A Brief History of Knowledge for Social Science Researchers: Before Method [1 ed.] 0367370794, 9780367370794

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Preface
1 How Can We Think about Research? A Gallery of Heroes
2 Epistemology and its Relevance to Research
3 A Historical Sketch of knowledge in the Western world: the Greeks through the Middle Ages
4 A Historical Sketch of knowledge in the Western world: from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment
5 A Historical Sketch of knowledge in the Western world: from the Enlightenment onward
6 Are we there yet? The birth and development of the social sciences
7 How Can We Think about theory? A gallery of heroes
8 A Brief History of knowledge, and the vistas beyond
Index

Citation preview

A Brief History of Knowledge for Social Science Researchers

A Brief History of Knowledge for Social Science Researchers outlines a history of knowledge from Ancient Greece to present day, in Europe and the Western world. This outline provides the basis for understanding where various research methods originate, and their epistemological, historical, political and social roots. This book provides social science researchers with an understanding of how research methods developed, and how their truth criteria, and what is accepted as knowledge, spring from human history. Research is often reduced to data collection, results and publication in the stressful, results-oriented academic environment. But research is a human enterprise, a product of both individual creativity and historical, political and social conditions. This book will focus on how shared research criteria (as we know them today) were developed through the work and thought of philosophers, social activists and researchers. This book will be useful for graduate and post-graduate students, particularly those studying Research Methods, and Philosophy of Science courses; and for experienced social science researchers who wish to understand how research methods have developed in human history. Deborah Court is an associate professor of Education at Bar-Ilan University and research consultant at the Arab Academic College in Israel. She conducts ethnographic research in multicultural and inter-religious settings. She is keenly aware of the importance for graduate students and experienced researchers to understand the epistemological underpinnings of research methods.

A Brief History of Knowledge for Social Science Researchers Before Method Deborah Court

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Deborah Court The right of Deborah Court to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-37079-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-35260-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

Preface

vi

1

How can we think about research? A gallery of heroes 1

2

Epistemology and its relevance to research 8

3 A historical sketch of knowledge in the Western world: the Greeks through the Middle Ages 17 4 A historical sketch of knowledge in the Western world: from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment 28 5 A historical sketch of knowledge in the Western world: from the Enlightenment onward 39 6 Are we there yet? The birth and development of the social sciences 47 7 How can we think about theory? A gallery of heroes 59 8 A brief history of knowledge, and the vistas beyond 77 Index

79

Preface

When I was doing my doctoral studies in education at the University of British Columbia in the late 1980s, I was fortunate to have as my advisor the late Professor LeRoi Daniels, a philosopher and epistemologist who introduced me to the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and other writers on philosophy of science and philosophy of knowledge. Thank you, Roi, wherever you may be. I took the philosophical bent with which you imbued all your students forward to my own research and teaching. This little book grew out of a doctoral course I taught for many years, in which I introduced doctoral students to the history of knowledge and asked them to reflect on their own decisions about method, methodology and theory, through the lens of epistemology and the roots and implications of different research paradigms. While some thought it a waste of time – please, let me get on with my data collection! – others came to it like thirsty plants. Rushed and pressured to make methodological decisions and complete their dissertations, they were given little time to reflect, and to experience the intellectual enjoyment of learning about, and seeing themselves as part of, the great human story of the development of research knowledge. Before method, we need to know from whence we came. I hope this book, like an album of family photographs, will help to show how each of us is part of the continuing, unfolding story of the search for questions, answers, knowledge and meaning.

1

How can we think about research? A gallery of heroes

What does it mean to “think about research”? We need to do research, right? We need to learn statistical tests, concepts and methods of analysis; how to build and validate questionnaires; test hypotheses and analyze results. We need to learn how to conduct interviews and observations, analyze documents and write a research report! And theory! We need a theoretical framework! So much to do; who has time to “think about research”? This little book provides an opportunity to do just that: to slow down and explore some essential questions. The most basic: what is knowledge, to which all research strives to contribute? Where does knowledge come from, how does it develop? What kinds of k nowledge come from research, and how does knowledge change as a result of research? What underlies methodology and method, research tools and procedures, methods of analysis, use of theory, construction and testing of theory? How do methodologies and theories develop, change and advance? And what is theory, anyway? Where does it come from? Knowledge, research methodologies and theory are a moving stream, flowing ever forward. Rocks in the way may temporarily impede the flow, but water is inexorable; it will find or make a path and continue to progress. Clearly people are responsible for the development of knowledge. People are the products of their time and place; their culture and its knowledge, standards and beliefs. Research is a human enterprise, a product of both individual creativity and historical, political and social conditions. Great researchers (and here we intend philosophers, philosophers of science, researchers of the sciences and the social sciences) are those who, while necessarily working within available resources and conditions, succeed in thinking beyond their time and place, imagining beyond current knowledge, breaking boundaries and genuinely moving knowledge forward. Sometimes this means being very brave.

2  How can we think about research? As a way to illustrate these important understandings, we will begin with a Gallery of Heroes – people who made particular contributions to advance the research enterprise. This is not intended to be in any way a comprehensive list, for of course there could never be such a list. These brief portraits provide examples of how one person’s work can move our collective understanding forward and will serve to awaken questions that will be explored throughout the book.

Nicolaus Copernicus 1473–1543, Poland While the orthodoxy of his time stated that the stable earth is the center of the universe, and that the sun, planets and stars move around the earth (the geocentric theory), the alternate idea that the earth is a planet which rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun (the heliocentric theory), had been proposed hundreds of years before by Greek scientists such as Pythagoras. Copernicus’ contribution was that he used data, mathematical measurements from the simple instruments available at the time, to give quantitative substantiation to this idea. This in effect created a new, measurement-based argument for an old, theoretical idea. Copernicus was not able to prove his argument; rather, he substantiated it mathematically. Unfortunately, the idea that the earth was the center still held sway; there were “epistemological, philosophical, religious, theological, scriptural, physical, mechanical, astronomical and empirical objections” (Finocchiaro 2010: xiv) to Copernicus’ work! Though Copernicus made fairly modest claims in his published work, his book was nevertheless banned by the Church shortly after he died. Copernicus’ synthesizing of observational data in effect launched modern astronomy.

Galileo Galilei 1554–1643, Italy Galileo, working almost a hundred years after Copernicus, made many discoveries in mathematics, motion, physics and astronomy. He had the advantage of using the recently invented telescope, upon which he improved, to make observations. Significantly, his approach was experiment driven. He, like Copernicus, espoused the heliotropic theory. His experiments, measurements and observations allowed him to disprove the geocentric theory. His published work was banned by the Church, and he was tried for heresy. The charges of heresy were based on two reasons: first, his claim that the heliotropic theory was true, and, second, his claim that truth in the natural world can be found not by following Scripture, but by experimentation and data collection and analysis (Finocchiaro 2006). At his trial, he was forced

How can we think about research?  3 to recant his scientific claims and publicly state the truth of Scripture. He is often called “the father of modern science” and is seen as the progenitor of the scientific method.

Marie Curie 1867–1934, Poland, France Marie Curie was Polish-born and a naturalized French citizen. A chemist and physicist, she was the first woman to win a Nobel prize and remains the only woman to win a Nobel prize twice. Among her many accomplishments during her illustrious career, she discovered two new elements, radium and polonium, to add to the recently created periodic table. She developed the theory of radioactivity, a term she coined. During World War I, she developed mobile radiography units to treat wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Building on Curie’s experiments with the behavior of elemental atoms, other scientists discovered that atoms are not indivisible, they are made up of smaller particles (Pasachoff 1996). Marie Curie died from the effects of radiation after her decades of work with radioactive materials, whose dangers were not yet understood. Her research into radioactive elements and her development of the theory of radioactivity paved the way, among developments in many other areas, to radiation treatment for cancer patients. She is known as “the mother of modern physics.”

John Dewey, 1859–1952, United States John Dewey was a psychologist, philosopher and educator. As well as writing extensively on child-centered pedagogy that begins with the interests of the child, he also wrote on epistemology, ethics, art and political and social theory. He strongly believed in the importance of democracy and saw the school as the natural place for democratic attitudes, knowledge, propensities, skills and critical and reflective thinking to be learned, in this way both respecting the child and building a strong civil society. He analyzed how people think and learn. He wrote on the centrality of students’ direct experience in education through active engagement with problems, ideas and other people. Dewey was instrumental in the progressive movement in education. Progressivism, based in the epistemology of pragmatism, of which he was one of the progenitors,1 was out of step with the mass education and rote learning that developed as a result of the industrial revolution. Dewey: “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself” (Dewey 1916: 239). Dewey’s work continues to this day to influence educators, psychologists and philosophers, and his books are continually mined, re-examined and analyzed, so profuse and profound were his ideas.2

4  How can we think about research?

Nettie Stevens, 1861–1912, United States Nettie Stevens was an American geneticist at a time when this branch of science was just beginning. She may seem like an odd choice for our Gallery of Heroes – Nettie who, you may ask? But her important work illustrates a point we will make repeatedly, that research is done by people in the context of their time and place, with all the challenges and constraints that may involve. Nettie Stevens was a female scientist at a time when there was still a tendency to overlook the work of female scientists. She, independently from Edmund Wilson, who was also working on this problem, solved the mystery of how animals and plants become male and female, with her discovery of sex chromosomes (Brush 1978). Studying egg tissue and the fertilization process, Stevens was the first to recognize that females have two large sex chromosomes in the shape of X’s and that males have one full size X and another smaller chromosome resembling a Y. Her genius was not just in observation and data collection, but in interpreting data to understand its meaning. Stevens worked at a time when the world of science was just opening up for women. Although her achievements were not unrecognized, she never attained a university position and failed to attain a level of professional success and recognition commensurate with her achievements. She remained on a low rung of the academic ladder … and her theoretical achievements, even in respect to chromosome studies and sex determination, are usually valued subordinately to those of Wilson. It is time to recognize fully the valuable contribution she made, not only to cytology, but to the new science of genetics. (Ogilvie & Choquette 1981: 310) By profiling Nettie Stevens in our Gallery of Heroes, we hope to contribute to long-overdue recognition of her important contribution to genetics.

Michael Polanyi, 1891–1976, Hungary, England Michael Polanyi was a chemist and philosopher of science who delved deeply into the nature of knowledge and the role of the knower. He critiqued positivism as giving a false account of knowing as being external, factual and provable only. He rejected the idea of scientific detachment, writing instead of the intellectual passion of creative scientists. He regarded knowing as “active comprehension of things known … skillful knowing” (Polanyi 1962: vii). His books Personal Knowledge and

How can we think about research?  5 The  Tacit Dimension provide detailed analysis of kinds of knowledge and create conceptions of personal knowledge and tacit knowledge, which had never before entered epistemology or been seen as relevant to the work of scientists. According to Polanyi “we know more than we can tell” (Polanyi 1966: 4) because knowledge is always personal, held by a knower, and includes facts, personal experience and intuition in complex unity that cannot be completely externalized and explained. Polanyi’s profound and original analysis of knowledge and knowing continues to influence scientists, social scientists, educators and philosophers of science in relation to the conduct of research, the nature of scientific knowledge, professional training and many other fields.

Rachel Carson, 1907–1964, United States Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and conservationist who brought her scientific knowledge, love of nature and writing skills together in her many works. Her writing about the life of the ocean was lyrical and accessible, opening this topic to the general public. Her most famous work, Silent Spring, was written at a time when DDT and other pesticides were widely used in agriculture and even home gardens. Carson sounded the alarm about the damage being done to the environment, to animals and people by these chemicals. For this, she was fiercely opposed by chemical companies and by some in government. But the accessibility, common sense, beauty and passion of her work awoke the general consciousness about the need to protect the environment, and about the fact that humans are part of an interdependent ecosystem. This led to the banning of DDT, to the beginning of the popular environmental movement, and to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency. Her work led to early awareness of climate change. Carson’s passion, scientific knowledge, persistence, writing ability and love of the natural world and everything in it, led to the development of a new field of study, research and action: environmental protection. She has been called “the mother of the environmental movement.”

Paulo Freire, 1921–1997, Brazil Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher. He formulated the concept of critical pedagogy, a term which can be traced to his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He held that teaching and learning are political acts and that true emancipation, which he sees as the goal of education, can be achieved through the awakening of critical consciousness. He attacked what he called the banking model

6  How can we think about research? of education, in which children are seen as empty accounts to be filled by teachers, texts and curriculum. Freire strived to bring about personal empowerment and social transformation through education. His childhood experience of poverty and hunger helped to shape his dedication to improving the lives of the poor. He felt that helping the poor in Brazil to achieve literacy would help them to change their lives, and for this radical belief and his work towards it he was jailed by the military junta, after which he was exiled. In exile, he continued to write and develop the idea of critical pedagogy and social transformation through education. Since Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated into English, Freire’s work, notably his conceptualizing of education as empowerment rather than the filling of empty vessels, has had great influence in the areas of pedagogy, teacher training and educational reform around the world. He was “a philosopher and revolutionary educator of pivotal significance to the project of liberation and social transformation” (Leonard & McLaren 1993: 1). How are these people’s stories relevant to the topic of this book? All research intends to contribute to knowledge. Most (though not all) individual research studies, and even most lifetime bodies of work, contribute to the incremental growth of knowledge in a particular area. What we see in the work of the people profiled in the Gallery of Heroes are exceptional contributions that reach the heart of knowledge itself and give us new ways of working with knowledge, new concepts, new theories and ways of conceptualizing theory. The work of these people created seismic shifts. Some created whole new fields of study. Their work continues to influence research and researchers in diverse fields, changing research thinking in significant ways. Each of the people in the Gallery of Heroes thought beyond the details of particular research to overarching ideas, ideas that had never before been formulated or had been suggested but neversub-stantiated They imagined beyond the seen and known, and set about through experimentation or rigorous analysis, to bring their ideas to the scientific world. Each demonstrated courage, imagination, creativity and determination in the face of opposition by political, religious, intellectual, social, scientific or economic forces, because they challenged current thinking and social norms. Polanyi calls this intense determination “intellectual commitment,” and sums up his belief in this commitment thusly: “I believe that in spite of the hazards involved, I am called upon to search for the truth and state my findings” (Polanyi 1962: 299). Thinking about research means, at least in part, looking at how knowledge is understood, created and advanced. Before beginning our journey through Western history we will, in the next chapter, explore the concept of knowledge itself.

How can we think about research?  7

Notes



References Boydston, J.A. (Ed.). Guide to the Works of John Dewey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. Brush, S. “Nettie Stevens and the Discovery of Sex Determination by Chromosomes.” Isis 69, no. 2, 1978, 162–172. Dewey, J. Democracy and Education. New York: The Free Press, 1916. Finocchiaro, M.A. Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs. Heidelberg, London, New York: Springer, 2010. Finocchiaro, M.A. “The Church and Galileo. Review Article.” Catholic Historical Review 94, no. 2, 2006, 260–282. Leonard, P. & P. McLaren. Paulo Freire: A Critical Encounter. London, New York: Routledge, 1993. Ogilvie. M. & C. Choquette. “Nettie Maria Stevens (1861–1912): Her Life and Contributions to Cytogenetics.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 125, no. 4, 1981, 292–311. Pasachoff, N. Marie Curie and the Science of Radioactivity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Polanyi, M. The Tacit Dimension. London: Routledge, 1966. Polanyi, M. Personal Knowledge. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Scheffler, I. Four Pragmatists (Routledge Revivals) (p. 1). London: Taylor and Francis, 2013.

2

Epistemology and its relevance to research

It is the nature of human beings to strive to learn about the world. As babies, we find and explore our own feet. As small children, we investigate our immediate surroundings, trying repeatedly to fit the round peg into the square hole until we see the relationship between the shape of the peg and the shape of the hole, and succeed. When we begin to talk, we ask endless “why?” questions, because we really want to know! To know why and how, what and whom and whether to organize relationships between different facts and experiences and to fit this ever-growing body of understanding into the increasingly complex tree of our knowledge. We construct our own knowledge tree, continually transforming it and ourselves (Fosnot & Perry 2005: 28): we are literally born researchers. We want to know how the world works now, partly in order to predict how it might work in the future. As we grow older, our investigations become more sophisticated. Some of us actually become researchers as part of our professional work, learning and practicing disciplined methods of data collection and interpretation. All of us continue in one way or another to investigate and gather data in order to gain more detailed, refined knowledge, likely adding in some small way to the human knowledge tree. Most of us truncate our data collection in some areas because we are busy, the data is not visible or easily available, or we have already decided about a particular matter and feel that we do not need any more data. This can lead us to develop biases and uninformed or underinformed opinions. This is not good research practice, but it is, unfortunately, common. We all have areas of our knowledge that are frozen, closed to new information and new learning. This is probably true of both individuals and societies. Nevertheless, and despite our shortcomings, humankind quests for knowledge and we seek it because it is our very nature to do so.

Epistemology and its relevance to research  9 But what is knowledge? How does knowledge relate to facts, beliefs, feelings and experience? Are there different kinds of knowledge? How does collective, shared knowledge develop? Who decides what counts as knowledge? Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that explores these questions. Views of knowledge underlying research studies are an essential, though sometimes unstated, component of research methodology and procedure. This is true in every field but is perhaps most pressing in the social sciences, where different epistemological sub-groups flourish to a greater extent than in the sciences. We will explore this claim in later chapters, especially in Chapter 6. Suffice it to say for now that, although to this day some social science statisticians will say that science is science, facts are facts and research is research; most social science researchers agree with the fundamental notion, as expressed by the philosopher Peter Winch, that “the conceptions according to which we normally think of social events are logically incompatible with the concepts belonging to scientific explanation” (Winch 1958: 95).1 And as understood by Kant, “sociohistorical knowledge cannot be established entirely within the realm of pure reason, for human affairs conflate moral, intellectual, and empirical issues” (Hall 1999: 7). Epistemologically, social science researchers have a complex but rich row to hoe.

