Page 34 - Decoding Culture
P. 34

THE WAY WE WERE  27

           reliable test materials;  in its  assumption that propositional form
          was the ideal means for expressing scientific knowledge; and in its
          emphasis on maximizing precision  of evidence. Taken  together,
           these three legitimized an essentially empiricist research practice.
             Concern to  establish  an  adequate  observation  language  was
          crucial in the development and application of the rhetoric of vari­
          ables and indicators. This is not the place to rehearse the complex
           and chequered history of that discourse,  nor to chart its analytic
           deficiencies;  these  issues have  been  well  illuminated by Pawson
           (1989) . Of more immediate relevance here is the tendency of vari­
           able  analysis to  encourage,  even  to  legitimize,  ontologies which
           define  the  social  world  in  a  manner  most  amenable  to  that
          approach. Thus, if behaviour is to be understood in terms of rela­
          tions between variables, processes of social  action are likely to be
          conceptualized as a concatenation of measured values  scored  by
          individuals  on  specified  dimensions. To  speak  of effects,  then,
          within such an epistemology,  is to demand some form of 'before'
           and 'after'  exposure measurement on selected scales,  most com­
          monly conducted  with  the  naturalized  individual  as  the  primary
          focus.
             Now add to this the supposition that the ideal form for scientific
          knowledge is propositional. Although the case for such a claim is
          firmly  rooted  in  the  deductivist  view  of  scientific  inquiry,  in
          research practice propositional form often survived without a con­
          comitant  emphasis  on  deductive  structure.  The  rigorous
          requirements of deductive-propositional methodologies were ame­
          liorated  by  a  slide  toward  the  less  demanding  inductive­
          propositional form (Tudor, 1982:  166-168), toward what Willer and
          Willer (1973)  call 'systematic empiricism'. Here,  allegiance to the
          hypothetico-deductive  model  of scientific  method  is  superficial.
          Propositions are no longer statements deduced from theory and
          subjected  to  test;  they  are,  rather,  empirical  generalizations,





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