Scientific (r)evolution: Dealing with the human factors
By Leila Jameel, PhD student at UCL Department of Experimental Psychology.
On behalf of Tom E Hardwicke, Matthew Jones, Eryk J Walczak, Lucia M Weinberg
In 2012 Daniel Kahneman sent an email to several prominent social psychologists warning that he saw a “train wreck looming” for the field. This statement was issued in response to the scandalous case of research fraud perpetrated by Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel. It sent shock waves rippling, and the entire psychological discipline was placed under intense scrutiny. Gradually the issues highlighted by this debate filtered across psychology, to the social and physical sciences.
It has become increasingly clear that the scientific enterprise has blown off-course. It is plagued by threats that undermine its progress including the aggressive ‘publish or perish’ culture and severe cuts suffered in response to austerity measures. Media exposure concerning the extent of Stapel’s fraudulent activities (more than 50 peer-reviewed articles were retracted), has led to a more nuanced understanding of scientific integrity. Whilst outright data falsification is considered to be a rare but dangerous threat, traditionally the majority of scientists are assumed to be honest and objective experts. However, a landmark paper claimed that questionable research practices are widespread amongst scientists (Martinson, Anderson & de Vries, 2005). Furthermore, the psychological sciences, and many others, are beleaguered by a lack of robust replication studies (Ioannidis, 2012), and all too often fall prey to the seduction of ‘bite-sized’ science so adored by top journals (Bertamini and Munfano, 2012).
In September 2014 a group of psychological and cognitive scientists at the University of Amsterdam decided to harness this fervent introspection to promote positive change. They organised an excellent event, “Improving Scientific Practice: Dealing with the Human Factors”, which gave an overview of threats to the scientific enterprise and debated potential solutions, ranging from wide-scale cultural change, to pre-registration of study protocols, or harnessing new technologies that allow for data sharing and transparency. A group of five post-graduate students, Tom Hardwicke, Leila Jameel, Matthew Jones, Eryk Walczak and Lucia Weinberg, received funding from the Department of Experimental Psychology, UCL to attend. To read their review of the event, and views on the issues and solutions debated please see: http://www.opticon1826.com/article/view/opt.ch.
Whilst the issues discussed were not new, indeed many were highlighted decades ago, they have often brushed under the carpet. So, what is different this time?
- The power of scientists to tackle these things independently has shifted – technology (i.e. the internet and various data tools) allows researchers to share and scrutinise their own and others’ work more effectively.
- The scale of the scientific enterprise has grown rapidly in the past decade, whilst government funding of the sciences has dwindled. This creates a culture of fierce competition where individuals, and institutions (i.e. universities and grant-funders) become focused on outputs. Whilst there are sensible and noble intentions behind these measures, it ultimately creates a system that unduly rewards individuals on the basis of the quantity of their output (i.e. number of papers produced and amount of money received) or head-line worthy research. As opposed to a focus on the quality of their work (i.e. truly original contribution to research, or work that translates into real-world applications) or their contribution to the scientific community (i.e. mentoring or inspiring others, and working collaboratively with other research groups). In such a competitive system individuals can become focused on ‘bite-sized’ science, which allows them to churn out research that is quick to conduct and easily digestible by the reader. Randy Schekman (winner of the 2013 Nobel prize for Medicine) even suggested that “the incentives offered by top journals distort science, just as big bonuses distort banking.” For the full article please see: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/how-journals-nature-science-cell-damage-science).
- A human context has been provided. Rather than viewing researcher fraud as an isolated case of moral turpitude, scientists are beginning to acknowledge that they are human, and thus subject to the same biases and driven by the same motivations as any other individual. From the PhD student whose supervisor pressurises them to only report the studies that support their theories, to the postdoc who really needs one more paper for their CV to be in with a chance of winning that grant proposal, to the esteemed Professor who is so wedded to their views they unquestioningly dismiss alternative evidence. Scientists can be fooled and manipulated by the system and statistics that governs them and their work. Whilst this might seem like a depressing revelation it is actually very helpful. It allows scientists to view upholding research integrity as a joint endeavour and to realise their own limitations and to seek to mitigate these accordingly.
In their review Hardwicke et al. (2014) summarise these issues, and debate the relative merits of the proposed solutions for dealing with the ‘human factors in science’.