Knowledge and truth Though data gained from both personal learning experiences and disciplined research investigations add to our knowledge, both personal and collective, data is not in itself knowledge, nor is information knowledge. Burke (2016: 128) borrows a metaphor from Claude Levi-Strauss when he states that information is raw, while knowledge has been cooked. This ‘cooking’ is done by a knower or knowers, by individuals and societies, in different places and throughout h istory. The knower is the essential but hardly definable ingredient in the cooking. Each knower will interpret the recipe a little differently, bringing to the task his or her “art of knowing,” and thus, the establishment of truth becomes decisively dependent on a set of personal criteria of our own which cannot be formally defined … The idea of an impersonally detached truth would have to be reinterpreted, to allow for the inherently personal character of the act by which truth is declared. (Polanyi 1962: 71)

10  Epistemology and its relevance to research There can be no easy and unequivocal equation, knowledge equals truth, or the reverse, and there can be no disregarding the knower. Guba and Lincoln (1994: 108), in fact, explain epistemology as exploration of the nature of the relationship between the would-be knower and what can be known. The role of the knower is openly acknowledged in interpretive research, less so in quantitative studies. We would argue that even in statistical studies that are apparently ‘untainted’ by human hands, the researcher, who makes choices every step of the way, employs his or her personal art of knowing in the quest to approach some objective truth (approach but not arrive at); truth that is justified according to the evidence gathered and is generally agreed to be so. Every kind of research has its own, stated truth criteria, and good research practice, which results in valid research knowledge, follows these truth criteria. Truth and knowledge are conceptually related. It is nonsensical to speak of knowledge that is not true, though that can lead us into murky waters and questions like, true for whom? Is there personal or cultural truth? Can different ‘truths’ result from different interpretations of research data? The requirement that knowledge be true – an uneasy but essential requirement – helps us come closer to dealing with how feeling, belief and opinion fit with knowledge. We can dispense with feeling. Feelings are personal – how one feels is how one feels – and feelings are neither true nor untrue. Belief is a more interesting matter. Leaving aside religious belief, which cannot be our concern here, we must pursue the relationship between belief, knowledge and truth in the context of research. Certainly, everything cannot be true; that idea makes a mockery of truth. The classical view of knowledge, held by most philosophers from Plato onward, was that knowledge equals “justified true belief” (Nagel 2014: 47–48). Known as the Tripartate Analysis of Knowledge (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2017), justified true belief states that S knows that p if: p is true, S believes that p, and S is justified in believing that p. Plato requires that belief p be justified in order to call it knowledge, adding the condition that the person S should know the reasons for the belief (Schmitt 1992: 1–2). The notion of justified true belief has been argued, expanded and refuted by philosophers through the centuries; in addition, from the Greeks onward there has also been a strand of skeptical philosophy that doubted, in its extreme form, whether we can really know anything. Putting skepticism aside, we can say that justified true belief was generally accepted by philosophers as the correct definition of knowledge until Gettier (1963) opened a flurry of new ph ilosophical work around justified true belief. In Gettier’s analysis, a person

Epistemology and its relevance to research  11 looking at a broken clock, a clock which has always been reliable, can be said to have justified true belief that s/he knows the time. But wait. This belief, while true to the person, who truly believes s/he knows the time, and is justified in that belief, is actually false. The belief does not accord with fact. This is actually a justified false belief, and it is not knowledge. There seems to be a gap in the reasoning of justified true belief. Goldman (1967) attempted to close this gap is a simple way with his “causal theory of knowledge.” According to this theory, “experience-based knowledge required the knower to be appropriately causally connected to a fact” through memory, perception or inference (Nagel 2014: 51). The purpose of the causal theory is to eliminate inferences that begin with a false proposition. There have been criticisms of and adjustments to this theory in the decades following, but it largely stands. Justified true belief, together with the causal theory of knowledge, provides not a bad criterion through which to judge research knowledge. The caveat is that this criterion is most suited to empirical research: “Plato’s ideas about mind, knowledge and rationality” have “impacted our conception of intelligence and of rationality itself and … shaped out conception of science” (Eisner 2008: 4). From this, we have the development of the positivist epistemology that dominated research thinking, to the exclusion of other epistemologies, for many years. Aristotle, a student of Plato, wrote that there are “five states of mind by which we reach truth … These are science, art, practical wisdom, intuitive reason, theoretical wisdom; of these the first, fourth and fifth are concerned with knowledge alone, the second and third with practice also” (Ross 1925, 1980, xv). This generous landscape of kinds of knowledge that Aristotle presents, including artistic knowledge, which not every scientist would accept, presages many of the recent developments in the burgeoning field of kinds of knowledge acknowledged by and accessible to research. Some say that we should speak of knowledges (Burke 2016), plural, and not of one grand body that can be called knowledge, while others speak of kinds of knowledge. This book, together with Aristotle, takes the second approach and refers to the kinds of knowledge. The discussion of knowledge in this section is important because research of any kind is all about knowledge. We conduct research because we want to gain more knowledge in different areas in order (in the main but not always) to solve problems and improve the human condition. A research study is based in the existing knowledge base, its conduct and conclusions are evaluated according to the truth criteria of that research tradition, and it contributes to the shared knowledge base from which other studies will spring.

12  Epistemology and its relevance to research

Epistemology: theories of knowledge Epistemology is that branch of philosophy that wrestles with the questions explored above. What is the nature of knowledge? What forms does it take? Where does knowledge come from? How can we know? How can we know that we know? What kinds of knowledge are there? The Greeks distinguished between episteme, knowledge, and technê, craft or art. These would seem to correspond to the basic distinction between two kinds of knowledge that was first discussed in modern times by Gilbert Ryle (1946, 1949), who distinguishes between knowing how and knowing that. Knowing how seems to be close to Aristotle’s practical wisdom, knowing that to factual knowledge. In the last hundred years or so, we have seen much philosophical and research-related conceptual and epistemological work. These developments include learning theories, research paradigms and methodologies. Concepts like tacit and personal knowledge (Polanyi 1962), constructivism (generally traced back to Piaget, Vygotsky and Dewey), personal practical knowledge (Elbaz 1981), knowing in the arts (Eisner, 1963), knowing-in-action (Schon 1983), and narrative knowing (Polkinghorne 1988), among others, have entered the research lexicon. We would argue that, as rich and important as these developments are, they do not all create new epistemologies. Others disagree. Norman Denzin (1997), for instance, presents a stunning list of epistemologies: Afrocentric, evocative, gender, multiperspectival, normative, objective, ocular, pragmatic, queer, realist and standpoint! We would suggest that, without compromising the methodological, conceptual and ideological importance of these, it is unhelpful to call them all epistemologies; at least some of them could be collapsed into more general epistemological categories. The point is that all of the above, and others, have research implications, and their development creates new or renewed interactions between research and epistemology. Let us look at one example. If there is narrative knowing, there must be an epistemological basis with the help of which we can plan, conduct and evaluate narrative research. Narrative research fits in interpretive epistemology. In terms of its truth criteria, it is unsuited to the criterion of causally justified true belief. The following interesting discussion of narrative research into teachers’ practice shows how one researcher attempts to addresses this. although the knowledge claims of narrative researchers may not be fully justified, we might nonetheless be intellectually entitled to accept them. Entitlement is a line of defense for beliefs and

Epistemology and its relevance to research  13 behaviors that is epistemologically different from justification, for it is grounded in different reasons. Whereas justification is based on causal explanations, i.e. the common epistemic standard of justified, true (in the sense of correspondence theory) belief, entitlement is based on teleological explanations, which are interpretive in nature. They do not require a correspondence conception of truth. I propose three criteria to warrant our entitlement to knowledge claims in narrative research of the relevant sort. These conditions are interpretive, practical and ethical (38) …. we might nonetheless be intellectually entitled to accept them [researchers’ claims] if they provide a plausible reconstruction of events that is connected to a reasonable account of a teacher’s practice, presented within an articulate and defensible concept of what it could possibly mean for practice of that kind to be considered worthy of praise (50). (Caduri 2013: 38, 50) Our purpose in bringing this example is not to debate its worth; rather, it provides an example of the kinds of work that need to be and are being done, and the kinds of interplay between methodology, method and epistemology, that new research areas require. This is especially true in interpretive research, under which heading we can include narrative research, research into practical and personal practical knowledge, qualitative case studies, phenomenological research, research into constructivist learning, and others. As in Caduri’s account above, studies of this kind are unlikely to achieve knowledge according to the criterion of causally connected justified true belief. Researchers in these areas try to understand the subjective experience, the lifeworld, of research participants, and though they certainly try to produce trustworthy research knowledge, it is of a different nature than that produced by quantitative studies. Mixed methods studies, which sometimes work within two different epistemological bases, present researchers with additional, unique challenges. We will touch on this in Chapter 6. Again, every new method is not a new epistemology, and we need to be cautious when speaking of epistemologies. Burgeoning ‘epistemologies’ could cause us to become lost in detail, in a house of mirrors. It would be more productive to fine tune our understanding of central epistemologies, which are described variously as scientific, interpretive and critical (Scotland 2012); positivism, pragmatism and hermeneutics (Fuchs 1993); or as positivism/postpositivism and phenomenology, as well as others, and from there to flesh out the methodological

14  Epistemology and its relevance to research implications. The central division, under a variety of names, seems to be between empirical epistemology that recognizes objective, provable knowledge, and interpretive epistemology that privileges the knower and recognizes subjective knowledge that varies between persons. We will examine the historical and intellectual roots and development of these further in subsequent chapters. As researchers we need to investigate the epistemological base of the research paradigm that we have chosen for our study.2 A research paradigm is generally accepted to include ontology – the nature of our beliefs about reality, – epistemology, methodology and method. Ontology and epistemology are the “building blocks in the foundations of research” (Grix 2010: 4), yet we often leap to methodology, having decided on an intuitive, unstated basis or on a practical basis what topic, questions and methodology we wish to pursue, without pausing to examine the foundations and see that they are sound. Theory, which we have not yet addressed, is also central to the research enterprise. We will examine theory in Chapter 7. The bottom line, and with this we will conclude this chapter, is that, ‘what counts as true?’ may be answered in different ways, but in research it must be answered, and answered in accordance with the epistemology within which we work. On the other hand, this essential research reflection should not lead us back into the ‘paradigm wars’ (Bryman 2008). Researchers toil in a shared enterprise. All research, of every kind, aims at adding to human knowledge, and while epistemology, methodology and truth criteria differ, all researchers share this common goal. While paying close attention to epistemology, we would do well not to let epistemology divide us, and to heed Hall’s (1999: 229) words: Contemporary conflicts over knowledge have an unfortunate effect: they reinforce ideological divisions at the very time when there is an opportunity to better understand the complex web of uneven connections that structure the entire range of inquiry’s practices.

Notes 1 This classic and unfortunately largely forgotten little philosophical gem, The Idea of a Social Science, is highly recommended. 2 For an excellent, expanded discussion of epistemology and research methodology, Kerry Howell’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Methodology is highly recommended.

Epistemology and its relevance to research  15

References Bryman, A. “The End of the Paradigm Wars.” In Pertti Alasuutari, Leonard Bickman and Julia Brannen (Eds.) The Sage Handbook of Social Research Methods. London, Los Angeles, CA, New Delhi, Singapore: Sage, 2008, 13–25. Burke, P. What Is the History of Knowledge? Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2016. Caduri, G. “On the Epistemology of Narrative Research in Education.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 47, no. 1, 2013, 37–52. Denzin, N. Interpretive Ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997. Eisner, E. “Art and Knowledge.” In J. Gary Knowles and Arda L. Cole (Eds.) Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008, 3–12. Eisner, E. “On the Impossibility of Theory in Art Education.” Studies in Art Education 5, no. 1, 1963, 4–9. Elbaz, F. “The Teacher’s Practical Knowledge: Report of a Case Study.” Curriculum Inquiry 11, 1981, 43–71. Fosnot, C.T. & R.S. Perry. “Constructivism: A Psychological Theory of Learning.” In Catherine Twomey Fosnot (Ed.) Constructivism, Theory, Perspectives and Practices, 2nd ed. New York, London: Teachers College Press, 2005, 8–38. Fuchs, S. “Three Sociological Epistemologies.” Sociological Perspectives 36, no. 1, 1993, 23–44. Gettier, E. “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23, no. 6, 1963, 121–123. Goldman, A.L. “A Causal Theory of Knowing.” Journal of Philosophy 64, no. 12, 1967, 357–372. Grix, J. The Foundations of Research. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Guba, E. & Y. Lincoln. “Competing Paradigms in Qualitative Research.” In Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research. London: Sage, 1994, 105–117. Hall, J.R. Cultures of Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Howell, K. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Methodology. London, Los Angeles, CA, New Delhi, Singapore: Sage, 2013. Nagel, J. Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Polanyi, M. Personal Knowledge. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Polkinghorne, D.E. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. Ross, D. “Introduction.” In David Ross (translator), Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925/1980, v–xxiv. Ryle, G. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson, 1949. Ryle, G. “Knowing How and Knowing That: The Presidential Address.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 46 (1945–1946). Published

16  Epistemology and its relevance to research by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Aristotelian Society, 1946, 1–16. Schmitt, F. Knowledge and Belief. London: Routledge, 1992. Schon, D. The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Scotland, J. “Exploring the Philosophical Underpinnings of Research: Relating Ontology and Epistemology to the Methodology and Methods of Scientific, Interpretive and Critical Research Paradigms.” English Language Teaching 5, no. 9, 2012, 9–16. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Analysis of Knowledge,” 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/. Winch, P. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958.

3

A historical sketch of knowledge in the Western world: the Greeks through the Middle Ages

Knowledge does not actually begin somewhere. Knowledge is part of human existence; it grows and has grown in every culture, in every time. Many great histories could be written about knowledge in China and India, among Native North Americans, and among every other group of people who have ever walked the earth. Neanderthal knowledge (for instance) would be fascinating to document, though we can do this only dimly through archeological records. Written language has helped enormously in our understanding of knowledge of past cultures, as have artistic depictions of the lives of people. Our concern in this chapter is not precisely knowledge about other times and cultures. Rather, we want to see how people viewed knowledge: what counted as knowledge, what kinds of knowledge were valued, how knowledge was evaluated and investigated, and the relationship of knowledge development to the epistemological, political, religious and cultural conditions of each period that we will survey. We will not look at Asia or at aboriginal cultures. We will follow the history of knowledge in the West, a European and then also New World story, for one reason. This is the intellectual history from which the common research tradition has grown. For better or for worse (and not denying, especially in recent decades, influences from outside this historical stream), this is the intellectual tradition from which research methodologies and academic language spring. These methodologies and this language are common to researchers all over the world, shared in international academic journals and at academic conferences. A common language, with, of course, cultural nuances, allows people in the research community to learn from one another’s work and thus more effectively advance knowledge. In each period that we will now begin to sketch, we will make the point that the central values of the age were expressed in works of science, art and civil society, and to a great extent also shaped those works.

18  The Greeks through the Middle Ages We will say this repeatedly: any brief history is fatally flawed, for ‘brief history’ is in fact an oxymoron. History is detail, countless years, people, cultures, processes that are inextricably intertwined. Because of this complexity, any attempt to summarize must fail. Nevertheless, this task of summarizing and crystalizing is undertaken repeatedly by historians, philosophers, and writers in the sciences, in order that we can learn from other people in other times without drowning in detail. It should be possible for our present purposes to glean some meaningful general understandings. In a way this is what theory does, takes countless details and binds them into a whole cloth in which a comprehensive and meaningful pattern is discernible. More about theory in Chapter 7. As we look at the history of knowledge as it relates to research, we are exploring the history of ideas. As we saw in Chapter 2, k nowledge must be in some way, by some credible criteria (such as justified true belief), demonstrably true. Ideas spring from existing knowledge, from urgent circumstance (as in the old proverb, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’1) and from the indefinable wells of human creativity. Writing on the history of ideas, noted sociologist Randall Collins (1998: 3) tells us that ideas beget ideas; individuals beget ideas (and we can only see how particular individuals generate ideas by “abstracting them from the surrounding context”); individuals work in intellectual fields of “structured rivalry” (6) – opposing thought in the same field, which stimulates ideas; and intellectual history is a history of groups. All of this is relevant to our current story. Our brief history of Western knowledge will begin with the Greeks.

Harmony in ancient Greek2 culture Countless volumes have been written on the contributions of Greek mathematicians, philosophers and artists to Western culture. Herodotus more or less invented the study of history; the work of mathematicians like Pythagoras, whose famous theorem most of us learned in school (and who coined the word ‘mathematics,’ which means ‘that which is learned’) gave birth to mathematics as a serious field of study; philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle moved philosophy from the realm of mythology to epistemology, reason and empirical evidence.3 In addition, the concept and practice of democracy were born in ancient Greece. In art, magnificent sculpture and architecture honored gods and political and cultural heroes. The Greeks did not develop a systematic natural science (Polanyi 1962: 181) but their contributions to rationality helped shape scientific study in

The Greeks through the Middle Ages  19 later times. Greek knowledge of natural science was necessarily limited; the Greeks believed that all matter was composed of the four elements earth, air, fire and water, which were earth-bound and temporal. A fifth element, ether, was spiritual in nature. “Science and philosophy begin when ideas about the origin and nature of the universe are decoupled from myth and religion and treated as theories to be argued about” (Williams 2001: 4), and the Greeks, while holding beliefs about their gods, did “decouple” their mathematical, philosophical and civic intellectual work from the gods, and they engaged in serious debate. The Greek mind was philosophical and inquisitive. As people became conscious of knowledge as a slow accumulation of experience acquired by active search, they became curious also to understand the nature of knowledge and the process by which it is acquired. Thus opened the great debate on the validity of the information conveyed to us by the senses, and on the part played by Reason in the constitution of human knowledge. (Farrington 1939, 1956, 2017: 35) This is a significant contribution indeed to epistemology and to research thinking. The primary values in Greek intellectual work (we summarize boldly but not trivially) were harmony, proportion and beauty. If we have to choose one word for the central value of the Greeks, it is harmony. The English word ‘harmony’ comes from a Greek word meaning, rather beautifully, ‘concord of sounds’ (Li 2008: 90). Heraclitus described harmony in terms of opposites, like hot and cold, life and death, with the tension between them forming harmony. Pythagoras sought and found harmony in numbers, in the mathematical ratios between numbers, in proportions and geometrical relations (Sambursky 1956, 1987: 33). Aristotle’s notion of the ‘golden mean,’ following the middle way between two extremes, led, according to Aristotle, to harmony, and was an attribute of beauty. Democracy began as local government in the city-state of Athens, where it was especially well-developed. Other Greek city-states followed. All native-born, male, non-slave citizens (approximately 30% of the population) had the right to vote on civil matters. Athenian democracy gave citizens “unprecedented freedom to express their opinions and to make their own decisions” (Thorley 1996, 2004: 4). As with every topic that we touch on here, thousands of analyses have been written on the development of democracy. Briefly, then: despite the exclusions of

20  The Greeks through the Middle Ages women, foreigners and slaves from Greek democracy, this new system was an antidote to totalitarianism and can be seen to fit with Heraclitus’ notion of harmony arising from the tension of opposites. People in a democracy may hold different views, but the system of rights and freedoms promotes harmonious civil life in a way that totalitarianism cannot. Democracy encourages freedom of thought, necessary for the generation of ideas and the advancement of knowledge. Finally, art in ancient Greece, especially sculpture and architecture, are expressions of the ideal of harmony. Artists sought to sculpt the perfectly proportioned human body in marble or bronze; architects sought to design temples with elegant proportions. Greek research and intellectual activity in mathematics, philosophy and art was conducted towards, and in an environment that valued, the ideal of harmony. The democratic system, a framework for harmonic civil life, gave people the intellectual freedom to pursue ideas.

