Dilemma Qualitative Method

Martyn Hammersley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134978779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 1990. Originally published in 1989, The Dilemma of Qualitative Method is a stimulating guide to the discussion of qualitative versus quantitative approaches to social research, originated in nineteenth-century debates about the relationship between the methods of history and natural science. One of the key theorists in this area was Chicago sociologist Herbert Blumer. The book analyses the historical context of the dispute and provides a detailed account and systematic analysis Blumer's methodological writings including his doctoral thesis. The strategies for qualitative research advocated by Blumer within the Chicago tradition are reviewed and assessed.

Chapter One

PHILOSOPHY AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

At the heart of Blumer’s metatheoretical and methodological work is the question of the relationship between the methods employed by the natural and those appropriate to the social sciences. Of course, the idea of a science of human social life has a long history, going back beyond the point in history when the concept of science began to be distinguished from philosophy.¹ With the striking developments in physical science in the seventeenth century, the proposal that the same methods be applied to the study of human social life gained ground. Then and later there were also reactions against the encroachment of the new science on areas that had hitherto been the domain of theology, philosophy and the humanities. By the nineteenth century, as a result both of further rapid progress in the natural sciences (not just in physics but also in chemistry, physiology, and biology) (Knight 1986) and of the growing influence of the Romantic reaction against Enlightenment thought, the question of the relationship between the social and natural sciences reached crisis-point.

Before the nineteenth century much thinking about society had been based on the ideas of natural law or natural rights. The central concern of this tradition was with the common good and with how society might best be organized to achieve this. Initially, the common good was conceptualized in terms of the realization of the essential character of humanity. For Aristotle and those who followed him, every kind of thing, including animal species, had its own nature or end, and the good was defined as anything that was conducive to the achievement of that end. In the case of humans, the good was sometimes conceived as a life spent in pursuit of philosophic truth, though politics was viewed as a more distinctively human activity (Lobkowicz 1967). Among later natural right theorists, such as Hobbes and Locke, the common good became redefined as peace in the war of all against all, and as the satisfaction of human needs and wants.

Natural law, the law of the perfect society, was distinguished from the laws of actual societies, and regarded as probably unattainable. Nevertheless it was the ultimate standard by which human societies were to be judged, and it represented a combination of what we would today distinguish as legal and scientific laws. Natural law was held to be discernible by reason, and the discovery and clarification of natural law was the function of the philosophers. Richard Wollheim (Wollheim 1967) usefully summarizes the core of natural law doctrine as follows:

The whole universe, on this view, is governed by laws which exhibit rationality. Inanimate things and brutes invariably obey these laws, the first out of necessity, the second out of instinct. Man, however, has the capacity of choice and is therefore able at will either to obey or to disobey the laws of nature. Nevertheless, owing to the character of these laws, it is only insofar as he obeys them that he acts in accord with his reason. ‘Follow nature’ is therefore, on this view, the principle both of nonhuman behavior and of human morality; and in this last category justice is included. The laws which apply to man and which he can and should obey are not identical in content with those which apply to, for example, planets or bees and which they cannot but obey. Nevertheless, since the universe is a rational whole, governed by a unitary principle of reason, the analogies between the laws of nonhuman behavior and those of human morality are very strong and readily penetrated by the rational faculty with which man has been endowed.

(Wollheim 1967:451)

This concept of natural law remained central to the work of writers on society up to and including Rousseau (Strauss 1953), but its meaning was gradually transformed until it came to be descriptive rather than normative, picking out causal relations or at least regularities in the natural world. Eventually the concept of natural law came to be understood in the context of the modern sciences of nature, and its application to the study of human society became seen in analogous terms (Zilsel 1942; Needham 1951; but see also Ruby 1986).

