A guide for interdisciplinary researchers: Adding axiology alongside ontology and epistemology

7 thoughts on “A guide for interdisciplinary researchers: Adding axiology alongside ontology and epistemology”

1. I appreciate the article and the follow-on conversation. Thank you for opening up the issues in a most stimulating way.
   Your arguments seem to emphasize interdisciplinary processes that can invite alternative views, some of which are conscious, others less so, and some that are opaque because of their tacit nature.
   A book that addresses some of the paradigmatic issues of interdisciplinary work is The Structure of Moral Revolutions, by Robert Baker. The examples he cites, e.g., attitudes towards death and autopsies, bioethics, etc., seem to track with your discussions to a degree.
   A question: do you see any differences in this approach when comparing and contrasting research boundaries and constraints?
   Thanks for a good read and energizing thoughts.
   Jim

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2. Thanks to Peter for keeping philosophy on a front burner. In response to the Comments originally posted … I’d be curious to know what you think about the Toolbox Project’s categories and sequence of questions–vis a vis your focus on identifying underlying values and assumptions. Eigenbrode, of course, was a partner in its design. I also appreciate your calling attention to Després, et al. given their building on Habermas with a scheme of different forms of rationality. Julie T. Klein

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3. Dear Peter- Thank you so much for such a great article! I certainly learned a lot. Curiously, I am a musician, music teacher, and coordinator of cultural exchange projects. I found some of your thoughts very insightful and helpful for my practice. I want to ask you (or any other colleagues reading) is there a “go to” textbook that you might recommended that would get me started in mastering the basic understanding of axiology from an academic perspective? Moore specifically, lay out all of the fundamentals of ethics and aesthetics? I have run into many challenges in my practice in recent years, specifically with regards to aesthetics, educational validity, and social issues. Thank you so much!

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4. Thanks for a very thought provoking post. Are you aware of any use of this type of heuristic in surveys of research teams (particularly those that might have a transdisciplinary element) or management issues? Your post brought to mind this 2007 Eigenbrode et al article “Employing Philosophical Dialogue in Collaborative Science” (http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1641/B570109) and I wondered about the possible use of your piece as a tool to explore thinking either within teams or across issue areas where significant conflicts exist over resource management decisions (and the science used to make those decisions). Thank you.

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   • Regards your first question “Are you aware of any use of this type of heuristic in surveys of research teams…”:
     Sorry to have to answer in the negative but nothing comes to mind I’m afraid.

     Regards your second question: “…the possible use of your piece as a tool to explore thinking either within teams or across issue areas where significant conflicts exist over resource management decisions (and the science used to make those decisions)”:
     A good and complex question Lindsey, one in which I am unsure I can respond to adequately (after taking more time than I should have to ponder it) – here is my effort to follow.

     I think you have picked an excellent example in Eigenbrode et al (2007) (http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1641/B570109), and my response is just to speculate a little up and away from it, which is a useful springboard for thinking things through.

     So, in its current form the heuristic is shaped towards individual contemplation, and I suspect it may be difficult to use the heuristic in an interdisciplinary team context – it lacks detail and context, requires specialised knowledge to understand and, all things being even, would likely need to be reworked or unpacked for team use. On the assumption though that a team did have the ability to undertake a healthy collaborative process, it might be possible to emerge a greater good from the heuristic through an ad-hoc approach or using a collaborative process similar to the one outlined in Eigenbrode et al (2007) (p.60) (or to experiment with other processes; eg., nomadic concepts comes to mind (https://naturalsciences.ch/co-producing-knowledge-explained/methods/td-net_toolbox/nomadic_concepts); or, still keeping it simple, focusing on a power aware, ongoing team collaboration process such as depicted (on page 479 in) Després et al (2004) ‘Collaborative planning for retrofitting suburbs: Transdisciplinarity and intersubjectivity in action’ (DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2003.10.004)). It makes me nervous thinking about it all though, quite a few things could fail to work, and I would worry there is a risk of increasing conflict or confusion in a team – especially if this is a prescribed task.

     One of the benefits of Eigenbrode et al (2007) is that the system they outline arises in part from participants own understanding, through a relatively straightforward collaborative process. The heuristic though is simultaneously more specific (in structuring ontology, epistemology and axiology), and broader (as based on a theory of science outlined in Patterson and Williams (1998)). To me, by itself the heuristic is a challenging conceptual array to use collaboratively.

     What this then suggests is that a more complex and intensive (or extended) collaborative process would be required, as based on a more expansive knowledge base. The immediate obvious way forward then is to use the work that the heuristic emerges from, that is Patterson and Williams (1998), as the platform (with caution paid to the age of the work). This would provide both greater context and specific knowledge (of which the heuristic is just a sub-part). The main challenge, assuming team consensus to advance down this pathway, would be to find a supportive collaborative process to explore Patterson and Williams (1998) with.

