Gergen - reading assignment Flashcards
(24 cards)
What science wars refer to ?
The Science Wars were intellectual debates during the 1990s between scientists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences. The conflict centered on whether scientific knowledge is objective and universal (as scientists argued), or socially constructed and influenced by cultural and political factors (as postmodernist scholars claimed).
What are two assumptions that emerged as sth social scientists mostly agree on?
Assumption 1: “Whatever exists makes no necessary requirements on representation.”
Assumption 2: “What stands as objective truth can be established within a research tradition”
Explain “Whatever exists makes no necessary requirements on representation.”
This means that whatever we take to be the world does not demand any particular form of representation. So, surely the way the world is influences our representation of it (we
cannot just choose anything), but there is not one way to represent it: there are many
different ways to describe the world before us (and so the way we represent it is not fully determined by the empirical information)
Explain “What stands as objective truth can be established within a research tradition”
This means that although we let go of an objective truth in the strong sense of
something foundational, it is still useful to have agreement within a research tradition about the character of what exists. Such shared understandings and agreement on how
we describe the world (e.g., “this here is an apple”) is very useful in science and makes it possible to have “progress”, and these shared understandings can stand as “objective truth”
How does Gergen call the consensus position that is characterized by these two
assumptions?
Reflective pragmatism
What is the mirror metaphor?
In the mirror metaphor the researcher tries to mirror nature (or the objective outside world).
The idea is that as researchers we observe the world and our ideas reflect what we observe as a mirror. We use methods that should safeguard our research from bias (as if we clean the
mirror and try to keep it steady)
What are constative utterances?
descriptions of reality (statements of fact, like: depression diagnoses are more common in females than males)
What are performative utterances?
statements that themselves change reality (they bring about change, like: run for your life!)
According to Gergen, should we see claims of scientific community as constative, performative or both?
Both! Our claims are both constative (we reach agreement on a description of reality within a
research community) but also performative (with this knowledge we also offer the possibility to transform the world that we describe)
How does this reflection on constative versus performative relate to Hacking’s looping
effect?
It is very similar: the looping effect refers to how “our investigations interact with the targets themselves, and change them.” (Hacking) So Hacking argues how our naming and studying
human kinds, changes the human kinds we are studying. So, similar to Gergen’s point it
emphasizes that we are not just “describing” but also “changing” reality.
What are dangers related to research treated as mirror (mirroring tradition)?
If we focus on the goal of mirroring reality, that is, giving some description of the world that we agree on as a scientific community, we focus on “what exists” instead of “what could exist
if we would change the world”.
We keep reinforcing “this is how it works” (the status quo) rather than thinking about how our knowledge could lead to a new way of “how the world works”. Trying to mirror limits our imagination.
Mirroring tradition also limits the imagination, by interfering with researcher’s understanding of research consequences. Develop this point.
As researchers we are not aware that by describing a certain reality we solidify that reality and become less and less open to views that challenge that description of reality.
When we
started describing certain patterns in reality as “mental illnesses” this led to a field of
psychiatry that became more and more visible, so that more money is invested in it, and more people being diagnosed, more possible diagnoses etc.
This makes it more and more difficult to criticize psychiatric diagnostics or the medicine for it.
What is alternative proposed by Gergen to mirroring tradition?
future forming orientation in research
Explain future forming orientation in research
The alternative is that we imagine the future of our hopes and explore how to make that future possible. This means that values will be in the forefront ( “what do we want?” “what do we consider important?”) and a purposeful vision will guide our research. Instead of
asking “what is the case?” we ask “what world do we want to build?”
How Gergen relates to Harlow’s studies on macaque monkeys?
First, this research was more “mirroring” in the sense that the monkeys confirmed a pattern we had seen in children development, and the pattern was described using a biological
account.
However, after this study Harlow and another colleague changed focus and rather than describing attachment styles and explaining it through isolation, they did a study that explored how the effects of isolation could be eliminated.
So, that research rather than describing and explaining the world, offered a possibility to change the world.
What are 3 forms of inquiry that could fit within future forming orientation?
- inquiry as incitement
- research as creative construction
- research as collaborative action
inquiry as incitement
refers to critical research that incites resistance to the
status quo.
Examples are discourse analysis in which language is analyzed to point out
language that has bad consequences (e.g, language that oppresses or discriminates).
research as creative construction
refers to researchers who
attempt to build new “forms of life”. In this line of research the aim is not to highlight existing
problems but to actually develop practices that achieve solutions or positive outcomes.
research as collaborative action
the researcher works
collaboratively with people outside the academy in achieving social change, so that the act of
creation is not just in the hands of the research community
What is example of research in psychology that fits into “inquiry as incitement” framework?
articles that question assumptions in
psychology.
E.g., Michell who makes us aware that we think of our constructs as quantitative,
and shows the implications of such an assumption
What is example of research in psychology that fits into “research as creative construction” framework?
people who work on open science endeavors.
E.g., developing methods for preregistration or building a database where people
can make their data openly available is a way of creating practices that you value as
“positive”.
What is example of research in psychology that fits into “action research”?
PAR - participatory action research
One of the challenges to this approach is that each individual has their own ideas of “what is good? -> so the future question becomes highly personal. What is Gergen’s response to that?
According to Gergen, morals result from social traditions. Our morals make sense within the relations that we participate in and so it does not make sense to ask about the morals of an individual researcher. Relational activity is what gives value.
But, Gergen also recognizes that different traditions do give rise to possibly conflicting values or morals and so it becomes
important to not just rely on a single tradition: moral decision-making should rest on dialogic process.
According to Gergen, what made the natural sciences so successful in society? What suggestion social sciences should take from it?
Gergen claims that the success of natural sciences is in its outcomes for
society, its contributions to everyday life. So the importance of scientific knowledge was not
“the facts” but the outcomes for society (e.g, making weapons, machines, materials).
As social sciences we should also focus more on our outcomes for society, there are many big societal challenges that ask for our research to help create a better society.