References:
Bertamini, M., Munafo, M. (2012). Bite-size science and its undesirable side effects. Perspectives on Psychological Science 7(1) 67–71. DOI: http://dx/doi.org/10.1177/1745691611429353
Hardwicke, T.E., Jameel, L, Jones, M, Walczak, E.J. and Weinberg, L.M. (2014). Only human: Scientists, systems, and suspect statistics. Opticon1826 (16):25. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/opt.ch
Ioannidis, J.P.A (2012). Why most published research findings are false. Perspectives in Psychological Science, 7(6): 645-654. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal. pmed.0020124
Martinson, B. C., Anderson, M. S., de Vries, R. (2005) Scientists behaving badly. Nature, 435(7034): 737–738. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/435737a
CfP: 2nd Annual London DTC Conference – ‘Creating and Communicating’
On March 23rd and 24th 2015, the London Doctoral Training Centres will host their second annual conference organised by 2nd year ESRC funded students from a range of disciplines. The conference offers an excellent opportunity for PhD students to present and get feedback on their work,engage in academic debate and networking and think more creatively about their research.
Abstracts are invited for paper/ oral presentations and posters from London-based ESRC funded doctoral students. Abstracts should be submitted here http://goo.gl/forms/AAprBwBPE7 , submission details below.
Conference programme
The theme of the conference is “Creating and Communicating”, encouraging participants to offer insights from their different research topics and disciplines. This theme is not intended to restrict the scope of the papers and posters presented, which may be on any topic. Presentation sessions will be organised around sub-themes, and inter-disciplinarity is encouraged.
The programme will include:
– Two keynote speakers pioneering creative and innovative approaches to communicating research.
– A panel session with invited researchers, policy-makers, journalists etc. addressing traditional and novel methods for communicating with different audiences.
– An interactive activity focussing on inter-disciplinarity.
– A variety of presentation media and new ideas for communicating and disseminating research.
– An interactive poster session, with a prize for the best poster(s).
Conference logistics
The conference is free to attend, and held at London School of Economics and Political Science. It lasts for two days (timings to be confirmed), and is non-residential. The programme includes lunch on both days, a drinks reception on the first evening and an evening dinner on the second day. (Please note that in order to manage the delegate list and budgets, a returnable £10 deposit will be required from every registered attendee. This will be refunded for all those who attend.)
Call for abstracts
Conference participants may either make an oral/ paper presentation or present a poster, and abstracts are invited for both. Given the theme of the conference, non-traditional forms of presentation are welcome. If you wish to discuss a proposed presentation method, or to discuss technical or equipment requirements, please email the organisers at
dtcconference2015@gmail.com.
Please note the number of oral/ paper presentations is limited, and the selection committee may suggest an abstract is accepted for a poster presentation. If there are more submissions for oral/paper presentations than can be accommodated in the time available, priority will be given to 2nd year students, and there may be limits on the number of students from any one institution.
Participants making an oral/ paper presentation will be allocated 15 minutes for their presentation with limited additional time allowed for questions. Presenters are not expected to submit written papers, but the organisers can arrange for limited written materials to be circulated at or before the conference. Prizes will be awarded for the best poster presentations, with an opportunity for the winning posters to be presented at a plenary session.
Abstract submissions:
– Please specify whether you are proposing to present a poster or an oral/ paper presentation. You may leave your proposal open, in which case it will be considered for both.
– Abstracts must be submitted using the form accessible here: http://goo.gl/forms/AAprBwBPE7. If there are any problems in making your submission please contact the organisers using the email address below.
– Please try to give your abstract a short title which clearly indicates the scope of your presentation.
– Abstracts for posters should be no more than 100 words, and for oral/ paper presentations should be no more than 300 words.
– Abstracts exceeding 400 words will not be considered.
The deadline for submission of abstracts is 10am on Monday 12 January 2015. Successful applicants will be notified by the end of January.
Further information
For further information on any aspect of this conference please email the organisers at dtcconference2015@gmail.com.
Event: Dr Alex Apsan Frediani on ‘Reclaiming Regeneration: Reflections from an Action Learning Initiative in Inner São Paulo’
Blindfoldedly Feeling an E-lephant: Why studying the internet has got me all confused
Good afternoon, Internet.
And in that greeting lies my current problems. What exactly goes on in the internet? What are all those people doing with it? Who are you, internet user? How did you get here? Why are you looking at my stuff? And what are you going to do with it afterwards, you sick freak?