     What such a collaborative process should be though extends a tad beyond your question, though it would have to be well-attuned to the particular context of the team, the particularities of the NRM issue involved and may have to be built rather than pulled ‘off-the-shelf’. I’d also note that I’ve not dealt much here with the issues that might arise from teams operating with a strongly conflictual NRM issue, or one with stakeholders as partners, which opens up another set of complexities. This all though is getting to be a lot of work to establish and so this may reinforce that the heuristic is best used by the individual (researcher), which is to recommend against its ‘possible use in teams’, all things being even.

     Anyway, rather long response from me, but was interesting to try and think it through, so thanks for your comment Lindsey and apologies for the delay in responding.

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5. Lots of things that could be said here, but I’ll confine myself to two:

   First, I notice that you talk in terms of axiological commitments at the highest level of research – what the different paradigms value. In some ways, I find the integration of axiology with epistemology the most interesting angle: that boundary judgements about what is relevant (to the researchers and/or participants) are always associated with value judgements about what matters in terms of our purposes. And the relationship is two-way: values inform the drawing of boundaries, and pre-existing boundary judgements constrain the values that appear possible. This is an axiological perspective that has major implications for research because the latter can never be value-neutral – claims to objectivity about phenomena are still contestable using the question “have you looked at the right thing in the first place?” Thus, objectivity doesn’t disappear altogether (unlike in some interpretive perspectives), but only becomes relevant once we have agreement between the relevant parties in the research on the right question to ask. Of course, only some questions need a claim to an objective answer; some might need a normative or subjective one.

   My second point is more of a question – do you believe that, when we undertake controlled observations or investigations of meaning, the accompanying philosophical assumptions automatically flow in? I don’t think it’s that simple. When we are observing, we might be making an assumption that we’re looking at something in the real world in order to make an objective proposition about it, but I don’t think that then has to imply that the investigation of (subjective or normative) meanings is invalid. Likewise, when we investigate meanings, we are acknowledging human constructions, but that does not extend to the judgement that only meaning-orientated inquiry is valid, and scientific observation is wrong. I reckon we can have multi-faceted onto-epistemological positions that allow all the methods to be seen as valid. We only suffer philosophical contradiction when we mix methods if we accept what systems thinkers call “isolationist” assumptions: that only one mode of research is valid, and the rest are simply wrong because they are based on faulty philosophies.

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   • Thank-you for your thoughtful and interesting response Gerald.

     I’ll restrict my response to a single concern I had in writing the post, and which you perceptively draw out as a problem – notably ‘isolationist’ assumptions.

     I’ll apologise for the length (I’m not expecting a reply, if that is helpful), but your comment has let me have another go at this issue, successfully or not as the case may be! As it is long, I have split it into two – the first part is my suggestion of an additional paragraph to the above blog-post. The second part (which can be skipped), is my direct response to the isolationist issue you raised.

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     PART 1 of 2

     The problem with ‘isolationist’ assumptions emerging in the post (outside of ruling out the idea of the heuristic in the post as having any use at all) is that the post above needs extra explanation.

     My stripping out the normative commitments alone, from Patterson and Williams (1998), disbalances part of their meaning. Therefore, it is a problem in using the heuristic in this post to understand normative commitments, as the way that the bifurcated sets of normative commitments are discussed may impel an either/or approach to, eg., objectivist claims on one hand or meaning-making claims on the other. This can promote contradiction and restrict what methods may be (seen to be) valid or not, and what normative commitments may be seen as related to them.

     I’ve written an additional paragraph that should perhaps have been added to the post (possibly placed after the first figure). It may work to help resolve the serious issue you raise, about isolationist tendencies that emerge from reading the tables. To deal with methods though, I’d have had to add even more text, so this material still dodges the methods issue per se. Here is the suggested paragraph:

     “A warning is required though when thinking through these patterns of normative commitments. You, the reader, bring your own normative commitments to this experience. Your worldview and paradigm (or research tradition) preferences mean that certain normative commitments may be prioritisied over others (eg., you may prefer objectivist commitments over meaning-making commitments). Further, you’ll have and have likely used expertise developed within at least one disciplinary space/ paradigm, and so when reading about normative commitments there is a kind of ‘natural’ clustering of the individual commitments that reflect the paradigmatic orientation most familiar to you. Worldviews and paradigms come with histories, and their histories can be strong and exclusionary. The figure and tables in this post are meant to offer a glimpse of the complexity in the way normative commitments underpin research, a way of opening-up thinking by providing straight-forward statements to help in orientation. Importantly then, the link between any one commitment and another is not privileged, even though the explanation above infers (what would be incorrectly) that there is a necessary connection. Although the axiology, ontology and epistemology utilised should be consistent together, the explanation for this consistency are made within a paradigm, or at the level of the research program in the methodology, and they stand and fall on their coherency in practice and as policed by some community of users (researchers usually). Interdisciplinarity in this sense, requires identifying and releasing particular boundary conditions in-self, and a fairly continuous expansion of philosophical and technical knowledge about research”.

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     PART 2 of 2
     This is part two, my direct response to your comment re isolationist assumptions in the post.

     At the risk of reading your thoughts incorrectly Gerald, I’d like to frame a part of your comment that in turn led to the reframing of my post.

