Contemporary Study of Western Ethics The Taxonomy of Studying Ethics in Western Social Science If ethical theories are to be of practical use in the social sciences, they need to affect the way that people behave towards others based on their own belief systems or their own judgment. Scientists also need to see ethics as based on broader cultural laws and other philosophical concepts such as the pursuit of a more objective truth that represents those who it is designed to support or benefit, i.e. the pursuit of science and the behavior of scientists is an ethical issue. However, there are two issues with this ideal. First, in a number of circumstances scientists often behave according to a different form of moral logic and follow their unconscious instincts, even when they feel that they should behave differently. For instance, they may pursue their career at the expense of a pursuit of the truth during a research project, even when they know it may harm them and those around them. Second, ethical systems can often clash with other philosophical aims such as understanding a more objective truth. As Smith suggests, these tensions are often observable when ethical guidelines in Western social science conflict with the pursuit of hidden truths that may damage research participants: The core ethical problem in any social science is acting in the context of two conflicting values—​the pursuit of truth through scientific procedures and the maintenance of respect for the individuals whose lives are being lived, focally or peripherally, in the context of one’s research project. (Smith 1980, p. 192) Consequently,Western social scientific approaches to ethics are often examined according to three philosophical taxonomies: (1) Meta-​ethics, which examines the nature of moral judgement, and examines the origins and meaning of ethical principles; (2) Normative ethics which examines the contents of moral judgements and the criteria for what is right or wrong; (3) Applied ethics, which importantly addresses how ethics function in real communities and populations

Ethics in Western Social Research  135 or apply to individuals in the Western sciences, and therefore largely deal with controversial topics like war, animal rights, abortion, and capital punishment. NOTE: Although this chapter observed that ethics are often influenced by deeply held cultural traditions, they are not always only influenced by these old moral frameworks. Contemporary ethical structures can include issues such as participatory research, and the need to include stakeholders and research participants in the design and practice of research. Ethics can also map existing political morality or contemporary social and cultural mores, such as the use of people from under-​represented groups as curiosities in the focus of research. Contemporary ethical issues often change rapidly over time or according to intellectual fashions, and are said to carry differing amounts of risk in each of their own eras. Subsequently, people who were once thought to be objects of investigation are now regarded as humans with multi-​dimensional identities that carry out research on those they consider to be of like identity. Thus, Western social researchers now see the need to adapt to the use of appropriate, uninsulting practices, or adapt previous practices that may have insulted, terrified, or offended participants. For example, in its guidelines University College London’s Ethics Committee distinguishes between the different risks posed to researching a single topic using different contexts and foci: [An] oral history project about LGBT people in 1990s London might ask about what gay clubs they went to but not probe specific sexual practices. The latter might be high risk. The former is likely to be low risk. Think carefully about the social and cultural context, and the precise nature of the topics you are exploring. How much of a risk is there that discussing this part of their life might impact negatively in any way on the participant? If the risk is small, the project is probably low risk. (University College London 2022)

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following questions. QUESTION: Are there specific ethics that can be defined in the social sciences that are different from medical or natural sciences? If there are differences, how should social scientists define ethics in social research? What is the philosophical context of social research ethics?

The Foundation of Ethics in the Social Sciences It is argued that the concept of ethics in Western science dates back to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organon in 1620, whereas the modern discussions of ethics in Western human sciences and its subsequent guidelines can be traced back to the

136 Concepts Nuremberg Code (Resnik 2022). The Nuremberg Code was named after the criminal trials of the same name and written in response to Nazi-​inspired medical research on concentration camp prisoners, particularly those conducted by Josef Mengele during the Second World War and established a number of concepts in modern research practice. Concepts that were included in the Nuremberg Code and that have become the cornerstones of current ethical practice include: (1) the need to gain the voluntary consent of research subjects; (2) the understanding that research should be based on widely obtained and debated theory and knowledge rather than ideology; (3) the acceptance that experiments should avoid harm, suffering, death or injury to humans, and that every precaution should be taken against such harm or injury; (4) the tenet that only trained researchers and scientists are responsible for fieldwork; (5) the exercise that research participants can leave experiments at any point, and that the researcher must be prepared to end with good cause at any point if it causes upset or stress. Following the establishment of the Nuremberg Code, the topic of ethics as a concept in research practice was introduced in the USA, with the American Psychological Association’s (1953) code for scientific research developed in the early 1950s. This code was followed by the academic study of ethics in US universities, an increasing number of articles on the ethics of research practice, and later by the establishment of academic centers devoted to research ethics, such as the establishment of Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington DC in the early 1970s. The expansive study of ethics in Western science led to the introduction of national guidelines and laws in the USA, such as Guide for Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (US Health Services 1963), the Animal Welfare Act 1966, and the publication of the Belmont Report on the principles of research with humans in 1979 (The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and Behavioral Research 1979). In addition, US organizations conducting research, ranging from universities and colleges to the armed forces, developed their own ethical guidelines and research courses for students from a range of academic disciplines (see for example, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics 2022). During the 1980s, there also appeared to be a growing Western philosophical and public awareness of ethical issues outside the USA, which led to great scrutiny of academic and government research in particular, and shone a light on the influences of research sponsors. This led to growing political pressure from the research establishment on the development of studies observing, interviewing or testing humans. For instance, in this period Australian social researchers Kemmis and McTaggart (1988) began to discuss the dilemmas that social researchers faced when gathering confidential data and the consideration of research participants’ rights to control their own data. This led to a series of proposals about how confidentiality should be used by social researchers to balance the need to

Ethics in Western Social Research  137 report accurate data by the authors of knowledge and the rights of research participants. These included the following standards amongst others: Accept responsibility for maintaining confidentiality Retain the right to report your work: Provided that those involved are satisfied with the fairness, accuracy and relevance of accounts which pertain to them; and the accounts do not necessarily expose or embarrass those involved; then accounts should not be subject to veto or be sheltered by prohibitions or confidentiality. Make your principles of procedure binding and known: All of the people involved in your…research project must agree to the principles before the work begins; others must be aware of their rights in the process. (Kemmis and McTaggart 1988, p. 44) NOTE: Many of the earliest Western ethical theories, guidelines and codes in the field of social science were often developed with medical or legal models in mind (see for example the discussion of ethics in the UN World Campaign for Human Rights (Despouy 1993)). It was largely social scientists who had links to medical research, such as Western sociological and psychological researchers who worked on health studies, who began to focus on ethical constructs in research practice, and on the vulnerability of research participants (Hayhoe 2012). CAVEAT: Despite work to develop a culture of ethics in arguably the most academically influential countries in Western science, scurrilous studies continued to proliferate, particularly in those allied to the medical and behavioral sciences. For example, in a number of US studies people with learning disabilities and people from central America were deliberately infected with fatal diseases to study their bodies’ reactions to these infections and lab studies used deception to provoke mental and physical violence to other humans (Resnik 2022). Examples of scurrilous research were not simply limited to lab conditions, with some field studies reverting to subversion and deception to exploit vulnerable social groups, as their identity was outlawed at the time. For instance, Humphries’ (1970) study of cottaging or cruising gay people in the USA involved the researcher pretending to be part of a group of people that met to have sex in public lavatories. During fieldwork for this study, Humphries played the part of a Watch Queen, a role that involved watching out for people walking into the public lavatory whilst anonymous male couples went into the cubicles to have sex. However, during this fieldwork Humphries not only kept his identity as a social researcher secret, he would often follow people who had just had sex to their cars to record their number plates without their prior knowledge. He then took these number plates to police officers, and asked if he could trace their owners for a health study that he was conducting, to gather the identities of those he had followed.

138 Concepts NOTE: Following criticism of the study, Humphries admitted that he was gay and was from the community he studied (Hayhoe 2012), thus it is possible that even people from vulnerable communities can exploit their peers when they undertake social research.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss possible answers to the following questions. In your discussions analyze these ethical issues in detail, the further questions they raise, the further problems they develop and how a social researcher would address them ethically. QUESTIONS: Is deception in research ever acceptable or is it always unacceptable? What do you think deception is, can you provide a definition that embraces all deceptive situations? For instance, there are situations where people are forewarned that they may or may not be deceived, such as double blind or placebo studies. In these instances, did it feel that participants in this research agreed to deception? Are there instances where people are being watched, but it is felt they are not being deceived into doing so? For instance, it is generally understood if you walk past a video or audio recording device your voice or image is being recorded without permission. Is this acceptable? Is this an abuse of authority, or are there people who would not know they were being recorded, such as young children? Although ethics gained traction and scurrilous studies were called out in the USA following the Nuremberg Code, in other Western nations the recognition of ethics by social research institutions took longer to gain acceptance. For instance, following its US counterpart it was not until 1985 that the British Psychological Society (BPS) published its first code of ethical conduct (British Psychological Society 2009). Similarly, it was not until the following decade that the British Sociological Association and parallel professional associations representing sociologists and allied social researchers in mainland Europe and Australasia launched codes and guidelines based on those of their US counterparts—​the British Educational Research Association developed its guidelines in 1992, explicitly citing the American Educational Research Association guidelines as a source of much of its content (British Educational Research Association 1992). By the early millennium, most Western associations and societies of most social scientific disciplines had their own guidelines and largely agreed upon a number of core ethical concepts. The core concepts changed little in later revisions of guidelines in the decades that followed, with the most prevalent of these concepts including issues such as:

Ethics in Western Social Research  139 •

• •

•

•

•

The responsibility of the researcher to the research profession.This included points such as the responsibility of the researcher to uphold the good standing of the wider educational community and the responsibility to represent research data in the most honest and objective manner possible. The rights of the subjects of research. This included issues such as the research participants having the right to consent, and the right to withdraw from the study at any time during the study. The responsibility of the researcher to the public. This issue delineated between the duty of researchers to write in a way that is accessible to all whilst at the same time preserving the anonymity of those involved in the research. This issue was later discussed as a so-​called risk/​benefit equation (Imperiale and Casadevall 2018). The relationship that the researcher has with their sponsor. This issue is linked to the duty of the researcher to avoid undue influences from the political or private interests of sponsors and the independence of data and its governance by social researchers. The intellectual ownership of the research. This issue stresses that social researchers who are themselves less powerful than their professional line managers or sponsors, and who carry out the substantive portions of the research, should be able to claim an element of ownership of the research. For instance, junior researchers and students should have the right to being named as an author of subsequent publications, and if they are the main researcher they should be named as a first author. The relationship that the researcher holds with their host institution. This issue has largely inspired institutions such as universities and colleges to create their own codes of ethics that attempt to pre-​empt disputes between researchers or students and supervisors or funding bodies.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following issues and try to come up with solutions to the problems that arise as a result of them. DISCUSSION: There is a strong imperative for research to be ethical, however there has been criticism of ethical guidelines and codes, and the philosophies that underpin them. For example Foster (1999) made the following criticism of the British Educational Research Association Guidelines that can be applied to numerous Western guidelines in other subject areas, such as sociology, policy studies, social work, and anthropology: •

Guidelines generalized research, and they attempted to cover all research situations in a single set of rules.

140 Concepts • •

• •

Guidelines simplified highly complex philosophical issues, such as the interpretation of the truth. Foster doubted whether there can be any simple truth that can ever be fully proven. It was doubted that many social researchers could always specify a purpose for what they were trying to achieve at the beginning of their research (Homan 1991). In many cases, particularly exploratory studies that do not start with a hypothesis, the focus of the research may actually change during the course of a study. Informing the research subjects of all aspects of research can lead to behavioral change by research participants and therefore reduce the objectivity of observational data. Non-​professional researchers, particularly those pursuing what is now called citizen science or participatory research, were often sidelined by ethical guidelines. It was felt that research by non-​specialists blurred the traditional framework of research and any traditional assumptions that social researchers may have.

Summary This chapter has discussed the necessity to consider ethical concepts in Western social research. In common with science itself, the study of these ethics has a heritage dating back to Ancient Greece, and therefore the philosophy of ethics is as old as the philosophy of methodology. However, as this chapter also showed, these philosophies of ethics were not introduced to Western social science until the latter half of the twentieth century and in some cases the twenty-​first century. The philosophies that established modern Western ethics have now been interpreted in a current social and cultural context through guidelines, laws and policies by national and international associations and institutions, and are often based on a number of core concepts, including: the media used to record research data; the sensitivity shown towards the participants in the research, particularly those who cannot conceive conventional research media; the consent and involvement of the subject in all stages of the research, and the right to withdraw from studies; the anonymity of the research subjects to protect the mental and physical well-​being, personality and identity of the participants; the final dissemination of the data fairly, and the consideration of dissemination that does not undermine the research participants or the underlying aims of the research for personal gain. This chapter also examined the ever-​changing philosophies that underpin the creation of ethical codes, guidelines, policies and laws in Western social science. Furthermore, the chapter observed that ethical guidelines in particular were criticized for their generalizations that gave little practical help to social researchers during their social research.

