Corresponding Author: James C Field, PhD Werklund School of Education University of Calgary Email: jfield@ucalgary.ca Journal of Applied Hermeneutics March 12, 2017 The Author(s) 2017 Losing the So-Called Paradigm War: Does our Confusion, Disarray, and Retreat Contribute to the Advance? James C Field Abstract In this article, I argue that what is commonly lamented as the decline of qualitative research might be because of our own inability to reveal something true about being-in-the-world. Four problems with qualitative work are identified: making what is obvious inescapable, confusion around what constitutes qualitative research and phenomenology, uniformed and disrespectful mixing of methods, and devolution into “little t” truth. I finish by calling for bold, evocative interpretation, and posing the question: What is the nature of the revolution that hermeneutics can foment? Keywords Qualitative research, hermeneutics, phenomenology mixed methods, bricoleur, multiple realties, truth After being a coauthor on an article in the Journal of Applied Hermeneutics recently about the resurgence of positivist science, framed in terms of losing the war, I was left with a niggling feeling that has grown into an awful question that “cannot possibly be true, but just might be true.” It sits uncomfortably between knowing and not knowing, hope and dread. So, in this spirit, let me ask this dreadful question: What if the fact that qualitative research is “losing the war” is not simply because of some hostile take-over from science, or a creeping form of alt-right totalitarianism, (although I am sorely tempted to go with this interpretation), but because of our own failure, in far too many cases, to reveal, and to claim, boldly, courageously, something true, something that matters about being in the world and doing interpretive work? I can hear the howl that will go up in response to this question-assertion, and rightly so perhaps, from good Field Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2017 Article 5 2 folks who do good work. I submit this piece under a “guilty as charged” verdict, and I will have to wait; indeed, I look forward to what the “sentencing” might be. The trial is not over, I am sure. However, since I call for courage in doing interpretive work, I think it is time I heeded my own council. So, let me ask that we consider, briefly, the possibility that the enemy might be within. Like the Democratic Party in the United States, perhaps it is time we stopped laying the blame for qualitative research’s decline entirely on someone or something else, and took a good, hard look at ourselves. I offer here an initial foray into what might be termed “the crimes we ourselves have committed.” Making What is Patently Obvious Completely Inescapable, and/or Finding Exactly What We Are Looking For I remember the sting of the first phrase on one of my first graduate papers, from a supervisor whose style has long since disappeared: “This is all very literate,” he wrote in the margin of the third page, “the trouble is that you have made what is patently obvious completely inescapable.” An unkind remark perhaps, made over 30 years ago, but I think it is still a relevant and appropriate critique of far too much qualitative work. I read too many qualitative studies that end with “insights” like this: teachers need to develop relationships with their students; students need to trust their teachers; classrooms need to be safe spaces; principals need to support their teachers; and, hang on to your hats, staffs need to talk to each other. In short, a lot of wha t we know gets confirmed, but nothing new is revealed. Part of the problem here might spring from devoting too much time and space in interpretive work to scientific verification, (or should I say Lincoln and Guba-fication?) and not enough to interpretive revelation. Note what Norylk and Harder (2010) have to say about their review of 37 articles on phenomenological research: It is remarkable that many of the articles reviewed in our study drew on Lincoln and Guba’s criteria (1985) to evaluate or justify their research. These criteria are generic to qualitative research, and were not specifically developed to evaluate phenomenological work. (p. 428) Yet they are. So, it raises the question of what we are up to when we do things like this, but it also might contribute to the “much ado about nothing “charge leveled earlier. Could we be squeezing out controversies, contradictions, differences, and suddenly appearing, startling insights methodologically, through things like “member checking”? I see this procedure liberally employed in qualitative work, without much thought as to what it assumes - - convergence around a single point - - and, at the same time, what it might prevent. Something happens when we switch our attention from the phenomenon (die sache selbst) to the method used to generate and or confirm the truth of die sache. Oddly, the very thing that has to fall way, the procedure, so that what is revealed, the substance of the matter at hand can come into view, is brought back squarely into the field of vision. We switch our attention away from the truth, “the gleaming, glistening, shining forth,” to the how and the who of the truth. In these instances, we have failed to pull out the bottom card of the scientific enterprise: that it is method and tools that yield truth. Personally, I have never understood how “member checking” establishes truth or rigor. It seems to me to sail too easily past a set of questions that should trouble us these days: Have we checked Field Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2017 Article 5 3 for truth, or simply switched to detailing our relationship with our participants? If everyone agrees, then can we