tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post1658908659476240330..comments2023-10-30T12:26:15.822+01:00Comments on Research as a Second Language: Error and Blame, part 4Thomashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-76207991805110216762015-04-03T15:11:20.216+02:002015-04-03T15:11:20.216+02:00Thomas:
I like that analogy. We got 4 forward ge...Thomas:<br /><br />I like that analogy. We got 4 forward gears here but no reverse.Andrew Gelmanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02715992780769751789noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-35383397577250676152015-04-02T18:42:42.824+02:002015-04-02T18:42:42.824+02:00Yes, it's a peculiar world, at least on the fa...Yes, it's a peculiar world, at least on the face of it. Maybe that famous old story <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland" rel="nofollow">"Flatland"</a> provides an analogy. It's as though there's a whole dimension missing in W world. Rhetorically, you can only ever move forward, "carefully" re-contextualizing the arguments other people have made to bring about a new "collaborative synthesis", but never backward, as it were, to correct them where they went wrong.<br /><br />It's a world in which contradictions are not resolved (by rejecting one or both of the contradictory statements) but actively fostered (in the interested of greater "mindfulness" through "emotional ambivalence"). You are always allowed to <i>add</i> a new claim to the body of knowledge, no matter how poorly it fits in with what's already believed. You are never allowed to remove one.<br /><br />Like you say, it's disorienting. In Flatland there's no room to "turn over"; in W world there's no way to "turn around". It feels terribly constraining.Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-7844649423013672422015-04-02T18:18:28.909+02:002015-04-02T18:18:28.909+02:00Thomas, your posts remind me of moments I have liv...Thomas, your posts remind me of moments I have lived when attending philosophy seminars and the discourse turns to “possible worlds”. Since I have no formal training in the philosophy of science, these moments are rather disconcerting; I do not know what it means to admit the existence of worlds where propositions are true in some and not in others.<br /><br />A Weickian world permits an epistemology where knowledge may not meet a standard of justified true belief. And there appears to be some social ontology in W world that accepts everything he writes and some less-well defined similar work (Gladwell,…) as a set of social facts that can be used in some institutionalized version of sociological research. In this possible world, it appears (e.g. from Czarniawska) that style counts as theory. If the theory consists of a set of propositions, then they are true if they are in the proper style.<br /><br />A world which I (and you?) find more comfortable has a different epistemological tradition. Stories can be illustrative. Stories can count as justification of a proposition only if they are true (and replicable? and confirmed? and generalizable?). Fables, false accounts, and metaphors do not lead to justified true belief. In this world, analogical reasoning may have scientific value, but the account has some minimal requirements. The phenomena linked by the analogy must be close enough to justify the comparison. Can the phenomena be separated in a meaningful manner from the context? Is firefighting an analogue to university administration; that is, what are the phenomena (behaviors, facts, objects) that are analogous? Otherwise we are left with literary metaphors, which if they meet the requisite style, make for sound epistemology in W world.<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-7271766265883109502015-04-01T19:24:13.630+02:002015-04-01T19:24:13.630+02:00I wouldn't call sensemaking an "obscure&q...I wouldn't call sensemaking an "obscure" field. It's just an ordinary specialty, a sub-discipline. Maybe a bit a like Bayesian statistics or Lorquian poetics. I'm sure that whatever names I know in either of those fields I wouldn't know except through you and Jonathan Mayhew, respectively.<br /><br />As for Weick's influence, I'm increasingly confident that the "sensemaking mindset" has been widely adopted in business and public administration. I know it's anecdotal, but it seems to me that when Daniel Kahneman calls you a <a href="http://secondlanguage.blogspot.dk/2012/06/test.html" rel="nofollow">"famous organisational psychologist"</a> then you're no longer obscure.<br /><br />Also, he may actually be bigger in Europe than the U.S.<br />Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10721624.post-79694398762277271272015-04-01T18:24:56.134+02:002015-04-01T18:24:56.134+02:00Thomas:
I don't know if this helps, but nobod...Thomas:<br /><br />I don't know if this helps, but nobody I talk with about this stuff has ever heard of Karl Weick. He's an obscure figure and sensemaking is an obscure field. He <em>does</em> teach in a business school and so he's probably paid a lot, and I guess he's on speaking terms with various business executives, but I don't know how influential his stories are.<br /><br />P.S. The University of Michigan is a public university so you can <a href="http://www.umsalary.info/?FName=&LName=Weick&Year=2&Campus=0" rel="nofollow">look up</a> his pay. Salary for recent year is not given, I guess he's retired. Most recent year is 2011-2012, when he was paid . . . $298,500. Ulp!<br /><br />Maybe if his stories had been true, the admin would've raised his salary to a round $300K?<br /><br />Anyway, the point is . . . the b-school connection gives him the $ and some authority in our current culture. If he were doing the same thing but was, I dunno, a professor of social work somewhere getting paid $50,000 a year, the glamour wouldn't be there.<br /><br />But, from my perspective, Weick only exists because I heard about him from you!Andrew Gelmanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02715992780769751789noreply@blogger.com