In fact, I believe (though not without hesitation, contradiction, and hypocrisy) that there is nothing in the world except words. I believe that there may in fact be pure phenomenological experience out there somewhere, but that we can never have that experience, because in order for phenomena to register as experience they must be mediated by language.
I also believe that language is fundamentally and inescapably social. I believe that meaning happens in the readers' (listeners' viewers' ponderers') minds and is imposed onto text in an extremely complicated relationship with social and historical situation.
I certainly believe in the linguistic and social construction of meaning and experience, if not the material reality we think we live in. I also certainly believe that quantitative measures signify reductively; I think that words, with apparently fuzzier boundaries than numbers, do a better job of signifying our fuzzy reality. This puts me pretty firmly in the qualitative camp.
But I also, desperately, want research to be practical. Or at least my work. I try to remember every day that though my work may seem disconnected from the "real world" it is my world and is as real as anything ever will be. To that end, I locate myself with the pragmatists, and would not hesitate to research quantitatively if the rhetorical situation asked for it.
So--I barely believe in positive reality, but I want to affect that reality through words. The world is language, in other words, so what better than language to re-create the world.
Seth, I would have to agree with you. Wouldn't it be nice if our research were practical/useful? I think what I love about qualitative research (that lends itself to coding) is that it can be easily translated into numbers in ways that I'm comfortable with. Participants don't become numbers themselves, and their responses don't become numbers, but instead can morph into statements like "72% of respondents felt that 'the university had prepared them for the workforce,'" where we take actual quotations from participants and present them with convenient numbers.
ReplyDeleteFinding comfort in the fuzziness of research is an important skill, in my opinion. It's hard to balance the need for research to be valid, reliable, and generalizable with the reality that nothing is totally reliable, valid or generalizable. I think your approach to thinking about research and knowledge in terms of language helps to foreground for us all how powerful and slippery and messy and important research - like life - can be. I think being a pragmatist is not a bad place to be at all.
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