Ethics in Western Social Research  141 It can be said that the study of ethics is never a binary issue. When social researchers gain ethical approval they still cannot take it for granted that other ethical issues will not arise as they conduct their field studies, or that the ethical issues they predicted will remain constant. Thus, beyond ethical approval social researchers are personally responsible for their own ethical practice in real time, and need to ensure ethical oversight and responsibility based on the best and most reliable philosophical knowledge. In the following chapter, this book examines the development of dissemination of research findings, methodology and analysis through publication, and the peer review and editing process that is designed to develop validity of social research.

9 Writing and Recording Research Outputs

Introduction This chapter examines the process of creating visual, written, oral, and multimedia social research outputs; examines how to structure an output and how it is submitted to a journal or directly to a publisher; and considers how to write and refine an academic essay. This chapter also examines the structure of academic conferences; examines how presentations are developed and presented; considers the process involved in editing and developing presentations; discusses how to discern between academic articles, monographs or multiply authored books, reports, and theses; and considers what authors and readers look at attaining from research outputs. The aims of this chapter are to: (1) explain the process of developing research outputs and what their purpose is; (2) understand how to structure an academic argument in an output; (3) create the intellectual skills needed to present research orally or virtually to an audience, and how this presentation enhances a portfolio of research; (4) help readers structure writing in future research; (5) define impact and what it involves. The questions that pose the theme for this chapter are: 1. How do you structure an empirical output for different audiences? 2. What are different audiences looking for in a research output? 3. How can we ensure impact in research, and that research has use for the public at large?

Concepts Introduced Through this Chapter Research Output/​Outputs: Western social scientific research output is the communication of social research to an audience or a number of audiences.The audience for research is primarily other researchers, students, and academics, who use this output as raw material for their teaching or research. Secondary audiences for research outputs include government departments, businesses, institutions such as hospitals or schools, journalists, and the public with an interest in the topic. Research outputs are customarily written in what can be DOI: 10.4324/9781003241997-11

Writing and Recording Research Outputs  143 called academic language in peer-​reviewed journal articles or academic books, but more often are being offered in alternative formats, such as the spoken word, on video or through multimedia outputs. NOTE: In keeping with the principle of the general demarcation problem discussed in Chapter 3, there are structures and protocols of Western research outputs that range from militant positivism to elitist authoritarianism, and that stand in opposition to epistemological anarchism (Lakatos 1999). Importantly, there is a structured selection process of research outputs and there are standards of research work and ethics that cover the production, selection, and editing of research outputs. These publishing and presenting standards are often set by institutions or associations for scientists themselves, although they can also be developed by publishers or conference organizers, and are increasingly commercial and commodifiable. Editors/​Edited Works/​Editorial: In Western science, the work of the editor is one of the key roles in developing and ensuring the quality of research outputs. The job of the editor along with associate editors and members of an editorial board, what can be called the editorial team, is to outline the structure of an academic journal, a book, a book series, its scope and what is and what is not acceptable. The editorial team then filters articles, chapters or volumes within their journal, book or book series, individually or as a part of a corporate decision. NOTE: Importantly, the editor of a journal, a book or book chapter also chooses or at least has a say in choosing the peer-​reviewer for their journal or book, and adjusts the language of finished chapters or articles for publication. In this respect, it can be said that an editor is a powerful gatekeeper of Western social scientific research, directing the language that is allowable in social scientific outputs and ultimately providing a filter for what is permissible as social scientific knowledge. NOTE: It is important to understand that there are two types of editor in Western science: the academic editor and what is called for the purposes of this book the regular editor. The academic editor is not a professional editor although it can be argued that they are often paid indirectly, as they are often employed as academics and see it as part of their role to be involved in academic outputs as either a writer or an editor. Even though an editor is not directly paid for her or his work by a publisher, or if they are paid it will only be a token amount to avoid direct forms of corruption or bias, the academic editor is also largely responsible for the integrity of the academic content. By contrast, the regular editor of an academic book is perhaps what is most commonly thought of as a traditional professional editor, as she or he works as part of a publishing community who works for a publishing company, an association or similar or is freelance, and he or she is a highly skilled professional editor. Regular editors do nothing but develop skills in commissioning and publishing work, and can be called language and publishing process specialists. However, both forms of editor can be said to be specialists in their academic subject, e.g. a regular editor trained in sociology would not generally edit a book on medical studies or neuroscience.

144 Concepts NOTE: In the regular publishing world, regular editing is a profession that involves a long and highly involved training process, usually involving an academic degree and a vocational training in the skills of publishing. Regular editing also has a career path, where most editors start in jobs such as assistant editor and the profession has its own epistemological tradition, professional associations and trade periodicals, such as the US magazine Publisher’s Weekly. For instance, the editor of this book, who is employed by Routledge in Oxfordshire, is a good example of a regular editor. As a regular editor, she has a field of publishing, academic publishing. Hannah also has a focused specialism within this field, which are publications in the social sciences, and has academic qualifications and experience in this field. Other editors from other publishing houses may be in the field of non-​fiction and specialize in topics such as travel books, cookery, biographies, politics, and other forms of popular non-​fiction. Alternatively, they may work in the fields of fiction or poetry and specialize in genres, such as crime fiction, spy novels, romantic fiction, or contemporary or traditional poetry CAVEAT: No matter what their field or specialism, the roles of the regular editor in Western science are generally the same wherever and whoever they work for. For example, the editor’s roles include but are not restricted to commissioning books from authors, making sure the contents fit the proposal for the book, making sure that the language is appropriate, that the language and style of text fits with the publisher’s professional style and, perhaps most important of all, bringing books into production—​including this one! NOTE: In Western social science, and like peer reviewers, academic editors have little convention, training or rules they have to follow in selecting authors for research outputs. Consequently, and in common with the principle of elitist authoritarianism (Lakatos 1999), this puts the editor and peer-​reviewer in a position where he or she has as much or more power than any other in the construction of an epistemological narrative in their field. This issue of power is particularly focused on the academic editor, as he or she ultimately decides whether to accept a research output either because of or despite the recommendation of a peer reviewer. Furthermore, this decision is often made without an appeal process or clear reasons needing to be given beyond the peer review, leaving room for what may be described as potentially corrupt practices. Thus, although they do not have direct power over other academics’ careers, they can be said to have indirect power through arbitrary rules and Western academic conventions. Peer Review/​Peer Reviewer: A scientific peer review is an unpublished, confidential report on an academic document, such as a research output, a funding proposal or even a report on the impact of a publication. Peer reviews also contain some form of recommendation, such as whether an output should be published as a book or in a book or journal, or whether a research proposal by a potential researcher or team of researchers should gain funding. The peer

Writing and Recording Research Outputs  145 review also contains recommendations for any changes that should be made before publication. The peer reviewer is usually, but not exclusively, an academic or a researcher who has expertise in the field in which they are writing the review, or someone who has expertise in the impact, practice or output of a piece of research. In Western academic culture, it is felt to be an honor or a privilege to be asked to peer review a document, and the form and number of reviews that are undertaken is often recorded in some way, as the nature of the review can be thought to denote academic status. As it is thought to be a part of an academic’s role or it is thought to be an honor to review in certain journals or books, or for certain publishers or funders, peer reviewing is rarely paid, and if it is paid, payment is usually small, in kind or as products. For example, academic publishers may offer peer reviewers books up to a certain value for conducting a peer review of a book proposal, or a smaller payment than the value of the books as a token amount. NOTE: As a part of the culture of peer review, two or more anonymous people conducting the review are referred to as a double-​blind peer review, a triple-​blind peer review, etc., although for simplicity academics tend to refer to all multiple reviews as double-​blind. The reviewers are often recruited by and only known to the editor or the publisher of the output, and each of these multiple reviewers are supposed to be not known to each other. As part of publishing culture, it is thought that the larger the number of peer reviews the more reliable and democratic the decision to publish, as it is with the process of triangulation of data. NOTE: Peer reviews also exist in other areas of Western academic culture, such as the review of applications to a university-​based board of ethics, or the evaluation of academics’ or university departments’ research outputs to rank them against other departments or universities. Academics are also sometimes asked to peer review promotion or job applications, or asked to review applications for memberships or fellowships of professional bodies, associations or societies. Therefore, as this chapter argued above, the position of peer reviewer can hold tremendous power in Western academic culture, as it can influence the esteem, livelihood or career of a fellow academic. CAVEAT: The term “peer” supposedly denotes equivalence of academic, professional rank, or at least a person of an equivalent academic status. However, for practical reasons it is not often possible to find someone who is or a number of others who are of exactly the same status, subsequently peer reviews are not always conducted by people of the same academic rank or by people who are experts in the field. There is also rarely any formal training in the field of peer review, and in the case of double-​blind reviews, there is no consultation process between reviewers, i.e. there is generally little moderation of peer reviews, except by an editor (see below). The process of peer review can thus be said to be a relatively organic one, with few stated rules or conventions, and can lead to the exclusion of

•If provisionally accepted for publication with changes, the document is sent back to author(s) to make changes

Changed Document Resubmitted

changes to the document, or send to peer reviewers

•The academic editor makes a further decision based on reviews, and the document with changes is sent back to author(s)

Move Forward for Publication

another publication or suggest

•The peer reviewer will send their report with a decision and possible changes that can be made

Second Editorial Decision

•The academic editor can reject, recommend

Peer Reviewers’ Decision

•This may come after internal peer review or informal approach to academic editor

Editorial Decision

S u b m is s io n o f O u tp u t

146 Concepts

•The document with changes is sent back and the academic editor decides to accept or reject, with no further changes allowed if accepted

Figure 9.1 The Peer Review Process.

research outputs based on research for non-​academic purposes, language status, or because writers do not follow scientific conventions. For example, it has been argued that the traditional cultural practice of peer review has excluded academics based on their country status (Canagarajah 1996). The peer review process is illustrated in Figure 9.1.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following questions. QUESTION:What issues do you think may arise during peer review, for example where might subjective decisions occur, where may peer reviewers misunderstand the quality of the output? How do you think that peer review might be made more objective?

The Concept of Western Scientific Outputs Trends in Publishing Outputs It is arguable that there are mismatches in the production of research outputs between the producers of outputs and the audiences for whom they are designed. For example, are these outputs creative works with imaginative and

Writing and Recording Research Outputs  147 highly aesthetic prose or are they simply receptacles of information or knowledge that are meant to be easily digested within a general body of literature and knowledge, i.e. a small, often impersonal piece of an epistemological jigsaw puzzle? The former is often more enjoyable for the producer of the output, and the latter is often more efficient for the reader, who only wants to gain knowledge quickly and efficiently, before getting back to their novel or film for enjoyment. Of course, the creativity with which an output is developed may depend on whether the output is a lab report or an exposition of ideas or a more creative case study in order to demonstrate a point, and thus some outputs lend themselves to creativity whereas others do not. Whatever the need for producing an output, perhaps the most significant tension is the tension between the reader and writer of the output, as the reason the output is being produced is not necessarily what the reader needs from the output itself. Research on publishing research literature itself also appears to suggest that there is an intrinsic tension between the producers of the output, with the motivations of authors changing little. For instance, the results of author surveys of journal articles published by the international publisher Elsevier in 2002 and 2009 appeared to show that authors increasingly have personal motives for developing their publications and that there was an explosion of scientific publishing as a result (Mabe and Mulligan 2011). The survey for this study was with corresponding authors of journal articles, i.e. usually the first named author on an article, who submits and processes the article on behalf of the other authors. For instance, the survey observed that over 38,500 articles were published in Elsevier journals in 2002, with most authors being academics or other forms of professional researcher, and with only a few authors being postgraduate or doctoral students. In this initial survey, most authors had research as part of their job contract, with over two thirds working for universities or other higher education institutions. Of these authors, almost one fifth of respondents were named on up to five articles a year, and up to three quarters had their names on 25 articles in five years, although these were not necessarily single-​author articles, so the contribution to these articles was unknown. The Elsevier study showed that the authors who published in 2002 also chose their journal for what they felt was its intrinsic quality, i.e. how personally good they felt the journal actually was, although they stated refereeing quality and external quality factors, such as the reputation and impact factor of the journal were also highly important. In addition, authors in this early survey felt that the speed at which an article was published, and their preferred editor were also important but not as important as perceived quality. Interestingly, the physical quality of the journal, i.e. what it looked like, and publisher services such as design and marketing, and so forth were thought to be of little interest to these authors. By the 2009 survey of Elsevier journals, the number of corresponding authors had grown to almost 63,400, although their attitudes towards their output were broadly the same as in 2002, as were many of the demographics of these authors.