assume that it is the truth, or a truth we have found? What happens if there is disagreement, especially between the participants and the researcher? How do I treat that as a researcher? Do I assume that either what I think or what my participants think, feel, or see is false? Underneath these questions is the troubling question of authority: Can I draw my own conclusions or insights as a researcher, or is what I have to say about a particular phenomenon confined only to what my participants attest to or agree with? I wonder if we have made the mistake of unwittingly ascribing to a simple formula: meaning=agreement= significance=truth? Have we blocked a way to deeper understanding because “we are so accustomed in the contemporary world to think that the human being is the source of all ‘saying’” (Capobianco, 2014, p. 92)? I think this state of affairs is exacerbated by too many of us doing research with folks who think, feel, see, and act exactly as we do: as members of the choir, we do research on the choir. Little wonder, I suppose, that we often end up simply singing along, with the same old self. In this case, the projection of our pre-understandings are simply confirmed by the interpretations that return. We connect, we develop rapport, we commiserate, we become a community, and it all “resonates deeply,” to use a favorite term. But nothing happens in the research: there is no “thwarting of previous expectations,” Gadamer’s now famous criterion for having any kind of experience, or dare I say, research “worthy of the name.” We may know more, as a result of the study, but do we understand differently? Have we been clear about and committed to the difference? It seems to me that far too often, as researchers, we conduct our research unscathed, our viewpoints remain--expanded perhaps, but fundamentally intact. Put differently, the inquiry turns out to be event-less. It constitutes research with others like the self, to find what we all deeply desire: the self-same. We ride our interpretive horses around the hermeneutic ranch without the experience of, in Husserl’s evocative phrase, “being thrown from the saddle.” I think we have drifted too far away from the “life force of being,” (phusis) that ought to show up in our work, what Heidegger repeatedly described as the gleaming, glistening, glimmering, glittering, glowing that is the manifestness of Being to humans--the phos (light) at the very core of phainesthei (spontaneous emergence of the truth of being)—that calls forth from us wonder and astonishment and great joy, brightens, lightens and opens us, inclines our thinking toward thanking. (Capobianco, 2014, p. 37) Mixed (up) Paradigms, Approaches, and Methods I use the phrase “mixed up” here, a little tongue in cheek, in three senses: first, there is a proliferation and confusion of approaches, paradigms, and methods within the so called “paradigm” of “qualitative research.” Second, this condition exists within even a single tradition like phenomenology. Third, it seems to me that there is a growing tendency to throw or stitch traditions together, in too many cases hastily and naively, and call the result “a mixed methods approach.” There is a kind of repetition at work here –manifesting itself in different ways. Field Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2017 Article 5 4 The first sense of mixed up comes from using the term “qualitative” to represent or claim a singular paradigm (Given, 2017), or a “unified field” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). I cannot see how qualitative research qualifies as a paradigm--much less a side in a war--if by paradigm we mean, a single “disciplinary matrix-commitments, beliefs, values, methods, outlooks, and so forth, shared across a discipline” (Schwandt, 2007, p. 217). It is a mistake to think that “qualitative research” represents any kind of commonly shared ontology, epistemology, or cosmology, given the contradictory mix of positivistic and interpretivist approaches housed within, given the cacophony of incommensurate ideas about what constitutes truth, reality, the object of study, even who the researcher and the participants are. I think the variance “within” qualitative research is just as deep and broad as the variance “between” the so called qualitative and quantitative paradigms. Put a little more strongly, and bringing the “fight” and the “fault” home, the war is within, and not just between. Perhaps I am being too harsh in my judgement here, but I think the term “qualitative” has become meaningless in signaling anything of significance when paired with the word “research.” Worse, its use causes confusion for anyone seeking insight into the nature of interpretive work, especially in understanding what constitutes good work that one could depend upon. The second sense of mixed up is a particular instance of the first, I think, and arises from a deepening plurality of approaches, even within a particular discipline like phenomenology. Sometimes the so-called authoritative qualitative sources simply get it wrong. Here is the definition of phenomenology from The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research: “Phenomenology brings the observer’s equipment to the fore and makes it part of the equation of meaningful construction and participation” (p. 1007). Now whose phenomenology would that be? Certainly not Husserl’s, nor Heidegger’s, nor Sartre’s, nor Merleau-Ponty’s, nor Gadamer’s. When did phenomenology, even when it took its interpretive, hermeneutic turn with Heidegger, shift its attention from the life-world to “my equipment”? As readers, we do not know—there is not a tradition, or traditions, or a lineage of ideas/thinking laid out for us. Instead, we get this laundry list of people that is