The practical technology of empire building in ancient Rome4 Greece gradually gave way to Rome after a series of military conquests and territorial annexations. In 146 bce, Roman armies defeated the Greeks in the Battle of Corinth. This is often seen as the beginning of Roman rule, although other battles and defeats followed, until Greece was finally submerged in the growing Roman Empire. Roman civilization lasted about 1,200 years, with Rome becoming a vast empire, and citizens of the Roman Empire were an eclectic mix of different peoples and cultures. Many Greek traditions flowed into Roman culture. Democracy continued in Rome, with the new element of representational democracy, rather than direct democracy. Even before the great expansion of its empire, Rome was many times more populous and geographically larger than the city-state of Athens, and direct democracy was not a viable option. Roman democracy, as in Greece, excluded women, who in Rome were counted as citizens but still could not vote, as well as non-citizens and slaves. By no means a pure democracy, Roman government was a mixed system, first a republic, including popular assemblies and a senate, then, as the empire expanded, an increasingly authoritarian government run by the emperor. The Roman republic gave to Western culture many elements of government and law that helped shape Western governments today. The Romans were empire-minded, sending their armies far and wide in conquest of lands and peoples. The size and spread of their empire led to Rome being the capital of the civilized world (Erdkamp 2013: 2). Greece never had an empire; it was basically a

The Greeks through the Middle Ages  21 conglomeration of city-states, the central and most influential being Athens. Rome actively pursued empire, conquering lands stretching from Northwestern Europe to the Near East. A vast empire and more than a thousand years of history cannot be briefly summarized. Those who wish to delve into the details of the Roman Empire may consult one of the many massive tomes written on this subject. Our interest here is knowledge development as it relates to research. It is reasonable to say that if the major contributions of Greece were philosophical, mathematical, epistemological, civic and artistic, the contributions of Rome were civic and legal (many modern legal terms are still in Latin, because of what we have taken from Roman jurisprudence); and, most especially, Roman knowledge advancement was technological and practical. The Romans’ empire-building led to tremendous achievements in road-building, infrastructure, water delivery, sanitation and architecture. Many of Rome’s great achievements were innovative improvements on earlier technologies. Roman art and architecture were more realistic, practical and extravagant than Greek art, and were to a great extent derivative of Greek ideas. In our brief journey we have so far passed through Greek harmony and the philosophical, mathematical and artistic work generated in the context of this ideal; and Roman practicality in technological innovations and the trappings of grandeur generated by Roman empire building. Just as Rome was not built in a day, so (though the fall is often dated as 476 ce, the year the last Roman emperor fell) Rome did not fall in a day. As we trace Western history’s broad outline we must ask (as have so many others), why did Rome fall? Over a period of several hundred years, Rome faced invasions by ‘barbarians’: Huns, Goths, Vandals and Visigoths, as well dealing with major earthquakes and other natural disasters. During the centuries of invasions, the central government and its structures were weakened. Thus, the Western Roman Empire (much of what we now call Europe) fell. After this, No longer held together by the power of Rome, societies in Western Europe began to turn inwards and become cut off from one another; cities shrank as people returned to the countryside and a simpler, more rural way of life. As the system’s empire of travel and communications buckled, merchants could no longer transport their goods safely, so trade diminished drastically. (Moller 2019: 5) This was the beginning of the descent – for we will call it so, in terms of knowledge construction, invention, discovery and freedom of thought – into the Middle Ages.

22  The Greeks through the Middle Ages

The spread of Christianity: faith as a central value in the early Middle Ages The Eastern Roman Empire (the Mediterranean, the Balkans, Asia Minor and part of North Africa) survived hundreds of years longer than the Western Empire and became the Byzantine Empire. The Roman Emperor Constantine decided in 330 ce to move the capital from Rome to Byzantine. The new capital became known as Constantinople. When Constantine began to adhere to the new religion of Christianity (before this, Christians had for years been persecuted in Rome), he issued a proclamation legalizing Christianity and allowing freedom of worship in the Roman Empire.5 Meanwhile, in the crumbling Western Roman Empire, the Emperor Theodosius I  declared Catholicism the state religion. Various Christian sects were active, but by 900 ce, the official religion of the Byzantine Empire was Eastern Orthodoxy. In 1054 ce, the Roman Catholic Church, headed by the Pope, and the Eastern Orthodox Church, split officially into two groups. The Byzantine Empire eventually crumbled after civil wars and attacks by the Turks, which gave rise to the Ottoman Empire. The Middle Ages, the name often given to the post-classical era, are often dated from the 5th to the 15th century ce. In the European history, we are tracing, the period from 500 to 1000 ce is often referred to as the Dark Ages (though this term has fallen out of favor with historians as being judgmental and pejorative), a period of intellectual darkness when freedom of thought and the spirit of discovery were greatly curtailed by political and social conditions and the power of the Church. Part of the reason historians in the past characterized the early Middle Ages (500–1000 ce) as ‘dark’ is because of a paucity of records of that time, which is at least partially the result of limited literacy. Much had changed in Europe. Conflicts between the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches, and the newly arisen Islamic territories, led to the closing of trade routes and drastic reduction in economic, social and cultural intercourse around the Mediterranean Sea, which had for many centuries been the main trade route and link between East and West. Western Europe became increasingly isolated. Because of the lack of movable wealth through trade, land became the only tangible source of wealth. All social existence was founded on property or on the possession of land… The feudal system simply represents the disintegration of public authority… the appearance of feudalism in Western

The Greeks through the Middle Ages  23 Europe in the course of the ninth century was nothing but the repercussion in the political sphere of the return of society to a purely rural civilization. (Pirenne 1937: 7, 8) One of the results of deurbanization was a decrease in literacy and learning, with education effectively being centered in monastic, religious centers, with the Bible as its text. Faith was the central value of this time, faith in what the Church taught and what religious officials said was written in and intended by the Bible.6 The Church in effect acted as the government as well the source of spiritual leadership. The early Middle Ages is often described as a period of low literacy levels in Europe among the common folk, that is, the serfs who worked the feudal lords’ lands and the poor townspeople. We will adopt that narrative here, while recognizing that literacy and illiteracy are not polar opposites.7 Low levels of literacy, a rural society and a well-organized and powerful Church organization, as well as low tolerance for dissenters, who were considered heretics and punished, meant that great power was concentrated in the hands of the Church. This is not to say that humankind did not continue to strive towards discovery; such striving is, after all, our nature. Advancements in the early Middle Ages were largely practical, mechanical and agricultural: the systematic harnessing of water and air power by means of mechanical devices; improvements in plowing and three-field crop rotation (Stock 1978). As well, unnamed inventors produced the mechanical clock, the windmill and the blast furnace (Hannam 2011). There was also philosophical work during the Middle Ages, work which was “born of the confluence of Greek philosophy and Christianity … Medieval philosophy … developed within faith as a means of throwing light on the truths and mysteries of faith…” (Encyclopedia Britannica). Given the centrality of the Church in the life of Medieval Europe, there is no doubt that its influences on scientific and philosophical enquiry were profound. The Church held political and spiritual power and to a great extent defined and circumscribed what was worthwhile knowledge. As it is said, knowledge is power.8

Gradual loosening of the strictures of religion, and the awakening of scientific inquiry in the later Middle Ages Faith, combined with illiteracy in Latin, the language of the Church, made fertile ground for superstition, the poor cousin of faith. Superstition was inextricably linked with religious belief. In difficult

24  The Greeks through the Middle Ages living conditions, including early death, high infant mortality and waves of devastating illness, people sought scapegoats to explain their troubles as part of a religious story. “In Europe, as many as 90,000 people were prosecuted as witches between 1420 and 1780” (Games 2010: 4). Belief in witchcraft came with the early English settlers to the Thirteen Colonies in North America, where “colonial societies introduced new elements of coercion and cruelty” (Games 2010: 5) and where belief in and punishment of supposed witches far outlasted these beliefs in Europe, stretching as far as the early 19th century. Witchcraft was connected to the Devil, the antithesis of God and a central part of the Christian narrative of the time. In the later Middle Ages, superstition, witchcraft and magic became a subject of earnest intellectual debate among Church authorities and scholars, who discussed “the scope and nature of divine and demonic action in the world, the meaning and effects of ritual action, and the possible ways humans could understand and employ natural voices in the universe…” (Bailey 2013: 18). Bailey traces these debates into the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, seeing in them the path to a gradual disengagement with superstition and to some extent with faith, and increasing stress on human agency in the natural world. One expression of superstition in the later Middle Ages was beliefs about the Jews, which led to their frequent persecution. Jews were said to murder Christian children before Passover to use their blood for the making of matzah. The Jews were also said to have poisoned the wells and caused the devastating Black Death,9 the plague that swept Europe between 1347 and 1351 and killed somewhere between one and two million people, at least a third of Western Europe’s population. Paradoxically, those peasants that survived the plague saw their living conditions improved, as land was plentiful and laborers were not, so their human value rose. This weakened the power of feudal lords. The monasteries were also devastated as people fleeing the plague took refuge there. After the plague a new generation of religionists arose, more poorly trained than their predecessors, and this helped reduce the absolute centrality of the Church. In the later Middle Ages, theology became gradually decoupled from science and philosophy. The protective belts around theology (Funkenstein & Sheehan 2018) weakened and finally collapsed with the spread of Protestantism.10 Theology was appropriated by laymen, who were encouraged to think for themselves about God, and to study this world as an expression of God’s work, not just as preparation for the

The Greeks through the Middle Ages  25 next world (Funkenstein & Sheehan 2018). As trade routes reopened, there was interaction with the Islamic world through Spain and Sicily, whereby new mathematical and scientific ideas were introduced. The Crusades,11 the Church-driven holy wars aimed at recovering the Holy Land from Muslim rule, also opened interaction between Europe and the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. The ability to think more freely, the opening of trade routes, combined with improved social and living conditions after the plague, led to a renewal in scientific thinking and paved the way for the stunning intellectual flowering of the Renaissance, which we will visit in Chapter 4. During the period of history from Aristotle to the fall of Rome, the theories of the Greeks and others had advanced about as far as their philosophical imaginations would allow. Their hypotheses were stalemated because they never went beyond empirical classifications of nature. The ancient Greeks neither conceived of nor practiced experimentation to verify their observations and concepts or made viable predictions to arrive at universal physical laws. Also, during the period from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance, learning, experimentation and questioning existing dogma were just not tolerated. Objective observation and experimentation were the major processes of science that became the engines that drove scientific progress through the end of the Renaissance into the present century. (Krebs 2004: xxiv) While the statement that learning and questioning were “just not tolerated” is too absolute and one-dimensional to capture a thousand years of history, a thousand years that did in fact include much learning, questioning and invention, this quotation provides us with a reasonable summing up. We have seen that the values of the age, together with political and religious forces and physical events like the Plague, both compel and constrain creative and scientific thought and activity. The time in which we live circumscribes our understandings of what knowledge is. Is knowledge found in Scripture? In observation? In philosophical musing and debate? In solving practical problems? How does k nowledge move forward, and towards what kinds of knowledge should we direct our efforts? We move now into that period of intellectual flowering known as the Enlightenment. There we will find, among other things, the formal beginnings of the social sciences.

26  The Greeks through the Middle Ages

Notes 1 The origin of this proverb is unclear, but it is sometimes attributed to Plato. A similar phrase does appear in his Republic. 2 Most historians date ancient Greek culture from the 8th century bce until Greece fell to the Romans in 146 bce. Of course, cultural influences did not end abruptly, but flowed to some extent into Roman culture. 3 Though interestingly, in his classic book Science and Politics in the Ancient World, 1939, 1956, 2017, Benjamin Farrington claims that the real Greek spirit of scientific research was crushed by the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, who sought eternal truths rather than the real-world investigation of solutions to real-world problems. 4 Often dated from the first Roman Emperor, Augustus Caesar, 27 bce – 14 ce, until the reign of the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in 476 ce. The Eastern part of the empire continued as the Byzantine Empire until the fall of Constantinople in 1453 ce. See Joshua Mark, The Ancient History Encyclopedia, www.ancient.eu/Roman_Empire/. 5 After Christianity became the state religion, despite official freedom of religion, Jews were persecuted and their rights restricted. 6 Some recent scholarship attempts to paint a more complex and nuanced story of Medieval Europe, which is usually known for this “darkness”, probably to the neglect of other aspects. See Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages, Jack Hartnell (2018). 7 See Franz Bauml (1980), “Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy in Medieval Europe” for an excellent discussion of this issue. Bauml makes the point that the Church language was Latin, and while most peasants were illiterate in Latin, there were varying levels of literacy in the local vernacular. 8 This saying is widely attributed to Francis Bacon but it appears in earlier sources as well. 9 The Black Death was caused by the bites of infected fleas which were carried by rats and other rodents. Cities were hit harder than rural areas because of population density and unsanitary living conditions.

References Bailey, M.D. Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Bauml, F.H. “Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy.” Spectrum 55, no. 2, 1980, 237–265. Collins, R. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Encyclopedia Britannica. “Medieval Philosophy.” www.britannica.com/topic/ Western-philosophy/Medieval-philosophy. Accessed July 2, 2019.

The Greeks through the Middle Ages  27 Erdkamp, P. (Ed.). The Oxford Companion to Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Farrington, B. Science and Politics in the Ancient World. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939, 1956. Oxford: Routledge, 2017. Funkenstein, A. & J. Sheehan. Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Games, A. Witchcraft in Early North America. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2010. Hannam, J. The Genesis of Science. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2011. Hartnell, J. Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages. London: Profile Books, 2018. Krebs, R.E. Groundbreaking Scientific Experiments, Inventions and Discoveries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. Li, C. “The Idea of Harmony in Ancient Chinese and Greek Philosophy.” Dao 7, no. 1, 2008, 81–98. Moller, V. The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found. New York: Doubleday, 2019. Pirenne, H. Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. Translated from the French by I.E. Clegg. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937. Polanyi, M. Personal Knowledge. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Sambursky, S. The Physical World of the Greeks. Translated from the Hebrew by Merton Dagut. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956, 1987. Stock, B. “Science, Technology and Economic Progress in the Early Middle Ages.” In David C. Lindberg (Ed.) Science in the Middle Ages. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 1–51. Thorley, J. Athenian Democracy. Oxford, New York: Routledge, 1996, 2004. Williams, M. Problems of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

4

A historical sketch of knowledge in the Western world: from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment

As we have seen, one of the reasons the Middle Ages in Europe are sometimes called the Dark Ages is that we have fewer historical records for that period than we do for periods before and since. There is a historical darkness because we simply don’t know much of what went on. This springs from a lack of record keeping and recording, reduced (but by no means absent) scientific activity, difficulties with sharing knowledge, and low levels of literacy. Because of all of these, there was a forgetting of much past knowledge. Physics teaches us that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Not so with knowledge, which can certainly be created; creating knowledge is what much of human activity is about, one way or another. Continuing the physics metaphor, knowledge, like energy, cannot be destroyed, but it can be lost, forgotten or, perhaps in times like our own, brushed aside by rushing tides of new knowledge. In our own time, we have, for instance, lost, forgotten or marginalized much traditional knowledge of aboriginal peoples (Linden 1991). In the Middle Ages, some knowledge possessed by the Greeks and Romans was lost or forgotten. Many books were lost forever. Some technological and craft knowledge was forgotten, as was knowledge of sophisticated governmental and administrative structures developed by the Romans. The social and political conditions leading to this losing and forgetting included the closing of trade routes with the fall of the Roman Empire, routes which had enabled exchange of ideas as well as goods; the devastation and social and cultural disruptions caused by the Black Plague; and censorship by the powerful Church of ideas that appeared to threaten Church canon. The flow of social and political life is just that, a flow, and it is tricky to stop the clock and point to specific events saying, “here, here, and here, change began.” Nevertheless, together with others who have attempted to understand these changes, we will stress a number of key events, inventions and discoveries that helped bring Europe out of the Middle

From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment  29 Ages and into the age which became known as the Enlightenment. As  we saw in the examples of influential scientists profiled in the Gallery of Heroes in Chapter 1, there are in every age people who work against the establishment tide; particular individuals whose creativity, ingenuity and persistence lead them to make especially significant contributions in the developing story of knowledge.

The scientific revolution, the Renaissance and the rise of humanism The idea that much knowledge was forgotten does not mean, if course, that Medieval science was non-existent or that scientists were continually starting from the beginning. During the several hundred years after the fall of Rome, intellectual activity was largely centered in monasteries, where monks, working within a religious framework, studied medicine and astronomy, which kept alive some activity in those areas as well as in mathematics and geometry. This work was limited in goals and scope. The Scientific Revolution, roughly dated from 1500 to 1700, is described by some scholars as the time when Europe really moved from ‘medieval’ to ‘modern’ (Principe 2011). The Scientific Revolution is intimately tied to the more or less concurrent period known as the Renaissance (‘rebirth’ in French). The Renaissance is usually associated with Italy, where an incredible artistic flowering occurred. Artists like Botticelli and da Vinci, as well as many others, worked during this time. Their meticulous sculpture and painting required study of human anatomy as well as artistic brilliance. Da Vinci and Michelangelo, among other Renaissance artists, are known to have undertaken detailed anatomical dissections in order to truly understand and thus portray the human body (Bambach 2002). This is research with artistic goals. Developments in literature, poetry, all fields of science, and medicine, among other fields, require and involve research of some kind. Renaissance developments in all these areas are linked in that they are the result, beginning in the 15th century, of “a massive broadening of Europe’s horizons, both literally and figuratively” (Principe 2011: 5). Exploration and settlement of the New World, developments in all fields of science, and a flowering of art and philosophy, went hand in hand, as Europe was gradually reborn. The Italian Renaissance, “fully underway a generation or two after the peak plague years, provided the first key background for the Scientific Revolution: the rise of humanism” (Principe 2011: 8). Humanism is an intellectual and philosophical movement that began in Italy, as part of the Italian Renaissance during the 13th and

30  From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment 14th centuries, gradually spreading to the rest of Europe. It finds its roots in ancient Greek philosophy and the study of virtue in all aspects of human life. Humanism stresses the essential value of human beings, centering on the rational solving of human problems in this world, rather than focusing on God, Heaven and the Divine. Humanism values rationalism and empiricism over faith and superstition. And while we have not yet arrived in our story at an ‘official’ beginning of the social sciences, we can find in humanism their seeds: the combination of philosophy, interest in the nature of humankind, interest in ethical and values-related questions, and rational inquiry. As Europe moved out of the era known as the Middle Ages, there was renewed interest in some ancient thinking, especially the work of Greek philosophers, 16th and early 17th century work in astronomy, by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, traced its roots back to the early Greek proposals of a heliocentric system in which the earth and planets revolve around the sun. The geocentric system, in which the earth was the center of the universe, was the accepted model at the time of the Greeks. Scientific advances, especially the development of the telescope, enabled observation and mathematical calculation that supported the heliocentric model. As we saw in Chapter 1, Copernicus and Galileo were censured by the Church, but their ideas nevertheless spurred further scientific work. During the 17th century, largely freed by the Protestant Reformation from Church censure, and enriched by the sharing of scientific knowledge enabled by printing, scientific knowledge exploded, and the methods of science began to be standardized. There were great developments in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry and biology.