148 Concepts However, there was an exception to this demographic, as those doctoral and postgraduate students who chose to publish their work almost doubled in this seven-​ year gap, with 10 percent being the corresponding author in 2009. One other interesting observation from this era was that articles attributed to single authors had become fewer in the previous 50 years. This number seemed to suggest that there were a greater number of researchers becoming authors on what we may call corporate articles, but that authors were consistently associated with more or less the same number of articles in their career, thus a broader range of research was being published as associated with a greater number of researchers.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following questions. QUESTION: Why do you think that the number of research outputs and researchers publishing researchers has increased rapidly? Do you think this increase of outputs is a good thing, or do you think that there may be disadvantages to such an increase in the number of outputs?

Repositories of Research and Open Access Outputs Another significant concept that has arisen in the past decades is the depositing of outputs in databases and online in Western scientific and academic databases, and whether the information and knowledge in these databases should be free or paid for by the audience or the developer of the article. The most common method of depositing outputs at present is the research repository, which is a database of research outputs often referenced by the authors of the research outputs, and stored and published by universities.These repositories include specialist subject repositories run by professional or scientific organizations, such as ATHENS, or commercial, governmental or NGO repositories, such as PubMed that is described as the US national library of medicine, or Google Books. For some, when research outputs have been created, they are a significant part of the culture of modern Western science and allow scientists to examine ways of promoting the ideas or findings of their research outputs for free and to everyone. This form of publishing and repositing is termed open access publishing. For others, these depositories should be restricted or at least paid for, to recognize the work and value of the developers, or to preserve some degree of exclusiveness to knowledge production. NOTE: In Western scientific publishing culture, open access is available as two standards: gold or green open access, with green being embargoed for a

Writing and Recording Research Outputs  149 period of time or downloadable with permission of the copyright owner, and gold open access being free all the time.There is often a charge to make outputs open access, with gold being more expensive than green on the whole. There are a few exceptions to this open access process, and these are outputs published by individuals, government organizations, projects, or associations, such as the European Commission’s portal, Europa.eu, which are free to publish and to read—​although Europa only publishes its own reports. Some writers also negotiate with publishers and perform tasks such as peer review in exchange for free publishing as open access. NOTE: The argument that many publishers make for offering free-​to-​read open access documents, is that they are either paid for from donations, grants, private funds and through free use of time, so they should be available to all. Open access supposedly democratizes research as it makes outputs available to readers beyond academia, thus science and social science is not restricted to the wealthy or elitist institutions alone. CAVEAT: In reality, it can be argued that even if documents are open access, they are not accessible to all. For example, as the language of academic outputs can use restricted codes peculiar to academia or individual disciplines, the reader still has to have a knowledge of the discipline and training to interpret or use the output for their own usage. Consequently, as there is pre-​payment to develop the output it is arguable that only the wealthy or those who are sponsored can publish open access documents, and therefore construct a different form of inequality in open access publishing. CAVEAT: In more recent times, open access publishing has become particularly controversial, as a number of business people have started multiple open access journals to publish research often in broad subjects with these journals often not started by academics themselves—​although some academics have associated themselves with them. Many of these journals have rapid publishing agendas and quick peer reviews, and publish purely open access for a publication fee. This fee is often a large sum of money, and it is said to pay for services such as formatting, typesetting, editing, and advertising. As a result of the growth of these small journal businesses, open access publishing has been criticized as it is said to take advantage of the need for academics and professional researchers to publish to maintain their career or gain tenure to start their career. In addition, some academics are cold-​call-​ emailed (spammed) by people representing these journals, and this has caused consternation and criticism about the quality of these journals. NOTE: More recently, business-​oriented academic journals have become known as predatory journals, and listed on various websites by academic librarians such as Bealls List, which is itself now defunct following the retirement of Beall after whom it was named. However, these lists themselves have become controversial, although again this debate is ongoing, and like Western science itself shows the evolving nature of what standard publishing protocols are (da Silva, Moradzadeh, et. al. 2022).

150 Concepts

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following questions. QUESTION: Do you think that open access publications are a force for good or bad in modern Western science? Do you think that open access publications can be or should be regulated? If you do believe in regulation, how do you think open access can be regulated?

Developing Research Outputs Using Standard Protocols As this is an introductory book, this chapter will only discuss academic outputs, such as those for a peer-​reviewed publication or for university assessment in the form of a thesis or dissertation. In this context, scientific writing, graphics or oral or multimedia recordings for academic audiences generally follow a rigid structure, and this structure has developed over generations. For those who want to see how much this process has evolved, examine articles that existed before the Second World War and particularly those that existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in journals such as the Edinburgh Magazine and Review. These early academic articles tended to take the form of a letter, rarely mentioned methodology, and often contained simple political or religious diatribes. Different academic subjects and disciplines also tend to follow different structures and protocols of output, and these structures are presented by journals, publishers or organizations. For example, the American Psychological Association has a rigid essay-​writing structure and protocol, a proscribed form of language, and a citation and referencing system that apply to many psychology journals and psychology courses. For those writing on subjects such as health or technology and society or similar, organizations such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and medical journals also have very strict codes, and their own reference systems. In the case of IEEE and ACM, they also run their own publishing houses, which are now online and publish a wide range of documents from conference proceedings to highly regarded journals. Most journals and conferences which publish their proceedings, multimedia articles, oral submissions, academic theses, books and edited books nowadays require the following elements when they are first submitted: abstract, keywords, the author names and the correspondence address of the first author, often called the corresponding author (traditionally outputs used a physical address, though mostly now this is an email correspondence and rarely a telephone number), an introduction, some form of review of the literature, a methodology (which itself includes ethics), findings, discussion of these findings

Writing and Recording Research Outputs  151 (although sometimes the discussion is included in the findings, this may happen in grounded theory studies), and usually a conclusion. These elements are summarized more fully below. Abstract: The abstract briefly summarizes what follows, including the question, the hypothesis or the problem addressed by the study, the methodology and the methods, a brief summary of results in a sentence or two, and what has been included equally briefly. This abstract should be a taster of what is to follow rather than being a tiny version of the study. From this abstract, the reader should be able to decide whether or not to read the whole article, i.e. together, the title and the abstract should stand on their own. Many authors prepare the abstract after fully completing their output, so that it accurately reflects the contents of their paper. Introduction: If nothing else, the reader should understand what the study is about from the introduction alone. It is recommended that the introduction should start with a hypothesis if it is a deductive study, or an overarching research question if it is an inductive study. Outputs should also try to avoid starting with a lengthy description of the context of the study, it should start with a statement such as, “This study is about …” Following the opening information, the introduction should be followed by: the study’s aims and objectives; if there is space, a description of the context of the study, i.e. the background, of the study; a brief, clear statement about how the study is unique yet fits into the literature of the study; the model that it uses as its instrument of analysis, its methodology and its data collection methods; lastly, the introduction should give a brief synopsis of each section and chapter that is to follow. Review of Existing Literature: Many people misunderstand the need or place of general reviews of the existing literature in the field, and often only include their reviews because it is felt to be necessary. In reality, the literature review is one of the most important elements of an output and epistemologically the review is particularly valuable in defining the greater place of the output being produced to the research and academic culture that it exists within. Vitally, the literature review shows the ideas and knowledge, which can be seen as the knowledge framework or terms of reference that form the basis of the study, and it identifies the author’s or authors’ critical perspective and what she, he or they stand for intellectually. For instance, if a person or group are Marxists, they establish the literature on Marxism from which they draw. Are they neo-​Marxists? Are they economists? And so forth. If there is a single theory or model that is being used as an instrument of analysis, such as a feminist model, this is where the model of analysis is introduced and the literature that supports and challenges this instrument need to be introduced. Also importantly, there needs to be an introduction at the beginning of the literature review, outlining its aims and any literature searching methods, such as keywords used and databases or libraries searched in. At the end of the review, there should be a conclusion and a link made at the end of this conclusion that

152 Concepts connects to the methodology. For example, it could be written, “Because A, B and C find this, the idea that D can be challenged or needs reinvestigating. Therefore, what follows in the next [chapter or section] is the methodology that is used to conduct this new study [i.e. the re-​investigation].” It is also advisable to add two or three highly specific research questions to the conclusion, these questions can include the variables and context of the study. Generally speaking, and with very few exceptions, there should be no more than three questions, as the study will lose focus if there are too many points to address. NOTE: It is often advised that where possible most of the literature in the review should be within five or ten years of your time of writing or recording. This is true of studies in a topic or field that is the focus of a number of studies, and where it is important to acknowledge the latest studies in the field—​although these may not be the most important studies, and this should also be noted. CAVEAT: It is also permissible and even recommended that the classical studies that are at the root of current studies should also be cited and referenced, and this book is a case in point of this adage as the most important writing on social research is from the previous millennium. CAVEAT: There are studies where there are few if any similar studies or research outputs, and therefore few if any studies to cite or reference. In these circumstances, the author(s) are advised to cite the most important studies in their field regardless of the date of the references and old findings to place the literature in context. CAVEAT: In systematic literature reviews there are specific methods and processes of searching, and the chosen method needs to be stated up front before the literature is searched, as in this instance it can be said that the literature is the data. Similarly, in what are felt to be traditional grounded theory studies, where the literature is reviewed alongside the fieldwork during the study, the literature being reviewed is either a part of or forms the majority of the data itself (Hayhoe 2020). In this instance, some traditional grounded authors present an analysis of the literature within the presentation of the data and the analysis, although this is personal opinion. Methodology and Data Collection Methods: This section of the output provides the reader with enough details so they can understand and replicate the research study being discussed in the output. This section should also explain the ontology and epistemology of the study, how the author or authors studied the problem or issue at hand through data collection and analysis, and the ethical considerations and guidelines used in the study. From there, the author or authors should identify the procedures that were followed during data collection, and the order in which these issues or problems were approached chronologically where possible. Importantly, this section should explicitly name the data collection methods and cite published work that was used as a model of data collection. If possible, this section should also include the frequency, sampling of participants and the taxonomies of data that were recorded. Authors should be precise in describing

Writing and Recording Research Outputs  153 the issues that the study faced, such as not being able to recruit participants or participants withdrawing, and then discuss research design limitations. Results: The author should objectively present their findings, and then explain what was observed in the data, unless it was a grounded theory, in which case it is also possible to start analyzing here. In other cases, in-​depth analysis of the data should not be conducted in this section and no mention should be made about how these new results contribute to the body of scientific knowledge. The results section should follow a logical sequence, usually the order that the data was collected in, and should be based on the tables and figures, or sample prose with notes and quotes, presenting the findings to answer the question or hypothesis. Figures should also have a brief description, otherwise called a legend, that provides the reader with sufficient information to know how the data is presented, and what it is supposed to mean. Discussion or Analysis: The discussion should describe what the results from the previous section mean in context of what was already known about the subject. This section should also indicate how the results relate to expectations and to the literature previously cited in the literature review, and it is generally expected that no new literature is introduced at this point in the output. In this section, the author should explain how the research has moved the body of scientific knowledge forward and is unique or confirming of previous studies. NOTE: The author should not extend his or her conclusions beyond what is directly supported by her or his results, and by doing so should avoid undue speculation that is not supported explicitly by the data. For instance, if the data collected and analyzed is about issues to do with women who grew up in the 1970s, then it should not be suggested that the same could be said of women in the 1960s or 1980s, or even that this could effect girls being raised now. Conclusion: Some articles do not include conclusions, for example lab reports in psychology studies sometimes just finish with an analysis of the data according to a hypothesis. Conversely, some authors leave the discussion of their data to their conclusion. This is not important to the structure of the output, but it is a general convention that if a conclusion is added to an output, it should refer directly to the findings of the research. Importantly, conclusions should encapsulate the meaning of the study, preferably deductively point the way for their meaning in a broader context and include recommendations for practice based on the research. For instance, conclusions can include: possible changes to policy or the development of new policies; improvements to the way that issues or problems should be measured or addressed in future, including Key Performance Indicators (KPIs); recommendations for changing the management of institutions and changes to professional practice. In this section, what the study could not achieve and the next steps for further study should be discussed, and possible future philosophies of research can be included if there is scope to do so.

154 Concepts References: Whenever authors draw upon previously published outputs, it is vital that they acknowledge the source of this output, both to acknowledge the idea and thus not plagiarize, and so that claims made in the output can be verified.These references should also relate precisely to the citations in the contents of the output, i.e. if the author cites a work it must appear in the references, and if there is literature in the references it must have been cited in the previous sections. The references and citations should also explicitly follow a standard and named system of referencing and citation to avoid any ambiguity in validation of the research.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following questions. QUESTION: Why is it so important that there are standard structures and formats for scientific research outputs? What are the problems with insisting that social researchers follow a set format when they develop a research output?