supposed to count, at least in the index, as a definition: “Phenomenology is a complex system of ideas associated with the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz” (p. 27). Yes, I agree, it is —and where is it that we get to see, and thus come to know, this “system of ideas”? It is nowhere to be found. The point is that even the folks who should know, our qualitative neighbors and friends, do not know, or if they do, then worse, they have treated phenomenology badly, have disrespected its traditions, and failed to acknowledge its revelatory power. If our friends do not respect us, why would we expect our “enemies” to? Related to this is what happens in the field with phenomenological research, illustrated by the Norlyk and Harder (2010) study, which set out to answer the question: What makes a phenomenological study phenomenological? Apparently, we cannot tell: The analysis reveals considerable variation, ranging from brief to detailed descriptions of the chosen phenomenological approach, and from inconsistencies to methodological clarity and rigor. Variations, apparent inconsistencies, and omissions make it unclear what makes a phenomenological study phenomenological. There is a need for clarifying how the principles of the phenomenological philosophy are implemented in a study before publishing. (p. 429) Field Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2017 Article 5 5 There it is again—that feeling of hope and despair. Hope for the “methodological clarity and rigor” that exists, but despair for the variations, inconsistencies, and omissions that make it impossible to tell what makes for good phenomenological work. Heidegger’s (1999) charge comes roaring back across the ages: “phenomenological research has sunk to the level of wishy- washiness, to the level of the philosophical noise of the day…everything absorbs phenomenology… It is impossible to make out anything [definitive] about phenomenology” (p. 58). I am not arguing for sticking to or striving for some kind of non-existent, unattainable purity in doing phenomenological work. Nor do I think we should be enslaved by our traditions - -context, purpose, and people matter, and should make a difference to the why, what, and how of interpretive work. But I worry about the loss of identity and sense of goodness that seems to be occurring. Something is wrong when phenomenological work confuses phenomenologists. We do not do ourselves any favors by publishing work that is not rigorous and clear, and I am not talking about the Lincolning and Gubafication of interpretive work, I am talking about doing work where the goodness “gleams, glistens, glitters, and glows,” where it “opens us,” and where it “inclines our thinking toward thanking.” The third sense of “mixed up,” as in mixed methods, is constituted by the mixing of techniques (in-depth interviews and surveys), approaches (phenomenology and grounded theory are a favorite, for example), and philosophical traditions (in the former instance, German Idealism and quibbling, Symbolic Interactionists). The latter “mix,” between Barney Glasser and Richard Strauss, was in trouble from the start, and tellingly, did not last. But I digress. The point here is that such mixes-- number charts and narratives, concrete particulars and abstract categories, existentialism and positivism, practical wisdom and scientific propositions, are often tossed together, at will it seems. All of this is apparently accomplished by an increasingly popular hero figure in qualitative research, the free-wheeling bricoleur, a qualitative researcher licensed, somehow, to deploy “whatever strategies, methods, and empirical materials are at hand” (Lincoln & Denzin, 2005, p. 4), someone who “stitches, edits, and puts slices of reality together” (p. 5). Note: “The bricoleur explores the use of ethnography, Pinarian currere, historiography, genre studies, psychoanalysis, rhetorical analysis, discourse analysis, content analysis, ad infinitum” (Kinchloe, 2001, p. 687, my emphasis). In this superhuman capacity for ad infiintum, marvel at the bricoleur, the perspective-shifting, place-shifting, tradition mixing, tool-wielding, Nietzschean “oberman,” an “action-hero” if ever there was one. Should we be asking what it is that disciplines or should discipline the seemingly all powerful bricoleur? To whom or what do they answer or serve? What is it, if anything, that interrupts their will to power? Does the “thing itself,” the world, have a voice, or vitality, or integrity that we need to preserve and be in the service of? To what extent does the world compose us, or are we the all-powerful “mix-masters”? Where is the commitment from the bricoleur to “becoming indigenous to place” (Kimmerer, 2015, p. 205)? On the other side of this, pointing not to the mixer but to the mixed, is the question of What is it that is being mixed? How? What does the mix produce—is it a whole or just the sum of disparate, conflicting parts? Or am I being naïve here - - is something whole and integral too much to ask Field Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2017 Article 5 6 for in this post-modern, post-human, and now, post-truth world? Has any sense of what Bennett (2001) called “cosmological coherency” been abandoned? Has the “fractured future” arrived, as Denzin and Lincoln (2005, p. 1123) claimed it would, and is it here to stay? If we are confused and fractured why would anyone look to or depend upon us? I do not agree with Charmaz (2006), however popular she has become, when she attempts to stitch grounded theory together with constructivism and, in doing so, claims to be “marrying two contrasting and competing traditions” (p. 6). In such cases, we all should be asking, what kind of marriage is it that is based on competition