Category Archives: Philosophy

There is No Observation (Including Measurement) without Theory: The Stanley Fish View

Posted on by
1

As I have said before:

(B)ecause of a unified view of construct validity, theory (and hermeneutics) touches all aspects of validity and measurement.

One thing I meant by this is that you can’t do a good job of measuring practice or performance if you don’t understand how measures and practices are theoretically and empirically related, or as I said in my last post:

Any measure implies a theoretical rationale that links performance and measures and it can be tested validated and improved over time.

(Although the topic is faith not measurement) Stanley Fish supports the same type of idea and writes in his NY Times column:

. . . there is no such thing as “common observation” or simply reporting the facts. To be sure, there is observation and observation can indeed serve to support or challenge hypotheses. But the act of observing can itself only take place within hypotheses (about the way the world is) . . . because it is within (the hypothesis) that observation and reasoning occur.

I would use the word theory instead of hypothesis, which I reserve as a word for research questions in an experimental context, but otherwise the meaning is pretty much the same.

Fish goes on to explain an aspect of theory that explains why people do not like the challenges that are presented by theory and deep theoretical understanding.

While those hypotheses are powerfully shaping of what can be seen, they themselves cannot be seen as long as we are operating within them; and if they do become visible and available for noticing, it will be because other hypotheses have slipped into their place and are now shaping perception, as it were, behind the curtain.

I’m not saying it is easy, developing measures with deep understanding is difficult, but I believe the effort is well worth it when the result are better more relevant measures and better performance.

A Caveat to the Use of Theory

Posted on by
Reply

I must add a caveat to my last post.  I use theory in a pragmatic instrumentalist way, not in an absolute way.  Theory does have limits, an “everything in moderation” idea.  Alex Kosulin explained the potential problems when theory becomes over extrapolated in his 1992 Introduction to Vygotsky’s Thought and Language*

Tracing the evolution of psychoanalysis, reflexology, Gestaltism, and personalism, (Vygotsky) revealed a uniform pattern to their development, an aggressive expansion in a desperate attempt to attain methodological hegemony.  The first stage in the development of each of these systems is an empirical discovery that proves to be important for the revision of the existing views concerning some specific behavioral or mental phenomena.  In the second stage . . .the initial discovery acquires a conceptual form, which expands so as to come to bear on related problems of psychology.  Even at this stage the ties between the conceptual form and the underlying empirical discovery are eroded.  The third stage is marked by the transformation of the conceptual form into an abstract explanatory principle applicable to any problem within the given discipline.  The discipline is captured by this expanding explanatory principle. . . .At the fourth stage the explanatory principle disengages itself from the subject matter of psychology and becomes a general methodology . . . at which point, Vygotsky observed – it usually collapses under the weight of its enormous explanatory claims.

In other words; theoretical contexts are important and abstraction and extrapolation has its limits.

*Kozulin, A. (1992). Vygotsky in Context, in A. Kozulin (Ed.) Though and Language: Cambridge MA, MIT Press.

Scanning Horizons of Passion: Finding an Epistemological Identity

Posted on by
Reply

After watching Randy Komisar on Academic Earth, it seems a good idea to define the horizons of my passions.  The idea is to understand what values and beliefs are driving you, what makes you want to turn the wheel and take opportunities, what passions count, because life only makes sense in the review mirror, not in the windshield.  I’ll start in the rearview mirror by analyzing beliefs drawn from past jobs, my graduate training and my dissertation studies over the next couple of posts.

A Framework for Action with Reflection: Measurement with Validity

Posted on by
1

My recent reading reinforce a need for validation thinking.

First, David Jones’ blog in a recent post considers a quote about the problems stemming from theory without action (idealism) and action without “philosophical reflection” (mindlessness).

Second, a reassertion of a limited (but still robust) neo-positivism by Philip Tetlock in Expert Political Judgment.

My Response: Let’s begin by refine Jones quote to read as follows:

Theory without the measurement of empirical correlates to justify action will lead to actions that are based only on biased judgment; and action without broad reflection (even if that action is supported by logical empirical correlates) just as surely leads to action that is based on unrecognized biased judgments.

This is also the basic argument that stands between logical positivism and radical social constructivism (at least in its straw men forms).  I believe that it argues for a dialectic type of response that is `implied by Jones quote.  One of the problems in the positivism / constructivism argument is that both sides spin complex arguments that fail at parsimony, that is, they become needlessly complex in the attempt to justify their radical stances.  This is where validity thinking can serve as Occam’s Razor.

First, consider a unified idea of construct validity: measurements (at least in the real world almost always) measure constructs, not real objects.  (eg. Even if we measure real objects [like pencils] we must define pencils [as not pens or not markers] in a way that indicates that what is indeed being measured is a construct.  This is not quite idealism.  Although it is possible to distinguish between constructs (like IQ) and real objects (like pencils); we cannot operationalize the measurement of real objects without referring to a construct in some way.  So, operationalism, the logical positivist’s banning of constructs by fiat, will not hold.)

Next: The purpose of measurement is to overcome the biases of Jones’ idealism.  We don’t normally fall into idealism because we rely on scientific methodology (based in measurement) to counter bias.  But, we can’t totally escape idealism with measurement because constructs provide a place for ideas and idea bias to creep back in.  Hence the dialectic, we measure with reflection.

In Messick’s validation framework reflection looks like this.

