[lit-ideas] Re: Patty Duke & The Apriori [part 2of 2]

Should anyone be interested the book I mentioned in my exchange with Walter
is

Howard Becker (1998) *Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research
While You're Doing It. *Chicago: U. of Chicago Press

It is a thoroughly delightful book and one to which I turn when staring at
my data or confronting a pile of new notes I find my grey cells paralyzed.
One or another of Becker's suggestions is sure to start them moving again.

A somewhat stiffer read but, on first glance, promising work is Andrew
Abbott (2004) *Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences.* New
York: W.W. Norton & Company. Who could not be attracted by a book in which
the second paragraph of the first chapter reads,

Many people think of social science less as a conversation than as a
> monologue. For them, it is a long speech that ends with a formal question,
> to which reality meekly answers yes or no like the plastic heroine of a
> Victorian novel. Yet no good researcher believes in such monologues.
> Researchers know all about the continual interchange between intuition and
> method, just as they know about the endless teasing of reality as it evades
> them. Social science in practice is less old-style romance than modern soap
> opera.


There is also the delightful account of explanation that begins on page
eight,

There are three things that make a social scientist say that a particular
> argument is an explanation. First, we say something is an explanation when
> it allows us to intervene in whatever it is we are explaining, [e.g.,
> poverty when we know how to eradicate it]... Second, we say an account
> explains something when we stop looking for further accounts of that
> something. An explanation is an account that suffices. It frees us to go on
> to the next problem by bringing our current problem into a commonsense world
> where it becomes immediately comprehensible [do bear in mind, however, that
> my commonsense world and yours may differ].... Third, we often say we have
> an explanation of something when we have made a certain kind of argument
> about it: an argument that is simple, exclusive, perhaps elegant or even
> counterintuitive.... In this third sense, an account is an explanation
> because it takes a certain pleasing form, because it somehow marries
> simplicity and complexity.


This account is, of course, a heuristic, a way to sort out observations
concerning the situations in which scholars say "Enough" and move on to
their next project. But that is enough for me to want to read further.

John

-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/

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