2009 ALISE Conference

6

The Problem of Tradition: Teaching Research in the Shadow of the History of Science

John M. Budd

buddj@missouri.edu

The Problem of Tradition:
Teaching Research in the Shadow of the History of Science

There is a research tradition that builds heavily upon traditions that began in the early days of the Enlightenment.  The discipline that was once referred to as natural philosophy (the study of humans as they live in the natural world) was transformed by Francis Bacon’s criticism of ancient though.  He replaced the attempts at integrating knowledge by Plato, Aristotle, and many medieval philosophers with a technical method for observing natural phenomena.  The substance of his criticism and replacement was published in his Great Instauration and Novum Organum (both 1620).  Shortly after Bacon’s treatise on a new scientific method appeared, René Descartes published “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences” (1637).  The “Discourse” was not identical to Bacon’s method, but it shared the replacement of metaphysical causes with observed effects.  That is, the materialist for of scientific method gained purchase through the influential publication of these works.

The transformative methodological work of Bacon and Descartes was then received by a succession of thinkers, all of whom sought to extend the materialist scientific method to the study of humans, their actions, their beliefs, and their societies.  Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan connected the supremacy of science and its material method with the politics of states.  Later, an array of French philosophers, including Denis Diderot, Marquis de Condorcet, Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon, and Auguste Comte expanded the scientific method, and its materialist reasoning, to include the vanquishing of metaphysics.  What has, especially in the twentieth century, been identified as the problem of positivism has a long lineage.  The legacy of materialist approaches to inquiry is still very strong; it resides, to a considerable extent, in the ubiquity of statistical significance testing (ubiquity that is critiqued by Ziliak and McCloskey, The Cult of Statistical Significance, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2008).

One manifestation of the tradition is in the search for, and treatment of, evidence.  The paper will present an examination of the syllabi of research-related courses in ALA-accredited master’s programs, which demonstrates the reliance on the Enlightenment materialist tradition.  The references to evidence tend to suggest reliance on, among other things, behavioristic observations of information seekers and users, cognitive investigation that is limited to eliminativist or reductionist methods, or constructivist approaches that likewise reduce analytical possibilities.  The research-related courses are definitely not limited to such approaches, of course.  Alternatives will be mentioned that present such things as communicative action, melding of ontology and epistemology, and reflective techniques that involve both researchers and subjects.

The paper will then present a critical examination of what is included in courses, weighed against some normative possibilities for the conception of evidence.  The possibilities will be informed by the ways that questions can be framed.  It is the framing that guides the conduct of research; present practice (reflected in syllabi) and normative possibilities will be assessed according to questioning.  From that assessment the claims associated with evidence will follow.