Significant ideas from others that have influenced my own research from Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Polanyi, Jurgen Habermas, Basil Bernstein, Barbara Thayer-Bacon and Alan Rayner. Access to the 1995 Advanced Bluffer's Guide to Action Research.
MacIntyre, A. (1988) Whose Justice? Which
Rationality? Duckworth; London.
The rival claims to truth of contending traditions of
enquiry depend for their vindication upon the adequacy and explanatory power of
the histories which the resources of each of those traditions in conflict
enable their adherents to write. (MacIntyre, 1988, p. 403)
Michael Polanyi
(1958) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. London;
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Chapter 10 Commitment
Fundamental Beliefs.
I believe that in spite of the hazards involved, I am
called upon to search for the truth and state my findings. This sentence, summarizing my fiduciary programme,
conveys an ultimate belief which I find myself holding. Its assertion much
therefore prove consistent with its content by practising what it authorizes.
This is indeed true. For in uttering this sentence I both say that I must
commit myself by thought and speech, and do so at the same time. Any enquiry
into our ultimate beliefs can be consistent only if it presupposes its own
conclusions. It must be intentionally circular. (p.299)
Chapter 11 The Logic of Achievement
In the rest of this book I shall outline some views on the
nature of living beings, including man, which clearly follow from the
acceptance of my commitment to personal knowledge. Having decided that I must
understand the world from my point of view, as a person claiming originality
and exercising his personal judgement responsibly with universal intent, I must
now develop a conceptual framework which both recognises the existence of the
other such persons and envisages that fact that they have come into existence
by evolution from primordial inanimate beginnings. (p. 327)
Chapter 13. The Rise of Man
I have arrived at the opening of this last chapter without having suggested any definite theory concerning the nature of things; and I shall finish this chapter without having presented any such theory. This book tries to serve a different and in a sense perhaps more ambitious purpose. Its aim is to re-equip men with the faculties which centuries of critical thought have taught them to distrust. The reader has been invited to use these faculties and contemplate thus a picture of things restored to their fairly obvious nature. This is all the book was meant to do. For once men have been made to realize the crippling mutilations imposed by an objectivist framework Ð once the veil of ambiguities covering up these mutilations has been definitely dissolved Ð many fresh minds will turn to the task of reinterpreting the world as it is, and as it then once more will be seen to be. (p. 381)
I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting
communicatively must, in performing any speech action, raise universal validity
claims and suppose that they can be vindicated (or redeemed). Insofar as he
wants to participate in a process of reaching understanding, he cannot avoid
raising the following Ð and indeed precisely the following Ð validity claims.
He claims to be:
a) Uttering
something understandably;
b) Giving
(the hearer) something to understand;
c) Making
himself thereby understandable. And
d) Coming
to an understanding with another person.
The speaker must choose a comprehensible expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one another. The speaker must have the intention of communicating a true proposition (or a propositional content, the existential presuppositions of which are satisfied) so that the hearer can share the knowledge of the speaker. The speaker must want to express his intentions truthfully so that the hearer can believe (p.2) the utterance of the speaker (can trust him). Finally, the speaker must choose an utterance that is right so that the hearer can accept the utterance and speaker and hearer can agree with on another in the utterance with respect to a recognized normative background. Moreover, communicative action can continue undisturbed only as long as participants suppose that the validity claims they reciprocally raise are justified. (p.3) (Habermas, 1976, pp.2-3)
Habermas, J. (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action
Volume Two: The Critique of Functionalist Reason. Oxford; Polity.
"..... I have attempted to free historical materialism from
its philosophical ballast. Two abstractions are required for this: I)
abstracting the development of the cognitive structures from the historical
dynamic of events, and ii) abstracting the evolution of society from the
historical concretion of forms of life. Both help in getting beyond the
confusion of basic categories to which the philosophy of history owes its
existence.
A theory developed in this way can no longer start by examining concrete ideals immanent in traditional forms of life. It must orient itself to the range of learning processes that is opened up at a given time by a historically attained level of learning. It must refrain from critically evaluating and normatively ordering totalities, forms of life and cultures, and life-contexts and epochs as a whole. And yet it can take up some of the intentions for which the interdisciplinary research program of earlier critical theory remains instructive.
Coming at the end of a complicated study of the main features of a theory of communicative action, this suggestion cannot count even as a "promissory note." It is less a promise than a conjecture." (Habermas, 1987, p. 383)
Basil Bernstein (2000) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and
Identity: Theory, Research, Critique, Lanham,
Boulder, New York, Oxford; Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
"First of all, there are the conditions for an effective
democracy. I am not going to derive these from high-order principles, I am just
going to announce them. They first condition is that people must feel that they
have a stake in society. Stake may be a bad metaphor, because by stake I mean
that not only are people concerned to receive something but that they are also
concerned to give something. This notion of stake has two aspects to it, the
receiving and the giving. People must feel that they have a stake in both
senses of the term.
