Intellectual Ginnels

I have never charted my journeys of enquiry, which may be why I am unable to recall much of what I discover. In a determined effort to bore my remaining reader into submission I am setting out the strange paths traversed by my attention today.

Here is part of the spiel about a UK government funded research project, read in an online journal which I use as an information source at work. This phrase piqued my interest. “Action research is the methodology chosen for the project. Action research aims to integrate action and reflection so that the knowledge developed in the inquiry process is directly relevant to practitioners addressing the issues being studied.”
My sceptical antennae always quiver when I see the words ‘methodology’ and ‘strong theory’.

“A new £800,000 research project is bringing
together some of the UK’s leading academics
and industrialists to help reduce the amount of
climate-changing carbon dioxide released by
the food industry……

The research is headed by Peter Reason,
Professor of Action Research at the University
of Bath School of Management and Director of
the internationally renowned Centre for Action
Research in Professional Practice (CARPP). It
includes leading experts drawn from both
industry and academia….

Action research is the methodology chosen for
the project. Action research aims to integrate
action and reflection so that the knowledge
developed in the inquiry process is directly
relevant to practitioners addressing the issues
being studied. Action research is particularly
useful in identifying cultural, organisational and
subjective factors at play in a situation and at
turning strong theory into effective action.

So how does “Action Research” differ from the basic principles of managing any activity? Have a look at the Deming Cycle . W.Edwards Deming and Walter.A.Shewhart codified this bit of common sense back in the fifties. It was an early example of cybernetics , a discipline usually considered to have been founded by Norbert Wiener in 1948. Kurt Lewin, who was working in social psychology in the USA during WWII, coined the term 'action research' a few years before Deming and Shewhart put their ideas together in industry. Could it be that cybernetics and quality assurance have their intellectual roots in political philosophy and social psychology? Thinking about this led me ponder how justified beliefs are propagated. Why did the systematization of several different areas of science and engineering occur simultaneously in the USA in the late 1940s and early 1950s?

The study of the development of human beliefs has been embraced by different academic circles. Historians, philosophers and sociologists have all set out their various programmes, perhaps most controversially the Strong program associated with David Bloor and his Edinburgh group. More recently Biologists have got in on the act, with Dawkin’s theory of memetics strongly supported by the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Personally I doubt that any general theory can do justice to the complexity of the evolution of beliefs and ideologies. It seems to me that the careful historian is most likely to see the causes and connections between events.

So here I am, thinking about sociology and ideology, and I google The Theory of Ideology: Bringing the Mind Back In. I had not encountered the work of Trevor Pateman, and I was impressed. There is much more on his website , some that I find agreeable and enlightening, some that is more controversial but still well written and thought provoking, and this very amusing children's story .

Here, for the moment, the journey ends. I was aware of some of this material before and today’s peregrination will help fix a little of it more firmly in my memory and, hopefully, enable me to bring it to mind more readily. Trevor Pateman’s website and papers were a real gold nugget. There are hours of pleasure and contemplation to be had there. Oh happy day!

Testing Times

So we have had nine years of Mr.Blair’s “Education, Education, Education”; and what have we got? Dumb Britain

Rationality, Reason and Logic

These words form a web of confusion. Personally, I have no desire to be rational. Rationality is a Cartesian idea, in which all knowledge is based upon some kind of analytic schema, pace Quine.
Reason I can deal with - it is logic designed to convince; argument that is both valid and persuasive. Logic alone is not persuasive. An example - 1.crows are black. 2. crows are birds. Thus 3. birds are black. A valid argument; the premises are true. Sadly the conclusion is somewhat wide of the mark. So much for rationalism.

Sad Days

Terrible news today. We find that our friend, and mentor on all things Burmese Cat related, has died. For the short time we new her June Tomkinson was helpful, friendly and straightforward. We will remember her kindness.

Fallibilism

Have you ever heard or seen something odd, and shortly thereafter doubted whether it could have happened at all?
Heard on the BBC Radio4 programme PM, about an hour ago...
Eddie Mayer "We go now to Willie Notcutt, a surgeon at the Central Lancashire (it was actually Great Yarmouth - I was very fallible!) Hospital", followed by perfectly sensible interview about NHS funding.
Lancashire; Willie Notcutt? It couldn't be that somebody is tweaking Auntie Beeb's nose could it?
I remember from my days as a Med Lab Scientist getting a sample of tissue from a breast reduction, purportedly from a patient called Norma Stitz. I think that sort of thing is still going on.

Post script: Yes, there really is an anaesthetist called Willie Notcutt. He's quite famous through his association with a cannabis substitute called Sativa. It would have been so much more fun had he been a surgeon.

Archetypal Colonic Material of Taurine Provenance

I confess it; I am obscenely jealous of Butterflies and Wheels
The comments and articles are so..... good. The dissection of absurdity is so clinical. I often think of commenting on some current affair only to find that Benson and Stangroom have already done it.
Well, this is one they may have missed. Not current affairs, I will own, but a piece of prose so mind-numbingly self-conscious that the sense of the piece is quite obscured. A taste, for those unwilling to scramble their synapses...
"From a retrospective vantage point, modern anthropocentric historicism can be seen as one of the first archeological projects of individual moral consciousness, realized, inter alia, by the reduction of personal accountability and freedom to the anonymous structures of historical conjunctures understood as manifestations of the absolute spirit; the collective consciousness of class, nation, civilization or epoch; evolutionary tendencies of matter; or monadic structures of culture. In that, romantic historiosophy stands in direct opposition to the critical character of Kantian transcendental rationalism."
What makes this so truly awful is that the critique of historicism is well deserved and the article is very well researched; so why spoil it with the high flown PoMo style?

Blunkett Deblunked

I doubt that David Blunkett really deserved to lose his ministerial post over a spot of bureaucratic trivia alone, but then it isn't alone, is it? I dimly remembered the terrible reputation of Sheffield City Council in the 70s, so I thought a little digging might be in order - and what a nugget I found by this staunchly labour commentator. No, you did not misread - staunchly labour commentator.
Now if only we could get rid of psychotic bully John Reid, the poisonously dissembling Alan Milburn and the pathetically irrational Charles Clarke we might get a shot at the biggest charlatan of them all.