Lubomir,

Please read my post again.

The assertion was NOT that one must be a member of a community to
study it. The assertion was that direct empirical knowledge of that
community is the foundation of study.

Empirical knowledge OF something does not require membership IN it.
When the human sciences engage in the study of human communities,
empirical knowledge generally includes EXPERIENCE. Experience does
not require MEMBETSHIP.

There was no claim that "that just being a member of a particular
community and having first hand experience with its life"
"guarantee[s] that this person will produce research."

The assertion was that members in a community are uniquely equipped
to provide first-hand testimony. Their experience constitutes unique
and irreplaceable data. The direct experience of a scientist OF the
social milieu enables better understanding and evaluation of what is
spoken and communicated by community members.

Your central argument refutes a claim I never made.

You write, "The idea that each member of the community is a great
expert, researcher, and theoretic on its life simply merges the
distinction between and reflexivity of science and the spontaneity of
everyday existence."

This puzzles me. Where did anyone in this thread assert that "each
member of the community is a great expert, researcher, and theoretic
on its life"?

What each member of a community is an expert in is his or her own
life experience. Many members of communities are expert in many other
issues, including issues and sciences not under study by the
scientist who studies the community, but this is a different issue.
While issues of research ethics, rights of human subjects, and the
relationship of the scientist to communities under study are
important, these, too, are distinct issues.

The central issue here is the scientific validity of a simple concept
stated in notes by Maria, Dick, Jacques, others, and myself.

This issue is the primacy of the empirical world. In the human
sciences, gathering data and information, accumulating knowledge, and
developing understanding of the empirical world generally requires
direct experience.

There are exceptions, but these exceptions are specific and they
require clear distinction and development to be made useful.

You misread the post if you saw it as an assertion that one must be a
"member" of a community to study it. Membership is not required.

Neither is membership prohibited. A trained scholar may well study a
community in which he or she participates. Trained scientists have
done much good work on the sociology of science.

Nevertheless, no one stated that a scientist must be a member of a
community to study it, nor even always a participant. What I stated,
what Maria and Jacques wrote, and what Dick implied, is that one
requires direct, appropriate experience gathered in an appropriate
way.

No one has attacked scientific method here. No one suggested that
alternative institutions are needed. No one suggested that empirical
truth is established by majority vote.

I have consistently argued for reasoned argument from evidence. In
the human sciences, human beings are the source of evidence. It is to
the empirical world of human beings that one must look for empirical
evidence in the human sciences. One must thus to human beings and the
world of human interaction.

As far as philosophy of science, it is not helpful to push the
graduate school analogy too far. I don't know about Maria's degrees,
but I know that what she wrote makes good scientific sense. Dick,
Jacques, and I have managed to earn good, old-fashioned Ph.D.
degrees, and all of us have supervised or taught Ph.D. and
postdoctoral courses, including courses in the philosophy of science
at the interuniversity level. So I think you can say I'd manage a
300-level course course.

The first thing I teach all my students, first year to post doc, is
that a critique must be based on what is written. If I have not
argued that green elephants inhabit Mars, you cannot criticize me for
the claim that green elephants inhabit Mars.

Remember the old reggae hit? "I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot
the deputy." You are whacking me for the deputy here.

As to the philosophy of science itself, there is good support for the
statements I made. From Dilthey, Simmel, and Weber, to Mead, Blumer,
and Crane, nothing I wrote contradicts the best traditions of social
or behavioral science.

Your critique addresses a range of claims that were not made here. To
paraphrase another distinguished scientist, I did not shoot the
deputy.

-- Ken Friedman