Basically, as part of my research into online science-themed social networks, I’ve been making tentative steps into sociology of the internet. Which, you may be surprised to hear, is a RATHER LARGE TOPIC. There’s also rather a lot of people writing about it.1 Some of this lot suggest that, when you consider the history of mass communication, everything about the internet is just old news. Sometimes they have a point, particularly when countering naysaying claims that the internet heralds the corruption of youth and the end of humanity.1 My favourite example of…
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Smart phones, Simulacra, Prince and The Matrix: Why I (also) don’t want to be a Digital Witness
Authored by Scarlett Brown, a PhD Researcher studying Gender in Board Appointments at Kings College London, Department of Management. Originally appeared at the blog Sociology Lens.
The election of the Pope, in 2005 and in 2013
Avid Sociology Lens readers (as I am sure you all are) will have already read Roger Tyler’s piece this week; “Digital Witness: Memory vs. Experience”. In it, he discusses his experiences of attending Glastonbury Festival and the summer solstice at Stonehenge, and how in both cases he felt showed examples of how obsessed we have become with the need to document and record our experiences as they are happening. Even as the fireworks go off or the sun comes up, we all reach for our smart phones; as if, if we don’t record something and share it with our friends it cannot possibly have happened.
By a strange coincidence (either offering support for the issue, or implying lack of imagination, I’m not sure which…) I was in the middle of writing an almost identical piece this week. Given that I am lazy, and there is no such thing as too much Sociological analysis, I want to build on the points made in the article, and see if I can usher in a few more theories along the way.
For me, the catalyst for thinking about this issue was attending a Prince concert in Londona few weeks ago. Prince has a history of being quite demanding and cagey about people recording him without permission (he is one of the few artists that has successfully sued individuals for posting his songs on Youtube, for example), and so when the email came through beforehand requesting that we did not take photos during the performance, I wasn’t surprised. I had also heard stories of people being ejected from the venue for taking pictures at early shows, presumably for the same reason. We were reminded again at the gig numerous times before the show started, and the show itself opened with his band, 3rd Eye Girl, coming out to remind us not to take pictures. Their reasoning was so similar to St Vincent (as Roger discusses) that I suspect one took the idea from the other; “Don’t take pictures, because we want you to experience things in the moment”.
The ability technology has to prevent us appreciating what it actually is to be ‘in the moment’ reminds me of one of my favourite lines from the comedian Dylan Moran, as a response to people’s outrage that he doesn’t use the internet.
“People look at you like you just fell out of a tree, you know, and they’re appalled, and they say, “Well, why not? You know, you can’t be up to date.” And you think: How can I be any more up to date? I’m alive now! That’s pretty current where I’m from.”
It is strange how we have convinced ourselves that being ‘up to date’ or ‘in the moment’ necessarily means experiencing something whilst also recording it, and offering it up as our own performance. The ubiquity of smart phone technology has made this easier than ever. Like Roger, I am concerned with this because it also means the creation of an unnecessarily large amount of ‘Crappy pictures’. A quick search on Instagram or Twitter shows this easily; thousands upon thousands of pictures that in no way come close to demonstrating what is was actually like to be there. Everyone is a photographer, a creative. This is not to denigrate the creative possibilities of these technologies, but it often isn’t any more creative than simply proving that ‘I was there’. It goes on like some kind of cyclical validation cycle: (Take picture of Prince, tweet picture of Prince so everyone knows I am here and what a great time I’m having, tag my friends who are also here, then their friends will also know what a great time we’re having watching Prince), and repeat ad nauseum, rather than just leaving our phones in our pockets and actually watching Prince.
The worrying thing about this habit is not necessarily the obsession with the recording itself, its that by recording and repackaging we end up with something that is simultaneously less good and more important to us than the original was in the first place. The recording, the image or the neat (re)construction stops being a representation of the experience and instead becomes the experience itself. As with Baudrillard’s Simulacra: “It is the map that engenders the territory”, and the boundaries between experience and imagined experience cease to exist. Much like the Matrix (one of my favourite go-to metaphors), the imaginary or exaggerated/tidied/smoothed/filtered memories are more real than the reality was in the first place.
I hope this is not the case, and I especially hope that more artists, musicians, lecturers, speakers have the initiative to ask people politely not to make their work into a simulacrum. Or perhaps instead, will find ways to integrate the desire to record with their own artistic integrity; as in recent play Privacy or Amanda Palmer in her riposte to the Daily Mail, both of which instructed the audience to get out their smart phones in order to be part of the entertainment. Mostly, I hope that we will not be the last generation to enjoy the experience of turning the recording off and just being ‘In the moment’. Whatever that might mean.