How paper and the printing press changed the spread of knowledge in Europe Absolutely central among these key events was the invention of the printing press. But in order to print, paper was needed. Understanding of how to make paper was one of the factors that enabled the great leap forward that was printing. Before paper, books in Europe were written by hand, on parchment, which is heavily processed animal skin. This was a painstaking, slow process performed by scribes, many of whom worked in monasteries, producing mostly religious works. Copying books by hand was not only slow and labor intensive; scribal work was also prone to miscopying and mistakes. The ancient Egyptians and others, including the Greeks, wrote books by hand on papyrus, a paper-like material produced from processing of

From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment  31 the cyperus papyrus plant. (Interestingly, the word ‘paper’ is derived from the ancient Greek word papyrus.) The ancient Chinese also produced a kind of paper from plant fibers. In the Islamic world from about the 8th century on, early paper began to replace parchment and contributed to the building of magnificent libraries. Knowledge of paper-making spread slowly to Europe. Early papermills existed in Spain in the 11th century, and paper slowly gained in availability through France and Germany (Basbanes 2013). The increased availability of paper paved the way for the enormous advancement of literacy and political consciousness brought about by Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1438. Hunter (1943, 1974) claims that the progress of humankind since its dawning, through many thousands of years, can be divided into three fundamental evolutionary stepping stones: speaking, drawing and printing. Speech, the development of recognizable human sounds, enabled the communication of ideas. Drawing, which spans prehistoric cave drawings, hieroglyphics and calligraphy, “raised man’s intellectual powers to a vastly higher plane than could have been achieved through the mere utterance of vocal sound” (Hunter 1943, 1974: 3). Printing began with Chinese block printing in around 800 ce and became a world-changing technology with Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. In his groundbreaking 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Marshall McLuhan studies the change in collective consciousness brought about by printing. McLuhan argues that printing was not just a handy technology; it allowed European civilization to reinvent itself in profound ways.1 It certainly became a major gateway through which Europe left behind the Middle Ages and moved toward the Enlightenment. The capability to mass-produce the printed word led to the availability of more and more diverse written works, and with this came a rise in literacy. Simply put, there was more to read and more people reading. Printing allowed the dissemination of works other than Christian materials and revolutionized all kinds of learning. McLuhan (1962) says that the inexpensive mass production of books, which had previously been available only to the well-to-do upper classes, democratized knowledge, as well as leading to a standardization of spelling and punctuation. The printing press “rescued from obscurity a multitude of facts” (King 2019: 82). History began to be more systematically recorded as it happened, and scientific discoveries disseminated and shared in a way that was not previously possible. Scientific works and political treatises opened people’s minds to new ideas and new possibilities. This is not to say that the revolution happened overnight.

32  From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment In fact, “the output of early presses drew on a backlog of scribal work; the first century of printing produced a bookish culture that was not very different from that produced by scribes” (Eisenstein 1979: 26). But over the next hundred years or so, the intellectual life of Europe began to change. According to Eisenstein, the developments in early modern science as well as in religion were produced by exploiting the new opportunities afforded by printing, in particular the placing of an ‘uncorrupted’ copy of the original of a text, diagram or map into the hands of numerous other people who could study, compare, criticize and update them. As such, it is an instrument of change in the conception of objectivity, an instrument that fosters organized skepticism and allows intellectual work to be spread out among more people. (Raven 1999: 225) This change in the conception of objectivity is a profound contribution to knowledge production and sharing and the advancement of research. It is a key part of the story we are telling in this book as we trace the path of Western knowledge in order to arrive, finally, at social science research.

The Protestant Reformation: opening the doors to freer thinking The word ‘Protestant’ first appears in 1529 in Germany. It was applied to people who called themselves Christians but disagreed with – protested against – the Catholic Church. Protestants were also referred to as reformers, and the entire movement became known as the Protestant Reformation. The beginning of the Protestant Reformation, while neither sudden nor exact, is generally marked as beginning in 1517 in Germany when a German monk named Martin Luther expressed his displeasure with Catholic church corruption, specifically the selling of indulgences by which people could buy forgiveness for their sins. This is not to say that the Catholic church was only and solely corrupt. It had met the spiritual needs of Europeans for centuries, providing educational and administrative services as well as religious ones. But many people saw the corruption that existed and wanted change. Reading materials made available through mass printing engaged the common people in imagining alternatives and pathways to change. Luther pasted 95 theses against the indulgences to the door of a church in Wittenberg,

From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment  33 and for expressing his criticism he was ultimately excommunicated. He and other reformers, aided by the translation of the Bible from Latin into other languages, and its accessibility to the common p eople because of mass printing, worked to open the possibilities of freer thinking around religion. Another stream leading towards breaking the domination of the Catholic church flowed from a less idealistic source. In Britain, where Protestant ideas were already circulating, King Henry VIII wanted the Pope to annul his long marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. The Pope steadfastly refused, and in 1534, with the help of the Church’s head in England, Henry brought about the “Act of Supremacy,” which declared that Britain’s monarch was the head of the Church in England. Henry in effect granted his own annulment, and he married the unfortunate Anne Boleyn, who was tried for treason and beheaded only three years later. This split in the church caused by the Act of Supremacy ultimately led to the establishment of the Protestant Church of England. Elsewhere, a Frenchman named John Calvin broke from the Catholic Church around 1530. He wrote and spoke extensively about the reforms that he felt were needed in order to advance Christian theology. In 1536, he fled religious persecution in France and settled in Geneva, where his branch of Protestantism, which included new liturgy and church government, developed into the Presbyterian church. Clearly, there is much more to the story than this. The Protestant Reformation is a story of wars, power struggles, economics and politics as much as it is a story of the desire for greater religious freedom. Like all history, it involves a complex intermingling of events and causes. Unquestionably, though, the Protestant Reformation moved Europe toward greater social equality by stressing that there were “different roads to the salvation of the individual,” drawing “new social classes and also, very importantly, women into public life and into the political process on a hitherto unprecedented scale” (Koenigsberger et al. 2000: 8). The creation of Protestantism represents “the greatest faultline to appear in Christian culture since the Latin and Greek halves of the Roman Empire went their separate ways a thousand years before” (MacCulloch 2004: xviii), with all the implications that such a massive shift entails. For the purposes of our story here, we will simply stress that greater religious freedom meant greater intellectual freedom and this, together with the vast intellectual benefits enabled by printing, and the new spirit of humanism permeating Europe, lifted Europe out of its medieval darkness and helped move it towards a time of incredible intellectual, creative and scientific flowering.

34  From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment

Revolutions, human rights and free agency With the rise in literacy, political consciousness and religious freedoms came growing awareness that the stratified social system existing in most European countries was unfair. For perhaps the first time since Greek democracy (which also, we must remember, excluded the majority of people), the general population began to question whether domination by royalty and the land-owning classes was the only and natural order of things. European explorers had made outposts in the Americas and brought back to Europe the riches they found there. Spanish explorers brought back gold and silver from South America and what is now Mexico. British and French explorers brought back furs, which became the height of fashion among the European upper classes, especially the beaver hat. These adventurers also brought back vegetables like potatoes and beans that were being grown by native Americans, and tobacco, which was introduced to Europe in the 17th  century and quickly became a valuable cash crop that settlers in the Americas grew and sold in Europe. Pursuing these riches, Europeans began to establish permanent settlements in this open, rich, wild, classless and promising New World, and some Europeans fled the domination of the ruling classes in their home countries to forge new lives as free, independent people in North America. The time was ripe for revolution. Historians have called the second half of the 18th century the Age of Revolutions … The revolutionary elements traditionally identified as most characteristic of the period and ripest with promise for the future included the popular sovereignty, natural rights language, and secessionist independence of the American revolution, the anti-monarchical and anti-aristocratic decapitation of the Old Regime effected in the French Revolution, and the apparent explosion of productivity and prosperity associated with the Industrial Revolution. (Armitage & Subrahmanyam 2010: xii) We will discuss the Industrial Revolution in the next chapter. The details of the two political revolutions, the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789, are somewhat different, but many of their fundamental aims were the same. The American colonists wished to break away from the yoke of British rule and achieve the universal and inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This phrase is so well-known that it is easy to take it for

From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment  35 granted, but imagine what each part of it meant to people who had always been, like countless generations of their ancestors, subject to political, social, economic and religious domination by others. That persons could be free agents, able to shape their own destinies, was a powerful new idea for a new age. The slogan of the French Revolution was liberté, égalité, fraternité – liberty, equality, fraternity. That revolution overthrew the monarchy and led to the establishment of a republic, ideally a government by the people, with a written constitution stating the rights of all citizens. And while this did not lead to a period of peace and brotherhood – much violence, the dictatorship of Napoleon, and many and various wars were to follow – nevertheless, something had changed forever. There is general agreement among historians that the French Revolution was one of the most significant events in modern history, the first popular uprising by the people against an autocracy. It raised questions that are still debated today, about liberty, the equality of all persons, human rights and the extent of the legitimate powers of government (Popkin 2016).

The Enlightenment Concurrent with these political revolutions, and a clear enabling factor of them, was the philosophical and intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. We have said in this book that each age is characterized by central values: harmony and beauty among the Greeks, grandeur and empire among the Romans, faith in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages. As Europe moved into the Enlightenment, it entered the time that became known as the Age of Reason. Reason and rationality characterized work in philosophy, social reform, scientific work, art and literature. The promotion of these values helped to undermine the power of the Church and the Monarchy. Helped by the Protestant Reformation, which led to the possibility of freer religious thinking, freedom of religion became a prominent right. Together with this, freedom from religion arose as a new possibility, reason and the exercise of intellect offering a new way to direct one’s life, in tune with humanism’s stress on people rather than God. This did not necessarily mean an absolute rejection of religion, but rather a new way to encounter and understand the world through thought, investigation, logic and reason (Jacob 2019). All ‘eras’ are later named as such by historians. As we try to learn from history, we retrospectively structure, label and name. While no specific date or event marks the beginning of the era we call the Enlightenment,

36  From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment many historians mark the beginning of the Enlightenment in 1687 with the publication of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. The Mathematica is generally considered to be the seminal work in the development of modern physics and astronomy.2 Newton, building on and going beyond the work of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, presented a view of the universe as wholly determined by its own laws, with God outside this mechanical system and irrelevant to it. People could have their personal God, but He did not run the universe. Newton was revered as a great natural philosopher; in that time ‘science’ meant knowledge generally, and what we today call both natural science and social science were considered to be part of philosophy (King 2019: 3). It is impossible to talk about the Enlightenment without talking about philosophy and philosophers. Philosophy is the garden in which ideas grow: rationality and reason, skepticism, human agency, the nature of freedom, human rights – these were (and are) debated by philosophers, and their ideas both influenced and were influenced by developments in science and the arts. Some date the beginning of the Enlightenment to the French philosopher Rene Descartes’ publication of Discourse on Method in 1637, and his famous declaration cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. Descartes “aimed actively to exploit the natural power of human reason” (Gottlieb 2017: 12). He is often seen as the father of modern philosophy, and the thinker who crystallized the central philosophical question, what do we know, and what justifies our claim to k nowledge? As we saw in Chapter 2, philosophical musings on the nature of knowledge and how knowledge is acquired and verified, deeply occupied ancient Greek philosophers. The engagement of Enlightenment thinkers in these same epistemological questions was situated in the different context of their age, an age dedicated to progress in science, government and the quality of hu man life. In Britain, John Locke argued against Descartes’ notion of self- evident truths, arrived at purely through reason. For Locke, the raw materials of our learning and the development of knowledge are provided by our experience (Gottlieb 2017: 31). This was expressed in Locke’s 1690 book, Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his 1781 book Critique of Pure Reason, contrasted (and attempted to reconcile between) these two fundamental schools of thinking among philosophers: the empiricists, who stressed the role of experience in the development of knowledge (Locke and A ristotle, among others), and the rationalists,

From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment  37 who stressed the role of reason (Descartes and Plato, among others). We will see the traces of both these views of knowledge as we explore the development of the social sciences. In France, Voltaire argued for separation of Church and State, free speech and other civil liberties. Enlightenment thinkers generally argued for all people’s ‘natural rights,’ to life, liberty and property. Property owning by the common man was an idea undreamed of during the long Middle Ages domination by the land-owning classes. Many philosophers, among them Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France and John Locke in Britain, developed theories of government that would be ‘of the people, by the people, for the people,’ an idea born in the Enlightenment and a phrase later made famous by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg address. There are, of course, other central Enlightenment thinkers in France, Britain, Germany and also in what became the United States. The American Enlightenment was influenced by European Enlightenment philosophy, and its ideas were a direct cause of the American Revolution. Many excellent books look in-depth at Enlightenment philosophy. It is not our purpose here, nor are we able, to explore this vast area. Suffice it to stand as a significant part of this incredible story, the story of the growth of human knowledge. We move now to the Industrial Revolution.

Notes 1 Tom Wheeler (2019: 2) says that now, in the internet age, we are witnessing history’s “Third great network revolution.” The first, according to Wheeler, was the printing press, the second, 400 years later, was the invention of railways, which “vanquished geographic distances,” and the telegraph, which “eliminated time as a factor in the delivery of information” (3). Wheeler says that todays network technologies are a continuation of those earlier inventions, and we do not yet know how profound this third revolution will turn out to be. “The new technologies have shown hints of transformative powers, we can only forecast an expectation of the true transformation that is coming” (3). 2 Since the history of knowledge sketched in this book is so decidedly male-dominated, we delight in noting that one of the great translations of and commentaries on Newton’s work was done by a Frenchwoman, Émilie du Châtelet, an aristocrat who devoted her leisure time to the study of physics. She is especially noted for popularizing Newton’s work and making it available to the many, instead of just to elite scientists. In 1740 she published Foundations of Physics. She was a working partner, and probably the mistress, of the French Enlightenment historian and philosopher Voltaire.

38  From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment

References Armitage, D. & S. Subrahmanyam (Eds.). The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Bambach, C. “Anatomy in the Renaissance.” Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrun Timeline of Art History, 2002. www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/ HD/anat/hd_anat.htm. Accessed August 20, 2019. Basbanes, N. On Paper: The Everything of Its Two Thousand Year History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Eisenstein, E. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Gottlieb, A. The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2017. Hunter, D. Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1943, 1974. Jacob, M. The Secular Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. King, M.L. Enlightenment Thought: An Anthology of Sources. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2019. Koenigsberger, H.G., G.L. Mosse & G.Q. Bowler. Europe in the 16th Century. London, New York: Routledge, 2000. Linden, E. “Lost Tribes, Lost Knowledge.” Time, September 23, 1991, 46–54. www.ciesin.org/docs/002-268/002-268.html. Accessed August 20, 2019. MacCulloch, D. The Reformation. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. McLuhan, M. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. Popkin, J.D. A Short History of the French Revolution, 6th ed. London, New York: Routledge, 2016. Principe, L. The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Raven, D. “Elizabeth Eisenstein and the Impact of Printing.” European Review of History: Revue Européenne D’histoire 6, no. 2, 1999, 223–234. doi:10.1080/13507489908568233. Accessed August 12, 2019. Wheeler, T. From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, 2019.

5

A historical sketch of knowledge in the Western world: from the Enlightenment onward

In Chapter 4, we sketched a number of interrelated movements, inventions and events from the latter part of the middle Ages through the Enlightenment. Towards the chronological end of that incredibly vibrant, blooming symphony of thought, creativity, scientific advancement and knowledge development, a new era of technological advancements in manufacturing and production propelled first Britain, then the rest of Europe and the United States, into a new urban, mechanized way of life that left agrarian society behind. This era became known as the Industrial Revolution.

