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Philosophical issues in researchPhilosophy has an odd relation to research. It asks questions about the questions researchers ask. As a researcher you might be interested in identifying the properties of a particular chemical catalyst, the meaning of a text or interview, but philosophers worry about whether your descriptions corresponds its ‘real’ properties, or how other researchers might claim to have a ‘better’ description than yours. Philosophers are interested in meta-analysis. This is not as fanciful as it first seems. Science is full of examples of shifts in perspective or paradigm, for example from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics.Philosophers attempt to make sense of what scientists are doing, and in what ways the results of their inquiries can count as knowledge. Good philosophy does not necessarily produce good research.Philosophy won’t tell you how to interpret a text, understand what someone is really saying, make sense of the output from an experiment, much less design it for you. Philosophy can, however, pose questions about your underlying assumptions and whether these ’fit’ with the types of research claims you want to make. Bad self-understandings are likely to lead to intellectual confusion; they may also impede your ability to understand why other researchers adopt a different strategy from yours.Your views will be shaped by your own philosophical stance, and how the ‘things’ you are dealing in your research are characterised in your discipline area. In some disciplines philosophical contestation is intense; in others many issues are ‘taken for granted’. New work can give rise to philosophical speculation in disciplines that were previously regarded as unproblematic. Quantum mechanics, for example, has provoked intense philosophical speculation.Broadly speaking, natural scientists have been traditionally drawn towards various forms of realism, whether empiricist (positivist) or critical realist varieties. Some philosophers have suggested that this is because natural scientists have to be realists about experimental objects, whether or not they are philosophical realists. Generally, natural scientists are interested in causality and explanation. This is characterised by positivists as a search for law-like regularities in nature of the type - x always follows y under certain defined conditions. Critical realists, however, have pointed out that law like regularity is rare in nature, and that it can usually only be produced under experimental conditions. This is because in open systems many mechanisms are responsible for producing a particular outcome. Critical realists are therefore concerned with elucidating the operation of a mechanism x which has causal powers and liabilities will produce y or not-y under certain conditions. These underlying mechanisms are real, but not necessarily observable events.Philosophical views in the social sciences are even more varied. The ‘things’ social scientists deal with are human subjects and systems that are reproduced through purposive and non-purposive human interaction. Some social scientists have argued that the social sciences can never be like the natural sciences, nor should they try. These anti-naturalist positions include hermeneutic or interpretative approaches where knowledge is seen to depend on understanding and interpretation. To understand the social is more like saying ‘I know what you mean’ to a friend when a jointly understood meaning is established. Rather than making causal links, hermeneuticians aim at understanding and intelligibility.Positivists down play problems of interpretation and argue instead that social scientists should look for regular patterns in social life in order to establish general law-like explanations of the same kind as those in the natural sciences. Critical realists, while accepting the necessity of starting from understanding want to maintain the possibility of explanation based on the existence of real mechanisms at work in the social world (albeit ones which are only relatively enduring based on their reproduction through human action). Positivism, which relies on x follows y type arguments, is out of favour in the social sciences, not least because the search for non-trivial examples of law like behaviour in the social sciences has yielded little of value. This is not surprising if, as critical realists claim, the experiments that would be necessary to produce such regularity are impossible to engineer in the social world.More recently various forms of post-modernism have been popular in the social sciences and humanities. Post-modernism casts doubt on the whole philosophical enterprise. It rejects grand theories and the search for truth and settles instead for local descriptions. All knowledge is made up of different ways of talking and organising our views about the world, different ‘discourses’. We cannot decide which the best talk is by an appeal to some outside reality or other universal criteria, so we must settle for judgmental relativism. In its extreme forms this represents the view that ‘your story is as good as mine’, since there is no universally valid way of deciding between the two. Ironically, it could be argued that this makes for more dogmatism rather than less, as there cease to be rational grounds for challenging truth claims - evolutionism and creationism on this model can be seen as just different stories. Realists, by contrast, claim that we can and do make judgements about better or worse explanations therefore based on an appeal to the real properties of the world. For realists, therefore, all knowledge is in principle fallible.In the humanities, especially literature and areas of visual culture, there has been a tendency towards the acceptance of hermeneutic approaches. The origin of hermeneutics is in theology and law interpreting the law or religious writing. The earliest hermeneutics was used to try and decipher the meaning of religious texts. It is worth remembering, however, that empiricism still has a grip in some areas of history and art history where establishing the ‘facts’ is the aim of scholarship. More recently post-modernism has tended to dominant, but no one philosophical remains uncontested.All the above claims are contentious. The point is not to agree or disagree with any of the above, but to use the questions it poses to establish where you stand in relation to the debates within your own subject area.Prompt questions on your philosophical approachThese questions will help you draw out the philosophical underpinnings of your own research. It will also help you identify those adopted by existing research that you read.Try and answer the questions in relation to your own research. Not all the questions will be applicable, but if they are not, try to explain why not. The list is not exhaustive, if you identify other questions or issues please note them.Prompt questionsAnswersDescribe the methods you might use to collect your data, or the ways in which you are intending to interpret texts or other objects. What assumptions are you making about the structure of the materials (natural, social or cultural) you are studying?If you are attempting to measure a property or quality (either natural or social), how would you know if you are measuring instruments measure what you intend to measure.How would you recognise error of measurement or interpretation?What degree of certainty will you have about your measurements or interpretations?Is measurement and/or interpretation dependent on your position as observer?Have you built in any assumptions about 'normal' in a statistical, theoretical or descriptive sense. For example, in the human or biological sciences are these sex specific norms, male as norm, are they species specific?In what ways (if any) would you claim to be an objective observer or interpreter?How self-consciously have you thought about these and other philosophical issues in your own research? ................
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