and contrast? Is it a marriage at all, or just conflict- ridden co-habitation? Do in-depth interviews produce the same kind of knowledge as Likert - scale surveys? Do they proceed from the same assumptions about the way human beings are? Do they treat the object of study the same, or are there different objects of study entirely? Do the mixes and mix-masters simply add up-is that what the verb “to mix” means? Is “mixing” the right thing to do at all? I do not think so. I want to be clear: seemingly different things do fit together, numbers can inform interpretation, or vice-versa, for example. But I do want things to be carefully braided or woven, and not simply mixed or loosely stitched. I want fine cloth to be the result, and not some hastily sewn together swatches of wool and polyester. Most importantly, I want the braider/weaver to be able to explain, as all good weavers can, the why, what, and how of the weft and the weave. A wonderful example of this, where the research traditions are carefully, knowingly, and respectfully combined, in startling, poetic fashion, is Robin Kilmmerer’s (2015), Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants. It gleams, it glistens, and it shines forth. Forfeiting Ground to the March of “Constructed, Multiple Realities” and “small t” Truth There is also, embedded in this representation of the qualitative researcher as the bricoleur, the image of a reality constructed wholly by humans, a world of what Latour (1993) calls quasi – objects, apparently subject to slicing, editing, and stitching according to human will. This is the problem that frightens me the most, and is the most life-threatening, in my opinion. It arises, partly at least, from playing it fast and loose with notions like “reality” and “truth.” The term “multiple realities” has become quite popular in the literature on qualitative research (see the assertion, commonly expressed in the theories of constructivism, for example). In most instances, I see it asserted, but rarely scrutinized or clarified, much less justified. I am afraid of statements, by researchers claiming to do interpretive work, like this: “The way we as researchers come to know reality constructs the reality we come to know” (Usher, 1996, p. 39). Hmm--what is it that the term “reality” refers to here? Additionally, this seems to me to be a vicious circle, not a virtuous one, with no way out. Even if there was a way out, how would we know if we simply and only construct the reality we know, and we can only know the reality we construct? Forgotten in talk like this is the way history and reality construct us. Are we prepared to give history, and the animate world, with its life-giving gifts, their due, and call them all constructivists? But hang-on, whose world, and whose reality am I talking about here—are there not multiple realities? Field Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2017 Article 5 7 My first encounter with the notion of “multiple realities” was with Alfred Schutz (1967), in his work on the phenomenology of the life world. Schutz had something specific in mind when he used the term— “as finite provinces of meaning” (p. 232). He did not mean separate, distinct mental states, multiple, individual consciousnesses, or entirely separate, independently existing worlds. There was no “this is my reality” and “that is your reality” with Schutz. That is, he was careful and discriminating when he used the term: The finite provinces of meaning are not separated states of mental life in the sense that passing from one to the other would require a transmigration of the soul…They are merely names for different tensions in one and the same consciousness, and it is the same life, the mundane life, unbroken from birth to death, which is attended to in different modification. (Schutz, 1967, p. 232) Quite often the “multiple realities” talk is paired with assertions like this in qualitative work: “There is no ‘Big T truth’ anymore, it is all ‘little t truth.’” In the face of a statement like this, I want to ask: Whose “little t” truth is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s? Is that a mistake in the title, flowing from an erroneous ontology - - it should be a small t instead of a capital T? Should we treat what we are hearing in the testimony about the genocide of a people, as just one version of the truth among many versions? Because if this is true, then what is my ethical obligation to the other and the call to action? If it is just “their truth,” how am I enjoined to and by the other, as Ricoeur (1992) asked, “over and above my willing and wanting” (Gadamer, 1960/ 1996, p. xvii) to respond? Let me try to come at this a little differently. What truth is Gadamer (1960/1996) calling for when he asserted that I should know myself such that “the text can present itself in all its otherness, and thus assert its own truth” (p. 269)? And what truth is it that Gadamer speaks to when he asserted that the critical task of hermeneutics is “to know what is asked by the distinction in operating between true prejudices or those which guarantee understanding, and false prejudices, which bring in misunderstanding,” (quoted in Grondin, 2003, p. 89)? Is this just another “little t” assertion, or is it the case, because I have “my own truth,” that I get to decide that what Gadamer is referring to is just one more “little t” truth among many? The trouble is that individuals, with their “own reality”, and their “own truth,” in an era of “post-truth,” do get to decide—that all Muslims are dangerous, that women are second class citizens, that children are sketchy, deficient beings, that meningitis can be cured with hot peppers, onions, garlic, and horseradish, and that the world is simply there as standing reserve