ESRC London Interdisciplinary Conference Round-Up
Authored by Ed Jones, PhD Student at the Bartlett School of Planning and conference co-organiser
On a sunny Monday afternoon, students from across London’s ESRC DTCs came together for the long awaited interdisciplinary conference. The rather verdant surroundings of London Business School provided the setting for two stimulating days of papers and discussion. Oxford University’s Prof Jo Boyden keynote lecture kicked off the conference with an engaging presentation exploring the methodological, ethical and epistemological challenges and opportunities of working across diverse disciplinary perspectives including economics, epidemiology and anthropology on the Young Lives Project, an ambitious mixed methods longitudinal research on child well-being. The parallel sessions later that afternoon covered a wide range of topics, from the economics of fiscal policy in a debt crisis to the changing nature of the middle class in Egypt. The presence of attendees from a variety of disciplines fostered interesting discussions, with sociologists and geographers engaging with a political science-focussed study of protests in Cairo in one of the sessions.
The evening poster session added another dimension to communicating across disciplines – participants rose to the challenge of presenting their research in a visually engaging way, sparking wide ranging discussions. The first day drew to a close with a three course meal courtesy of the LBS. Discussions continued in the pub, and a hardy handful of delegates pursued interdisciplinary debate late into the night in the Hotel Danubius bar. The second day saw the delegates split into groups for an interdisciplinary exercise, where participants used their imaginations and disciplinary perspectives to address the key issues, methods, drivers and possible outcomes of a scenario based around real world issues that drew on ESRC research themes.
The final round of parallel sessions then provided insights into a range of topics, including interdisciplinarity and corruption and digitally mediated social capital. Roger Burrows’ closing lecture provided much food for thought on the methodological challenges facing empirical social science research, and the opportunities brought by new technologies in allowing researchers to observe and understand the world. All in all, the conference provided a good arena for students to share the emerging findings of their research, develop understandings informed by other disciplines, and consider the opportunities and challenges presented by interdisciplinary working.
Where is the World Environment Organization?
Authored by Lucien Georgeson, a PhD student in the Department of Geography, UCL. Originally published at ClimateSnack.
While reading reports from various international organisations in the early stages of my research, I found it hard to believe how the environment is not given the same status as other global issues. It is an anomaly of the United Nations that there is no dedicated environmental organisation amongst the 15 autonomous, specialised agencies. This secondary status and the lack of coherenceover responsibilities harms environmental governance at the global scale. Would having a World Environment Organization help coordinate global environmental and climate change efforts?
A World Environment Organization would collaborate global efforts towards mitigation of and adaptation to all environmental challenges, of which climate change may be the largest. As summarised by the AAAS’s excellent What We Know report, ‘we are at risk of pushing our climate system toward abrupt, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible changes with highly damaging impacts’[1]. Continue reading
Interdisciplinarity at the London Business School – conference preview
Ed Jones is a PhD Student at the Bartlett School of Planning.
Later this month research students from all over London will come together for an interdisciplinary conference at London Business School. The conference will bring together ESRC-funded PhD students from a wide range of disciplines for two days of presentations, lectures and discussion. The conference will prompt reflection on our own research and disciplinary boundaries, and the issues raised by cross disciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to a range of topics.
The ESRC stresses the importance of interdisciplinary research, supporting ‘new and exciting research which combines approaches from more than one discipline’ and recognising that ‘many of the most pressing challenges are interdisciplinary in nature.’ Interdisciplinarity is a hot topic in academia, and funding bodies are increasingly keen to ensure that research activities adopt interdisciplinary perspectives. There is a fertile debate around the issues raised by interdisciplinary research; some stressing the benefits of seeing problems using perspectives from outside your field, while others see interdisciplinary encounters as reinforcing disciplinary boundaries if substantial engagement between different disciplines can’t be reached.
The conference has been organised by students from across London’s DTCs, who faced tough choices in deciding which of the excellent abstracts to choose for the talks and poster sessions. The sessions have been organised around the ESRC’s key themes of environment and energy, health and wellbeing, social diversity, technology and innovation, global economy, security and conflict, and understanding behaviour. There will also be a special session addressing recent events in Egypt. The sessions will cover a diverse range of topics, including why developing countries sign tax treaties, the ethics of Israeli militarism and Georgian hospitality. The second day includes an interdisciplinary exercise which promises to be an interesting and imaginative way of seeing real world issues from the standpoint of other disciplines.
With keynote talks from the University of Oxford’s pioneering childhood studies researcher Prof Jo Boyden and Prof Roger Burrows, the pro-warden for interdisciplinary development at Goldsmiths, the conference will be a great opportunity to meet with students from other social science disciplines, share knowledge and develop understandings.