Publishing a Research Output Taxonomies of Research Outputs Research outputs can be classified in various ways, and in this chapter we are going to examine two of the most general classifications, although it should be noted that these classifications are limited as this is a general text and its classifications of outputs are fluid. The most used method of classifying documents is by their form of output, with these outputs falling into the following general categories: 1. Live or recorded presentations, usually made at conferences, but increasingly being videoed and published as “talks,” such as TED or TEDx talks, recorded lectures or interviews, or the growing number of short presentations recorded by universities. These outputs are usually selected but not peer reviewed. 2. Written articles in conference proceedings, edited reports or occasional papers, journals or annals, which are still seen as the standard academic outputs by universities and similar institutions. These outputs are almost always peer reviewed, particularly those presenting selective research findings. 3. Government, commercial, charity, policy or non-​governmental organization reports of research findings. These reports are usually published at the end of research projects and both report on the results of a commissioned

Writing and Recording Research Outputs  155

4.

5.

6.

7.

research project by an organization, or are the results of an evaluation of a public engagement, knowledge exchange, an innovation or a design project. These outputs may be peer reviewed by colleagues or the commissioning organization, but are rarely double-​blind peer reviewed in the traditional sense of the phrase. Books, including monographs, multiple authored books, or edited collections of related articles and chapters by multiple authors. The proposals for these books are peer reviewed, or if these are edited books of collected chapters, the chapters are often peer reviewed. Blogs, which is a contraction of the phrase web log, and which can be anything from a Tweet or Facebook post, assuming that when this book is read these forms of blog will still exist, to a full essay or article designed for a broad audience. A limited number of these outputs are peer reviewed, although peer reviewing even scientific blogs is rare. News broadcasts, which are mostly written by journalists who are at least one step away from the study being reported, or more rarely by the scientist themselves. These are never peer reviewed, although they will be selected by news editors. Podcasts or vlogs, the former is a spoken sound recording and the latter of which is a video web log which is a spoken and videoed output, and occasionally includes captions. These are occasionally peer reviewed, such as in the case of Sage Case Methods videos, but this is rare, and they are more often selected or invited by editors.

The second way of classifying research outputs is by the purpose of the output and its contribution to the social sciences, with these purposes falling into the following typical categories: 1. Reporting on a research project, such as those this chapter has discussed above, either as a full report of the findings and analysis presented at the end of a project, intermediary findings part-​way through a research project or in their very earliest stages, or outputs on the nature of the research at the beginning of a study. 2. Stimulating or starting discussions about subjects or issues that are of contemporary importance to social research or in the social sciences. For instance, this may be a discussion of a particularly contentious political or public policy that has an effect on the public. 3. To start, stimulate or add to a debate on an aspect of a social scientific topic or a point of methodology, such as a new way of applying a methodology like phenomenology or ethnography, or debating the mores of a particular issue such as anonymity in ethics. 4. To explore or expose myths in public understanding of an element of the social sciences, such as to criticize a particular theory or policy that holds sway at a particular time and in a particular place, but research evidence points against its efficacy.

156 Concepts 5. To support or refute others’ findings, such as a letter to an editor that may point out faults in a previous research article, or an editorial that takes issue with a form of research or a particular research project. 6. To make a philosophical opening into a field or to raise awareness of new concepts or different forms of methodology or analysis, such as emancipatory research or multi-​level regression, or to discuss the possible applications of new technologies. Example of a Research Output:The Culture of Western Scientific Conferences Conferences are often organized by university departments or academic centers, government departments or non-​governmental organizations such as think-​ tanks, academic groups with an interest in a topic such as the promotion of a theory or the inclusion of a social group, academic and research associations or societies, such as the American Sociological Association or the Asia Pacific Educational Research Association. Conferences are generally regional, national or international, with all these conference organizers not excluding people from other regions, nations or even continents but simply basing themselves in this area in response to their organizational culture. For instance, the author of this book has presented at national conferences in countries other than those he resided in at the time, such as UK conferences when he was based at a UAE institution, and US and Asian conferences when he was based in the UK. NOTE: International conferences can also provide new experiences for researchers from outside a region who choose to attend. For instance, the author of this book has also presented Pan-​European and US-​based research at the Asia Pacific Educational Research Association’s conference, even though he has never lived in the Asia-​Pacific region (although he has previously lived on the US side of the Pacific ocean and he is familiar with its culture). In these cases, simply having a focus on research in this area or presenting on an area of interest to this area was enough to have a presentation and paper accepted at these conferences. Examples of academic conferences include annual conferences of large single organizations such as the American Sociological Association or the Fulbright Academy, or conferences supported by Special Interest Groups (SIGs) or sub-​groups of large umbrella organizations, such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE), the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) conferences on particular specialist issues. These conferences can be single, non-​recurring events but are more likely to be annual events. Other smaller interest groups also run their own conferences, for example research students from individual or coalitions of universities usually organize their own conferences in their own subject area. NOTE: Research conferences are created by a committee of voluntary members of an organization, who are then charged with choosing the invited

Writing and Recording Research Outputs  157 presenters or advertising for potential presenters to apply. In larger conferences, particularly international conferences, this larger team splits into sub-​committees, each of which usually have different sections that run simultaneously over the period of a number of days, this typical structure is illustrated in Figure 9.2. Some conferences also include poster presentations of work, which is usually research in progress, that is exhibited in a public area of the conference, often in corridors or a large hall where people can mull around. In addition, conference organizers develop workshops and seminar sessions, break-​out sessions, discussions and debates and keynote or plenary speakers, with these latter speakers usually invited because they are felt to be leading thinkers in a particular area or topic of knowledge. The committees also decide on fee payments and concessions, and sometimes also gather fees from those attending the conference, particularly if it is a small, local conference. However, the day-​to-​day task of booking rooms, obtaining fees and designing and printing booklets with the order and timing of speakers for larger conferences in particular are usually conducted by professional administrators, who have skills and experience in this area. To present a paper or poster on a research project at conference, researchers first have to submit a proposal or more usually an abstract of the paper to be presented to the conference committee or a subcommittee by what is called a hard deadline. The hard deadline is a date after which submissions will be rejected immediately. This output has to be about an original idea or research findings, and almost all conferences insist that the work has not been presented elsewhere before. The proposal or abstract is often double-​blind peer reviewed, and then reviewed by the committee or subcommittee, after which it is judged acceptable for presentation. After peer review and organizing committee review and acceptance, presenters at the conference then create and present their paper, traditionally in the form of a paper that is handed out before or during the session, or contemporarily as a slide show and sometimes a paper. Highly organized conferences will also collect papers or at least abstracts prior to the conference and have them published on paper, CD or USB, or online prior to the conference—​ nowadays, these articles are almost entirely on the web.

Conference Articles Plenary or Keynote Talk

Breakout Sessions

Poster Sessions Discussion Groups

Figure 9.2 A Typical Conference Structure.

Breakout Sessions

158 Concepts

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following questions. QUESTION: Why do you think that academic conferences are an important part of Western scientific culture? Do you think that the structure of Western scientific conferences can be problematic, and if you think they can be, why do you think they are?

Summary This chapter has discussed the nature of research outputs and their place in the culture of Western science and social research, and the motivation of researchers to present and publish work through different media. This chapter has also examined a study by one major publisher showing a steep increase in academic publication and the new and different classifications of contemporary research outputs that mirrors modern Western science and social science. However, this chapter has also observed that what authors look for when they choose a journal to publish with remains largely the same. This chapter has also examined the use and repositing of research documents, and the nature of open access publishing, the latter of which is a new innovation that makes research outputs available for free to readers, listeners and watchers, with the stated aim of making Western science more available. However, this chapter has also observed that open access outputs are themselves controversial, many small businesses have started their own journals, and it has been stated that some of these journals may be profit-​driven rather than exist with the intention of making Western science more open and democratic. Importantly, this chapter has examined the peer-​review process, and how this process reflects the subjective and evolving nature of Western scientific culture, and also examined the sections that a typical Western scientific output may include. Lastly, this chapter has presented an example of a popular form of research output, the academic conference, the structure of academic conferences, how these conferences are organized and discussed their selection process. In the next chapter this book examines public engagement, knowledge exchange, and most importantly their impact on Western social research.

10 Developing Impact and Public Involvement in Social Science

Introduction This chapter discusses how knowledge can be transferred from Western social researchers, institutions, and the public, and the concepts of impact, knowledge exchange, public engagement and participatory practice and research. This chapter also introduces the three-​Ws model of public engagement and participatory practice, and provides an example of its use in a once-​live European project, which included paths to impact that were a part of the participatory project. The aims of the chapter are to: (1) begin a debate on the social purpose of Western science and social research; (2) encourage the development of possible strategies for creating impact in research; (3) raise the profile of participatory practice as a means to develop impact, and add to the debate on what participatory practice can bring to Western science and social research; (4) add to a critical debate on the measurement of impact. The questions that frame the theme of this chapter include: 1. How do you engage the public with research, and exchange knowledge between academics, institutions, governments, and individuals? 2. What does society gain from Western science and social research, and what responsibility does Western science and social research have to society? 3. How can social researchers increase the impact and public use of their research?

Concepts Introduced Through this Chapter Knowledge Exchange: Knowledge exchange is simply the passing-​ on of previously constructed knowledge or the generation and sharing of new knowledge or existing knowledge in a new context or way. This exchange of knowledge occurs between the person who created or previously acquired the knowledge (the commissioned researcher) and an institution or individual person (the commissioner), the latter of which undertakes this process for their own benefit or for a perceived wider benefit. DOI: 10.4324/9781003241997-12

160 Concepts NOTE: The knowledge exchanged between the commissioned researcher and the commissioner does not need to be generated by the commissioned researcher. The researcher only needs to have expertise and superior knowledge of the field or be seen as an expert to draw on to gain a commission. The commissioned researcher may also be known for a skill or theory rather than a broad understanding of the knowledge itself. For instance, an academic may be commissioned for their knowledge of ethnography or statistical analysis using a particular form of regression. They do not claim to have invented either the technology or statistical technique, but their knowledge is sophisticated enough to be able to provide exchangeable knowledge in specialist contexts or public engagement projects. NOTE: One of the most common forms of knowledge exchange practices is consultancy or advisory roles, where a commissioned researcher is most commonly brought into an organization or institution to help construct a new design or development or to evaluate existing processes. Advisory and consultancy work can also help with the development of new policies or inform or improve the practice of an organization, institution or process. For instance, when the World Health Organization (WHO) set up the WHO Academy to develop health and medical education on a global scale it commissioned a committee of advisors who acted as a steering committee for the initial pedagogical direction of The Academy. Generally, organizations and institutions want to buy into the knowledge of a commissioned researcher, and use it for a project to forward their individual purposes or for the purposes of improving the broader society in some way. In this instance, organizations can include: local, national, and international governments, Non-​ Governmental Organizations (NGOs), international collaborations of nations, such as the UN and its sub-​organizations (such as the World Bank,WHO, or the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)), businesses, charities, galleries and museums, trade unions, and individuals who want to use knowledge for business or personal enrichment. Public Engagement: Public engagement is the active practice of providing value to what are potentially those who can benefit (the beneficiaries) of research by scientists or academics, either based on new research or through a skill the researcher possesses. In contemporary social research, public engagement is increasingly being built into the design of research projects, and is seen as good practice by the research community. Furthermore, public engagement has often involved defining who the beneficiaries of research are prior to designing the research, involving, liaising with or at the very least consulting with intended beneficiaries of research prior to and during studies and projects. Public engagement also commonly involves evaluating the impact of the research after completing it according to stated goals set prior to the study. NOTE: Public engagement is a relatively contemporary issue in many fields of Western science, although the practice of engaging with the public or

Impact and Public Involvement  161 developing research that is for the public good, which can itself be a contested term, has existed for centuries. For example, medical research was set up with the intention of providing better or new forms of therapy and developing a healthier and happier society. Engineering research was developed to make better structures, machines or physical services such as electrical circuitry or plumbing, that would enrich the well-​being of individuals and provide a potentially safer and wealthier society. Whether this enrichment or betterment of society via public engagement has happened or not in reality, or whether the stated aims of researchers are the same as the end result or their real intentions is, however, a matter of debate. For instance, and as this book discussed in Chapters 3 and 5, science can be used to manipulate populations and have power over individuals or communities (see for example Foucault 2001). NOTE: Beneficiaries of public engagement can be numerous groups or communities of people, and can be classified as short-​term, mid-​term and long-​ term beneficiaries of such engagement. However, it can be argued that the longer the term the benefits of public engagement have, often what is referred to as the legacy of public engagement, the more difficult it is to define the beneficiaries of the engagement. For example, a health researcher may develop a new intervention or process to reduce accidents with older people in their homes. The short-​term benefit of this intervention or process will be that the older people have fewer accidents, which is easily measured by accident statistics.The medium-​term benefit may be older people are healthier and happier, can still have access to the greater community and thus have better well-​being. This is harder to prove as many other factors may have an effect on their health, happiness and well-​being, however long-​term statistics may show some effect if not a causal effect. CAVEAT: In the case above, showing that the families of the older people or that society benefits through this increased life, health, happiness and well-​ being is almost impossible to show, as multiple and overlapping factors effect these individual outcomes. Thus, in such projects it is often better to develop a limited long-​term benefit, such as saying, “an older person continuing to get out after the age of N …” rather than being overly ambitious about the benefits of an intervention or process. Participatory Research/​Participatory Practice: Participatory research is a more proactive form of research involving direct and emancipatory types of public engagement, which produces a more direct form of engaging with the potential beneficiaries of research than traditional research practices alone. More recently, participatory practice was defined as a contemporary social science methodology to include stakeholders in the development of research or the development of public engagement, and is thus the process of developing and practicing participatory research or pro-​active public engagement (Barton and Hayhoe 2021). NOTE: In the development of participatory practice, stakeholders are participants in research or public engagement who are to be the beneficiaries