for our projects. But there are real consequences—there is that word again—culturally devastating, life, and planet threatening ones. So, at the risk of sounding like a closet positivist, let me make another bold claim: It is Big T trouble that we are all in the face of our little t truths, because Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States, and we are living out our lives on a dying planet. Admittedly, there is a complicated, dynamic relationship between big T and little t truth, one that needs to be carefully explored and worked through, but denying one and embracing the other does not get us any further down the road in deciding how to live well together on a planet and with people we are systematically degrading and extinguishing. But there I go again making Big T claims. Field Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2017 Article 5 8 This brings me to the final (re)turn. I agree with the translators of the latest collection of Gadamer’s work when they say: Our societies are faced with this challenge where violence has become one of the arts of ‘praxes’ within traditional liberal democracies. This may be a challenge harder to face than the challenge of the sciences. Can Gadamer’s reading of history deal with alternate ‘readings’ and respond to them or engage them? (Vandevelde & Iyer, 2016, p. xxxv) How do we deal with alternate readings and understandings that are artfully and violently opposed? When interpretive conflict turns deadly, then what? Should we all retreat into our own “little t” truths, or has this already happened? To some degree, I think it has. I see a real reluctance in interpretive work to defend any position fiercely and courageously, however dependent on time, place, and values it is, to draw a strong conclusion, even in the face of differing conclusions, to make any kind of bold ethical declaration about an “ought” or a “should,” however positional and contestable it might be. When we retreat, like a slow, fleeing army, from the world into the safe haven of “This is just my interpretation,” the “fading ethical intelligibility” (Kroker, 2014, p. 43) of such a stance leads all too quickly to the ethical abandonment represented in the next set of statements: “Who am I to judge?,” and “Who am I to say?” The reasons offered for this kind of “refusal to be” are multiple: “It is hard to say, because it is all very complex,” and “Things change so rapidly, that nothing holds,” and “There is no real solid ground anymore,” and “It all depends on your world- view.” I take all of these statements to be true, and I am not arguing for a lack of caution in making claims, or that tact and civility are not essential, or that being aware of the finitude and fallibility of being human is unnecessary, or that the claim the other makes on us is not tantamount to interpretive work, or even that it is not the case that truth occurs with untruth, to borrow from Heidegger. But, by granting all of this, I do not think we have to make all our interpretations weak and wobbly in advance, or take back everything we say, in anticipation that we might have to change, or refuse to be bold, courageous, and evocative, because there might be another view. And please, please let us stop saying that we cannot generalize because our sample size is too small. How would we know, anyway? Would that not require “a transmigration of the soul” (Schutz, 1967, p. 232) to other places and times, to see and know if, in fact, what we had to say did or did not obtain? And have we not, in claiming this, made the kind of sweeping generalization that we were trying desperately to avoid in the first place? Worse perhaps, does that mean we should put every sentence we utter in scare quotes? I understand that “giving oneself up to the argument of the other is an act of attentiveness” (Davey 2007, p. 169), and that being attentive and open is a primary feature of interpretive work. I also understand that, in being attentive, something essential to hermeneutic understanding takes place in that “one is able to forget one’s own purposes” (Gadamer, 1960/1996, p. 124). But I worry, especially in times like these, about “forgetting one’s purposes,” and constantly “giving oneself up to the argument of the other,” because it just might be that such a position, Field Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2017 Article 5 9 accepts, embraces and makes light of just what it should resist. It is tolerant of that which it should raise its voice in protest. It accepts just what it should defy. It lets violence off too easy. Its notion of the justice of strife is that of a weak-willed judge. It has no nerve for a real fight, which means to resist the wasteful effects of suffering. (Caputo, 1987, p. 285) Perhaps it is time to consider what hermeneutics might look like in an era of post-truth, where the signs of a budding totalitarianism are unmistakable, in “a society whose members act and react according to the rules of a fictitious world” (Arendt, 1948/1968, p. 62). Perhaps it is time that any research “worthy of the name” of hermeneutics leads not to sunny skies and safe pastures, but to thunderstorms, as Caputo, (1987, p. 214) has urged, steered not by the “calm hand that guides the ship through the waves” (Gadamer, 1999, p. 246), but rather by Heraclitus’s lightning bolt that flashes and takes our breath away (but does not make us run away). It is in this spirit that Vandevelde and Iyer’s (2016) posed their not-so-friendly question: “What is the nature of the revolution that hermeneutics, lying between philosophy and history, can foment” (p. xxxv)? References Arendt, H. (1948/1968). The origins of totalitarianism, Part three. New York, NY: Harcourt. 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