September 16th, 2009 (first published on vVvAlog at MIT)
Social and communications researchers should be moving if we want to create new knowledge about the complex world where we live and if we want to change it. In our studies we should not only adopt a multi-methodological approach combining the positivist, systems, critical, and interpretative paradigms, but also we should incorporate other forms of understanding reality that are not that rigid. The cause-and-effect, function, and reason explanations that the classic paradigms allow us to produce tend to be very limited and are designed to satisfy and perpetuate the structure of a tribal scientific community. A freer multi-methodological approach should not only explore these major scientific paradigms but also incorporate fairy tails, magic, and dreams, and other forms of viewing and testing the world. I agree with Feyerabend, “anything goes,” our research could be an anarchic and humanitarian enterprise that promotes change not only in our vision of the world but also in the world itself.
The limitations of paradigms and scientific theories of the world have been explained by some historians and philosophers of science extensively. Popper, for instance, criticizes the positivist paradigm and its assumption that there is an objective reality. I agree with him, there is a problem with the logic of induction; singular statements that lead to universal statements are superficial because they ignore their falsifiability and do not allow us to test them.
We must also criticize the social structure of science. Although Campbell claims that social structure is not important for science and states that to talk about facts and to search the truth is what really matters, I think that the tribal aspects of the structure are overwhelming. I agree with Kuhn, science has a social structure that is rigid and is designed to perpetuate itself and its paradigms. He describes that structure as a “disciplinary matrix” and provides historical examples of how that structure determines the behavior, values, and believes from the group.
In my opinion, the only way to escape the uniformity of science is by moving and adopting a trans/multi/anti-methodology as the one proposed by Feyerabend. Knowledge, as he states, is “an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives, each single theory, each fairy-tale, each myth, that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness.”(21) In the process of navigating that ocean we should become translators of many languages and worlds, explorers of foreign environments, dreamers in motion.
