I’m Farah, a research fellow at IHHD working with Marcello on the AHRC Connected Communities meta narrative review. Trisha, your description of how you went about your reviews was very helpful. You’ve also prompted a v. engaging discussion. There are further complexities that I’m trying to grapple with and maybe you can shed light on how you approached these issues in your reviews. Aside from this, I’m especially interested in how to place the meta-narrative review more appropriately in the larger literature on the history of ideas and the philosophy of science. The issues I discuss hereafter (in a non-coherent way – my apologise for this) emerge from the complexity of conducting a meta-narrative review of strictly theoretical literature on ‘communities’.

I found that at the beginning of this review I was thinking about how the literature piles on top of each other – emphasizing the time dimension of the narrative - unknowingly I was taking on a naïve interpretation of Newton – ‘standing on the heads of giants’. However, the history of science does not function in a linear progressive accumulation and this creates problems in the way to operationalize the review.

First, It’s difficult to create a narrative based on a dialogue across disciplines because researchers in any given paradigm frequently talk past one another because how fundamentally different their underlying assumptions are – a sort of dialogue of the deaf (issue of incommensurability). This is not the always the case of course. And part of the objective of the narrative itself is to identify and capture where there is a sense of this ‘dialogue of the deaf’ in the literature. Were you able to do this in your work?

The dialogue within disciplines is difficult to capture as well. Trisha, it seemed that in the empirical literature there was often agreed upon procedures in the discipline and practice of patient records/innovations for examples during a state of normal science (sort of the idea that you must conduct/understand procedures in this or that way to get your PhD in a topic). However, in the social science and theoretical based literature, there is often no agreed upon procedures. For example, within sociology Weber’s classes and Marx’s classes are not produced by the same procedures.

Second, and more importantly for me is the criticism that it might be the case that a ‘scientific’ breakthrough or anomalous positions will seem ridiculous at a given time. Anomalous results are often explained and used by others much later on – others working in different and new paradigms perhaps. This is because there is a clear social dimension to science. Anomalies are therefore not falsifications (from a positivist perspective) – because paradigm shifts are determined by sociological determinants. Everything from the economy to departmental politics of the individual and university. It can be argued that often truth is compromised/disappears and knowledge is wholly socially determined and dependent upon beliefs of a time and place. I think that Popper would agree (and describe this as a regulatory ideal in science). How do we accommodate this social dimension in the narrative and not artificially emphasize or de-emphasize some works over others? How can we use this criticism to better understand what is seminal? Is there a way that we can examine to what extent policy and published policy focused papers utilize certain theoretical papers at a given time over others or integrate a historical context in our review to better understand the social dimension?

A problem with Kuhn and the difficulty for me is that it is unclear how general to make it (where are the boundaries between sociology and anthropology) and how far to extend the idea of breaks between one paradigm to another. In more localized contexts you can demonstrate an underlying continuity to scientific enterprise and set limits to the influence of social factors. But what about cases where common elements are just not there? How effective is the discipline as a unit of analysis?

Foucault (archeological analysis/the order of things), as you suggest, responds to some of the issues– but more on this another time perhaps.

As for sorting things into piles manually – we aim to do this using Eppi Reviewer 4 software in our review– we'll let you know how this goes.

Thanks again for stimulating discussion Marcello, Paul and Trisha.