162 Concepts of the research or the public engagement, and this may include professionals or volunteers who support, advocate for or work with participants. In co-​ design or co-​making projects, stakeholders such as designers and engineers can also be seen as participants in this participatory practice. Through this co-​design, stakeholders thus have involvement in the data collection, analysis, ethics, and dissemination of the research and with the evaluation of the public engagement. NOTE: If the process of participation is inclusive, then this methodology genuinely empowers stakeholders in the research process and the outcomes of the research, as hierarchical power in the research process is flattened. In these circumstances, the theoretical skills of the researcher only have the same value as the knowledge of the stakeholders in their own needs and circumstances. Consequently, it can be said that participatory practice in research is social science that includes its own participants in forming its own emancipatory or inclusive goals, and any form of research that does not do this cannot claim to involve participatory practice. CAVEAT: As a part of research practice, or often in their role as a member of the community that is being researched, professional researchers themselves can also be thought of as stakeholders in the research they are undertaking through participatory practice. For example, many people involved in disability studies or feminist research are themselves people with disabilities or women who themselves have experienced exclusion because of these labels, and thus have an equal voice in the end goals of the research too. CAVEAT: Although stakeholders are felt to have similar interests during research and public engagement using participatory practice, tensions between stakeholders can happen and individual participants or sub-​groups of participants can become fractious (Rix, Garcia-​Carrisoza, et al. 2021). However, if treated objectively these tensions can provide strong data for the research project it is a part of or can lead to insights that can help to evaluate or stimulate co-​creation or engagement within their communities, depending on how these tensions are managed (Barton and Hayhoe 2022).

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following questions. QUESTION: Do you feel that research can be truly participatory? If you do, why, and if you do not, what issues may stop it being truly participatory? What type of tensions do you think may occur during participatory practice?

Impact and Public Involvement  163

Impact Through Public Engagement Impact is based on the principle that social scientists are the servants of society, and to pay back much of the privilege that Western scientists are bestowed through their education and training, it can be thought of as a duty to make research of value to society. This training is provided by opportunities only afforded to a very small number of individuals, and it is a privilege that comes with a debt to the broader community who fund and participate in this research. Engaging with the greater public thus makes social scientific research meaningful, and examining how research is said to impact on society and how this impact can be measured can be seen by some researchers to be part of the ethics of research. CAVEAT: This is, admittedly, not a universal point of view, and some academics think that academics no matter how privileged their universities or backgrounds are to be given free reign to develop their research as they feel appropriate (Derbyshire 2015). However, it is the stance of this book that research is not a socially Platonic exercise and should be seen as part of the functioning of greater society in order to have meaning. So, how do social researchers plan their impact? Defining Impact in Western Social Research Like science itself, impact is a hard concept to produce a single definition for as it is used in different ways in different communities and in different professions and contexts. Simply put, in relation to Western social science research impact is seen in two different ways: the first way is academic impact, and this understanding of research is meant to denote the impact that a piece of research, a theory or even an argument or critique has on the thinking and work of other academics. Measurement is often referred to using bibliometrics in this form of impact, i.e this refers to the number of times an output is cited by other outputs, or the number of outputs a research project produces. This can be called the traditional model of Western academic impact, and is illustrated in Figure 10.1. The second way that impact is defined is the way in which social scientific research, a theory or a research finding changes something in the world beyond research. To put it another way, it is the outcome of applying a piece of research to a real-​world problem, practice or evolution as a result of social scientific work. This understanding of non-​traditional, socially-​conscious impact

Initial Study Development from Academic Curiosity

Hypothesis or Research Question Developed

Research Practice Based on Academic Curiosity

Output Developed for Academic Aims

Figure 10.1 The Traditional Model of Academic Impact Development.

Number of Publications and Citations Are Measured

164 Concepts has led to a contemporary social-​cultural-​impact-​driven model of research, where social researchers do not simply test theories or develop grand theories in isolated institutions, but take their research outside institutions, or to public-​ facing institutions. NOTE: The difference between social researchers’ needs and institutional needs can be said to cause tensions in the development of research. For example, in the academic community, either on a national or international level, the quality and quantity of research outputs are measured as part of a scientist’s reputation. Furthermore, nowadays thanks to websites such as Google Scholar or Academia.edu the reduced measurement of citations is broadcast worldwide, and these measurements can inform academic promotions. In addition, university rankings, such as the aforementioned QS World Ranking, can also reflect the image of a country, and in some countries the number of universities in the top ten or top 100 in these rankings can stimulate or be seen as a measure of a need for more higher education funding. This, it can be argued, leads to social and other forms of research being seen as like a sport, and the most decorated and highly cited scientists as being highly valuable to highly ranked universities. As a result, many “high-​performing” universities, institutes or colleges may offer incentives to keep those researchers or attract such researchers to these universities, and such incentives can arguably be seen in academic recruitment advertisements. In this chapter, although the first definition is discussed as it has an influence on academic rankings, the social-​cultural-​impact-​driven model of research is the main focus, and this development is charted in Figure 10.2. NOTE: Interpreting its definition liberally, impact can be said to be as simple as informing a person’s opinion, making people think in a different way or using a theory as the foundation of a policy, rule or the evaluation of a real-​ world problem. It could be said that this is most if not all research activity, which could in some way inform the attitudes of a reader, viewer or listener of a research output, and which triggers or sparks some form of reaction, be it positive or negative. CAVEAT: For Western social research, impact in the cultural-​social sense usually refers to a form of social change that is more tangible and that can literally be sensed as having taken place, whether that occurrence is academic or cultural-​social. For example, if a policy is drafted as a direct result of a piece of academic research, and this policy has a measurable effect on the way that people live their lives, then it can be said to have influence as it is beyond the nature of academic activity. Furthermore, if the number of people succeeding

Impact Considered as Part of the Proposal

Hypothesis or Research Question Developed

Activity Based on Needs to Develop Impact

Output That Has Some Purpose to Society or Individual

Figure 10.2 The Impact-​Driven Model of Research Development.

The Impact of this Practice is Measured

Impact and Public Involvement  165 in education or work, or the number of people being drawn out of poverty because of this new practice increases, then this research can be said to have strong impact. To provide a specific instance of cultural-​social impact, the UK funding council’s measurement of university-​ based research is defined as: “where researchers build on excellent research to deliver demonstrable benefits to the economy, society, public policy, culture and quality of life. Impacts will be assessed through a case-​study approach that will be tested in a pilot exercise” (HEFCE in Derbyshire 2015). Subsequently, in contemporary Western social research impact is often considered before or at the start of the research process, with many research commissions becoming reliant on or demanding a consideration of impact as a condition of funding. CAVEAT: The development of impact can be said to be on three different levels: impact at the individual social researcher level; impact at the departmental, center or small unit level within an institution, where cultural-​social impact is being developed as a team; impact on a whole institution level. Numerous problems arise with impact that exists at all three levels, with arguably the biggest issue being the measurement and consequent ranking of impact based on this measurement. In particular: •

•

the measurement of departments, faculties, centers, and whole institutions such as universities and colleges, which have their academic and public impact measured and ranked, and these rankings are often listed publicly. These rankings include so-​called league-​tables, such as the QS ranking or the THE rankings of institutions and subject areas. Western academic faculties, departments and universities are sometimes pressured to develop academic and cultural-​social impact, as it leads to increased research funding, which exists in an ever-​competitive environment. As universities expand or try to attract new student demographics of research fundings, it can be said that higher education becomes more commercial and commercialized (Brown, Lauder, and Ashton 2010).

NOTE: In recognition of the growing importance of impact, more recently, a number of universities have regarded cultural-​social public engagement as an important institutional issue, and as a way of getting closer to the community that they are a part of. For example, in the UK this expansion of public engagement has led to the strategizing of engagement, with the foundation of organizations such as the National Co-​Ordinating Centre for Public Engagement to examine best practices. As they state: A good public engagement strategy addresses the same questions that any effective strategy attends to. It clarifies the purpose of the activity –​why it matters; clarifies the context; and sets a clear direction of travel. (National Co-​Ordinating Centre for Public Engagement 2017)

166 Concepts

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following question as a debate, and identify what might be the points for and against the argument. QUESTION: Should all research have some form of benefit to society?

The Three-​Ws Model of Public Engagement As shown in Figure 10.3, the three-​Ws model is a way of focusing on the main considerations when developing public engagement for cultural-​social impact, with the three Ws being summarized as: 1. Who to engage (see Figure 10.4): This can be a choice as simple as identifying whether research is most impactful in institutions, with students, through the use of technology, by engaging professionals or by working with the public at large. 2. Where to engage (see Figure 10.5): This W can be split into two forms of engagement in contemporary society: and virtual spaces, such as online publications, social media platforms, websites or online films such as those shown in Figure 10.6; engagement in physical spaces, such as parks, hospitals, schools, factories, or prisons such as those shown in Figure 10.7. 3. When to engage (see Figure 10.8):The when can similarly be problematized as categories or windows of opportunity, where engagement with the public can be seen as most effective. These windows of opportunity can be short term, such as conferences or workshops), and long term, such as programs in public settings, long-​term publishing programs using generalist titles, or developing communities of practice.

WHO TO ENGAGE

WHERE TO ENGAGE

WHEN TO ENGAGE

Figure 10.3 The Three-​Ws Model of Developing Public Engagement.

Impact and Public Involvement  167

INSTITUTIONS FACILITATING TEACHING AND MAKING POLICY PEOPLE TEACHING

PEOPLE LEARNING

Figure 10.4 Who to Engage.

PHYSICAL ENGAGEMENT

VIRTUAL ENGAGEMENT

Figure 10.5 Where to Engage.

BLOGGING (including microblogging) VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT or MOOCs

Figure 10.6 Virtual Engagement.

REAL-TIME ENGAGEMENT (including chats and e-conferences)

168 Concepts

PUBLIC LEARNING SPACES (museums, hospitals)

FORMAL LEARNING SPACES (schools, universities)

INFORMAL LEARNING SPACES (libraries, parks)

Figure 10.7 Physical Engagement.

FORMAL INSTITUTIONAL EVENTS (conferences, seminars, festivals)

MEDIA (schools, universities)

INFORMAL LEARNING SPACES (community centres, parks)

Figure 10.8 When to Engage.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following questions. QUESTION: The three-​ Ws model breaks down public engagement to three issues, do you think there could be other foci in different contexts? Do you think that there could be alternative foci, i.e. do you think that one of the three Ws could be replaced by another or more than one word?