  1. Content validity: does the way we are measuring make sense both logically and through the experience of ourselves and others.
  2. Substantive: is there a theory (empirically supported) that gives meaning to the measures taken.
  3. Structural: do the measures faithfully reproduce the tasks or processes theorized to exist in the contexts or natural settings to which you want to extrapolate.
  4. Generalizability:  Is there evidence that what you are measuring applies to other places and other times.  (Even if you’re not measuring to generalize your findings, evidence against generalizability should cause you to reflect on why the place and time matter)
  5. External: This is mostly (convergent or discriminate) criterion evidence.
  6. Consequential: Show me evidence that measuring is helping. (eg. Are “No Child Left Behind” measures helping students become better prepared for life after school; or are they at least helping to further the right wing agenda to undermine the power of the NEA.  (Opps. . . sorry . . . cynicism slipping in there)

Therefore, a framework for action with reflection is measurement with validity.

Understanding Learning by Understanding Language: It’s Growing, Not Transferring

Posted on by
1

I believe we cannot understand learning without taking into account the operation of language.  Specifically, understanding the way language operates is a reason why educators should abandon the transportation metaphor of learning (i.e. learning transfer) for a cultivation metaphor (growing the knowledge garden).

Language was at the center of philosophy during the last century.  Beginning with the linguistic turn and ending with the interpretive turn, these 20th Century movements had a profound effect on psychology and education. M.M. Bakhtin was one of the great elucidators of language that I encountered in my studies. I believe he was at heart a teacher, but his work defies easy categorization.  I recently came across this quote which emphasizes languages role as a tool of communication, intellect and thinking. (emphasis added)

Due to stratifying forces resulting from the dialogical contextual use of language; there are no “neutral” words and forms – words and forms that can belong to “no one”; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a heteroglot conception of the world.  All words have the taste of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions.  Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word.  [Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, Austin TX: University of Texas Press. (p.293).]

All language is populated by intentions and overtones that don’t just communicate, but form a conception of the world, by a particular person and in a place and time.  The thought of learning transfer is like thinking of a person that cannot speak except by using direct quotation.  Call it a left-over from a linear behavioral conception of learning.  Imagine if we could only speak to others by using direct quotations.  We don’t do that! We compose our statements according to the context and our purposes.  Similarly, when we learn, we also compose our knowledge (much of which is language) according to the context and purpose.  We may barrow ideas from other people and other times and circumstances, but they are reformulated and grown according to the context and the purpose at hand.  This is the benefit of a cultivation metaphor over a transportation metaphor.

What is a Relationally Responsiveness Approach to Action (and Art)

Posted on by
Reply

“We must renounce our monological habits so that we might come to feel at home in the new artistic sphere which Dostoevsky discovered, so that we might orient ourselves in that incomparably more complex artistic model of the world which he created” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.272). Taken from the John Shotter Article (Draft), Organizing multi-voiced organizations.

The 20th Century’s industrial model of education thinks of us as living in a mostly dead and static world that only changes slowly, deliberately and in ways that we control.  Important knowledge is of the patterns and regularities that allow us to control change, to be the cogs that make the machine work.  But that does not seem to be our world.  The world Bakhtin and Shotter describe is dialogical.  Important knowledge is how to interact and create in a chiasmic world that is always changing; never the same from day to day, changing us as we change it.  Its is like writing a novel where all the characters act on their own volition, emotional and unpredictable, where life is an artistic creation in the highest sense.

How Dialogic Relationally Responsive Philosophy is Important to Learning

Posted on by
Reply

There’s been some discussion of a Harvard Business Review Article by Peter Bregman.  He describes a case where people were unresponsive to a new corporate learning process and he solved the problem by being flexible and allowing them to individualize the process.  Ken Allen was responding to this article which generated my though of how Bregman’ case was a good example of a relationaly responsive dialogical approach and I posted this comment.

Hi Ken

I look to dialogical philosophy (Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, John Shotter) not postmodernism to understand Bregman’s case.   (I’ve read critiques that the anguished postmoderns were as negatively obsessed with the lack of certainty as the moderns were obsessed to trying to obtain it.)  A dialogic approach looks at people as relationally responsive.

Instead of trying to solve problems exclusively by analyzing “patterns and regularities” for perfection, we must also live in “the context of peoples disorderly, everyday conversational realities. . . (where) to solve problems, our task becomes the more practical one of struggling to create new ‘pathways’ forward into the uniquely new circumstances we create for ourselves as we live our lives together”.

Quotes from the back cover of John Shotter’s book Conversational Realities Revisited

I had a mentor in college (Helmut Bartel) that once said new paradigms were only successful if they could account for the successes and the failures of the old paradigm, while moving beyond it.  That’s what I think the idea of dialogic responsiveness does.  In Bregman’s case we can see the failure of the company’s and Bregman’s first modernist approach and how Bregman succeeded by being more responsive to the involved people.  The recent idea of closing training departments can also be read in the same terms of the failure of modernism (prescribed ‘one size fits all’ instruction based on observed patterns and regularities) for the dialogical (facilitating the ability of people to work together to solve problems in people’s everyday context).

Thanks for your post.  I struggle to understand philosophy that I know is important, but I can’t alway articulate just how.  I just grown by responding to your conversation and I am learning in dialogue right now.  And, I think my brain is completely fried for the moment.