The success of the natural sciences in the nineteenth century highlighted the question of the limits of scientific knowledge. It not only raised the issue of the proper relationship between scientific knowledge and religious belief, but also challenged assumptions about the connection between science and our everyday experience of the world. Was science the only source of true knowledge, and would it expand to deal with all aspects of our experience of the world, including our understanding of human life itself? Or was science only able to help us understand the material world? Indeed, was it able to do even this except in a partial and inadequate manner?²

Sometimes, these issues were conceptualized in terms of the clash of two contrasting positions: for example, idealism versus realism.³ However, the terms ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’ are treacherous, since they are used to refer to a variety of positions that differ in important ways. A particular problem is that they conflate epistemological and ontological issues, questions about how we know with questions about the existence and nature of reality. Nonetheless, they are a useful starting point for an analysis of trends in nineteenth-century thinking about the study of human life.⁴

I shall apply the term ‘realism’ to the claim that there is a reality independent of our ideas or experiences, and that we can gain knowledge of it. Very often, though not necessarily, realism is associated with the idea that science is the only true source of knowledge. In the nineteenth century, realism was also usually associated with materialism. This complex of ideas formed a key element of much Enlightenment thought

Materialism has had a curious history, as Bertrand Russell remarks in his preface to what is still one of the major philosophical texts on the subject, Frederick Lange’s History of Materialism (Lange 1865):

Arising almost at the beginning of Greek philosophy, it has persisted down to our time, in spite of the fact that very few eminent philosophers have advocated it. It has been associated with many scientific advances, and has seemed, in certain epochs, almost synonymous with a scientific outlook.

(Russell 1925:v)

For the materialist, the world is made up of matter: that is the substance from which all else is constructed. Furthermore, everything in the world obeys the laws of matter, including human behaviour and consciousness. For most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century materialists, science was the only true form of knowledge and could in principle explain everything. Materialists often regarded their views as anti-philosophical: they believed that science would replace both religion and philosophy, and, in any event, it was felt that the success of science removed any need for philosophical justification.⁵

An early advocate of materialism, realism and science was Francis Bacon. He argued that science was the most important source of knowledge, condemning the scholastics’ interminable arguments and the humanists’ reverence for ancient texts. He believed that the nature of the world, both physical and human, was to be discovered by observation and experiment. From facts about the world established in this way, the laws governing the world could be induced by rigorous method. Bacon conceived the process of acquiring knowledge in terms of the overcoming of various obstacles to true perception that he referred to as ‘idols’: universal or idiosyncratic mental weaknesses (the idols of the tribe and the cave), errors arising from language (the idols of the market), and those deriving from philosophy (the idols of the theatre). In order to discover the nature of the world, Bacon suggested, paraphrasing the New Testament, we must become as little children, ridding ourselves of the various idols that we have acquired in the course of our lives and that obscure our vision.

In reaction to materialism and realism, some philosophers—for example, Descartes—identified different realms, matter and mind, and in so doing both emphasized and placed limits around the power of scientific knowledge. Descartes viewed animals as machines, and therefore as subject to materialistic forms of explanation. Some human behaviour was treated as mechanistic too, but for the most part it was subject to reason and therefore not open to scientific explanation. Descartes also represented a contrast with Bacon in his conception of method. Where the latter stressed the role of induction from observational data, Descartes advocated a more deductivist approach, seeking to deduce scientific findings from a small number of first principles which were taken to be ideas innate to reason, and therefore indubitable.⁶

The issue of the limits to science and to its application to human social life took on particular importance in Germany in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps because at that time Germany witnessed both a flowering of the natural sciences and of the study of history.⁷ Furthermore, as we shall see, the German intellectual scene was a very important influence on philosophers and social scientists in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of whom studied there and were familiar with the German debates (Herbst 1965).

The most extreme reaction against the materialism associated with the development of the natural sciences in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the absolute idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. They sought to combine, on the one hand, the stress on spiritual or cultural diversity to be found in German Romanticism with, on the other, the emphasis on the freedom of the human will deriving from the Reformation, and brought to fullest expression in Kant.