Impact and Public Involvement  169

A Case Study of Developing Participatory Impact Through the Three-​Ws Model The Background to the Project Accessible Resources for Cultural Heritage Eco-​ Systems (ARCHES) was a project that ran from 2016–​ 2019, and developed participatory practice and research in European museums with people with sensory and learning impairments. Its purpose was to co-​design accessible museum technologies such as apps and interactive reliefs, and to improve physical and virtual access to museum buildings, collections and education. The project was funded by a large European Union grant, and it initially stated that it wanted to develop impact that enabled disabled European citizens to engage in cultural heritage, and engage more with technologies, with cultural learning, information and spaces and places (Hayhoe and Garcia Carrisoza 2019). The project intended to be anti-​classification, i.e. people engaging with the project did not have to identify themselves as visually impaired or hearing impaired, or as having a learning impairment. Its specific aim was thus to create more inclusive cultural environments, particularly for those with differences associated with perception, memory, cognition and communication, as individuals might have had more than one of these impairments. ARCHES formed a partnership between museums, including the Museo Thyssen-​Bornemisza and Lazaro-​Galdiano in Madrid, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wallace Collection in London, the Kunst Historisches Museum in Vienna and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias in Oviedo, which is in northern Spain. The project also involved research and development companies, such as Treelogic who were a research and development company from Oviedo, VRVis and SignTime who produced tactile and sign-​language technologies in Vienna, Artecontacto which was a non-​ profit organization working with visually impaired people in Barcelona, and Coprix which was a software company from Belgrade. The two university partners involved in the project were the University of Bath and the Open University which are both based in the UK. The three-​Ws of this project are illustrated in Figure 10.9. ARCHES’ Participatory Practice The Who: The participants in the project were defined as people who either did or wanted to attend museums and had what would traditionally be called a disability, the people who supported these museum visitors including friends, family and professional support assistants, the professionals from the partner museums, the professionals from the partner companies and academics from the partner universities. It was well noted that a number of the professionals and academics themselves had what were traditionally

170 Concepts

WHERE (Museums, Galleries, Universities, Blogs, Website) WHO (Disabled People, Museum Professionals, Technology Companies, EU Policymakers)

WHEN (Participatory Sessions, Meetings, Final Event, Training, Media, Blogs, Articles)

Figure 10.9 ARCHES—​Inclusive Technology in Museums.

thought of as disabilities, yet whether they had or had not did not affect their right to be a participant. The Where and When: All the participants attended regular sessions between 2017–​2019 in four groups based in the museums in London, Madrid,Vienna, and Oviedo, with the museums in London, Madrid, and Vienna swapping between each of their two venues during each meeting. The number of meetings, the breaks between meetings, the communication rules for each meeting and the ethics that were to be the guiding principles of the group were all decided in the initial meetings of these groups. Another initial purpose of the sessions was to attempt to develop civic participation as a community of learning, and each participant was encouraged to communicate according to the communication rules, even if the other participants did not appreciate what was communicated. As the meetings went on, they changed to include exercises, such as critical visits to galleries or other museums or discussions on technology, and feedback was gathered during these exercises using voice recorders, cameras, and written notes. This feedback was used as data and information for the research element of the project and the co-​design of technologies. Methodologically, ARCHES was designed to develop evidence with stakeholders to encourage a better understanding of what participatory design and inclusive technology was.This was to lead to a greater cultural participation in these museums by these stakeholders through the co-​design of what were termed inclusive technologies, that were also made available to a broader pan-​ European user group in the museums. It was important for the project to show that these were made available by and in museums, or in visitors’ homes where possible during the period of the project, and this availability was recorded as a measurable outcome.

Impact and Public Involvement  171

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following questions. QUESTION: What might have been some of the assumptions that the participants (the visitors, the professionals and the academics) brought with them to the project? (Don’t look below before discussing this question.) How might future research develop or change to mitigate for or examine some of these assumptions?

The Issues that ARCHES Faced ARCHES faced a number of issues that needed to be resolved in order to claim the participation of all its participants. The first issue was that ARCHES could not claim to be completely un-​classificatory as it recruited participants from associations for the blind and the deaf (so called) and for those with learning difficulties, thus many people engaging with these associations identified themselves as blind or deaf or as having a learning difficulty. This issue became more apparent when some participant visitors arrived alone whilst others arrived in groups with supporters, and largely stayed in the groups with supporters or alone. It was also noted during the project that many participants sat in gender and age groups. The second issue faced during the project was that the co-​designed technology started to arrive at different periods, as technology takes a long time to develop and test, however a number of the participants didn’t appreciate this asynchronous nature of the development of technology. This meant that the groups started with large numbers, but as frustrations emerged the numbers attending each session waned. There were also conflicts and tensions in these sessions when what some considered to be high or independently functioning participants were frustrated by what they thought was the slow pace of communication with what they felt were low functioning participants. These other smaller issues led to tensions in the groups, and during meetings there were numerous clashes: clashes between professionals and visitors, clashes between those who struggled to make themselves heard and those who talked frequently, and clashes between groups of different people who thought of themselves as high or low functioning or having a particular type of disability. Impact Driven Through the Research Despite these issues, new designs emerged and teaching and access practices slowly changed in the participating museums, and in order to provide focus for

172 Concepts these changes, ARCHES created new impacts in accordance with the European Union’s New Agenda, and particularly focused on an element of the policy termed COM (2018) 267, which stated that there was a need to “[foster] the cultural capability of all Europeans by making available a wide range of cultural activities and providing opportunities to participate actively.” This focus led to two forms of impact: in-​project impact and beyond project impact. In-​project impact included a manifesto of inclusion drafted by a range of participants during the sessions, different social media platforms and broadcasts by the participants, a poem written by one participant on a rare Bell at the Wallace Collection during a session and broadcast, videos that were produced in Madrid and which were broadcast on the web, and a number of media articles that appeared about the project. More practical impacts were also recorded during the project, that led to more interesting and sophisticated experiences for all visitors at the partner museums. For instance, feedback from the participatory meetings and feedback to the museum management led to Wi-​Fi being installed at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias, and more accessible websites at the Kunst historisches Museum and Wallace Collection. In addition, during the participatory sessions in London, accessible sensory backpacks were developed at the Wallace Collection, and were taken out by families outside of sessions. Furthermore, sessions in all four cities involved in the project recorded a noticeable shift in attitudes by technology and museum professionals and the way that they saw museum visitors less as categories of people with access needs. This shift eventually broadened the audience for the partner museums and technologies. There were also felt to be scientific cultural-​social influences and publications that informed different systems of inclusion during ARCHES, which were initiated by the university and technological partners. For example, new technological theories of making 3D instruments and avatars using sign language were formulated by the partners throughout the project, and apps that showed what was possible when using accessible language and graphics were developed. In addition, new theories of research methodology, such as grounded methodology and different combinations of emancipatory research, were formulated. In terms of the beyond-​project impact, developments occurred in parallel with ARCHES and after the project meetings wound up. For instance, the participatory methodology was published and then used in other funded studies, including two funded educational projects. For instance, part of a project called FabLab Campana in Monterrey, Mexico, developed a public education project using the model (Hayhoe, Diaz, et. al. 2018). Similarly, one university partner went on to co-​develop a public arts project on flooding in Bath that won an arts prize and went on to be featured at several local arts festival, the world’s first Digital Festival of Nature and Amsterdam’s Water Festival (Hayhoe 2020). This form of impact demonstrated that this form of practice was applicable in different contexts and with different forms of access and inclusion and in different types of community.

Impact and Public Involvement  173 Importantly, there were noticeable beyond-​ project impacts on life course because of the project. For instance, following their involvement in the project 16 participants went on to gain awards, training and jobs in the field of cultural heritage. In one instance, a participant from Vienna won a traineeship for barrier-​free journalism at a daily newspaper and then a job at the Austrian Press Agency, and he was subsequently elected the best junior journalist in the field of accessibility. Other ARCHES visitor participants went onto unpaid training courses and volunteer work. For instance, after experiencing sign-​language during ARCHES, a participant from London registered for a sign language course in his local area. Similarly, a participant from Madrid registered for a cultural course directed at people with learning difficulties after attending ARCHES sessions. In addition, a previously unemployed participant from London started a voluntary post with her local museum after attending the ARCHES sessions, and cited her experience on ARCHES as her motivation for this post. Legacy impacts, that is impacts that went well beyond the project and its participants and effect a form of cultural change, are also important considerations in public engagement and participatory projects. For example, in terms of its long-​term legacy the results of ARCHES were published through social media posts, videos, accessible text and PDF documents via its official website, which remained live after the project, and a handbook and various publications remain in virtual space. In addition, ARCHES’ participants conducted and continue to conduct workshops for museum professionals and use their findings to inform current events in museums, and participants have presented and demonstrated the work of ARCHES through conferences and demonstrations. The audience for all these activities importantly includes academics, university students, policy makers, museum and technology professionals and end users, and this impact continues to be recorded—​the latter is vital to inform future strategies of impact development.

DISCUSSION EXERCISE In groups, using your existing knowledge of social science, discuss the following questions. QUESTION: What other impacts could ARCHES have developed? How could ARCHES researchers measure this impact qualitatively and quantitatively and should they do this?

Summary This chapter has examined the development and definitions of knowledge exchange, public engagement, and participatory practice and research, and

174 Concepts importantly it has discussed the difficulty in defining the notion of impact. Following on, this chapter has discussed the three-​Ws model of public engagement and the need to consider Where, When and with Who engagement takes place.This chapter has also discussed the issues with the institutional promotion of impact and public engagement and presented an example of a participatory research project that generated in-​project and beyond-​project impacts. Beyond this chapter and this book, two issues should be recognized. The first issue is that participatory research and public engagement are not easy research choices, or simple or inexpensive in terms of time and effort. In the modern world with extreme pressures on the time of social researchers and academics, developing public engagement may seem like something that is an additional extra at most. For some, however, it is an essential element of all research that should be an element of its ethical practice. The second issue is that the concepts of impact, knowledge exchange, public engagement, and participatory practice and research are amongst the youngest and most immature concepts in Western research, much like ethical research was in Western social science 20 years ago. Thus, these concepts are the most in need of theories, criticisms, models of implementation and study and the most in need of fresh literature and other forms of output and teaching in order for this topic to be seen as an important theme by Western social researchers. What follows is the conclusion to this book.

11 Conclusion

In the introduction to this book, I addressed three questions. What is social science, and how is it derived from a broader conceptualization of science? What is scientific knowledge? What is the way forward for social science? There were two caveats to these questions. CAVEATS: (1) These three questions were restricted by the scope of the book, and I was unable to address the infinite complexity of all these issues, although arguably no book, not even a life’s work, could achieve this. (2) There are also issues that could not be discussed in the scope of a broad text as they needed specialist analysis, such as a fuller examination of the context of historical eras that were discussed or the overlapping nature of qualitative and quantitative data. Despite these two caveats, this book now answers its questions to summarize its main arguments.

What Is Social Science, and How Is It Derived from a Broader Conceptualization of Science? The main message that the reader can take from this book is that science is not a part of nature, it is not a part of an unchanging reality, and thus it is not a direct channel to the discovery of what are assumed to be natural truths or facts. Instead, the single most important issue that this book has highlighted is that science is a cultural practice. For example, as we discussed in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, all sciences require studies that are based on systematic methodologies, that can be reproduced and described in a research output, and that are developed according to a specific or numerous specific forms of data. Furthermore, social science should be seen within the family of scientific culture, with scientific methodologies and the amplest principles that are said to be common to all the sciences applicable to it. This being said, as I outlined in Section II, social science has specialized concepts that are particular to it and should arguably be seen as having its own sub-​culture. The Western sub-​culture of social science I discuss in this book is unique. For instance, Western social science often has a distinctly different conceptualization of data to those found in the natural or medical sciences. Natural and medical sciences are often more reliant on highly regulated experimentation DOI: 10.4324/9781003241997-13

176 Concepts and observation, whereas social science is open to the more creative use of what can be described as contemporary, non-​conformist data. This data can include self-​reflection by the researchers themselves, data guided by the participant of the research, artmaking, biography, and photovoice. In this respect, social science can often be seen as being closer to Feyerabend than Lakatos. Arguably, more than other forms of science, social science can also be said to be the most methodologically creative science, one which is evolving a different understanding of epistemology, and one with its own distinctive ontologies. Of course, there are problems with the conception and public image of social science because of its creativity. As this book has shown in Section I, scientific traditionalists and strict methodologists, who believe more in the rituals of the science and thus in the superiority of what are disingenuously called the harder sciences, accuse social scientific methodology of being subjective and unreliable. For this reason, social science is often equally disingenuously referred to as a softer science. The image of social science is also often questioned because of its lower reliance on institutional-​ centrism and on the authoritarianism and power structures of historical societies. However, this lack of structure has increased social scientists’ ability to spawn new disciplines, such as feminism, Marxism, and critical disability and race studies. The faster speed of change in social science is also undeniable. As new methodologies have developed, they can be said to have spawned more sub-​cultures, creating a broader spectrum of ontologies, epistemologies and above all more systematic approaches than are found in any other branches of science. These sub-​cultures are themselves evolving quickly, pushing their own boundaries of what is thought to be knowledge, epistemologies, and the institutional controls that have attempted to define the rules of social scientific culture. However, with this evolution further problems potentially arise, new institutions and demagogues appear that attempt to control these new sub-​ cultures, and subsequently new forms of emergent power start to materialize. Above all, as it continues to develop esoterically, social science is at risk of closing itself off to truly honest methodological, epistemological, and ontological cross-​cultural and inter-​disciplinary debate, all of which are vital to ensure that its evolution is more democratic and representative of those who it says it represents the interests of.

