Preamble

Preamble: An Arts and Humanities Approach to Empirical Methodology

Over the next several days, we’re going to be conveying a lot of information about conducting empirical research.

If this workshop were being offered through the philosophy department, we might be stressing the workshop content from the perspective of continental phenomenology or from formal logic.

If this workshop were being offered through a department in the sciences, we might be stressing the content from the perspective of practical procedures and norms in scientific method.

However, this workshop is being conducted through a department in the arts and humanities. As you might expect, our preferred approach to the workshop content is inspired by a more traditional humanities perspective.

There is, of course, a long history within the arts and humanities of criticism of science, usually in the form of critiques of positivism and scientism. Most of the criticisms I think are justified. However, most of the criticisms also miss the mark because they are criticisms of ideas that were long-ago abandoned in the sciences. For example, humanities scholars have long been critical of positivism — a scientific ideology formulated by August Compte in the early nineteenth century. Positivism is nearly two hundred years old, and its main tenets have little echo in today’s empirical practices. Even logical positivism (associated with philosophers like Alfred Ayer) is almost a hundred years old, and logical positivism had only a modest influence on scientific practice. It’s influence in music was really limited to Milton Babbitt and some of his students at Princeton University.

The dominant approach in nearly all modern sciences relies on what’s technically known as the Neyman-Pearson paradigm for inductive research. It bears little resemblance to positivism. And as we will see, it is an approach that sidesteps many of the traditional criticisms found in critical humanities discourse regarding science.

Methodology as Rhetoric

As I’ve noted, in approaching the workshop content, our aim is to employ a more humanities based perspective. In particular, we prefer viewing empirical methods from the perspective of rhetoric and ethics. First, rhetoric. Ultimately, research is about words: it’s about saying something or writing something. It’s about forming an argument or presenting an explanatory story.

Different rhetorical devices or patterns have more or less persuasive power. People find some words more compelling than others, and it’s helpful to understand what makes something persuasive. What we mean by “compelling” is utterances that are likely to change our opinions, attitudes, or beliefs.

As humanities scholars have long recognized, many rhetorical devices have questionable value or questionable validity. For example, we know that the words spoken by a man are often perceived to have greater persuasive power than those same words spoken by a woman. A lower-pitched voice sounds more authoritative, and men benefit from having generally lower voices. We know that in many societies (including our own) statements by older speakers carry more persuasive weight than when spoken by younger speakers. Sadly, one’s spoken accent or dialect conveys class information and suggests levels of education (whether warranted or not) that influence the persuasiveness of what a person says. Then there is the question of formal authority: the status as “Herr Doktor Professor” may lend gravitas to my words that may or may not be warranted. We rightly consider these sources of rhetorical power to rely on questionable legitimacy.

That’s not to say that all forms of rhetorical persuasion are illegitimate. Some rhetorical patterns have greater legitimacy than others. This is where I depart from certain strains in postmodernism and poststructuralism. There is a great deal of epistemological pessimism, even nihilism, that has taken hold in the arts and humanities because of the influence of postmodernism. What I share with classic postmodern views is a large degree of skepticism. Taken to its logical extreme, skepticism can be turned inward on itself, so we can become skeptical of skepticism. We might rightly be wary of the value of any given narrative. But we can also be wary of being dismissive of all narratives, since some narratives may indeed prove to have value. Not all narratives that cause us to change our opinions, attitudes, or beliefs are illegitimate forms of manipulation or oppression.

So one way of thinking about what we’ll be doing this week, is we’ll be learning particular forms of rhetoric that have the potential to lead to statements that have value beyond merely the commanding of power by whoever produces that statement.

Of course, we’re not going to simply learn a particular way of putting words together. Research involves more than words: it’s also about the experiences, thoughts, and observations that lead to particular words or statements. Our aim is to better understand how we transform experience and contemplation into opinions and perhaps convictions.

Methodology as Ethics

Statements and stories have ethical repercussions. Apart from proper treatment of human participants and research animals, many scientists unfortunately consider the goals of science to be independent of ethics. Specifically, for many scientists, the idea is to tell the truth, whatever the ethical repercussions. We will see that this fairly common view represents a deep misunderstanding of the Neyman-Pearson paradigm. Ethical considerations are built into the very fabric of Neyman-Pearson — they just aren’t obvious to most practicing scientists. They are better recognized by medical researchers and structural engineers whose statements or narratives can lead to injury or death.

We will see that the technical concept of the confidence level is much more important than simply establishing whether some observations are deemed “statistically significant.” Establishing a confidence level is much more important than its cavalier pro forma treatment in most sciences suggests. We will see that applying the Neyman-Pearson paradigm offers remarkable benefits to those in the arts and humanities who are especially sensitive to moral and ethical concerns. I would go so far as to suggest that, of all the qualitative and quantiative methods I know, the Neyman-Pearson paradigm offer the most rigorous approach for addressing the moral and ethical dimensions of knowledge-generating enterprises.