The Romantics—for example Lessing, Herder, and Goethe—rejected the Enlightenment view of humanity as representing a single, universal rationality and as governed by material needs, and of society and nature as mere resources for the fulfilment of human desires. They dismissed the associated view of science as analytic, as concerned with breaking nature down into its components and treating the world as a vast machine. Rather, humanity was for them an expressive unity, each part only finding its true meaning in its relations with other parts; just as the elements of a work of art find their expression in the whole. And, indeed, for the Romantics, art was the highest form of human activity. They rejected the analytic stance of modern science in favour of a more spiritual approach concerned to enter into communion with nature. They were also opposed to the individualism of the Enlightenment. For them, humans were expressive beings because they belonged to cultures developed and transmitted within communities; and there were many such communities, each bearing a distinctive form of life, valuable in its own right.

Absolute idealism also drew on Kant, and particularly on Kant’s notion of individual freedom as the pursuit of rational ideals. Kant sought to clarify and justify the grounds of natural scientific knowledge, adopting much of the empiricist critique of metaphysical speculation to be found in Hume. However, he departed from Hume in arguing that our experience is structured by categories that are a priori, such as space and time. According to Kant, then, our experience is a joint product of reality and of the categories of mind. We can never know reality independently of those categories, but science can discover causal laws within our experience. In this way, Kant sought both to secure the foundations of natural science, and to place limits on it. Science could not tell us about reality as such. Furthermore, Kant was particularly concerned to preserve ethics from the determinism of science. While he recognized that human beings are part of nature and are to that degree subject to the operation of natural laws, he insisted that they are also part of a higher, supernatural world that lies beyond the sensible world with which science deals. While he believed that the nature of that higher world could not be known in the manner of science, Kant sought to show that it was rational for us to act as members of that world. This implied exercising freedom of choice by following moral im-peratives, rather than submitting to our natural inclinations. From this perspective, those who obey the moral law rise above the world of sense and the necessity and order that govern nature, and enter the realm of freedom and reason that transcends the realm of phenomena. Thus, as Kroner (1914) remarks: ‘science conveys theoretical information only about a subordinate part of the world, a part whose metaphysical insignificance appears most clearly when we consider that from it originate just those sensuous impulses and desires which undermine the dominion of moral reason’. For Kant, the realization of human freedom in moral action is humanity’s highest ability and duty. It was this aspect of Kant’s work that most strongly influenced the absolute idealists.

The attempt of absolute idealism to combine Romanticism with Kantianism was not without problems. To integrate these two philosophical tendencies it was necessary to assume that the ethos of a culture would match the rational commitments of its individual members. For Kant the expression of true freedom was to follow the dictates of reason, and these were conceived as transcendental. Yet, the Romantics stressed the culturally variable character of ideals. Hegel sought to overcome this conflict by treating reason not as fixed in character but as developing over time and as immanent in the world. He believed that humanity had been in harmony with nature and society in classical Greece, a unity that was destroyed by the development of reason in the form of Greek philosophy. There was no possibility of a return to this earlier harmony. Modern humanity was, for the moment, condemned to conflict between inclinations, desire, and sensibility on the one side, and ideals, reason, and morality on the other; and as a result between individual and society. However, Hegel believed that these conflicts could be overcome in a new cultural synthesis that would mark the end of history, and humanity’s realization of its true nature. It would overcome the traditional philosophical antinomies: between matter and spirit; between the earthly and the divine; and between the individual self and world.

The idealists went further than Kant, claiming a form of philosophical knowledge more penetrating than that characteristic of natural science. They argued that Kant had violated his own rule that knowledge cannot go beyond experience in claiming that there is a supersensible world. They sought to render him consistent by reinstating metaphysical inquiry as the true source of knowledge; giving modern analytic science, at best, a subordinate role. For Hegel, it was philosophy, and in particular his own philosophy, not physical science that epitomized true knowledge.⁸ Equally, Hegel’s work contributed greatly to making history central to nineteenth-century thinking. As Ermarth comments:

History, which had previously been regarded by most secular thinkers as the sphere of contingency, chaos and error, became in Hegel’s system the very process of reason itself. In history the mind discovers and recovers the record of its own operation; it thereby comes to itself by overcoming its initial self-alienation.

