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

Quoting John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>:

> 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

W.O. Some of the above appears to elide the distinction between an argument and
an explanation. Perhaps the social scientists understand differently, but I was
under the impression that arguments provide justification (premises) for a
conclusion, while explanations bear the erotic components "explicans" and 
"explicandum." My Latin is extremely rusty (as Rick said in the face of the
advancing Germans, tugging at his ear) so I may be misunderstanding things
here. 

I was raised to believe in the truth of the general idea that an explanation of
P does not provide a justification of P. One must already believe state of
affairs P has occurred in order to ask for an explanation of P, but the concept
of an argument disallows already believing the conclusion prior to the provision
of premises (unless one is a professional politician or lawyer, of course.) Thus
the explicandum is not a conclusion, and the explicans is not a reason,
according to the requirements of the space of reasons.

But then what do Jesuits know about philosophy anyway.

Walter O
Eternal Student of Philosophy
Loyola College,
Montreal QC





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

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