     So, in regards how we know and what we value, your comment above focuses on the purpose of research, and how methods are chosen and enacted – and as we are discussing interdisciplinarity, this covers mixing methods. In the post, I tried to do a (not so successful) dodge on issues raised by the heuristic at the level of research program, methodology and methods. As you infer, there is complexity here of significance, and in my drafts of the post the word-count ballooned when I tried to deal with it. So, in the end it was not dealt with in the post. This then meant that the tension with determining normative commitments (at the worldview and paradigmatic level) remains in place when coming down to the level of purpose, planning and action in research – this can mean that the heuristic and my description of it suggests that, as you note, only certain kinds of claim-making (eg., objectivist) are legitimate. If that is the case, normative commitments can be exclusive (isolationist). A researcher reading in or doing interdisciplinary work that is exclusive, will then in all likelihood confront philosophical contradiction and potentially a crisis – instead of informing and expanding capacity, the heuristic instead may make it harder to be interdisciplinary.

     So, you ask “…do you believe that, when we undertake controlled observations or investigations of meaning, the accompanying philosophical assumptions automatically flow in?” You then say “I don’t think it’s that simple”. I will answer these in reverse order.

     So, I agree, the inter-relationship between normative commitments and the practice of research is not simple. This is because normative commitments inform the choice of method, alongside wrapping and informing method in practice; but the why, when and how of this relationship is another question entirely. I’ll unpack it (much of which and more, you’ll know), opening my understanding (or lack thereof) to critique, then answer your question.

     So, a method is a technique; a way of doing something in some context. A research method is a procedure for collecting/selecting, organising, analysing/synthesising and presenting data.

     A paradigm (eg., interpretivism) has a set of normative commitments that come with it. A method does not necessarily have such, only becoming a part of some set of normative commitments once some piece of research has been stabilised as a whole (finished). This preceding sentence has significant complexities in it, but for the sake of space I will oversimply the explanation of why I think this is the case.

     This is a vast generalisation, but when a research purpose is developed, that purpose will direct the research plan (research design/strategy). Part of the plan, and a critical part, are the choice and use of research methods. In disciplinary research, the research methods will be drawn from within a disciplinary paradigm – in this sense, the methods will appear to come with a pre-existing set of normative commitments stemming from the paradigm. In interdisciplinary research, the methods may come from differing disciplines/paradigms. Questions of incommensurability then arise in the interpretation of method entry (to the research) and use as linked to the normative commitments the involved researchers hold and also allow to exist (advertently or inadvertently). The normative commitments of the researcher/s involved (and their attached research community) in such scenarios are of high importance, as there is a kind of fusion going on that means the normative commitments that envelop the methods used may not be the normative commitments that one might expect as based on wherever the method first came from. By the time the interdisciplinary research is concluded, the methods will have become a part of some set of normative commitments, just what being dependent on the particular research context as a whole.

     What generally does the work in these scenarios is the methodology. The methodology justifies the methods in the research, and depending how extensive the methodology is, also the connectivity between normative commitments (ontology, epistemology, axiology), the research purpose/problem (questions), paradigm, disciplinary theories explicitly used, strategy (logic of inquiry), and so forth. Complexities pile on from here.

     One complexity you have noted, is that some paradigms (research communities) will tolerate or legitimate only certain methodology/method mixes – this is I gather what you mean by ‘isolationist’ – where a “mode of research” isolates itself as the only legitimate way to know and value.

     To return to your question, “…do you believe that, when we undertake controlled observations or investigations of meaning, the accompanying philosophical assumptions automatically flow in?” My answer is no. I think we are closer together than further apart on this – that is to say, isolationist thinking damages (even dooms) interdisciplinarity.

     In the end, your comment raises the concern if this suggested heuristic in this post is worth the effort to deploy it?

     Instead of answering either way (apart from adding the new paragraph that opens this comment and tries to deal with my saying ‘no’ to your question), I’d rather say that I arrived at writing this post in response to a comment (by Adam Potthast) to Moon and Blackman’s post (https://i2insights.org/2017/05/02/philosophy-for-interdisciplinarity/). Adam asserted, quite reasonably, that you would not “…see many philosophers agreeing with the characterizations of philosophical views in [Moon and Blackman’s] post”. A problem for interdisciplinary researchers, from my perspective, is that few started off their working lives as philosophers, and to master the discipline of philosophy or to be able to understand the received wisdom of philosophers is a substantive task, beneficial as it is. I’d propose that a pragmatic ethic of ‘whatever it takes in making do with philosophy for interdisciplinary research’ is, I believe, worthy. So, this kind of approach is not about mastery, but sensitisation. It is not about confidently knowing, but instead an ability to make better sense of the muddlesome ways we might have to do interdisciplinary research, whilst avoiding falling for the false-simplicity supplied by this very same way of ‘whatever it takes’ philosophising on science. It’s hard, messy and open to substantive error. But I think it is worth the effort, and so that lead to this post, for better or worse, and has powered this long response to your excellent comment.

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