The industrial revolution The Industrial Revolution is different in kind than the political revolutions in France and America. For one thing, in every country in which the Industrial Revolution occurred (in some it occurred sooner than in others, but eventually it reached nearly every country in the world), the revolution unfolded over several decades. For this reason (that the changes occurred gradually and not suddenly), some historians feel that the word ‘revolution’ is a misnomer. Nevertheless, the Industrial Revolution fits several of Merriam Webster’s broad definitions of revolution: a radical or complete change; activity or movement designed to effect fundamental changes in the socioeconomic situation; a fundamental change in the way of thinking about or visualizing something: a change of paradigm; a changeover in use or preference, especially in technology. In the previous chapter, we claimed that the invention of the printing press was a fundamental milestone in human history that ushered in an era of knowledge explosion that changed the world forever. So, too, the Industrial Revolution, the most important development in human history over the past three centuries… It has changed the world. Focused on new

40  From the Enlightenment onward methods and organizations for producing goods, industrialization has altered where people live, how they play, how they define political issues…. (Stearns 2018: 1) The origins of the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ are unclear, but the term was popularized by the 19th century British social historian Arnold Toynbee to describe Britain’s technical and economic development from 1760 to 1840. It is now the generally accepted term for the period when technological advances spread throughout Western society during the late 1800s and early 1900s. At the center of early industrialization in Britain was the cotton industry. Cotton was common in Asia but new in Britain, stronger than wool and linen, easily washed, wonderfully suited to a population with new standards of personal hygiene, and easily dyed in bright colors for a population increasingly eager to make a statement through their appearance (Stearns 2018: 28). New devices for carding, combing and spinning cotton fibers were invented, powered by waterwheels and later by steam engines. Movement of populations from rural agricultural settings to industrial urban centers, bringing people to work first in the cotton industry and then in manufacturing in general, brought about great social change. Workers were organized into huge factories, often with terrible working conditions for the laborers, who were mostly women, and children as young as four years old. They worked long hours for scant wages and were exposed to pollution, dangerous machinery with moving parts, and harsh punishments for what was deemed inadequate productivity. In the face of industrial demands and the chance for factory owners to make a lot of money, Enlightenment ideas about human rights seemed to be forgotten, or at least subsumed in the rush towards industrial progress. Allen (2017) calls this the Jekyll and Hyde faces of the Industrial Revolution: on the one hand, huge leaps in productivity and the mechanisms and technology of productivity, and on the other hand, great poverty and terrible working conditions for the new urban masses. According to Mokyr (2000), the question of why of the Industrial Revolution happened when it did cannot be answered without viewing it through the lens of a theory of knowledge, that is, looking at “the epistemic roots of the Industrial Revolution” (255). This great technological revolution flowed directly from intellectual developments of the 17th century scientific revolution and the 18th century Enlightenment. “The key to the Industrial Revolution was technology, and technology is knowledge” (254). While we understand this statement, we would argue

From the Enlightenment onward  41 with its baldness, preferring a more complex formulation: technology comes about because of advances in knowledge and acts to advance further knowledge development; technology encapsulates knowledge, displays and represents it, embodies it. The Industrial Revolution was a time of momentous change and invention. The central value of this age was progress through utilitarianism. People sought progress in “useful knowledge … the manipulation of nature for our material purposes” (Mokyr 2000: 255). Different than the philosophical musings of other eras, practically useful knowledge was pursued and channeled toward making industry faster, more efficient, more productive. As Polanyi (1962: 175) points out, ‘pure’ knowledge can be right or wrong, whereas action, the application of knowledge to practical problems, can only be successful or unsuccessful. The Industrial Revolution was about successful action to achieve technological (and thus economic) growth. If (as Polanyi suggests) scientific knowledge is ‘pure’ knowledge, then technology is practical knowledge: “technology teaches action” (176). In this vein, Polanyi notes the clear distinction (recognized in patent law) “between a discovery, which makes an addition to our knowledge of nature, and an invention, which establishes a new operational principle serving some acknowledged advancement” (177). This is a very important distinction, and helps to clarify Mokyr’s (2000) statement above that “technology is knowledge.” Information and knowledge during the Industrial Revolution were more widely available than ever before and were much sought after and prized among the middle classes. A British factory owner of the time characterized it thusly: “The diffusion of general knowledge, and of a taste for science, over all classes of men, in every nation in Europe, or of European origin, seems to be the characteristic feature of the present age” (Keir 1789:1 iii, quoted in Jones 2008: 1). As noted above, knowledge takes many forms, from propositional to practical, from thought and ideas to utilitarian application, and the bridge between these is observation and investigation, that is, research, whether that be formal, structured research or personal, trial-and-error work.2 Ideas must be conceptualized, concretized and tested. Nevertheless, this bridge is by no means straight. Practical progress required great leaps forward in research, yet pure scientific research, certainly during the first half of the Industrial Revolution, concerned subjects of limited technological use: astronomy, botany, magnetism, combustion and refraction of light (Mokyr 2000: 267). Some of the knowledge generated in these areas found practical application during the latter part of the Industrial Revolution. But the important influences of scientific

42  From the Enlightenment onward research at this time were broader: scientific method was developed, including the requirement for replicability of results; scientific method, mentality and culture began to permeate work in technology, and even influence popular culture. Research and science became popular topics among the middle classes, with lectures on simplified Newtonian physics engaging the public; science became a kind of middle-class entertainment (Jones 2008: 71–76). By inference, this popularization, this diffusion of (albeit diluted) scientific culture into the general consciousness would have inspired more young people to pursue learning towards research, discovery and invention, creating a greater pool of investigators to ask questions and have the tools with which to seek answers. Hand in hand with this came the development of a system of general education, available to all.

The development of general education During the second half of the Industrial Revolution, school systems were organized. While the details vary from country to country in the Western world, a few general observations are not out of place. Before the Industrial Revolution, the upper classes in every society in every period, even girls, were educated in order to fulfill their particular stations and roles in life. Throughout the Middle Ages lower class children became laborers of one sort or another early on, and school systems as such did not exist. Such basic education as existed was carried on under Church auspices. Moving out of the Middle Ages, in Britain at least, “The educational system was relatively undiversified, and consisted of small institutions, molded by the church, and set in rural or small urban communities subject only to small changes in population structure and social composition” (Lawson & Silver 1973, 2014: xxiii). During the Industrial Revolution, with the movement of populations, reduced influence of the Church and a new era of social awareness, governments everywhere in Western Europe and in America became increasingly involved in education. Gradually, with the growth of industry, “support for public education grew, and the result was a transformation of schooling from limited provision into widespread and hierarchical educational systems” (Carl 2009: 503). In Germany, the Protestant reformer Martin Luther had, as early as 1520, recommended that schooling be available and compulsory for all, his goal being that everyone would be able to read the Bible. In Geneva, John Calvin made a similar case for compulsory education, for similar reasons. “One of the hallmarks of the Renaissance Movement … was the rebirth of learning. The Christian Reformation activists tirelessly

From the Enlightenment onward  43 advocated universal education as an important means in producing responsible citizens” (Zhang 2004: 27) At the beginning of the 19th century, the King of Prussia made attendance compulsory at state schools, making the German state of Prussia the first place in Europe to do so, with other countries soon following (Zhang 2004). In the first half of the 19th century in Britain, schooling was available but voluntary, with schools controlled by charity organizations, mainly the Church of England. With the passing of the Education Act in 1870, and then the Education Act of 1876, elementary education became compulsory for all children (Ucan & Ucan 2019). Compulsory elementary schooling in France began in 1841. Public schools were to be free, secular, and mandatory for boys and girls between the ages of 6 and 12. In the United States, which were then still the Thirteen Colonies, some free public schools were opened in the early 17th  century. After the American Revolution, by the middle of the 19th century, individual states began to pass compulsory education laws. Not until 1918 were all American children in all states required to complete elementary school. In all these places, and in the other Western nations not mentioned here, elementary schools were developed first, and then secondary schools, as the requirements and expectations that citizens be educated grew. The history of public schooling is in itself a rich and fascinating topic, with each country living out its own ideologies, politics and cultural life, and expressing these in its education system, but that in-depth history cannot be our subject here. We should, however, pause to say that while it is tempting to view the development of compulsory public education as solely positive, a beacon lighting the way from ignorance to intellectual emancipation, social historians have also seen less altruistic, darker motives for the development of compulsory education. Among these, the imposition by the upper classes of education on the lower classes in order to impose cultural hegemony and subvert the revolutionary tendencies of the lower classes; and a means of creating a working population who possess the necessary basic skills and are also used to external discipline and thus submissive and easy to control (Mitch 1999). Twentieth and twenty-first century sociologists of education, working in the area known as critical educational sociology, see the modern incarnation of these dark motives as the cultural reproduction of elite knowledge by schools. Schools are, in this analysis, planned and administered by the elite, sorting children and denying advancement to those not possessing elite knowledge, behaviors and skills – the ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu 1984), of the elite, thus ensuring that the offspring of the elite continue

44  From the Enlightenment onward to dominate and run society. In other words, “schooling is an arena in which elites struggle to reproduce their advantage through the success of their children” (Schofer 2019: 14). Without denying the complexity of the story of public education, the question for us is, why is schooling important to advancing the plot of our story? First, it is an important part of the Industrial Revolution. As the Industrial Revolution advanced and industrial technologies became ever more sophisticated, there was greater and greater need for educated workers who could read, follow diagrams, etc. There was more and more need to train the teachers who would teach in the schools, the factory owners and administrators who would run the great industrial machine; the lawyers, accountants, bankers and engineers who would meet particular needs of an ever more sophisticated society; the physicians who would treat an ever expanding middle class with expectations of a good life. Whatever the self-serving motives of the upper classes may have been, and however imperfect the schools may have been, there is no question that general education advanced knowledge in society. Second, we are working our way towards the social sciences, and education is part of the social sciences. Many of the great educational thinkers of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, those working to advance the quality of public education, were (depending on their time) philosophers, political theorists, psychologists, sociologists: people who were engaged in social science activity, whether it was called that or not. And third, as educational expectations, availability and needs grew ever greater, as elementary and then secondary education began to seem not enough, there was extensive development of existing universities, the opening of new universities, and the development of specific research institutions. Research universities3 may have provided Bachelor’s degrees to the increasingly desiring and able masses, but their main task was research; engaging in research was (and is) their raison d’être. In these research universities, and importantly for the story we are telling in this book, the demarcation between the natural and the social sciences became more distinct. Rather than coexisting as two aspects of philosophy, as they had done for centuries, the natural and the social sciences began to be developed and defined. The Enlightenment ­ values of logic and reason, and the Industrial Revolution value of efficiency, both come to play in the increasing development of statistical research methods. At the same time, Enlightenment values of freedom and equality allowed for the development of qualitative methodologies, as interest in the lifeworld of ordinary people grew and flourished. Two central research paradigms developed, with different epistemological bases, different views of knowledge and the attendant

From the Enlightenment onward  45 methodological differences. Twentieth century events, notably the various wars, brought about social changes that engendered new streams of social science research, including mixed methods research with its unique epistemological challenges. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. This part of the story is the topic of Chapter 6.

Notes 1 See Keir, J. The First Part of a Dictionary of Chemistry, 1789. 2 Of course, people are not always looking for what they actually find during their investigations. For instance, when William Rontgen was conducting an experiment with a cathode ray tube in 1895, he accidently discovered the X-ray. See Meyers (2007), and Jones and O’Brien (1991), for engaging looks at some of these accidental discoveries. 3 Research universities became especially well developed in the United States, where institutions such as Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Harvard and the Universities of Chicago, California and Michigan continue to lead research in many fields. This is not to say that research was or is centered at universities in the United States. Many illustrious institutions, among them universities, predate the birth of the United States by many centuries. The oldest national scientific institution in the world is the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, or simply The Royal Society, founded in 1660. It provided a forum for many illustrious (as they were then called) philosophers to share and debate scientific ideas and to promote ‘experimental philosophy.’ Today the Royal Society, which is not itself a research institution, works to promote scientific research, recognizes excellence in science, supports outstanding science and provides scientific advice for policy makers. See Tinniswood (2019) for a full history of this venerable scientific society.

References Allen, R.C. The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Bourdieu, J. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984. Carl, J. “Industrialization and Public Education: Social Cohesion and Social Stratification.” In Robert Cowen and Andreas M. Kazamias (Eds.) International Handbook of Comparative Education. London, New York: Springer, 2009, 503–518. Keir, J. The First Part of a Dictionary of Chemistry. Birmingham: Pearson & Rollason, 1789. Jones, C.F. & J. O’Brien. Mistakes that Worked: 40 Familiar Inventions and How They Came to Be. New York: Random House, 1991. Jones, P.M. Industrial Enlightenment: Science, Technology and Culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands 1760–1820. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008.

46  From the Enlightenment onward Lawson, J. & H. Silver. A Social History of Education in England. London, New York: Routledge, 1973, 2014. Meyers, M. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007. Mitch, D. “The Role of Education and Skill in the British Industrial Revolution.” In Joel Mokyr (Ed.) The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective, 2nd ed. New York, London: Taylor and Francis, 1999, 241–278. Mokyr, J. “Knowledge, Technology and Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution.” In Bart van Ark and Simon K. Kuipers (Eds.) Productivity, Technology and Economic Growth. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000, 253–292. Polanyi, M. Personal Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Schofer, E. “The Growth of Schooling in Global Perspective.” In Thurston Domina, Benjamin Gibbs, Lisa Nunn and Andrew Penner (Eds.) Education and Society: An Introduction to Key Issues in the Sociology of Education. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019, 7–22. Stearns, P.N. The Industrial Revolution in World History, 4th ed. New York, London: Routledge, 2018. Tinniswood, A. The Royal Society, and the Invention of Modern Science. New York: Basic Books, 2019. Ucan, A.D. & S. Ucan. “A Critical Review of the Compulsory Schooling Reform in England and Its Lasting Implications for Today.” Education Reform Journal 4, no. 1, 2019, 14–25. doi:10.22596/erj2019.04.01.14.25. Accessed August 26, 2019. Zhang, M. “Time to Change the Truancy Laws? Compulsory Education: Its Origin and Modern Dilemma.” Pastoral Care 22, no. 2, 2004, 27–33. doi:10.1111/j.0264-3944.2004.00260.x. Accessed August 26, 2019.

6

Are we there yet? The birth and development of the social sciences

Philosophy and her children From the Greeks onward, in the story we are tracing, ‘philosophy’ was the overarching intellectual field that included investigation of the natural world. While philosophy and science may at first glance seem fundamentally different to our modern minds, and certainly they are different fields today, there remains logical connection between them. It was not until the 19th century that the word ‘science’ began to be used as we use it today and to develop as a field separate from philosophy. Until that time, ‘natural philosophers’ engaged in study of philosophical issues and of the natural world, as one great field of inquiry. And in fact, both philosophers and scientists continue to engage in the shared enterprise of the pursuit of knowledge. Science concerns itself with discovery and the creation of new knowledge; philosophy concerns itself, at least in large part, with epistemology, the nature of human knowledge: what it is possible to know, how we can know that we know, the utility of knowledge, and the moral and ethical implications of our knowledge. That work is, in turn, essential to the methods of science. In previous chapters, we have moved through Greece and Rome, through Medieval times in Europe, through printing, Church reforms, great political and social upheavals, the Scientific Revolution, to Enlightenment ideas about human rights and the pursuit of freedoms, including freedom to learn and to propose and test new ideas without fear of censure. Together with new intellectual freedoms came new technologies that enabled rapid dissemination and sharing of discoveries, questions and ideas. While philosophy and science remained intertwined, with many people working in both, science began to be developed as a distinct area involving disciplined empirical investigation into the natural world. Some people tried to resolve the apparent conflict between scientific objectivity and religious faith, or else to

48  Birth and development of social sciences separate them as belonging to two different, separate realms, neither rejecting the other. The general trend was towards the replacement of religious faith as an explanatory basis for belief, with the empiricist requirement for evidence and the rationalist requirement for logical argument. As science advanced, scientific fields began to become specialized and differentiated. For instance, with the expansion of empires and the discovery, exploration and settlement of new lands, came ever improved methods of navigation1 for travel to these lands. More adventurers traveled abroad, and with this came increasing interest in collecting, classifying and naming new and exotic species of animals and plants. The collecting sciences of the 18th century became the biological sciences of the 19th century (Ede & Cormack 2012). Charles Darwin’s research into the evolution of species through natural selection, and his decidedly non-Christian proposal that animals and humans shared a common ancestry, shocking as it was, took hold as a scientific theory, further weakening the hold of religion and strengthening the hold of science. Medieval alchemy, that is, attempts to transform matter, especially base metals into gold, progressed into the disciplined study of chemistry, and so on. Natural science distinguished itself from philosophy, and the natural sciences began to distinguish themselves one from the other. It became clearer that (whatever one’s religious beliefs) there are complex natural processes governing the physical world, and these do not accord in any straightforward way with the Biblical account. With this, people began to believe that instead of a social order wholly established by God, society and culture are themselves products of history, the actions of people, and the evolution of culture, and that they had changed and would continue to change (Hunt & Colander 2017: 24). This begat interest in the social world as a field of study, different from both philosophy and natural science. By the late 18th century, the overarching area called philosophy had developed into three interrelated but distinct realms of inquiry: philosophy, natural science and social science. The social, as opposed to the natural, had become “intellectually imaginable” (Tröhler 2015: 23) and began to be explored academically.

Roots of the social sciences One of the many new directions of inquiry flowing from the Enlightenment, was increased interest in the social world and in human beings as social and cultural actors. With new freedoms, new awareness of

Birth and development of social sciences  49 human rights and increased ease of travel, came new interest in the lives of both the urban poor at home, and of the natives in far-flung empirical colonies. The spread of this interest can be seen in artistic works of the time, with Charles Dickens in 19th century Britain romanticizing the lives of the urban poor in novels like Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations. In Italy in the late 19th century, operas2 such as Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana did a similar romanticizing of the lives of the poor lower classes. And opera was not just for upper class audiences. In Paris, for instance, the new middle class, the bourgeoisie, loved the opera as popular entertainment (Huebner 1989). This diffusion into popular culture of interest in the lives of the common folk went hand in hand with the development of academic investigations into people’s lives and cultures. Investigations into the lives of people involved both the quest to understand the characteristics and structures of societies (early sociology, the investigation of society) and the rules governing the behaviors of various groups in these societies (early anthropology, the investigation of culture). The concepts and methods of sociology and anthropology were and are interrelated, but in general we can say that sociology sought and seeks ‘objective’ knowledge, thus frequently (but not solely) employing statistics; anthropology sought and seeks the ‘subjective’ knowledge and experience of cultural participants themselves, thus employing participant observation. Together with sociology and cultural anthropology (sometimes called social anthropology, as opposed to physical anthropology or archeology), psychology developed as a distinct discipline in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. Concurrent with these, the political study of society developed into political science. The first school of political science was established in 1872 in France as the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. The study of the role and movements of capital and other resources in society became the field of economics. The social sciences were and are interdisciplinary in nature – they all involve the study of society – and many key figures appear in the development of several social science fields. Karl Marx, for instance, is important in sociology, economics and political science. Because our interest in this book is knowledge as it underlies research method, we will trace two developing epistemological streams (positivist/ objective and interpretive/subjective). One reasonably coherent way to trace the development of the social sciences, and these two streams of thought, is through the contributions of particular people. No philosophical or intellectual movement is traceable to one or two individuals,

50  Birth and development of social sciences but there are key figures whose contributions can help us understand the ideas their work represents. Each of these people made a significant contribution of new ideas, and though method may not have flowed immediately from their work, their work had methodological implications.