Me, Myself, and Introspection: Autobiography in Academia
Authored by Oliver Marsh, a PhD Researcher in Science Enthusiasm and Social Media at the UCL Science and Technology Studies Department. Originally appeared at the blog SidewaysLookAtScience.
The other week, while writing a paper for a Digital Sociology workshop, I inserted the following nauseatingly self-absorbed passage:
For completeness, I should probably also tell you a couple of salient points about my own background. I originally entered university doing a physics degree, intending to go into science communication, but finished up doing history of science, particularly social history of science communication, and then moved into sociology of science a few months ago. I should also note that I was never a serious member of any online science enthusiast communities, including the ones I’m studying.
Even as I was writing it, I wasn’t quite sure why it was there. Maybe a subconscious longing for a fancy personal intro in a conference, like proper academics. Maybe the influence of a paper I read recently about Antonio Gramsci who – in addition to doing time in prison (making him one of the few social scientists with an excuse for not doing data collection) and wanting to scatter socialist literature from hot air balloons – examined the personal backgrounds of scholars. But the most honest answer is that it sent a signal: although I was discussing sociological methods, I actually have zero experience of sociological methods and if they asked me hard questions I would cry. Surprisingly the response was not ‘this is an academic meeting, take your X Factor backstory and get out’. Instead, they felt this was a useful addition to my talk. Which I regard as a victory for my cowardice. But was it a victory for academia?
Generally I regard cowardice as inimical to academia – scholarship should be about putting your ideas out in a bold and clear way that maximises the ease of being properly critiqued. Sometimes personal features assist cowardice and laziness – for instance, an idea might be accepted or rejected without due critical thought because of who wrote it.1 But in other cases personal features assist good scholarship, as with (for example) feminist scholars who have shown able to show some very subtle biases in academia due to a lack of female perspectives.2 So one question is: when do personal features make for better scholarship?
There’s a rather bigger question lurking behind that: what do we want scholarship to do? What distinguishes ‘scholarship’ from other stuff that involves thinking, hypothesising, debating, and generally trying to be clever? Personally, I think of academia as a project to understand all the world. Why is that apple falling to the ground? How did we come to have our systems of government, our forms of entertainment, our belief systems, etc.? Is there a Lord Gaga? This implies a certain degree of detachment – the emphasis is on the world, not our writing about it. We don’t create our own new worlds, unlike creative writers; we try to take our evidence from the world and not just ask other people, unlike journalists; we use methodologies, unlike generally clever people writing generally clever things. The utopian aim of scholarship, then, might be some abstracted and impartial understanding of the whole world, the ability to answer any question without just making stuff up.
Well, maybe. To fully discuss that here would require me to use postmodernism, pluralism, and far more space and coffee than I have available.3 The point I’d like to make is that ensuring best-fit with the world is hindered, not helped, by trying too hard to be abstract and impersonal. The personality and skills of an individual inevitably enter into academia, what with it being a practice carried out by humans. There are mechanisms for distancing these influences, like anonymous reviewing or declaration of funding interests. But to say these are completely successful would be to miss interesting, and probably important, points. Take experiments. A common argument runs that experiments should give the same result irrespective of who is carrying them out. The principle is pretty clear, but I can assure you that the results of experiments can vary wildly depending on whether or not they’re being carried out by me. Less glibly, this also neglects the fact that doing one experiment over and over isn’t the entirety of ‘science’. Even the best experiments have to move out of the lab sometime, and this involves some pretty human processes like judging when the experiment should end, whether the experiment is good enough to convince (especially if it overturns prior beliefs), whether the news is worth passing on further (and if so, how), or even if it’s worth doing in the first place.
As a sociologist I’m contractually obliged to point out that contexts, as well as personalities, enter into all this. I certainly know that I’m a much harsher critic of papers when I read them for reading groups than when I read them to teach undergraduates. In the former case I’m trying to maximise the number of interesting (read: argumentative and nitpicky) points I can throw into the discussion. In the latter I’m trying to show the students some useful points they can take out of that reading which they definitely actually did, honest. Now obviously there’s more to it than that – I really hope my overall assessments are somewhat influenced by how good the arguments are – but I’d be lying if I claimed I could easily recognise and defeat all my biases. And I’d also be lying if I claimed such biases weren’t also present when I produce new research. So that’s where autobiographical passages like the one I opened with come in handy. By showing one’s personal background and the contexts one is working within, a scholar can give that bit more info to help audiences locate possible biases, blindspots, and bonus experience instead.4 It’s really just an extension of making your methodology clear.
