So how can we best understand the world? Wow – I’m not even sure if we are close to even beginning to answer that question. Just the other day I was reading an article on the Fermi Paradox (on why we haven’t convincingly discovered alien life yet). This article theorized on how civilization will someday harness the energy of stars and even galaxies directly (like building Dyson spheres). We can already theorize about our own abilities thousands of generations down the line that would take a million times greater understanding of the universe…. so where does that put us today?
Well, I guess we really can’t rate since we can’t see the future. We only have what we know now. But I think if we can theorize these crazy advanced civilizations, then we should at least realize that no one person can know everything, and therefore we need others. We need to always be ready to change, to grow. Ultimately, while there are absolute truths out there… there are scientific facts… we are so far away from knowing enough as a species to even begin to think that we can hold absolute truths. So while I believe there are truths out there – we are far, far from possessing them.
So having covered the “how” and stated my case first, I will now state that I feel social constructivism is the best way to understand the world and determine what can be known. This would not mean that we can not discuss absolutes, but that we should hold lightly to these truths knowing that some major break through tomorrow could change our thinking radically. Scientists (including Eisenstein) originally fought tooth and nail against the big bang theory. Many held to the steady state theory, while others thought that it proved there was a supreme being of some kind and therefore dismissed it as “creationism.” Eventually, they came to accept the evidence and changed paradigms rapidly. They just had to discover that it took billions of years and not thousands. But what if they had embraced it originally? Would we be that much farther down the road of exploring our reality? Who knows.
But if we held on to our ontologies a little looser… maybe, just maybe we would fight less and learn more.
Of course, a lot of this probably comes from me being a “metamodernist” for lack of better words. I swing back and forth between modernism and post-modernism, accepting parts of both while rejecting others. That explains I believe that there is truth out there, but that we have very limited abilities to understand truth and need to give room for disagreement, debate, and change.
However, I have mostly been speaking of scientific matters and not so much on research matters (although they do overlap). When we start talking about what we can know about another person, that is a whole new ball game. We spend a lot of money to have trained professionals help us understand ourselves in therapy sessions. Then we try to find the words to express what we understand. When we find those words, we have to communicate those through systems that often remove part of our communication (phones, email, etc). Even if we are face-to-face, the person we are speaking to could get distracted, or there could be a loud atmosphere, or any one of many things that would make our communications difficult to hear or receive. Then the hearer has to interpret the words and other visual clues, filter that through their understanding, and see how that connects to what they know. All of this would happen in good communication – so imagine adding layers of misunderstanding (both of ourselves and others)? What we can know about others is very distorted, and we can only know what a person has learned or knows based on what they communicate to us through tests, papers, oral exams, etc. So in other words, what we can know through research or education is very limited and distorted. I like illustration from my first class at UNT comparing our communication to a wall with small windows through it that only give us small glimpses into the whole picture.
So, research is basically our attempt to stare through those small windows to figure out what is going on. We hope to stare through enough windows eventually to get a small usable picture of what is going on in a specific area. Our in-class definition had some very good points like ” the exploration of being able to meaningful support answers to questions
that can be expanded to other situations through the use of observations to help provide potential explanations, predict outcomes, add a descriptive look into social or natural behaviors and activities.” My addition to the class definition was “It is not a perfect pattern to replicate exactly, but a set of examples of what worked in one place at one time. We should look at research as a table full of play-dough sculptures that others have created. We choose the ones that might apply to our situation, take them out, and use them or re-mold them as we see fit.” I think that many times, people like to look at research as a “still life” arrangement that they have to them sit down and paint an exact replica of because “this is the best practice!” We can’t exactly replicate what happened in any research project, even if we tried. That is why I like the play dough analogy. Try as you might, most people can’t create a perfect play dough sculpture. At best we create ones that look like something else… maybe. But you shouldn’t just look at one play dough sculpture at a time like you would with a still life arrangement. You should look at all that are out there, like looking at a “table full of play dough sculptures.” Then start to pick and choose which ones look like they might work for you – or even just the parts of different ones that look good. Then use them as is, or remold them into something else.
How does this help me? Well, hopefully I will not look at my research as a way to find answers, but just as a way to add to the big table of play dough. I can look at my research as something that is only a part of what others will use, not the be-all, end-all answer. Hopefully that will change my writing to be more helpful in the long run.
But, this could also make it more difficult to work with others, at least with those that are looking for easy answers and best practices. It may also make it harder for me to publish. Maybe I will just have to hold back on all this squishy relativity stuff and make some grand bold statements occasionally just to get published. I know a co-author and I just had a really difficult time getting our cyber bullying article published just because it was… gasp!… mixed methods (thank you finally Texas Public Health Journal!). So maybe I will need to pull it back a bit more towards the dark side of quantitative research to work better with those types. We shall see.