From positivism to post-positivism Auguste Comte was born at the turn of the 18th century in postRevolution France, a tumultuous time when a just, stable social order was imagined and sought. Comte did not found sociology, but he greatly developed it, and he gave this field its name. He is also remembered as the founder of positivist epistemology.3 Positivism does not accept metaphysics or religious experience as knowledge; only experience in the empirical world provides knowledge that can be verified. In the words of Comte himself: …each branch of our knowledge passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the theological, or fictitious; the metaphysical, or abstract; and the scientific, or positive…in the final, the positive state…reasoning and observation, duly combined, are the source of this knowledge. (Comte quoted in Lenzer 2017: 71–72) This Law of Three Stages sees humankind moving through its superstitious phase, to an intermediate, abstract phase, then finally to a scientific phase in which humanity evolves into the understanding that reason and empirical investigation form the pathway to understand both the natural and the social worlds. According to Comte, “The study of the positive philosophy affords the only rational means of exhibiting the logical laws of the human mind, which have hitherto been sought by unfit methods” (Comte quoted in Lenzer 2017: 79). For Comte, sociological, positivist research would employ the methods of the natural sciences, meaning that only aspects of society that are external and thus observable could be studied. Emile Durkheim, who continued the positivist project in sociology, called these observable aspects ‘social facts.’ Durkheim’s 1895 book The Rules of Sociological Method (in French, Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique) established sociology as a positivist social science. The message is that all certain (positive) knowledge results from positivist research, that is, work that combines data systematically gathered from sensory (empirical) experience and interpreted through reason and logic. Positivism continued to be refined both in the sciences and in sociology. One important development was the conceptualization of

Birth and development of social sciences  51 logical positivism, whose most famous home was the Vienna Circle in Post-World War I Europe. The Vienna Circle was a group of illustrious philosophers and scientists who met regularly in Vienna to discuss scientific language and methodology. Logical positivism, also called logical empiricism, holds that metaphysical questions are not false, as Comte believed, but meaningless, devoid of any logic. Logical positivism was more rigorous than positivism in its absolute rejection of any metaphysical speculation. The Vienna Circle sought a unified science and language of science. They would accept only the results of experimentation and logical analysis as knowledge, nothing else, and they aimed to tackle the foundations of mathematics, physics, biology and the social sciences (Sigmund 2017: 142) and introduce this logical rigor to all of these fields. The Circle produced a manifesto in 1929 articulating their position. The central tenet of the Vienna Circle was the ‘verifiability principle,’ which holds that a statement is meaningful only if it can be verified either empirically or logically. Empirical verification was done through research; logical verification through the meaning of words and the internal logic of statements and groups of statements.4 One of the first critics of logical positivism was a junior member of the Vienna Circle, Karl Popper, who saw a serious problem with the verification principle. We will revisit his important contribution in Chapter 7 when we look into the notion of theory. To close the story of the Vienna Circle, we will note that many of the members were Jewish, and with the rise of Hitler and increasing antisemitism in Germany, members began to emigrate, many to the Unites States, and while the group dissolved, their work continued in new settings. Positivism and logical positivism emphasize, as part of the stress on scientific objectivity, the independence of researchers from the objects of their research, in order that their own views and biases not influence results. A social scientist who adhered to a pure positivist philosophy would thus accept only quantitative research methods. Post-positivists critique and amend positivism. Post-positivist research seeks objectivity not through attempting to isolate researchers as persons from their work, but through acknowledging that researchers always bring their views and biases to their work, examining the effects of biases and attempting to neutralize them in order to approach objectivity. Post-positivists accept both quantitative and qualitative methods. Pure positivism lasted longest in behavioral psychology, until about the middle of the 20th century. In the social sciences the more flexible but still rigorous post-positivist epistemology and its related methodologies is one dominant stream in social science research today.

52  Birth and development of social sciences

Non-positivist sociology, anthropology and the interpretive paradigm This is our first encounter in this chapter with the word ‘paradigm,’ a concept which now becomes important to our discussion. We will see in Chapter 7 how the work of Thomas Kuhn, who coined the term ‘paradigm shift,’ gave ‘research paradigm’ its modern meaning. A research paradigm is “a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated; broadly: a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind” (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary). In this chapter, we have so far seen the social and historical roots and epistemological bases of the positivist and post-positivist paradigm. We move now to the interpretive paradigm. The views of knowledge, and thus of how to advance knowledge through research, in these two paradigms, are very different. The positivist and post-positivist paradigms relate first to natural science and secondarily to social science. The interpretive paradigm relates solely to social science research. Willis (2007: 94) juxtaposes the postpositivist and interpretive paradigms thusly: In post-positivism reality is external to the human mind; the purpose of research is to find universal principles and laws; the classic scientific method5 is the correct research procedure; and data should be used to test and falsify theory (we will see Karl Popper’s notion of falsification, which replaced the Vienna Circle’s verification theory, in Chapter 7). The interpretive paradigm views reality as socially constructed. The purpose of research is to uncover cultural participants’ own understandings, using both qualitative and quantitative methods towards this purpose, and data are analyzed with the understanding that meaning is contextual and universal laws are less important than context and meaning. Working in a similar time frame to the Vienna Circle was the German sociologist Max Weber, who wrote on sociology, historiography, politics and law. Unlike members of the Vienna Circle, who were scientists and mathematicians whose ideas touched more or less tangentially on the social sciences, Max Weber was a social scientist, a central figure in the history of sociology. He promoted an antipositivist stance, arguing for an interpretive understanding of human action. He analyzed the connection between bureaucracy and individual freedom, finding that the technological and economic structures in capitalist society form an ‘iron cage’ which hinder individual freedom. Similar themes appear in the earlier work of Karl Marx. Both men

Birth and development of social sciences  53 studied inequality in society. Marx undertook an economic analysis of capitalism and predicted polarization between capitalists and workers, which would lead to a proletariat revolution and then to a classless society. Weber saw social stratification as more complex and nuanced. The work of Comte and Durkheim, Marx and Weber, much of which was philosophical and theoretical, led to the development of sociological method in which “observation, description and classification replaced the search for historical laws” (Morrison 2006: 5) in order to understand society. Weber strengthened the interpretive nature of sociological research by calling into question Durkheim’s positivistic notion of ‘social facts,’ focusing instead on ‘social acts’ that were the products of human judgment and evaluation. This “led him to pursue the dimension of human ‘inner states’ by propounding a theory of human social action” (Morrison 2006: 6). For this reason, Weber is a pivotal figure in the development of the interpretive paradigm. Meanwhile, from about the middle of the 19th century, anthropology began to develop as a distinct field. The study of people in the colonies of the various European empires was underway. Such study involved relatively brief visits to foreign lands to collect descriptions of peoples’ ways of life, visits enabled by the colonial system. Descriptions were from an external-outsider viewpoint, and often gave paternalistic views of the lives of ‘savages.’ In the 19th and early 20th centuries colonialism structured the relationship between researchers and the people they studied; academic study in these settings was a kind of exploitation (Lewis 1973). In-depth fieldwork and the move away from paternalistic, ‘objective’ anthropology really began with Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish doctoral student at the London School of Economics who set out in 1914 to study the people in the New Guinea Trobriand Islands. When World War I broke out Malinowski, a subject of the enemy combatant Austro-Hungarian Empire who was visiting a British colony, was regarded with suspicion by British authorities and confined to the islands, where he had to remain for several years. This led him to do fieldwork of a length and depth that had never before been imagined. He gained the trust of the residents, as well as fluency in their language, participating in many aspects of day to day life. His 1922 book detailing this work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, is a classic in cultural anthropology. In it Malinowski lays out, together with his findings, the method of in-depth ethnographic6 fieldwork that became the roadmap for this kind of work. Fieldwork must be methodical, thoroughly documented in living detail, and illustrated with case studies, in order to reach “the final goal, of which the ethnographer should never lose sight.

54  Birth and development of social sciences The goal is, briefly, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world” (Malinowski 1922, 2014: NP). In North America anthropologists also studied the cultures of native Americans. The German-born American Franz Boaz, often seen as the founder of American anthropology, devoted his career to study of the Kwakiutl and other Native tribes of British Columbia. At a time when western Europeans were considered biologically superior (by Western Europeans!), Boaz worked to undermine these prejudiced views, conducting studies that showed wide variations between and within national groups, and depicting the richness of Native North American cultures (Guest 2016). In the second half of the 20th century, Clifford Geertz, a professor at Princeton University, echoed Malinowski’s methods in his championing of ‘thick description,’ urging anthropologists to try to see beyond their own ‘cultural cosmologies’ to the meanings cultural participants themselves ascribe, in order to interpret a culture’s web of symbols. He was strongly influenced by the earlier insights of Max Weber. In Geertz’s words: Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. (Geertz 1973: 5) In the view of Geertz, and his intellectual followers, understanding a culture’s symbols and rituals are key to unpacking cultural meaning.

But really, what is a paradigm? According to Guba and Lincoln (1994), a paradigm is a set of basic beliefs about the nature of the world and people’s place in it (107). An “inquiry paradigm” (what some would call a research paradigm) “defines for inquirers what it is they are about, and what falls within and outside the limits of legitimate inquiry” (108). Paradigms involve first and foremost, ontology: what we believe is the nature of reality, and thus, what can be known about reality. Then, paradigms involve epistemology: given our ontological view of reality, what, then, is the nature of the relationship between the knower and what can be known? Then, and only then, comes the methodological matter of how a knower can go about finding out whatever s/he believes can

Birth and development of social sciences  55 be known (108). Guba and Lincoln list four paradigms: positivist, post-positivist, critical theory (called ‘critical realism’ by some) and constructivism. Post-positivism flows from positivism, and we view them together here. Constructivism is another name sometimes given to the interpretive paradigm. Cultural participants construct their own knowledge and meanings, and the researcher’s role is to understand those, as much as possible. The third paradigm, critical theory, or critical realism, finds its roots in the Marxist doctrine of societal inequality and the quest for emancipation. The goal of research in this paradigm is to actively critique and then change society. Critical realism situates itself as an alternative paradigm both to scientistic forms of positivism concerned with regularities, regression-based variables models, and the quest for law-like forms; and also to the strong interpretivist or postmodern turn which denied explanation in favor of interpretation, with a focus on hermeneutics and description at the cost of causation. (Archer et al. 2016: NP) Critical realism is accepted by most writers on the subject as the third research paradigm, different in its goals (to expose and correct societal inequalities and to identify causes), and its view of knowledge. Some writers today present long lists of paradigms, while others prefer to see these as variations on three central paradigms: postpositivist, interpretive and critical realism. We need to stress here, not for the first time, that research paradigm does not equal research methodology; they are not the same thing. There is, however, a direct relationship between choice of methodology and the underlying research paradigm. Decisions about research do not (should not) start with choice of method and methodology: those flow from the chosen paradigm. Choice of research paradigm should be conscious, justified and made explicit. This allows researchers to be fully aware of what they are trying to do, rather than leaving the philosophical assumptions and choice of logic of inquiry implicit and unexamined, as so often happens…The paradigm selected should be the one that the researcher considers will provide the greatest likelihood of being able to answer the research questions satisfactorily. (Blaikie & Priest 2017: 22)

56  Birth and development of social sciences

Whither the paradigm wars? Long before the famous “paradigm wars”7 (Gage 1989), in a classic article almost one hundred years ago, the sociologist Charles Cooley gave a good description of two kinds of social knowledge, of which he says there are two distinct sorts. One he calls the spacial, which is based on sense perceptions and gives rise to the exact sciences, measurement and statistics. The other he calls the mental-social complex, which leads to sympathetic-dramatic knowledge that does not lend itself to measurement. A “working agreement” should be made between the two in order to advance social knowledge, and in fact it is important to do so: The external or behavioristic study of human life should not be disjointed from its natural union with the sympathetic observation of consciousness. Statistics is a method of manipulation, not of perception [emphasis added]. Interpretation and provision, in sociology as in other sciences, is a work of the constructive imagination. (Cooley 1926: 59) With this, we will close: in order to advance human knowledge in the social sciences, we need to work from different paradigms, in order to answer (and ask) varying questions and kinds of questions. This will require the use of different methodologies, and sometimes their artful combination in mixed methods studies. This book is not really about method, but about what comes before. But we would be remiss not to say that mixed methods probably does not mean mixed paradigms. Mixed methods researchers usually work from either the post-positivist or the interpretive paradigm (less often the critical, but yes, that, too), sometimes using a mix of quantitative and qualitative tools to answer questions that spring from the ontological standpoint of one paradigm. And what about theory? Where does theory come in? This is the topic of Chapter 7.

Notes 1 These included new methods for determining longitude, and the increased available of printed charts and guides. See https://penobscotmarine museum.org/pbho-1/history-of-navigation/navigation-18th-century. Accessed September 3, 2019. 2 See Hutcheon and Hutcheon (1996), for an excellent recounting of the how 19th century opera portrayed the lives of the poor. 3 Comte was of course influenced by earlier philosophers, notably David Hume, a Scottish empiricist philosopher who disavowed religion in favor of scientific study of human nature.

Birth and development of social sciences  57 4 The classic work on logical verification was written by the British A. J. Ayer, who spent several months with the Vienna Circle, and on his return to England wrote Language, Truth and Logic, published in 1936. 5 “In a typical application of the scientific method, a researcher develops a hypothesis, tests it through various means, and then modifies the hypothesis on the basis of the outcome of the tests and experiments. The modified hypothesis is then retested, further modified, and tested again, until it becomes consistent with observed phenomena and testing outcomes. In this way, hypotheses serve as tools by which scientists gather data. From that data and the many different scientific investigations undertaken to explore hypotheses, scientists are able to develop broad general explanations, or scientific theories.” Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/ science/scientific-method. Accessed September 8, 2009. 6 Ethnography is the method of cultural anthropology. From the Greek ἔθνος (ethnos), meaning a people or nation, and graphy, meaning writing; thus, writing about a people. 7 The term “paradigm wars” was coined by N. L. Gage in 1989 to characterize the adversarial character of methodological debates occurring during the final quarter of the 20th century. These were specifically related to research in teaching, where the quantitative-qualitative divide sparked angry debate about what kinds of knowledge could be produced and what kinds of method were legitimate in educational research.

References Archer, M., C. Decoteau, P. Gorski, D. Porpora, T. Rutzou, C. Smith, G. Steinmetz & F. Vandenberghe. “What Is Critical Realism?” Perspectives, a Newsletter of the ASA Theory Section. www.asatheory.org/current-newsletteronline/what-is-critical-realism. Accessed September 10, 2019. Ayer, A.J. Language, Truth and Logic. New York: Dover Publications, 1936. Blaikie, N. & J. Priest. Social Research: Paradigms in Action. Cambridge, Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017. Cooley, C.H. “The Roots of Social Knowledge.” American Journal of Sociology 32, no. 1, 1926, 59–79. doi:10.1086/214025. Accessed September 2, 2019. Ede, A. & L. Cormack. A History of Science in Society, Vol. 2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Gage, N.L. “The Paradigm Wars and Their Aftermath: ‘Historical’ Sketch of Research on Teaching since 1989.” Educational Researcher 18, no. 7, 1989, 4–10. doi:10.3102/0013189X018007004. Accessed September 2, 2019. Geertz, C. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Guba, E. & Y. Lincoln. “Competing Paradigms in Qualitative Research.” In N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994, 105–117. Guest, K. Essentials of Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age. New York, London: Norton, 2016. Huebner, S. “Opera Audiences in Paris 1830–1870.” Music and Letters 70, no. 2, 1989, 206–225.

58  Birth and development of social sciences Hunt, E.F. & D.C. Colander. Social Science: An Introduction to the Study of Society, 16th ed. London, New York: Routledge, 2017. Hutcheon, L. & M. Hutcheon. Opera: Desire, Disease, Death. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Lenzer, G. (Ed.). August Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings. London, New York: Routledge, 2017. Lewis, D. “Anthropology and Colonialism.” Current Anthropology 14, no. 5, 1973, 581–602. Malinowski, B. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. First published Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922. Kindle reissue Oxford, New York: Routledge, 2014. Morrison, K. Marx, Durkheim, Weber, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006. Sigmund, K. Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2017. Tröhler, D. “The Construction of Society and Conceptions of Education.” In Thomas Popkewitz (Ed.) The ‘Reason’ of Schooling. New York, London: Routledge. 2015, 21–39. Willis. J. Foundations of Qualitative Research: Interpretive and Critical Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007.

7

How can we think about theory? A gallery of heroes

What is theory? This is both an obvious question – who doesn’t know what theory is? – and a difficult one – okay, wise guy, tell me what theory is, then. Clearly the answer is not simple. Many articles and books have been written about ‘theory,’ ‘theorizing,’ and ‘theoretical’ in various social science fields. Sutton and Staw (1995: 317) wrote, regarding ‘theory’ that, “Because its referents are so diverse – including everything from minor working hypotheses, through comprehensive but vague and unordered speculations, to axiomatic systems of thought – use of the word often obscures rather than creates understanding.” Thomas (2007) notes meanings ranging from personal theory to grand theory, and questions the use of grand or ‘scientific’ theory in the social sciences at all, stating that the allure of theory in the social sciences rests on its success in the natural sciences. According to Thomas, social science theory has an “acquired potency for bestowing academic legitimacy” (20). Despite this ongoing academic discussion of theory’s definition and proper use, most of us are taught in university that research must be grounded in theory, or (more recently) if the research is based in qualitative methods, to generate theory. Some rebels throughout the years have disagreed. The great philosopher, psychologist and educational pragmatist John Dewey called for specific inquiries into specific social structures and interactions in order to understand and solve educational and social problems. According to Dewey, such specific investigations are more effective than the generalizations and abstractions that theorizing aims at and requires. Taking a more radical position, and writing about research in both the natural and the social sciences, the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (1975) argued against the use of theory and against universal methodological rules, and for ‘epistemological anarchy.’

60  How can we think about theory? Feyerabend believed that the strictures of order imposed by theory and by methodological rules limit scientific thought and actually hinder discovery and progress. On the other hand, the father of ethnography, Bronislaw Malinowski, who we met in Chapter 6, says that in fact we are always theorizing; that theory at some level is inherent in all social science writing and thought: “There is no such thing as a [scientific, historical or cultural] description completely devoid of theory … every statement and argument has to be made in words, that is, concepts. Each concept in turn is the result of a theory, which declares that some facts are relevant and others adventitious” (Malinowski 1944: 8), even if this ordering and generalizing is intuitive rather than explicit. In other words, we are always working from some sort of theory, and it behooves us to make it explicit. This allows others to understand our work better and to build on it (or reject it on a reasoned basis). In sociology, constructing and testing social theory is absolutely central to the work of sociologists. Abend (2008: 173–174) decries the lack of clarity about ‘theory’ and writes, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, one way of describing what sociologists of social movements do is to develop ‘theories’ about social movements. Sociologists of the family develop ‘theories’ about the family … it is a widespread belief that empirical sociological research should be driven or informed by ‘theory.’ Thus, sociology journals tend to reject ‘atheoretical’ and ‘undertheorized’ papers, as well as papers that fail to make a ‘theoretical contribution to the literature’… Abend does not undervalue theory, rather, he asks us to be clearer in our use of the word ‘theory’ and not to wave it as an unreflective flag of legitimacy for academic work. For our purposes here, let us agree to adopt a general definition of theory such as that offered by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a broad definition that works well in all fields of study: “a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena.” Theory should never act as a straight jacket, permitting study only of its predefined concepts and connections. This is what Feyerabend criticized. But since research aims to advance shared understanding, this means having a shared conceptual language and shared understanding of what previous research and existing theory say about the topic of study. We can’t be endlessly repeating ourselves because of some misguided apprehension that theoretical constraints permit us only to study what theory has already defined and explained

How can we think about theory?  61 for us. At the other extreme, we cannot be constantly reinventing the wheel because we are loath to base our work in any existing knowledge. The balance is somewhere in between. Theories create order, shared language, and important procedural rules; they combine individual, particular research findings into meaningful conceptual wholes. They state relationships that research has discovered and verified, and this allows prediction. They do not (must not!) preclude creation of new methods and generation of new concepts and connections. They do not (must not!) require us to reject our own research findings if they do not accord with existing theory. It is up to us to interpret our findings in a meaningful way, and if existing theory does not help us do this, well – this is how new theories are born. Theories should help us order, understand, and explain our world, and on the basis of that researchgenerated understanding, ask new questions. Methodologically, there is a kind of dance between looking carefully at details, and generalizing from those details to reach substantial universal understandings. Research in any field should include studies that investigate the ants crawling on the ground and (to continue the metaphor) the overall ecology of the forest. This is how knowledge advances. The academic world (graduate studies, academic publishing, grant writing) requires reference to theory and with good reason. Proposed, executed, and published research needs to have a theoretical framework and to contribute to new theoretical understanding. A theoretical framework is not simply a literature review, or a review of existing theories. It takes aspects of one or more theories to provide a conceptual framework for this study, a framework that both generates and supports the research questions. It is both structurally sound and robust and open enough to allow for discovery, not simply further verification of existing theory. Does theory in the social sciences work the same way as theory in the natural sciences? According to the general definition above, yes. There are clearly basic differences between study of the natural world and study of the human, social, and cultural world. The social sciences lend themselves less to scientific experimentation, and to prediction; nevertheless, in every field we seek to understand processes, to identify and name meaningful concepts and to see the relations between them. Theory helps us to structure our findings and raise them to a level where we can see connections, and it provides a scaffolding on which to stand while we conduct further investigations. We move now to the connecting stories of Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos. Their stories illustrate the importance of the personal biographies of people whose work advances knowledge

62  How can we think about theory? in notable ways, and offer one example of the growth of knowledge, in this case, our knowledge about theory. While none of them were social scientists, their work has had great influence in the social sciences. We begin our gallery of heroes with them.

