Hello everyone,
(long post, sorry, can skip it if you don't have time:)
There is an old book, "The Science Game." It is a text on research methods, and it is not very different from the myriad of texts in that field. However, in its introduction, the author, Neil Agnew, makes one very important statement. All research has started from everyday inquiring behavior. That behavior is methodologized and particular efficient ways of knowing are formatted as methods. Further, these methods are improved and disseminated. Agnew's idea is that what we call science today (I mean the social institution, not the Positivist paradigm) is an elaboration of common logic.
We also know that the oral tradition was predominant among the European population till the end of the 19th century. There were European countries at that time with very low percentage of literate population. Literacy in Europe, and in particular in Eastern Europe, is a fact of the 20th century. So much about scientific Europe. Europe was the land of peasants, shepherds, and illiterate people until about a century or two ago. We can conceptualize the outcomes of the folk ways of knowing as indigenous knowledge. Currently the term indigenous knowledge excludes the rich oral history of Europe. European folklore is amazing, but nowadays it is not appreciated and often completely neglected as a fact of European intellectual history. It is more fashionable to talk about the folk/traditional knowledge of people from other parts of the world and to refer to it as indigenous knowledge. We have to be clear here: we are talking about folk/traditional knowledge. And European folk knowledge is indigenous knowledge. I have rarely heard anyone making a case for European folk knowledge.
Being and experiencing have always been at the foundation of knowing, even in the Positivist way. The question is what we do after that. What about reflection? The concept of reflection is rarely mentioned in such discussions. However, there are two major phenomena that improve substantially the ability of humans to understand the World: reflection and abstraction. Without reflection we cannot understand our immediate situation and cannot develop stable and persistent knowledge phenomena. Without abstraction, we cannot manage the deluge of information. Abstraction helps us see recurrent patterns. Reflection and abstraction should be declared as major foundations of the human condition.
Experiencing has been the major way of dealing with the complexities of the world in the pre-literate cultures. It is about developing personal knowledge and operating on that basis. When the existing knowledge production systems cannot serve the subject (individual), experiencing provides a basis for making sense of the environment and figuring out proper actions. In some professions, personal experience is still the major instrument for operating, despite of a couple of centuries of science. Many medical doctors confess that their profession is an art. Forget about MRI. It is all about personal knowledge. Donald Schoen is banking on this fact.
Folkways and folk wisdom have been produced through hundreds of years of collective experience, accumulation of information, some kind of information processing, and so on. As a result, people develop knowledge that guides them in everyday life. However, we all know that most of this knowledge was borderline and very often, misguiding. That was the main argument for developing science and for searching for methods that produce high quality knowledge.
Science is a Western cultural institution, like it or not. While philosophy has a longer history and wider geographical area of coverage, science emerged in Europe after the Renaissance, with the advent of Rationalism. Any attempt to talk about science in Ancient China or Greece is unfounded. I have heard a professor in architecture making a passionate claim that Laozi was the first sociologists, 25 centuries ago. We all know that sociology has emerged in the 19th century, and actually in the second half of the 19th century. Again, a Western game. And it is a game. It is based on conventions just like the games. It is played as a game. There are a number of cultures that do not want to accept this game. They play other games.
By the way, Positivism took the upper hand only after a couple of centuries of competition and struggle with the humanistic traditions, like Hermeneutics. Alexander von Humboldt was one of the last defenders of the humanistic ways of thinking in the emergent world of Rationalism. Actually, this is a long and complex process and I simplify it a lot. Today the paradigmatic competitions and divides are felt mostly in the interdisciplinary fields. There are no such problems in the natural sciences and humanities. Their paradigmatic boundaries are so well defined that they exclude everything that doesn't fit in their calibrating filters (see "The Two Cultures," Charles Percy Snow) .
Science is not the only knowledge production institution. We can count here religion, myth, art, and several others. However, there is substantial difference in the epistemological criteria (I use this term here because of a lack of a better one) and methodologies of all these knowledge production systems.
For some time I work on the methodologizing of everyday inquiring behavior, inquiring behavior in the arts, and the professions. I believe that some spontaneous forms of professional inquiry can be improved substantially. They can be aligned with particular epistemological norms and criteria for quality of information, and can be re-introduced in their respective professional communities. The benefit is that the quality of inquiry and information in the arts and professions can be traced and managed much better. Additionally, such methodological work also contributes to the development of the field of qualitative methodology and the development of innovative research methods. This is a long topic and I will stop here.
Best wishes,
Lubomir Popov, Ph.D.
Bowling Green State University
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