Little Shift, for Pancake-Flip · 19 December 2007
A few years back, I started asking how-questions.
I was initially trained in statistical and formal modeling—ways of asking and answering why-questions predicated on a world constructed out of “things” also known as variables. Think Freakonomics: elegant pat-answers to elegant why-questions. Beautiful, but trite. The just-so stories of my formal training were appealing, but the non-recognition that they were analytical houses of cards collided head-on with my background in Continental philosophy. Because of all those dead Germans, I wanted more attention to the humanly-constructed nature of the realities at hand. And to the endlessly tactile, experienced, immediacies of the WORLD. Phenomenology, baby.
How-questions are messy and they pay less, but the process of answering them is more involving and the provisionality of their answers seems more honest. I like the idea of letting the data, or simply the world, discipline my big ideas. So it is: now I do ethnography and interview-based research far more than large surveys and statistical models. Even though it’s the models that get the phone calls: the world loves tight explanations. Close description, hesitant generalization: much less sciency and much less useful in our facts-you-can-use forward tilt existence.
Anyway, as I looked back the other day on the first year of writing in this space, I saw a hilarious predominance of why-questioning. God, do I know how to write 500 words without making an argument? What am I, Maureen Dowd-meets-Yoga Journal?
Well, hrmmm. To a degree I’ve been nicely trained that words are tools for putting together just-so stories; and this effects the structure of my thought down to the way I engage with ashtanga yoga and our weird modern cultures of transformation and quests for the sublime. Very 21st century American of me. But the thing is, I have plenty of (equally western) resources for doing thick description and grubby worldfulness and how-questioning. And this year I’d like to light them up a little bit more, work closer to the ground, and grasp a little less for arguments and explanations.
More of the how, less of the why. As the big shift comes in on us (do you feel it? do you? our pancake’s just about cooked, you know), we will see what happens, and how interesting my boring can get.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
, evolution
, science
, social theory
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Such a pleasure, not to finish a thought.
Posted by: karen · Dec 19, 08:31 PM · #
you flip the pancake when the bubbles rise to the top…
Posted by: cranky housefrau · Dec 20, 05:20 AM · #
mmm, I think that is what is going on this week. Many people are just fried.
Shortest day, strong moon, ovulation, rain (which I love)...: choose your culprit.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 20, 05:43 AM · #
Well on my phd I spent approx. 2 years on the why and then the rest finding out how. Without the why, you don’t have any solid reason for doing what you do. The why is the grounding element. The how comes as a result. Then of course comes when (will I finish) and then of course the “where” (did I put all the papers I read), then the “what?” (when they ask a pertinent question in my viva).
So many questions. Though as they say not every question requires an answer.
Hello btw, I’ve not been very good at checking in and blogging either recently!
cj x
Posted by: CJ · Dec 20, 06:42 AM · #
I’m bi-directional. Sometimes I already have the idea and I find the right data to support it; Othertimes I’ll use the data to help figure out the idea. In the end, all I really care about is the quality of the idea and how it’s presented (the story).
Posted by: cody · Dec 20, 08:08 AM · #
Not being natively accustomed to questions divided into “how” and “why” (is that the humanities in me?), I think it falls out this way: I’ve often used “why” to interrogate a thing, to state a paradox, a sort of aggressive ice-breaker. “How,” on the other hand, while still capable of polemic (see a longish post of mine recently), usually comes out “how does thing x work?” and is then followed by a series of extrapolations, evidence and theorizing, some of which is always bs. “Why” is usually short for “WTF is up with…” and “how” then follows up.
Posted by: patrick · Dec 20, 08:10 AM · #
Why questions are metaphysically silly. :)
Posted by: R · Dec 20, 12:41 PM · #
It must be crazy to try to work out the whys of a sociological problem. It’s hard enough to leap from black box thinking to real-world thinking just in physics. With people as the subject, I’d guess it’s really disorienting. People as probes for gauging people… where do you start?
Posted by: Carl · Dec 20, 12:47 PM · #
Yeah, when the object of study has consciousness and agency, it sorta complicates things. But I guess that’s part of the fun…
Posted by: R · Dec 20, 02:25 PM · #
CJ! Hello! Good to see you and warm wishes to you there in the English rains.
This reminds me to say that I have email pending to about five of you here, weeks delayed now; and I want to write it when the freneticism of my typing-clicking fingers (and the mind that belongs to them) is subsided.
I am thinking of you, actually, but running around too much to connect about it. Presently, I will. (I love how the Victorians used “presently” to mean “not in the the moment, but at a later moment….” but you know what I mean.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 20, 04:04 PM · #
The bi-directional thing is the mark of knowledge in action. I like that. It’s pragmatic. Apropo of dead Germans, you might enjoy these good ideas, CP.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 20, 04:20 PM · #
“Object of study.“ Leave it to a sociologist! (Me included—I totally make hay with that phrase.) Carl, yes it’s crazy. The interaction of scientist and subject. Heisenberg’s a painful cliche by now and a bad analog for social science in the first place, but this complication you mention is rich rich rich.
We should cross out “why” in academic journals—except for in real, practical research like the computer science of CJ’s doctorate—and replace it with “WTF is up with?” I think that would keep us a lot more honest. Because what is why?? What is “cause“? Um, a lot of medieval metaphysical mumbojumbo, as my hero David Hume established.
Like ether, sort of. (Though the whole NYT rumination yesterday about the “reality” of natural laws was fun.)
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 20, 04:23 PM · #
You know, I don’t think it is ok for me to name-check both Heisenberg and Heidegger in the same comment thread.
Especially after I just committed to writing more descriptively. Ha!
That is enough for this owl.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 20, 04:26 PM · #
Maybe citing Heisenberg in reference to social ideas is cliche for sociologists but there is symmetry in nature from top to bottom. Is that not what your beloved Wilber says? He cadged that from physics, by the way. WE had the idea first.
But since there is symmetry in the phenomena, the descriptive symbols must be symmetric too. You have nothing simpler to help you say “observer and observed influence one another inseparably” than you do in merely saying “Heisenberg.” Might as well put it to use.
Posted by: Carl · Dec 20, 04:41 PM · #
Ok. Though it pains me to see a good empirical rule translated by soft-sci into a wobbly metaphor.
Conceptual stretching: malady of the social sciences. Though it does afford The Editor and me many good laughs, especially at conference time.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 20, 05:25 PM · #
Why questions are metaphysically silly.
Zen masters and monks laugh at why questions. At first it seems perplexing, and then it’s just delightful.
Posted by: karen · Dec 20, 06:04 PM · #
I like you so much better than Maureen Dowd or Yoga journal.
Posted by: eor · Dec 20, 10:37 PM · #