Pragmatism paper Morgan 2014

 Pragmatism Paper Morgan 2014

Pragmatism as a Paradigm for Social Research David L. Morgan Qualitative Inquiry 2014 20: 1045 originally published online 3 February 2014 DOI: 10.1177/1077800413513733

Pragmatism has its frequent linkage with Mixed-Methods Research (MMR) has heightened the awareness of pragmatism (e.g., Biesta, 2010; Hall, 2013; Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004; Maxcy, 2003; Morgan, 2007; Pearce, 2012; Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2010).

Pragmatism as a philosophy

The argument here is that pragmatism can serve as a philosophical program for social research, regardless of whether that research uses qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods. As a new paradigm, it replaces the older philosophy of knowledge approach (e.g., Guba, 1990; Guba & Lincoln, 2005; Lincoln, 2010), which understands social research in terms of ontology, epistemology, and methodology.  This claim to be a new paradigm rests on demonstrating the broader value of pragmatism as a philosophical system, along with its immediate practicality for issues such as research design.

MMR as a research community has a strong tendency to emphasize the how to aspects of research; however, this captures only part of the message of pragmatism, which places more importance on questions about why to do research in a given way. 

 When we ask “why to” questions, this points to the importance of our choice of research goals. Yet even the “how to” questions involve more than making technical decisions about research methods because of the commitments we make when we chose one way rather than another to pursue our goals. Thus, a limited emphasis on “what works” is never enough, because it ignores choices about both the goals to be pursued and the means to meet those goals.

Denzin (2012) summarizes the importance of these issues as follows: The MMR links to the pragmatism of Dewey, James, Mead, and Peirce are problematic. Classic pragmatism is not a methodology per se. It is a doctrine of meaning, a theory of truth. It rests on the argument that the meaning of an event cannot be given in advance of experience. The focus is on the consequences and meanings of an action or event in a social situation. This concern goes beyond any given methodology or any problem-solving activity. (p. 81).

 Dewey describes inquiry as a process of self-conscious decision making. 

Many problematic situations require thoughtful reflection, and this is where inquiry comes into play. 

As an example, the tendency to treat inquiry and research as synonyms indicates the importance of careful, reflective decision making in research. Because inquiry places such a central role in both Dewey’s thinking and the research process,

This context dependency means that our ability to use prior experience to predict the outcome of a current action is fallible and probabilistic—there is always the chance that our prior experiences will not be sufficient to guide our actions in a given setting, or that what appear to be the safest assumptions will fail to produce the expected outcome.

What distinguishes inquiry is that it is a process by which beliefs that have become problematic are examined and resolved through action. It is a process of making choices by asking and answering questions, in which those questions concern the likely outcomes of applying current beliefs to future action. In Dewey’s approach to inquiry (1910b/2008), there is no sharp boundary between everyday life and research. Instead, research is simply a form of inquiry that is performed more carefully and more self-consciously than most other responses to problematic situations. Just as a decision about buying a car demands more attention than what to order for lunch, research in general requires a considerable amount of effort to make the choices that are most likely to have the desired consequences.

Dewey’s systematic approach to inquiry involves five steps, which can be summarized as follows (for more detailed treatments of Dewey and inquiry, see Biesta & Barbules, 2004; Morgan, 2013; Strubing, 2007): 1. Recognizing a situation as problematic; 2. Considering the difference it makes to define the problem one way rather than another; 3. Developing a possible line of action as a response to the problem; 4. Evaluating potential actions in terms of their likely consequences; 5. Taking actions that are felt to be likely to address the problematic situation.

Like any other form of experience, each instance of inquiry is situated within a given context. For pragmatism, every set of circumstances that we encounter brings forth some potentially unknowable set of prior beliefs, so that we are always acting within some definition of the situation. When we are pursuing a research project, we are acting within a mind-set that determines what it means to choose one research topic rather than another as well as what it means to choose one research method rather than another. Of course, these choices can be quite different when we are doing qualitative, quantitative, or MMR.

 Instead of knowledge, he spoke as “warranted assertions,” where warrants come from the outcomes of inquiry—that is, the outcomes of using a belief in practice, in which knowing cannot be separated from doing. For Dewey, the knower and the known were inseparable, bound together in a process of inquiry, with a simultaneous reliance on both belief and action.

 This leads to questions about what difference it makes not only to acquire knowledge one way rather than another (i.e., the procedures we use), but to produce one kind of knowledge rather than another (i.e., the purposes we pursue). Knowledge is not about an abstract relationship between the knower and the known; instead, there is an active process of inquiry that creates a continual back-and-forth movement between beliefs and actions.

Pragmatism not only replaces arguments about the nature of reality as the essential criterion for differentiating approaches to research, it also recognizes the value of those different approaches as research communities that guide choices about how to conduct inquiry. Thus, pragmatism acts as a new paradigm to replace an older way of thinking about the differences between approaches to research by treating those differences as social contexts for inquiry as a form of social action, rather than as abstract philosophical systems.

Pragmatism presents a radical departure from age-old philosophical arguments about the nature of reality and the possibility of truth. As Hall (2013) puts it, pragmatism offers “an alternative epistemological paradigm” (p. 19). In this new worldview, knowledge consists of warranted assertions (Dewey, 1941/2008) that result from taking action and experiencing the outcomes. But inquiry in general and research in particular are specific realms of experience, and as such, they are only part of Dewey’s larger philosophical system.

 More specifically, pragmatism emphasizes that all aspects of research inherently involve decisions about which goals are most meaningful and which methods are most appropriate. 

Ethical questions are questions about what to do and about the difference it would make to act one way versus another, and, as such, they fall directly within Dewey’s philosophical emphasis on human experience.

The most basic objective has been to demonstrate that pragmatism presents a coherent philosophy that goes well beyond “what works.” Based on the work of John Dewey, pragmatism points to the importance of joining beliefs and actions in a process of inquiry that underlies any search for knowledge, including the specialized activity that we refer to as research.

Rather than framing the study of social science research as commitments to an abstract set of philosophical beliefs, pragmatism concentrates on beliefs that are more directly connected to actions. This calls for an approach to methodology that goes back to its original linguistic roots, the study of methods. Pragmatism shifts the study of social research to questions such as: How do researchers make choices about the way they do research? Why do they make the choices they do? And, what is the impact of making one set of choices rather than another? 

Pursuing this new agenda requires examining not just what researchers do but why they do things the ways they do. Research never occurs in a vacuum, so how it influenced by the historical, cultural, and political contexts in which it is done? And how do our research communities come together to emphasize one way of doing things rather than another? We need to pay more attention to how these factors influence both the choices we make and the ways that we interpret the outcomes of those choices. This is the path that pragmatism proposes.