What Is Scientific Knowledge? Given the Discussion in Section I, It Can also Be Asked, Is It “Truthful” Knowledge? How Reliable Is It Really? Following on from this first question, this book has suggested that in the social sciences at the very least there cannot be said to be a single truth or

Conclusion  177 form of knowledge. Instead, we only see the generation of numerous truths in accordance with the sub-​cultures of social science, and increasingly of its different disciplines. As this book demonstrated in Chapter 5, these social scientific truths are often influenced by the broader cultural point of view of its ruling classes. Thus, their epistemologies can be affected by the sub-​culture of social scientific methodologies and the most dangerous elements of Western cultures that these studies are based in. Furthermore, the truth that is generated by individual social scientific studies should also be seen as being significantly influenced by their historical starting points and cultural traditions, and as being manipulated with dangerous consequences by the language through which this knowledge is generated. The notion of “the truth” should thus also be seen within a wider cultural epistemology.This book focused on the development of science and social science in what is often called a Western context one that originated in ideas, theories, and beliefs from what is now thought of as a perceived geographical area we now call Europe. However, as this book demonstrated in Chapter 2, the West and Europe are post hoc inventions added onto the foundation of the sciences and the influences for this ancient European thinking was influenced by what are now regarded as non-​European cultures. Therefore, its non-​European-​ness should now be acknowledged in its cultural traditions, and its Asian and African traditions should now be particularly acknowledged. Furthermore, we should also acknowledge the problems with the cultural traditions of social science, particularly its imperial influences. As this book showed in Chapter 5, social science uses as its starting point the Western classifications of social groupings, such as socio-​ economic/​ social class classifications, gender classifications, sexuality classifications, racial/​ethnic classifications, and religious/​ethical/​philosophical classifications. These social groupings have thus become the variables of its data, and are reduced to taxonomic binaries with strict boundaries, where humans are imagined as falling into one classification or the other no matter where they stand in relation to the ontological borders and rules of these groups. For instance, traditionally the boundary between men and women is socially classified according to the rules of sexuality or the ability to “theoretically” reproduce, even though according to science women do not have to actually reproduce to “theoretically” be able to reproduce. Similarly, the rules of the random classification of black and white people were, and arguably still are, classified according to rules of what is perceived to be a “theoretically” historical geographic or religious origin, which may lead to a visual aesthetic according to social science. Subsequently, according to Jim Crow Law, humans have been led to believe that being partly African American or American Indian makes someone wholly African American or American Indian. According to this law, it is not hard to calculate mathematically that all humanity is African American and much of

178 Concepts it is simultaneously American Indian, as you only need to have a very distant African relative to be African and to be distantly related to an American Indian. In these instances, the imagined origin of a human is an important point in Western social scientific boundary rules when following these social classifications and is sometimes seen as more important than real features and an external reality in the present. These boundary rules lead to further anomalies. For instance, some people classified as black have lighter skin than people classified as white because they are perceived as having a black ancestral origin. Similarly, people who are classified as Jewish do not need to follow Judaism to still be identified as being Jewish because they come from a family that one or two generations back practiced Judaism, an issue that the Nazis manipulated in the early twentieth century. CAVEAT: There are many sub-​cultural anomalies to these social scientific boundaries and rules. For instance, in different contexts some people are classified according to taxonomies of mixed variables, such as a mixture of cultural heritage, nationality, religion, or religious denomination, such as white Irish or white German or, in the UK, people whose cultural heritage is from the Indian sub-​continent classified according to religion, such as Muslim Indian, Hindu Indian, Sikh Indian. Thus, it can be said that no single, global truth can ever exist in a culturally created world where these synthetic taxonomies are the very focus and topic of research. Furthermore, the rules on which these scientifically constructed truths and taxonomies are based are often contradictory and have interwoven arbitrary contexts and forms of truth, with each Platonically claiming to be the theory of forms.

What Is the Way Forward for Social Science? As alluded to in the answer to the first question, if social science is going to progress it is going to have to do what no other form of science has managed to do previously: it is going to have to break away from its own self-​interest; it is going to have to dis-​empower its powerful departments, associations, centers, and characters that have become the temples and demagogues of social science; and, it will need to challenge those who proclaim themselves to be the arbitrators of its cultural rules and regulations. More importantly, to become democratic, social science needs to come out of its powerful host institutions, particularly universities and colleges, be more participatory, and be less dependent on the proclivities of its more powerful bankers, such as governments and big business. Until it addresses these fundamental issues, Western social science will remain a powerful and corruptible cultural practice.

References

Ackoff, R.L. (1989). From data to wisdom. Journal Of Applied Systems Analysis, 16(1), 3–​9. Amatari, V.O. (2015). The Instructional Process: A review of Flanders’ interaction analysis in a classroom setting. International Journal of Secondary Education, 3(5), 43–​49. American Psychological Association (1953). Ethical Standards of Psychologists.Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Aristotle (A.J. Jenkinson Trans.). (1994). Prior Analytics. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Accessed at http://​class​ics.mit.edu/​Aristo​tle/​prior.mb.txt, August 1, 2021. Aristotle (2009). The Nicomachean Ethics—​ Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ayala, F.J. (2009). Darwin and the scientific method. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(1), 10033–​10039. https://​doi.org/​10.1073/​pnas.090​1404​106 Barthes, R. (S. Sontag, Ed.) (2000). The Roland Barthes Reader. London:Vintage. Barton, J., and Hayhoe, S. (2021). Emancipatory and Participatory Research for Emerging Educational Researchers: Theory and Case Studies of Research in Disabled Communities. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Bell, D. (1992a). Racial realism. Connecticut Law Review, 24(2), 363–​379. Bell, D. (1992b) Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York: Basic Books. Berreman, G.D. (1968). Ethnography: Method and product. In J.A. Clifton (Ed.), Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (pp. 336–373). London: Houghton Mifflin. Bhaskar, R. (2008). A Realist Theory of Science. London: Routledge. Blanco, W., and Roberts, J.T. (Trans. by W. Blanco). (1992). Herodotus, The Histories. New York: Norton. Bolter, J.D. (2016). Posthumanism. In K.B. Jensen, R.T. Craig, J.D. Pooley, and E.W. Rothenbuhler (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (pp. 1–8). Hoboken, NJ:Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118766804. wbiect220 Boyd, W. (1928). The History of Western Education. London: A & C Black Ltd. British Educational Research Association (1992). Ethical guidelines for educational research. Southwell, Nottinghamshire: British Educational Research Association. British Psychological Society (2009). Code of ethics and conduct: Guidance published by the ethics committee of the British Psychological Society. Leicester: British Psychological Society. Brock, S.L. (2007). Harmonizing Plato and Aristotle on esse: Thomas Aquinas and the De hebdomadibus. Nova et Vetera, 5(3), 465–​494.

180 References Brown, P., Lauder, H., and Ashton, D. (2010). The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler-​Adam, J. (2015). The weighty history and meaning behind the word “science.” The Conversation. Accessed with https://theconversation.com/the-weighty-historyand-meaning-behind-the-word-science-48280, October 1, 2015. Canagarajah, A.S. (1996). ‘Nondiscursive’ requirements in academic publishing, material resources of periphery scholars, and the politics of knowledge production. Written Communication, 13(4), 435–​472. Carroll, R.A. (2006). Gender dysphoria and transgender experiences. In S.R. Leiblum (Ed.), Principles and Practice of Sex Therapy (pp. 477–508). New York: Guilford Press. Cartwright, M. (2018, October 25). Europa. In World History Encyclopedia. Accessed with www.world​hist​ory.org/​Eur​opa/​ Cassimally, K.A. (2011, August 7). Define science. Scitable by Nature Education. Accessed with www.nat​ure.com/​scita​ble/​blog/​labc​oat-​life/​def​i ne_​scie​nce/​, August 7, 2011. Chomsky, N. (1998). The Common Good. London: Pluto Press. Chomsky, N., and Barsamian, D. (2015). Propaganda and the Public Mind. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Choo, C.W. (1996). The knowing organization: How organizations use information to construct meaning, create knowledge and make decisions. International Journal of Information Management, 16(5), 329–​40. da Silva, J.A.T., Moradzadeh, M., Adjei, K.O.K., Owusu-​Ansah, C.M., Balehegn, M., Faúndez, E.I., et al. (2022). An integrated paradigm shift to deal with “predatory publishing.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 48(1), 102481. Da Vinci, L. (T. Wells, Ed.). (2008). Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Darwin, C. (1859). The Origin of the Species: By Means of Natural Selection of the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: Oxford University Press. Darwin, C. (1871). The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray. De Saussure, F. (R. Harris Trans.). (1972). Course in General Linguistics. London: Duckworth. Denzin, N.K., and Lincoln,Y.S. (1994). Handbook of Qualitative Research.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Derbyshire, J. (2015, September 27). Against “impact”—​In defence of the humanities. New Statesman. Accessed with www.newst​ates​man.com/​cult​ure/​2009/​10/​imp​act-​ phi​loso​phy-​resea​rch, July 1, 2021. Descartes, R. (1998). Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Despouy, L. (1993). Study Series 6: Human Rights and the Disabled Person. Geneva: United Nations. Doyle, W. (1979). Classroom tasks and students’ abilities. In P.L. Peterson and H. J. Walberg (Eds.), Research on Teaching (pp. 183–209). New York: McCutchan. Doyle, W. (1983). Academic work. In N.S. Glasman and J.W. Pellegrino (Eds.), Review of Educational Research (pp. 159–​199). Cambridge, MA: Longfellow Hall. Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics (2022). The History of Ethics at Harvard. Accessed with https://​eth​ics.harv​ard.edu/​hist​ory, July 15, 2022. Edmonds D., and Eidinow, J. (2002) Wittgenstein’s Poker. London: Faber & Faber. Eliot, T.S. (1934). The Rock. London: Faber & Faber. Feyerabend, P. (1978). Science in a Free Society. New York:Verso. Feyerabend, P. (1993). Against Method. New York:Verso.

References 181 Field, C.J., Kimuna, S.R., and Straus, M.A. (2013). Attitudes toward interracial relationships among college students race, class, gender, and perceptions of parental views. Journal of Black Studies, 44(7), 741–​776. Floridi, L. (2003).Two approaches to the philosophy of information. Minds and Machines, 1, 459–​469. Floridi, L. (2004). Open problems in the philosophy of information. Metaphilosophy, 35(4), 554–​582. Floridi, L. (2012).Turing’s three philosophical lessons and the philosophy of information. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 370(1971), 3536–​3542. Foster, P. (1999). Some critical comments on the BERA Ethical Guidelines. BERA Research Intelligence, 67, 1. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish:The Birth of the Prison. New York:Vintage. Foucault, M. (1979). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (R. Howard Trans.) (1989). Madness and Civilisation. London: Routledge Classics. Foucault, M. (J.D. Faubion Ed.) (2001). Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–​1984, Volume 3. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (2002). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Psychology Press. Foucault, M. (A.M. Sheridan, Trans.) (2003). The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. London: Routledge Classics. Frankopan, P. (2015). The Silk Road: A New History of the World. London: Bloomsbury. Frické, M. (2009). The knowledge pyramid: A critique of the DIKW hierarchy. Journal of Information Science, 35(2), 131–​142. Friere, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Garroutte, E.M. (2001). The racial formation of American Indians: Negotiating legitimate identities within tribal and federal law. The American Indian Quarterly, 25(2), 224–​239. Geertz, C. (1983). Local knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. London: Harper Collins. Giovannelli, L. (1999). Aristotle’s Theory of Sexual Reproduction as it Emerges in “On the Generation of Animals.” Thesis presented in support of the degree of doctor of philosophy, University of Chicago, USA. Glaser, B.G. (1998). Doing Grounded Theory: Issues and Discussions. Mill Valley, CA: The Sociology Press. Gleick, J. (1997) Chaos: The Amazing Science of the Unpredictable. London: Minerva Press. Goffman, I. (1991). Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. London: Penguin. Gombrich, E.H. (1992). The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art. London: Phaidon. Gottlieb, A. (1997). Socrates—​Philosophy’s Martyr. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Gramsci,A. (Q. Hoare, and G. Nowell Smith, Eds.) (1971). Selections from Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Gribbin, J., and Gribbin, M. (1997). Richard Feynman—​ A Life in Science. London: Icon Books.