Karl Popper 1902–1994 We said earlier in this book that there are people in the history of knowledge who we remember because of their significant contributions. Persons are products of their time and place, and these influence their work. The people who stand out are those who push ahead of their time, find or discover or propose something different, radical, full of potential, and not always popular. Karl Popper is a giant in the grand research story and provides a good case in point. As a young man in Vienna, a secular person with four Jewish grandparents, he was interested in building a just society and became attracted to Marxism and the social equality it seemed to offer. He joined the Marxist socialist party but became disillusioned with the violence that surrounded Marxism. He later called it a pseudo-science, because, unlike the idea that he went on to conceptualize, that any theory must be open to falsification, Marxist theory can never be falsified, adapting itself to existing conditions so that it is always right. He said the same thing later about psychoanalytic theory. As we saw in Chapter 6, in the early decades of the 20th century, the Vienna Circle of scientists and philosophers of science sought a unified method and language of science that would produce positive, verifiable knowledge in every field. Only statements that could be verified either experimentally (empirically) or logically could be accepted as knowledge. In terms of research, this meant, among other things, that the goal of research was to verify theory. Karl Popper, a junior member of the group, argued against the Circle’s basic tenet of verifiability. Instead, according to Popper, researchers should try to disprove or falsify theory through their research efforts. Popper’s ideas first crystalized in his 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, the publication of which gave him enough academic credit to flee Nazism and receive an academic post in New Zealand. After the Second World War, he immigrated to the UK and spent the rest of his career at the London School of Economics. As Popper wrote in the introduction to his later book, Conjectures and Refutations, the very refutation of a theory – that is, of any serious tentative solution to our problem – is always a step forward that takes us

How can we think about theory?  63 nearer to the truth….Those among our theories which turn out to be highly resistant to criticism, and which appear to us at a certain moment in time to be better approximations to truth than other known theories, may be described, together with the reports of their tests, as ‘the science’ of that time. Since none of them can be positively justified, it is essentially their critical and progressive character – the fact that we can argue about their claim to solve our problems better than their competitors – which constitutes the rationality of science. (Popper 1963: xii) Popper is one of the great proponents of critical rationalism. He famously said, and named one of his last books thus: “All life is problem solving,” a fitting motto for researchers in any field. While Popper is largely seen as a philosopher of the natural sciences, he was deeply interested in the social sciences as well. He wrote political criticisms – notably The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) in which he gives a spirited defense of the open society and liberal democracy. He also wrote on social science methodologies, especially situational analysis, which does not strive to generate universal theories – that is, theories capable of explaining and predicting social phenomena across all times and places. Rather, the aim of situational analysis is to untangle the complex web of human interaction that produces unintended, and often unwanted, social phenomena … situational analysis is best understood as an approach that produces theories of ‘middle range’ models that are less universal than laws but more generalizable than specific descriptions. (Gorton 2006: 3) Falsifiability rests on the assumption that there is objective reality. Some social science inquiry utterly rejects this notion, asserting that all reality is personal and subjective. But that extreme subjectivist position actually nullifies the possibility of research. Research is not aimed at endless descriptions of various subjectivities. This is nonsensical. Research aims to advance knowledge and understanding, and this involves arriving at meaningful theoretical generalizations built from the details of human experience. Popper’s stress on critical spirit and ‘situational analysis’ seems like a rather useful way of looking at social science theory.

64  How can we think about theory?

Thomas Kuhn 1922–1996 In Chapter 6, we saw that a research paradigm is a set of beliefs about the nature of the world, what can be known about reality, the relationship between the knower and the known and, given these beliefs, what methods can be used to investigate reality in order to advance our knowledge. The concept of a research paradigm was first used by the American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn in his influential 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.1 Kuhn’s idea of a paradigm shift entered the popular lexicon and is widely used to describe a radical change in any field. According to Kuhn, a paradigm provides a coherent research tradition within a particular field, attracting a group of supporters, researchers who conduct their investigations within that paradigm’s methodological and conceptual structure for inquiry. It is orderly, and at the same time open enough to generate new research questions. When a particular paradigm is dominant, research is in a period of what Kuhn called ‘normal science.’ Once there begins to be an accumulation of anomalies – questions that cannot be answered or even properly asked, and/or results that do not fit the paradigm – there will be a ‘paradigm shift’ as a new paradigm forms, attracts supporters and generates new research questions, methods and explanations. There can be periods during which concurrent, competing paradigms both generate research and attract supporters. Competing paradigms are often incommensurable; they use different concepts and speak, as it were, in different languages. During such a period of competing paradigms, it may be unclear which will succeed. These are times of scientific revolution. Kuhn claimed that this is how science progresses, not in a straight line, but through periods of orderly, normal science and periods of revolution and paradigm shift. Unlike philosophers of science before him, who depicted the growth of knowledge as orderly, the relationship between evidence and the confirmation or falsification of theory as formal, and who concentrated on the products of science, Kuhn portrayed the processes of scientific investigation and the growth of knowledge from a sociological and even psychological perspective (Mladonivic 2017), though he did not write about the social sciences. Perhaps for this reason, Kuhn’s work has been very influential in the social sciences. He depicts scientific work as a human enterprise, undertaken by persons, possessed, like all people, of ambition, ego, bias, the need for academic advancement, the awe of established figures and their theories, and the norms of their culture. The humanity of the enterprise does not preclude the goal of approaching objectivity; in fact, it makes that goal more reachable because it helps us remove our blinders.

How can we think about theory?  65

Imre Lakatos 1922–1974 A Jewish, Hungarian born philosopher of mathematics and science, Imre Lakatos, like Karl Popper, was attracted in his youth to Marxism. During the Nazi occupation of Hungary, he joined a Marxist resistance group, eluding the Nazis by changing his name. After the war, he became a dedicated communist. Disillusioned by communism after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, he fled to Vienna, and from there to London, where he completed a PhD at Cambridge and then received a post at the London School of Economics, where he met Karl Popper, who influenced Lakatos’ work. In brief, we know Popper for his thesis of the requirement that theory be falsifiable and his insistence that science advances through critical rationalism. We know Kuhn for his formulation of research paradigms, normal science and scientific revolutions which lead to a paradigm shift between competing paradigms. We know Lakatos for his unique extension of this conceptualization. According to Lakatos’ ideas, published posthumously in 1976 as Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, theories must stand against repeated research attempts to falsify them. Anomalies begin to arise and new, emerging theories are formulated to explain them. There comes a point when the dominant theory can no longer stand; the anomalies can no longer be explained in the ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses around the ‘hard core’ of the theory, they reach and break into the basic tenets of the theory that are held in the hard core, and the theory must give way to a new theory that better explains both the content that the previous theory explained, and the new content generated by the anomalies. He calls this progression of theories a research program. Lakatos wanted to resolve the apparent conflict between Popper’s falsifiability and critical rationalism, and the revolutionary structure that Kuhn described. He sought an analytic framework that would resolve this apparent contradiction, a methodology that would give a rational explanation of scientific development and that is compatible with the historical story, which can be seen to be a story of revolutions. According to Lakatos, a research program can be degenerating  – producing no new predictions as its auxiliary belt attempts to deal with anomalies; or progressive. A progressive series of theories demonstrates prediction of novel facts, allowing more exact predictions and better explanations, and the generation of new research questions, perhaps requiring new methods to investigate them. Lakatos is much closer to Popper in his depiction of this process as rational, rather than revolutionary as suggested by Kuhn. Neither Kuhn nor Lakatos intended their work to refer to the social sciences. Kuhn saw the social sciences as bedeviled by disagreements

66  How can we think about theory? about the nature of knowledge and even about what problems can be legitimately researched; Lakatos held similar views (Walker 2010). Nevertheless, the work of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos has been adapted to the social sciences and has shed important light on the nature of theory in the social sciences. The author of this book used Lakatos’ framework in her doctoral dissertation – lo, these many years ago! – to analyze the body of literature on teachers over many decades and to assess whether the moves from study of teacher behavior to study of teacher decision making to study of the then emerging field of teacher thinking, with their underlying theoretical assumptions, represented a progressive series of theories according to Lakatos’ criteria (the short answer, from a long dissertation, was yes).

Theory in the social sciences: continuing the gallery of heroes Where should we go from here? Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos contributed to our understanding of theory itself. We could say that they gave us theories about theory. It makes sense now to turn to some examples of people working in the social sciences who produced social science theory in a particular field. This list is not, and could never be, exhaustive. Some of those represented here demonstrate our frequently repeated thesis about the importance of personal biography among those who pushed beyond current thinking and changed the face of knowledge, research, theory and practice in their fields. The stories of some demonstrate that while their theories were extremely influential, they were subject to criticism as well. A successful theory explains extensive data in a coherent way, answers some questions and generates many others, thus propelling research and knowledge development forward. But theory is just that: theory, and it is not forever. It is not holy. Popper’s ‘critical spirit’ means that we are constantly questioning. This selection is from the 20th and 21st centuries, when the social sciences really began to bloom. We have chosen five from the many worthy candidates, among those theoreticians whose ideas may directly affect the work of people reading this book. A last comment before we look at their contributions. These theoreticians were or are also practitioners in their fields, not philosophers working only in the realm of ideas. Other than (and like all generalizations, this one is subject to exceptions) experimental psychology, social science theory is developed in the field, by people who research and very often work in the field. This says something fundamental about the unbreakable connection between the quest for social science knowledge and the goal of using new knowledge to improve the human condition.

How can we think about theory?  67

Jean Piaget 1896–1980 Piaget was a Swiss developmental psychologist. With training in biology, he was interested in biological influences on cognitive development. Through his research with children he hypothesized that cognitive development occurs as a series of adaptations to the environment, through processes he called assimilation – transforming the environment to fit into existing cognitive structures – and accommodation – transforming cognitive structures to incorporate new information from the environment (Huitt & Hummel 2003). These ideas became one of the bases for the development of constructivist epistemology.2 Piaget’s theory of cognitive development states that people pass through four stages in their intellectual development: sensorimotor, from birth to two years, during which infants demonstrate intelligence through motor activities and emotional interactions; pre-operational, during early childhood, when language and the use of symbols develop, children are imaginative, non-logical and egocentric; concrete operational, mid-childhood through early adolescence, during which logical thinking and systematic use of symbols develops; and formal operational, adolescence through adulthood, during which abstract, conceptual thinking develops. Piaget claims that some adults never reach the formal stage. Piaget’s theory was constructed on the basis of his own extensive research, and it has generated many thousands of further studies, educational programs and psychological interventions. It is not our purpose here to evaluate Piaget’s theory, which has clearly been one of the major psychological theories of modern times; rather, we wish to note its phenomenal influence on education and psychology, and to offer it as an example of the generation of theory through research. Finally, without denigrating in any way the usefulness, influence and brilliance of Piaget’s theory, we wish to note once again that theory, like research, is proposed, constructed and conducted by persons, in society, not in an antiseptic bubble where objective truth reigns. In his analysis of the use of the concept of theory and some of the problems that he sees with it, Thomas (1997) says that Piaget became a formidable and powerful figure, his ideas difficult to oppose during his lifetime, and the power of his theory an example of “the dangerous fixity of theoretical knowledge within an institution committed to certain ideas” (89). Thomas cites critics who say that despite an accumulation of evidence against some of Piaget’s ideas, his theory’s “resilience and putative solidity as a basis for further study continues, because of the status of theory as received knowledge” (89). Were we to look more deeply into the continuing use and development

68  How can we think about theory? of Piaget’s theory and the many criticisms against it, we might perhaps discern signs of revolution, à la Kuhn, or a progressive series of theories, à la Lakatos.

Margaret Mead 1901–1978 Mead was a well-known cultural anthropologist whose fieldwork in Samoa in 1925 and 1926 focused on child-rearing, and especially on adolescent girls. This study led to publication in 1928 of the classic ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa. During her work in Samoa Mead sought to understand whether adolescence is a universally stressful time (as she saw it in the West) because of hereditary, that is, biological factors, or whether culture played a major part (the nature versus nurture dichotomy). She found that adolescence was not stressful for Samoan girls, who lived in a homogeneous culture, had greater sexual freedom than Western girls, and did not have to deal with an array of choices. This led her to theorize that determinants of behavior are social/cultural rather than biological. The first edition of her book based her conclusions solely on the culture of Samoa. In later editions, she added implications for American education and child rearing. Expanding the age range of the girls she studied, she also researched early childhood in Manus, and the care of infants in Bali. Mary Catharine Bateson, Mead’s daughter, who also became an anthropologist, wrote this about her mother in Bateson’s introduction to the 2001 reissue of Coming of Age in Samoa: “everywhere she went, she included women and children, who had been largely invisible to earlier researchers” (xii). This in itself was a major contribution. Mead later studied child rearing, personality and culture in the United States. Her work influenced the famous pediatrician Benjamin Spock, among many others. As well as her theory of cultural determinism, she wrote on the cultural conditioning of sexual behavior and gender identity, and on women’s rights. She also proposed a ‘theory of war,’ which states that war is not a biological necessity but a cultural aberration arising in class societies. She identified classless cultures that do not wage war, and she distinguished between individual and group violence. Mead’s work was very popular when it was first published, and she remained an influential figure throughout her lifetime. However, there was criticism that her theory of adolescence was developed on the basis of her romanticizing and idealizing of Samoan culture, and that she incorrectly ignored universal biological and psychological factors. The fiercest criticism was led by anthropologist John Derek Freeman.

How can we think about theory?  69 The  so-called Mead-Freeman controversy remains one of the most intense and angry debates in the history of anthropology, with supporters on both sides.3

Erik Erikson 1902–1994 Erikson was a German-born American psychologist and psychoanalyst who developed what became an influential theory of psychological development. He coined the terms ‘identity crisis’ and ‘life cycle.’ His theory is very often used as a basis for research into personal identity development; in fact, it would be difficult to find a study in this area not built at least partially on Erikson’s theory. He defined eight psychosocial stages through which a person should pass from infancy to late adulthood. He saw humans as passing through crises at each stage as they negotiate between biological and psychosocial forces. The eight stages are hope, with negotiation between trust and mistrust; will, with negotiation between autonomy and shame; purpose, with negotiation between initiative and guilt; competence, with negotiation between industry and inferiority; fidelity, with negotiation between identity and role confusion; love, with negotiation between intimacy and isolation; care, with negotiation between generativity and stagnation; wisdom, with negotiation between ego integrity and despair. This eighth stage is reached in late adulthood. A ninth stage, very old age, including failing physical health and isolation leading to loss of autonomy and trust, was added after Erikson’s death by his wife and collaborator, Joan Erikson. Erikson’s lifelong interest in identity can be seen to be rooted in his own biography, and he himself wrote about this. He was born to a Jewish woman in Denmark. She separated from her husband and conceived her son with a non-Jewish Danish man who she never named. She moved to Vienna and married Erik’s Jewish pediatrician, who adopted him. Erik was not told until late childhood that this was not his real father. He remained bitter about this for much of his life. He was raised Jewish but looked Danish. As a blonde, blue-eyed boy he was teased for being Danish in temple school; in the larger community, he was bullied for being Jewish (Friedman 1999). As a young man in Vienna Eriksen met members of the Freud circle, seeing psychoanalysis in its early stages. He was analyzed by Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud, and decided to pursue psychoanalysis as a career. In 1933, he and his wife fled the rising Nazi threat and moved to America. In Boston, he practiced child psychoanalysis and interacted with, among others, Kurt Lewin, ‘the founder of social

70  How can we think about theory? psychology,’ and with Margaret Mead. Through these influences and his own ongoing creative exploration and study, Erikson’s work connected psychoanalysis to anthropology, sociology and history in new ways. The main criticisms of his work have been that his stages describe the psychosocial development of European-American males, and may be less applicable to others; and that his stages may not be sequential and may not relate specifically to the ages he ascribes. Nevertheless, his theory, constructed from his psychoanalytic practice and his ongoing analysis of his own life, has been profoundly influential in various social science fields. …here was one psychoanalyst who not only constructed a powerfully suggestive, engaging theory to explain how, step by step, we build our lives… but, more than many of us, pulled together out of the ambiguities, mysteries, confusions, of his own past a singular…identity. That last word, of course, became synonymous with Erikson. (Coles 1999: 15)

Pierre Bourdieu 1930–2002 Bourdieu was a French sociologist, cultural anthropologist and philosopher who wrote about power structures in society and how they are transmitted from generation to generation. Building on the work of Heidegger, Husserl, Durkheim, Marx, Weber and others, he developed a theory of power and practice that stated that social hierarchies are reproduced not by conscious machinations on the part of the elite; rather, social agents act according to an implicit practical logic that they possess, an instinct that he called habitus. They are not rational actors, as posited by rational choice (or rational action) theory, to which Bourdieu was fiercely opposed. Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction was based on extensive sociological field work over many decades. He developed empirical models developed from his field work, to illustrate his theory. Bourdieu changed the conceptual landscape of social theory, contributing such concepts as habitus, social reproduction and cultural capital. Cultural capital comprises the social assets that a person acquires from childhood, in the family and in the educational and social circles in which the family participates. These assets are expressed in speech, intellectual content, style of dress, etc. Cultural capital comprises accumulated social knowledge that confers social status and power. Cultural capital leads to the accumulation of economic capital and to positions of power and influence in society. Social activities

How can we think about theory?  71 and struggles for power take place in what Bourdieu called fields, the arenas in which the struggles take place. A field can be social, economic, educational; fields interact; and all are hierarchical. Bourdieu’s terminology and his propositions about social reproduction have become part of the common lexicon in several social science fields. The influence of his theories has been profound in sociology, cultural studies and sociology of education. Regarding education, Bourdieu saw schools in Europe and America as central contributors to the reproduction of social inequality, by safeguarding the preservation of the structure of distribution of powers through a constant re-distribution of people and titles characterized, beyond the impeccable appearance of equity and meritocracy, by a systematic bias in favor of the possessors of inherited cultural capital. (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990: xi) In simplistic terms, curriculum, classroom structure, educational vocabulary and methods of teaching embody the cultural capital of those in the upper hierarchical echelons and favor those children who come to school with similar cultural capital. The field of critical educational sociology, which aims to expose this systematic reproduction of inequality and empower the various actors in the educational field, is largely built on Bourdieu’s work. Interestingly, Bourdieu was one contributor (not the only one) to the notion of researcher reflexivity. He saw academia as one important field of social reproduction and said that it is incumbent on social researchers to be critically reflective about their perceptions of the people they are studying. They need also to stand back from and reflect on this process of reflection, and finally to reflect on their relationship to their field of study, sociology. He called this reflexive sociology.4 As with any theory, Bourdieu’s has had its critics. The main criticism is that his work is too deterministic, materialist and structuralist, seemingly stating that people’s life trajectories are determined by habitus, which is determined by the social strata into which they are born. This makes the process non-rational and does not seem to allow for the possibility of change. Bourdieu rejected this criticism, stating that those who read his work carefully will find there the potential sources of change (Yang 2013). Like anyone else, Bourdieu was the intellectual product of his time and place, in his particular field. France was philosophically insular, it had been devasted by World War II, and was politically divided

72  How can we think about theory? afterwards. French sociology embraced a pessimistic, critical view of society very different from the optimistic, forward-looking sociology of post-war America. For a long time, there remained little interaction between French and Anglophone (American and British) sociological thought. Bourdieu himself was anti-American, and his sociology was profoundly French (Susen & Turner 2011). Nevertheless, the influence of Bourdieu’s work has been widespread and very significant. He is one of the most influential intellectuals of modern times, and the fecundity of his work has been enormous. People in various fields continue to develop his ideas, and his theory has been used to understand and explain a great variety of social phenomena. This is one mark of a great theory: its ability to provide coherent explanation, and its fruitfulness in generating new research questions, methodologies and ideas.