Second, people must have confidence that the political arrangements they create will realise this stake, or give grounds if they do not. In a sense it does not matter too much if this stake is not realised, or only partly realised, providing there are good grounds for it not being realised or only partly realised." (Bernstein, 2000, p. xx)
Barbara Thayer-Bacon (2003) Relational (e)pistemologies.
Oxford; Peter Lang)
My project is one of analysis and critique, as well as redescription. What I offer is one pragmatist social feminist view, a relational perspective of knowing, embedded within a discussion of many other relational views. In Relational "(e)pistemologies," I seek to offer a feminist (e)pistemological theory that insists that knowers/subjects are fallible, that our criteria are corrigible (capable of being corrected), and that our standards are social constructed, and thus continually in need of critique and reconstruction. I offer a self-conscious and reflective (e)pistemological theory, one that attempts to be adjustable and adaptable as people gain further in understanding. This (e)pistemology must be inclusive and open to others, because of its assumption of fallible knowers. And this (e)pistemology must be capable of being corrected because of its assumption that our criteria and standards are of this world, ones we, as fallible knowers, socially construct. (Thayer-Bacon, 2003, p.7).
Rayner, A. (2004) INCLUSIONALITY: The Science, Art
and Spirituality of Place, Space and Evolution. Retrieved 3
September 2006 from http://people.bath.ac.uk/bssadmr/inclusionality/placespaceevolution.html
Prelude 'Inclusionality'
expresses the idea that space, far from passively surrounding and isolating
discrete massy objects, is a vital, dynamic inclusion within, around and
permeating natural form across all scales of organization, allowing diverse
possibilities for movement and communication. This way of understanding natural
form radically affects not only the way we interpret all kinds of irreversible
dynamic processes, but also the fundamental meaning of 'self' as a complex
identity comprising inner, outer and intermediary domains, rather than an
independent, single-centred entity. Correspondingly, boundaries that from an
orthodox perspective are regarded as discrete, fixed limits (smooth,
space-excluding, Euclidean lines or surfaces) of isolated objects or systems,
are seen inclusionally as pivotal, relational places. Here, complex, dynamic
arrays of voids and relief both emerge from and pattern the co-creative
togetherness of inner and outer domains, as in the banks of a river that
simultaneously express and mould both flowing stream and receptive landscape.
Shifting the Logical Premise - From Orthodox
Imposition to Heterodox Inclusion
At the heart of
inclusionality, then, is a simple shift in the way we frame reality, from
absolutely fixed to relationally dynamic. This shift arises from perceiving
space and boundaries as connective, reflective and co-creative, rather than
severing, in their vital role of producing heterogeneous form and local
identity within a featured rather than featureless, dynamic rather than static,
Universe. We hence move from perceiving space as 'an absence of presence' Ð an
emptiness that we exclude from our focus on material things Ð to appreciating
space as a 'presence of absence', an inductive 'attractor' whose
ever-transforming shape provides the coherence and creative potential for
evolutionary processes of all kinds to occur. Correspondingly, we extend beyond
orthodox impositional logic based on the notion of discrete objects transacting
within pre-set limits of Cartesian space, to the heterodox inclusional logic of
distinct, ever-transforming relational places with reciprocally coupled insides
and outsides communicating through intermediary domains. In other words, we
move from the 'logic of the excluded middle' to the 'logic of the included
middle'. To make this shift does
not depend on new scientific knowledge or conjecture about supernatural forces,
extraterrestrial life or whatever. All it requires is awareness and
assimilation into understanding of the spatial possibility that permeates
within, around and through natural features from sub-atomic to Universal in
scale.
***********
I've just put on the web a copy of the Advanced Bluffers
Guide to Action Research I used in 1995 with a group of doctoral researchers.
You can access this from the frontpage of http://www.actionresearch.net or
directly at
http://www.jackwhitehead.com/jack/95contents.htm
I think the third cycle on relevance, rigour and validity
might be helpful in your own research as Peggy Kok applied Winter's six
criteria for enhancing rigour in action research and Martin Forrest
demonstrated how a validation group helped to enhance the validity of his
narrative.
The fourth cycle on creating educational theory and a good
social order could be helpful in your own enquiries. I'm seeing a narrative the
explains your own learning as your seeking to live your values as fully as you
can and to enhance your skills and understandings as your living educational
theory.