The problem with that is… well, there are lots of problems. Firstly, how much information to give? Given all that contextual stuff, should every footnote include a potted ‘I read this paper while…’ backstory? Should all work begin with your 3-volume autobiography, just to make sure that you haven’t missed a relevant self-detail? Secondly, even if your audience can minimise your biases they also bring their own. Thirdly, and most worryingly, this could push academia towards a clamour of voices, each with their own valuable viewpoint, and away from anything that can be synthesised sensibly. This can be seen in a bizarre and fascinating chapter entitled ‘Perfectly Normal Female Interest In Men Bonking’ – if you look for it on the internet I’d advise using an academic search engine – coauthored by sociologist of fandom Henry Jenkins and two fans from the communities he studies. They begin with the interesting argument that academics, in providing their own reflections on fans, downplay the importance of fans’ own self-reflections. Their solution to this is simply to hurl out pages and pages of fans’ self-reflections on slash fiction. The authors’ point, I think, is that all these competing voices have equal validity which should not be distorted by some academic synthesis– a fact the authors acknowledge by not providing a conclusion. The disjointed content is interesting, but it doesn’t connect up to give a firmer grasp on any world . If there’s any methodology going on, besides selective copy-and-pasting, it isn’t clear.
But despite all that, I’m still in favour of providing some autobiographical reflections in academic work. It’s good for full clarity, to open yourself up to the possibility you’ve fooled yourself. It opens up all work to the charge of human fallibility, rather than only when we want to highlight human-ness for our own purposes (it’s interesting it’s interesting that history of science lectures, in my experience, provide photos, biographical snippets, and other humanising sights of scientists, but only textual extracts from other historians). It’s also a possibly good way to highlight prevailing influences in groups of academics, whether in a particular institution or country or all of academia. Many of these are pretty well known anyway – white middle-class dominance ahoy – but there’s no harm in making that even more painfully obvious. Basically, whatever we want academia to do, we want it to be ‘right’ or ‘correct’ in some way5 – and rightness and correctness are only a few steps away from honesty.
But these are all very fresh and slightly confused thoughts. In particular, I’d like to say something more specific than ‘let’s have some autobiographical reflections everyone’, something which takes on board the problems I raised rather than stuffing them in a cupboard to deal with later. So if you have any ideas or suggestions I’d be very interested to hear them. So send them to me. Along with your 3-volume autobiography.
1 = One argument runs that big-name academics can hide dodgy ideas behind their eminence, while PhD students’ ideas are held back by a presumption of their inexperience. I think this is a somewhat blinkered argument, as the work of big-name academics gets plenty of hype and attention, and in academic terms this often translates as greater criticism – after all, I’d hope we go through enough training to recognise dodgy ideas no matter whose name is at the top of them. The bigger problem, I’d argue, is not hero worship but the disproportionate attention, both positive and negative, paid to certain academics. After all, if a PhD student writes a groundbreaking paper in a forest and no-one is around to hear it…
2 = A specific example from my own field is Elisabeth Lloyd’s work on the various adaptive explanations proposed by biologists for existence of the female orgasm.
3 = Very simplistically, the view propounded by many postmodernist and postmodernism-influenced scholars is that the statement ‘that’s just the way it is’ is never a good one – we cannot access a single privileged description of the real-world-out-there, as metaphysics tries to do, but instead lots of (often incoherent) viewpoints. Ideas of ‘truth’ and ‘progress’ and ‘humanity’ are seen as created by humans, while the real-world-out-there remains permanently inaccessible. Pluralism, again very simplistically, says that there are many possible viewpoints on anything, and there’s no problem with these existing side-by-side. Although there’s obvious links with postmodernism, I get the sense that many pluralists are ok with saying we have some access to reality. But this is all philosophy, which is most definitely Not My Thing. If you want to know more from some actually reliable informants,, the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy is often pretty good.
4 = My excellent friend and colleague Raquel Velho gave me a good example of journal articles in disability studies. This is a field in which personal experience is often very important, but also the power of disclosing said experience is down to the author (unlike gender, nationality, or affiliation which can be gleaned from author details).
5 = Despite all that postmodern and pluralism stuff – on which subject my thoughts are very conflicted and confused – but the point I’d make is that aiming for some form of truth-to-the-world is better than scholars throwing in the towel and going ‘heck I’ll just sit in an armchair and say whatever like cos it’s all kind of true and kind of false anyway’
Economic and Social Research Blogs of London 