182 References Harper, P.S., 2008. A Short History of Medical Genetics (No. 57). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hayhoe, S. (2008). Arts, Culture, and Blindness: A Study of Blind Students in the Visual Arts. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. Hayhoe, S. (2012). Grounded Theory and Disability Studies: Researching Legacies of Blindness. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. Hayhoe, S. (2015). Philosophy as Disability and Exclusion: The Development of Theories on Blindness,Touch and the Arts in England, 1688–​2010. Charlotte, NC: IAP. Hayhoe, S. (2017). The open society and its continual enemies: The need to re-​balance education and develop a more critical attitude to knowledge and accepted practice. Paper presented at OXSCIE 2017—​Oxford Symposium for Comparative and International Education, Oxford, 8/​06/​17–​9/​06/​17. Hayhoe, S. (2020). An Introduction to Grounded Methodology for Emerging Educational Researchers. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Hayhoe, S., Cohen, R., and Garcia-​Carrisoza, H. (2019). Locke and Hume’s philosophical theory of color is investigated through a case study of Esref Armagan, An artist born blind. Journal of Blindness Innovation and Research, 9(1), 3. https://​doi.org/​ 10.5241/​9-​149 Hayhoe, S., Díaz de León Lastras, A., Cortes Capetillo, A., Briony, T., Montgomery, C., Reynaga Peña, C., et al. (2018). Participatory Methodology, Inclusive Control Systems and Inclusive Technical Capital Developed by Engineering Undergraduates and Teenagers from a Marginalised Community in Mexico. Technology and Disability, 31, 17. https://​doi.org/​10.3233/​TAD-​190​001 Hayhoe, S., and Garcia Carrisoza, H. (2019). Accessible Resources for Cultural Heritage EcoSystems (ARCHES) Deliverables 2.4: Recommendations, Guidelines & Policy Briefing. Brussels: European Commission. Heer, F. (1963). The Medieval World: Europe, 1100–​ 1350. London: Readers Union Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Hegel, G. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. (G. Di Giovanni, Trans.) (2010). The Science of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heng, G. (2011). The invention of race in the European Middle Ages I: Race studies, modernity, and the Middle Ages. Literature Compass, 8(5), 315–​331, DOI: 10.1111/​ j.1741-​4113.2011.00790.x Herrnstein, R.J., and Murray, C. (2010). Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hickman, C.B. (1997). The devil and the one drop rule: Racial categories, African Americans, and the US census. Michigan Law Review, 95(5), 1161–​1265. Hogg, M.A., Adelman, J.R., and Blagg, R.D. (2010). Religion in the face of uncertainty: An uncertainty-​identity theory account of religiousness. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1), 72–​83. Homan, R. (1991). The Ethics of Social Research. London: Longman. Howe, S.G., and Howe Richards, L.E. (1909). Letters and Journals of S.G. Howe. Boston, MA: Estes Publishing. Humphreys, L. (1970). Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. New York: Aldine. Imperiale, M.J., and Casadevall, A. (2018). A new approach to evaluating the risk–​ benefit equation for dual-​use and gain-​of-​function research of concern. Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, 8(6), 21. DOI: 10.3389/​fbioe.2018.00021

References 183 Janesick, V.J. (1998). The dance of qualitative research design: Metaphor, methodolatry, and meaning. In N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 209–219). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Keeling, D.M., and Nguyen Lehman, M. (2018). Posthumanism. In Oxford Research Encyclopaedias—​Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1093/​acref​ore/​978019​0228​613.013.627 Kemmis, S., and McTaggart, R. (1988). The Action Research Planner. Sydney: Deakin University Press. Khanna, N. (2010). “If you’re half black, you’re just black”: Reflected appraisals and the persistence of the one-​drop rule. The Sociological Quarterly, 51(1), 96–​121. Kim, S., Whitford, M., and Arcodia, C. (2019). Development of intangible cultural heritage as a sustainable tourism resource: The intangible cultural heritage practitioners’ perspectives. Journal of Heritage Tourism, 14(5–​6), 422–​435. Kossovsky, A.E. (2020). The Birth of Science. New York: Springer. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1007/​978-​3-​030-​51744-​1_​17 Kuhn, T.S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lakatos, I. (1999) Lectures on scientific method. In M. Motterlini (Ed.), For and Against Method (pp. 19–112). Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Leroi, A.M. (2014). The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. London: Bloomsbury. Levi-​Strauss, C. (1994). The Raw and the Cooked:An Introduction to the Science of Mythology. London: Pimlico. Li, G. (2022). Mapping People: An Ethnographic Case Study of Ikea Shoppers. Accessed with www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​yjFk​UqAe​Uq8, June 28, 2022. Lipset, S.M., and Bendix, R. (1991). Social Mobility in Industrial Society. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Locke, J. (J.W. Yolton, Ed.) (2001). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: Everyman Library/​J.M. Dent. Longino, H.E. (1987). Can there be a feminist science? Hypatia, 2(3), 51–​64. Lorenz, E. (1979). Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? Paper given to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington DC on the December 29, 1979. Lott, T. (2003, August 7). Personal choices we can’t explain. London Evening Standard. Mabe, M., and Mulligan, A. (2011). What journal authors want: Ten years of results from Elsevier’s author feedback programme, New Review of Information Networking, 16(1), 71–​89. DOI: 10.1080/​13614576.2011.574495 McPherson, M., Smith-​Lovin, L., and Cook, J.M. (2001). Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 415–​444. McShane, J. (1991) Cognitive Development: An Information Processing Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Miller, G.A. (1966) Psychology:The Science of Mental Life. London: Penguin. Mills, C.W. (2000). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Moggach, D., and Lledman, S.E. (1997). Hegel and the enlightenment project. The European Legacy, 2(3), 538–​543. Nagel, T. (1991). Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Canto. Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-​Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

184 References National Center for Science Education (2016). Definitions of Fact, Theory, and Law in Scientific Work. Accessed with https://​ncse.ngo/​defi​niti​ons-​fact-​the​ory-​and-​law-​ sci​enti​fic-​work, July 2021. National Co-​Ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (2017). How to develop a public engagement strategy: Examples of how universities are developing strategies for public engagement. Bristol, UK: National Co-​Ordinating Centre for Public Engagement. Newburger, E. (2012). Derrick Bell (1930–​2011): An iconoclast and a community builder. Harvard Law Bulletin, Winter 2012, https://​today.law.harv​ard.edu/​derr​ ick-​bell-​1930-​2011/​ O’Connell-​Davidson, J., and Layder, D. (1994). Methods, Sex and Madness. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Odinot, G., and Wolters, G. (2006). Repeated recall, retention interval and the accuracy–​ confidence relation in eyewitness memory. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20(7), 973–​985. OECD (2015). Frascati Manual 2015—​Guidelines for Collecting and Reporting Data on Research and Experimental Development. Paris: OECD. Padden, C.A. (2005). Talking culture: Deaf people and disability studies. PMLA, 120(2), 508–​513. Palmer, N., and Forrester-​Jones, R. (2018) Research ethics training: Using a virtue ethics approach to training to support development of researcher integrity. In N. Emmerich (Ed.), Virtue Ethics in the Conduct and Governance of Social Science Research (pp. 65–​82). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Palumbo, C., Tyropani, M., Pace, V., and Todarello, O. (2012). Presence of psychiatric symptoms and personality profiles among transexuals: Is gender identity disorder a true clinical entity? European Psychiatry, 27(1), 1. Peacock, J.L. (1986). The Anthropological Lens: Harsh Light, Soft Focus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato (1955). Plato,The Republic. London: Penguin. Plato (R.H. Weingartner, Trans.) (1973). The Unity of the Platonic Dialogue: The Cratylus, The Protagoras, The Parmenides. New York: Library of Liberal Arts and Bobbs-​Merrill Company. Popper K. (1979). Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Revised Edition). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Popper, K. (1998). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Popper, K. (1999). The Open Society and its Enemies,Volume 1:The Spell of Plato. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Popper, K. (2010). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Routledge Classics. Resnik, D.B. (2022). Research Ethics Timeline. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Accessed with www.niehs.nih.gov/​resea​rch/​resour​ces/​bioeth​ics/​ timel​ine/​index.cfm, July 15, 2022. Rix, J., Carrizosa, H.G., Seale, J., Sheehy, K., and Hayhoe, S. (2020).The while of participation: A systematic review of participatory research involving people with sensory impairments and/​or intellectual impairments. Disability and Society, 35(7), 1031–​ 1057. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​09687​599.2019.1669​431 Rotondia, N.K. (2012). Depression in trans people: A review of the risk factors. International Journal of Transgenderism, 13(3), 104–​116. Rowley, J. (2006).What do we need to know about wisdom? Management Decision, 44(9), 163–​180.

References 185 Russell, B. (1903). The Principles of Mathematics. London: Allen & Unwin. Russell, B. (2009). The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Sidebottom, E. (2013). Roger Bacon and the beginnings of experimental science in Britain. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 106(6), 243–​245. Siegel, E. (2017, April 17). The real problem with Charles Murray and “The Bell Curve.” Scientific American. Smith, L. (2013). Sex on the brain. Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, 39, 142–​143. Smith, L.M. (1980). Some not so random thoughts on doing fieldwork: The interplay of values. In H. Simons (Ed.) Towards a Science of the Singular (pp. 179–205). Norwich, UK: CARE, University of East Anglia. Sneath, P.H.A., and Sokal, R.R. (1973). Numerical Taxonomy:The Principles and Practice of Numerical Classification. San Francisco, CA: Freeman. Sparrow, A., and Glendinning, L. (2008, November 12). Gordon Brown and David Cameron clash over Baby P. The Guardian. Spiegelhalter, D. (2020). The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data. London: Puffin. Stanford University (2022). Stanford Profiles: Helen Longino. https://​profi​les.stanf​ord. edu/​helen-​long​ino, Downloaded on May 29, 2022. The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1979). The Belmont Report: Principles of Ethical Research on Human Subjects. Washington DC: The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in Biomedical and Behavioral Research. University College London (2022). Ethics Committee. Accessed with www.ucl.ac.uk/​ hist​ory/​eth​ics-​commit​tee March 23, 2022. US Health Services (1963). Guide for Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. Washington DC: US Health Services. Vygotsky, L.S. (M. Cole, V. John-​Striner, S. Scribner, and E. Souberman, Eds.) (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wallenfeldt, J. (2022, January 24).Where does the name Europe come from? Encyclopedia Britannica. www.bri​tann​ica.com/​story/​where-​does-​the-​name-​eur​ope-​come-​from. Weaver, J. (1997). That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community. New York: Oxford University Press. WHO (2016). Disabilities. Geneva: World Health Organization. Williams, L. (2018, November 30). History of Science. Encyclopedia Britannica. www.bri​ tann​ica.com/​scie​nce/​hist​ory-​of-​scie​nce Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. New York: Anscombe. Wittgenstein, L. (D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness, Trans.). (1974). Tractatus Logico-​ Philosophcus. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Wong, K. (2021, Fall).The origin of us. (pp. 5–​9). Scientific American Special Collector’s Edition—​The Age of the Humans.

Index

anthropology 3, 62, 102, 139 Aquinas, T. 31, 32 Aristotle 24, 26–​7, 29–​33, 48, 129 Bacon, R. 29–​33 Bell, D. 58–​60 Chomsky, N. 56, 60, 87 critical realism/​critical reality 41–​2, 79, 120, 130 critical rationalism 41–​2, 48, 120, 125 data collection method(s) 2, 39, 52, 97, 103, 106, 108–​10, 116, 151–​3 Darwin, C. 117, 125–​7 da Vinci, L. 32, 33 economics 63, 71, 74 editor 38, 67, 143–​7, 156 epistemology 62–​3, 74, 88, 93, 99, 115, 118, 123, 125, 127, 128, 152, 176, 177 ethical guidelines 129, 134, 136, 139, 140 Feyerabend, M. 54, 60, 70, 72 Foucault, M. 55–​6, 60, 83, 116, 118, 161 grounded studies/​g rounded theory 74, 151–​3, 172 Hegel, G. 26, 37–​9, 48, 62 Heraclitus 23, 33, 48, 88, 120 impact 1, 14, 75, 135, 142, 144, 145, 147, 158–​74 journal article(s) 2, 14, 65, 97, 115, 117, 143, 147

knowledge exchange 1, 155, 158–​60, 173, 174 Lakatos, I. 52–​4, 60, 63, 66, 124, 143, 144, 176 literature search 99, 122, 151 Longino, H. 57–​8, 60 materialism 20, 37, 99 metaphysics 20–​1, 27, 31, 99 moral(s) 23–​6, 43, 56, 66, 78, 85, 86, 88–​90, 92, 113, 114, 123, 129–​35 natural science 4–​6, 11, 33, 53, 69, 88, 104, 105, 118, 135 non-​participant observation 97, 109–​10, 112 ontology 61–​2, 74, 76, 88, 101, 104, 113, 118–​21, 123, 125, 128, 152 open access (publishing) 99, 107, 148–​50, 158 paradigm 1, 13, 51, 54, 55, 63, 74, 75, 84, 117, 127 participant observation 97, 109, 110, 112 peer review 14, 70, 107, 122, 141, 143–​6, 149, 150, 154, 155, 157, 158 Plato 24–​8, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37–​9, 44, 45, 48, 55, 85, 88, 90, 131, 163, 178 Popper, K. 4, 26, 41, 42, 48–​52, 54, 57, 60, 62, 66, 77, 79–​82, 84, 87–​9, 103, 119, 131 positivism/​positivist 18, 35, 37–​9, 41, 44, 47, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57, 74, 79, 104, 119–​21, 128, 130, 131, 143 post-​humanism 59, 132 predatory publishing/​predatory journals 149 Protagorus 23 psychology 62, 63, 71, 85, 150, 153

Index  187 public engagement 1, 14, 155, 158–​68, 173, 174

sociology 34, 62, 63, 74, 89, 109, 137–​9, 143, 156

qualitative data 13, 85, 97, 104–​7, 109–​11, 117, 121, 175 quantitative data 13, 97, 104–​5, 107, 110, 111, 117, 175

thematic analysis 121, 122, 128

Russell, B. 44–​6, 48, 60, 120, 124

visual data 97, 104–​6 Wittgenstein, L. 45–​9, 57, 60, 79, 103, 108