Patricia Hill Collins 1948– Collins is an American sociologist whose 1990 book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment used not only academic but literary sources to explore the experience of black women in America. Her analysis draws on African-American women’s prose, poetry, oral history and music, as well as on sociological sources, to present the thesis that black women live at the ‘intersectionality’ of various systems of power and oppression: race, class, gender, sexuality and nation. Her second book, a collaborative collection of essays, was called Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism. This collection gave new direction to the fields of race and gender studies, and further developed the concept of intersectionality. Collins continues to write, publish and lecture on issues related to race, gender, feminism, power and oppression, civil rights, nationalism and education. As well as developing the concept of intersectionality, she uses ‘standpoint theory,’ an idea suggested earlier by Hegel and Marx, to capture the master-slave and employer-worker relationships. Standpoint theory is used to analyze inter-subjective discourses and assumes that people’s experiences, knowledge and opinions are shaped by the social groups, whether dominant or subjugated, to which they belong. Standpoint theory has been adopted by feminist scholars and further developed in Collins’ work. Another powerful conceptualization by Collins is that of the American black woman as ‘the outsider within,’ a notion that has since

How can we think about theory?  73 been used to capture the experience of other minorities in other places, by a wide variety of social researchers. Her early writing on this topic brings the concept to life and shows her narrative style of writing: Afro-American women have long been privy to some of the most intimate secrets of white society. Countless numbers of Black women have ridden buses to their white “families,” where they not only cooked, cleaned, and executed other domestic duties, but where they also nurtured their “other” children, shrewdly offered guidance to their employers, and frequently, became honorary members of their white “families.” These women have seen white elites, both actual and aspiring, from perspectives largely obscured from their Black spouses and from these groups themselves. On one level, this “insider” relationship has been satisfying to all involved. The memoirs of affluent whites often mention their love for their Black “mothers,” while accounts of Black domestic workers stress the sense of self-affirmation they experienced at seeing white power demystified – of knowing that it was not the intellect, talent, or humanity of their employers that supported their superior status, but largely just the advantages of racism. But on another level, these same Black women knew they could never belong to their white “families.” In spite of their involvement, they remained “outsiders.” This “outsider within” status has provided a special standpoint on self, family, and society for Afro-American women. (Collins 1986: S14) Such writing is exceptionally engaging. No dry theorizing here: the theoretical concept ‘the outsider within’ comes through with powerful clarity. Collins has written about how her own background, as a black girl growing up in white society and educated in public schools, made her aware from an early age that her struggles would be different and more difficult than her white classmates. Her black feminist theory, using intersectionality, standpoint theory and the outsider within, incorporates the sociology of knowledge – that is, race, gender and social position influence knowledge – with critical social theory. She remains one of the most influential theorists in this area, her work providing theoretical guidance for countless studies in feminism, cultural studies, multiculturalism, anthropology, sociology, epistemology and more.

74  How can we think about theory?

So, what is theory? Having viewed the ‘theories about theory’ of three major philosophers of science, and the theories of five social scientists whose work changed the conceptual and theoretical faces of their fields, we return to the annoying question with which this chapter began. Let us try now, through the lens of these people’s work, to refine our understanding of theory. First, we need to repeat our oft-stated claim that theory is created by people, working in a specific field, time and place. On the one hand, this seems so obvious as to be trivial, but we need to restate it in order to dispel our almost instinctive awe of theory. As we have seen from the five examples above, theory that is developed from the field, and, once formulated, is tested, tried and refined by a growing body of researchers, absolutely deserves our respect. We could not move forward without it; it gives us the conceptual structure from which to move forward and dig deeper. But, as we see from Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos, theory is not holy scripture. A strong theory lasts a long time, is made from rich, pregnant concepts and connections, and generates generations of new questions, methods and answers, until it is no longer generative or until there is an accumulation of occurrences that it does not explain. When this happens, an alternate theory may form. This does not mean the first theory was wrong. Careful, diligent researchers whose findings are not well explained by existing theory should not necessarily conclude that their findings are somehow mistaken (this happens more often than you might imagine, especially in PhD studies where researchers must satisfy evaluation committees). Most of us will toil happily and fruitfully within the helpful structure of existing theories. A few us may make discoveries that lead to construction of new theory. Social science knowledge advances in both these ways. Remembering that the word ‘science’ comes from the Latin scire, to know, then social science means knowing about society. The word ‘theory’ comes from the Greek theoria, a looking at (Shoemaker et al. 2004: 1, 5). Social science theory, then, means looking at society in order to know it. Constructing theory means moving from the endless details of field research to the conceptual understanding that allows us to see the forest and not just the trees, and then returning to the trees in order to see them with deeper understanding of their biology, chemistry and ecology. How are societies constructed? What motivates people, what moves economies, what symbols embody meaning in different cultures? How can we look in order to know, in order to understand how to help people’s lives be better? How can we accumulate

How can we think about theory?  75 understandings in theoretical formulations in order to answer these questions and accomplish these tasks? We are nearing the end of our journey, dear readers, our brief history of knowledge. Let us review, recap and look forward, in our final chapter.

Notes 1 Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions remains one of the most cited academic works of all time. 2 “Constructivism is a theory about knowledge and learning; it describes both what ‘knowing’ is and how one ‘comes to know.’ Based on work in psychology, philosophy, science, and biology, the theory describes knowledge not as truths to be transmitted or discovered, but as emergent, developmental, nonobjective, viable constructed explanations by humans engaged in meaning-making in cultural and social communities of discourse” (Fosnot 2005: ix). 3 See the excellent book The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy, by Paul Shankman, for a full accounting of the controversy. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. 4 See R. Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu, for a full explanation of Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

References Abend, G. “The Meaning of Theory.” Sociological Theory 26, no. 2, 2008, 173–199. Bourdieu, P. & J. Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1990. Original French edition Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1970. Coles, R. “Foreword.” In L. Friedman (Ed.), Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson. New York: Scribner, 1999, 15–18. Collins, P. “Learning from the Outsider within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.” Social Problems 33, no. 6, 1986, S14–S32. www.jstor.org/stable/800672. Accessed October 3, 2019. Feyerabend, P. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London, New York: New Left Books, 1975. Fosnot, C.T. (Ed.). Constructivism: Theory, Perspectives and Practice, 2nd ed. New York, London: Teachers College Press, 2005. Friedman, L. Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik. H. Erikson. New York: Scribner, 1999. Gorton, W. Karl Popper and the Social Sciences. New York: State University of New York Press, 2006. Huitt, W. & J. Hummel. “Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development.” Educational Psychology Interactive. Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University. 2003. www.edpsycinteractive.org/topics/cognition/piaget.html. Retrieved September 24, 2019.

76  How can we think about theory? Malinowski, B. Malinowski Collected Works Volume IX: A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. London, New York: Routledge, 1944. Mead, M. Coming of Age in Samoa. “Words for a New Century,” Introduction by Mary Catharine Bateson. New York: Harper-Collins, 2001. Mladonivic, B. Kuhn’s Legacy: Epistemology, Metaphilosophy and Pragmatism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Popper, K. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London, New York: Routledge, 1963. Popper, K. The Open Society and its Enemies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945. Shoemaker, P., J. Tankard Jr. & D. Lasorsa. How to Build Social Science Theories. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004. Susen, S. & B. Turner. “Introduction: Preliminary Reflections on the Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu.” In Simon Susen and Bryan Turner (Eds.) The Legacy of Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Essays. New York, London: Anthem Press, 2011, 1–32. Sutton, I. & B. Staw. “What Theory Is Not.” Administrative Science Quarterly 40, no. 3, 1995, 371–384. Thomas, G. Education and Theory: Strangers in Paradigms. Berkshire, UK and NY: Open University Press, 2007. Thomas, G. “What’s the Use of Theory?” Harvard Educational Review 67, no. 1, 1997, 75–104. Walker, T. “The Perils of Paradigm Mentalities: Revisiting Kuhn, Lakatos and Popper.” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 2, 2010, 433–451. Yang, Y. “Bourdieu, Practice and Change: Beyond the Criticism of Determinism.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 46, no. 14, 2013, 1522–1540.

8

A brief history of knowledge, and the vistas beyond

History is, of course, a moving river, flowing from the past into the present, and on into the future. We are making history now; the knowledge we create today will be part of tomorrow’s history of knowledge. We have said here that a person’s research is conducted, inevitably, in the cultural context in which that person lives. Personal biography, which includes details of family and of surrounding political, religious, social, economic and geographic factors, creates the intellectual laboratory in which a person works. Previous and current research in one’s field provide the intellectual and epistemological framework. And yet. There are those who think beyond these conditions, whose insights spark new directions, new discoveries, the generation of new concepts that capture aspects of the human experience in new ways. Perhaps the theory that you are now beginning to formulate in your own work will find prominent place in some future gallery of heroes. Stating the idea of cultural context in a broader way, we have said that research, science and art, and creative work in general, in a particular era, captures and expresses the central values of the age. As presented here, the work of the Greeks expressed the values of beauty, proportion and harmony. The Romans’ work expressed the values of practicality and empire building. Creative output in the middle Ages was based in values of religious faith, and then the gradual awakening of a spirit of scientific inquiry decoupled from faith. Renaissance work expressed the new value of humanism. Enlightenment work embraced reason. How do you think future researchers and philosophers will characterize our age? The age of technology, perhaps? Your work may not be about technology in any way, but it is certainly conducted in a technological environment, with various computer programs that help with data analysis, on-line recovery of articles and books, on-line submission of articles for publication, vast virtual libraries of research tools

78  A brief history of knowledge and writings of every kind. Or perhaps our time will be characterized by the breakdown of borders, by mass movements and displacement of populations, and by the attendant cultural, religious, intellectual and linguistic mixing, the results of which we do not yet know. Or, perhaps some will find the central value of our age to be acceptance of and respect for difference, in ways never before dreamed of. We are part of the ever-unfolding history of knowledge, whose vistas stretch in all directions, as far as the eye can see, and beyond. It is important to see ourselves as part of this landscape, recipients of the knowledge created by those who went before, and contributors to those who will toil in the fields of knowledge in the next generation, in the next age. May your journeys in the landscape of our knowledge be creative and fruitful.

Photograph by Yonatan Court.

Index

age of reason 35 age of revolutions 34 American Revolution 34, 37, 43 anomalies 4–65 Aristotle 11, 18–19, 25, 36 belief 1, 6, 9–14, 24, 48, 54, 64 black plague 28 Boaz, Franz 54 Bourdieu, Pierre 44, 70–71 Britain 33, 36–37, 39–40, 42, 43 Byzantine 22, 25 Calvin, John 33, 42 Carson, Rachel 5 Catholic Church 22, 32–33 causal theory of knowledge 11 Christianity 22–23 Collins, Patricia Hill 72 Comte, August 50–51, 53 concept 5, 6, 13, 18, 52, 60, 64, 67, 72, 73 constructivism 12, 55 Cooley, Charles 56 Copernicus, Nicholas 2, 30, 36 cotton 40 critical rationalism 63, 65 critical theory 55 Crusades 25 cultural capital 70–71 culture 1, 17–18, 20, 32, 33, 42, 48, 49, 54, 64, 68, 74 Curie, Marie 3 data 9–10, 50, 52, 66, 77 Dark Ages 22, 28

DaVinci, Leonardo 28 Descartes, Rene 36, 37 Dewey, John 3, 12, 59 Durkheim, Emile 51, 53 economics 49 education 4, 6, 23, 42–44 empirical 2, 9, 11, 14, 18, 25, 47, 50, 51, 60, 70 empiricism 30, 51 England 33, 43 Enlightenment 24, 25, 28, 29, 35–37, 40, 44, 48, 77 epistemology 3, 5, 8–15, 18, 19, 47, 50, 51, 54, 67, 73 Erikson, Erik 69–70 ethnography 60, 68 Europe 17, 21, 22–24, 25, 28–31, 35, 41, 42, 43, 47, 51, 54, 70, 71 evidence 10, 18, 48, 64, 67 experience 11, 13, 19, 36, 49, 50, 63, 72, 73, 77 fact 5, 8, 9–12, 31, 50, 53, 60, 65 faith 22, 23, 30, 35, 47, 48, 77 falsification 53, 62, 64 feudalism 22 Feyerabend, Paul 59, 60 fieldwork 53, 68 France 31, 33, 37, 39, 43, 49, 50, 71 French Revolution 34, 35 Friere, Paulo 5, 6 Galilei, Galileo 2, 30, 36 Geertz, Clifford 54

80 Index geocentric 3, 30 Germany 31, 32, 36, 42, 49, 51 Greeks 10, 12, 18–20, 21, 25, 28, 30, 35, 47, 77 Gutenberg, Johannes 31 Heraclitus 19, 20 heliocentric 3, 30 humanism 29, 33, 35, 77 Industrial Revolution 3, 34, 39–41, 44 interpretive 10, 12, 13, 14, 49, 52–56 intersectionality 72, 73 Islam 22, 25, 31 Italy 30, 49 Jews 24 justified true belief 11–13, 18 Kant, Immanuel 9, 36 knowledge 9–14, 18–19, 21, 23, 25, 28–32, 36, 37, 39–41, 43–44 knower 5, 9–11, 14, 54, 64 knowing 5, 9, 10, 12, 74 Kuhn, Thomas 52, 61, 64–65, 66, 68, 74 Lakatos, Imre 61, 65 literacy 6, 22, 23, 28, 31, 34 Locke, John 36, 37 logical positivism 51 Luther, Martin 32, 42 Malinowski, Bronislaw 53–54, 60 Marx, Karl 49, 52, 53, 55, 62, 65, 70, 72 Mead, Margaret 68–69, 70 meaning 18, 19, 24, 51, 52, 54, 55, 74 medieval 23, 29, 47, 48 method/methodology 1, 3, 8, 9, 12–14, 17, 30, 36, 42, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50–56, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 71, 72, 74 Middle Ages 21–24 mixed methods 13, 45, 56 narrative 12, 13, 72 natural sciences 49, 50, 59, 61, 63 Newton, Isaac 36, 42

New World 17, 29, 34 normal science 64, 65 North America 24, 34, 54 objective/objectivity 10, 12, 14, 25, 32, 49, 51, 53, 63, 64, 67 ontology 14, 54 outsider within 71, 73 paradigm 12, 14, 39, 44, 52, 53, 54–56 paradigm shift 52, 64, 65 personal 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 59, 61, 63, 66 philosophy 9, 10, 12, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 29, 30, 35, 36, 37, 44, 47, 49, 51 Piaget, Jean 13, 67, 68 Plato 10, 11, 18, 37 Polanyi, Michael 4–5, 12, 41 political 5, 6, 17, 22, 23, 25, 28, 31, 34, 35, 47, 49, 77 Popper, Karl 51, 61, 62–63, 65, 66, 74 positivism 5, 13, 50, 51, 55 post-positivism 13, 50 pragmatism 3, 13 printing 30–33, 47 progressive theories of theories 65, 66, 68 protective belt 24, 65 Protestantism 24, 33 Protestant Reformation 30, 32–33, 35 qualitative 13, 44, 51, 52, 56 quantitative 2, 10, 13, 51, 52, 56 rationality 11, 18, 35, 36, 62 reflexive sociology 71 Renaissance 25, 29, 42, 77 researcher 10, 12, 55, 71 Rome/Romans 20–22, 25, 29, 47 scientific method 3, 42 Scientific Revolution 25, 29–30, 40, 47, 64 social science 1, 9, 25, 30, 32, 36, 37, 44–45, 48–56 standpoint theory 73 statistics 49, 56 Stevens, Nettie 4

Index  81 subjective 13, 14, 49, 63, 72 superstition 24, 30 technology 20, 31, 39, 40, 41, 42, 77 theory 1, 2, 3, 6, 11, 13, 14, 18, 40, 48, 52, 55, 56, 59–75 thick description 54 truth 2, 3, 6, 9–11, 12, 13, 14, 63, 67

United States 37, 39, 43 values 17, 19, 25, 30, 35, 44, 77 verifiability 51, 62 Vienna Circle 51, 52, 61 Voltaire 37 Weber, Max 52–54, 70 witchcraft 24