(Ermarth 1978:49)

The absolute idealists were very influential in the early nineteenth century, but by the 1840s even Hegel’s influence began to wane. This was partly because his philosophy had become identified with the Prussian state at a time when that state was under attack, partly the result of the progress of science and the failure of absolute idealism to take effective account of natural scientific ways of thinking. As we have seen, materialism was closely associated with the development of science, it was a view adopted by many working scientists, and in the 1840s and 1850s, in the wake of the collapse of idealism it experienced a revival in Germany (Gregory 1977). However, ironically, developments in one of the sciences also posed a serious challenge to it. Research on the physiology of human perception began to suggest that our experience of the world, including scientific observations, is dependent on the physical structure of our senses. This reinforced earlier arguments to be found in Kant and the British empiricists that rejected realism, at least in its most naïve form, denying that we could have knowledge of a world independent of our experience. This conflict was brought to a head in the Materialism- usstreit of 1854: during a scientific convention Helmoltz and some other leading scientists attacked materialism, calling for a revival of Kant’s critical philosophy. This was one of the first signs of the revival of interest in Kant that was an important feature of the century.

As a result of these developments, neither idealism nor materialism dominated the philosophical scene in Germany in the latter half of the century. Positivism, a point of view that had begun its development in Britain and France, gained considerable support in Germany as the century progressed. Like materialism it took science as an epistemological ideal, but it differed from materialism in rejecting realism. Equally important was the historicist movement which developed out of German Romanticism. While it shared the idealists’ rejection of the view that natural science was the only form of true knowledge, it did not accept what it saw as their reduction of the human spirit and its history to a single process of rational development. Instead, like Romanticism, historicism stressed the diversity of human cultures. Also important at this time, as we have seen, were calls for a return to Kant, and there developed a substantial neo-Kantian movement. It was believed that Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had misread Kant’s work and that this was one reason for the failure of their systems. But the interpretations of Kant that resulted were diverse, some quite close to positivism, others sharing much with historicism, yet others approaching Platonism.

Positivism, historicism, and neo-Kantianism were extraordinarily influential in Germany, and subsequently for US intellectual life in the early twentieth century. Many of the arguments used by Blumer and by qualitative researchers today can be found in these three nineteenthcentury intellectual movements. For this reason, I shall discuss them in some depth.

POSITIVISM

Positivism is a much abused term.⁹ I shall use it to refer to the combination of three ideas. The first concerns the concept of scientific law. The positivists retained from natural law theory the idea that the central aim in the study of the social world was to identify universal laws. However, under the influence of developments in both philosophy and the natural sciences these laws came to be reinterpreted as regularities describing human behaviour rather than as political ideals used to judge the value of existing political arrangements.

A second important element of positivism is the restriction of knowledge to experience, in the form of elemental sensations. This is a form of phenomenalism: the claim that we only have knowledge of the phenomena available to our senses. This does not necessarily involve a denial of the existence of an external world: questions of the existence or non-existence of such a world are simply placed outside the boundaries of the knowable. An important feature of the phenomenalism of the positivists was a rejection of the concept of causality. They denied that laws involve necessary connections. Instead, laws were treated as summaries of regular patterns of occurrence experienced among phenomena.

A third component of positivism is the view that science represents the most valid form of human knowledge. Much of the impetus of positivism arises from the desire to apply the methods of the natural sciences to other areas, in the belief that this will produce similar benefits to those already visible in the physical realm, notably advances in technology. Furthermore, for positivists, all scientific inquiry shares the same methodological principles, and perhaps ultimately is reducible to a single science, most commonly physics.

The beliefs of the nineteenth-century writers who are usually regarded as positivists vary considerably, not just in how they interpret the concept of law, phenomenalism and the primacy and unity of science, but also in how strongly they adhere to these principles. None the less, these three ideas, in some combination, are to be found in the work of some of the most influential nineteenth-century philosophers, in particular Comte, Mill, Spencer, and Mach.

Positivist thinking was stimulated by the scientific developments of the seventeenth century, though there were earlier precursors (Kolakowski 1972). Although Newton’s views were predominantly realist, in the sense that he believed in the existence of atoms, and even of forces like gravity that were independent of our perceptions of them, his concern to distance his work from speculative metaphysics led to statement...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Notes
• References