Auspices for Research

Management of Consensus

The proper use of research methods is a personal and social responsibility affecting:

•each and every serious inquirer
&
•the relevant research community.

Consensus is used to manage this concern: but the consensus is not always correct.
Examples :

The extreme v central distinction used in the initial plotting of the methods generates two concentric circles that determine different orientations to consensus. The circles reveal sets of methods operating under two different auspices.

• Inner circle methods (L'3-hypothesizing-verification, L'6, L'4, L'1) are ultimately under collegial auspices and receive much social guidance, rulings, support and, in extremis, control so far as is possible.
• Outer circle methods (L'3-hypothesizing-falsification, L'2, L'7, L'5) are ultimately under personal auspices and may garner either social support, social opposition or active neglect.

Inner Circle: Collegial Auspices

The inner circle traces out methods whose application is routinely shaped and bolstered by the relevant collegial environment, usually an academic discipline, as explained below. Collegial rejection when using these methods is unmanageable and may be personally devastating.

• Explanatory-verification methods operate under collegial auspices because the relevant peer group works within a paradigm that defines what relations are acceptable as well as what hypotheses are plausible. Disciplines also develop conventions and even set expectations for how explanations should be couched, what sort of explanations are permitted, and what sort of data is allowed.
  More

  Wider society or philosophical critics may reject the paradigm or challenge disciplinary conventions, but that carries little weight within the peer group. Typically, disciplinary leaders attempt to capture wider society, and impose their paradigm as 'true', 'correct' or the 'only proper way' to conduct science. They exercise power ruthlessly by determining publication, funding, promotion and tenure.

  Example: Behaviorism

  Academic psychology was dominated by the behaviorist paradigm for much of the 20th Century. Even after being overturned as simplistic and inappropriately constraining in the final decades, the paradigm continues to determine funding of neuroscientific hypotheses (according to Panksepp, 2012) Panksepp, J., and Biven, L. (2012). The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion. New York: W. W. Norton & Company..

• Formal methods operate under collegial auspices because the value of certainty is communal. Axioms, assumptions, deductions and streams of mathematico-logical reasoning are invariably checked, by others in the field and will be rejected if unsatisfactory. If rejected, the findings do not enter the disciplinary canon.

• Dialectic methods operate under collegial auspices because the community is the only legitimate source of the polarizing ideas or contradictory positions. Members desire resolution of theoretical conflicts because unification is both a scientific and a social goal. By contrast, there may be reluctance to visit buried conflicts where unity is not being threatened.

• Empirical methods operate under collegial auspices because facts only become facts if everybody agrees to them. To get that essential consensus, the facts need to fit within existing customs, theories and paradigms. Peers must have a willingness to give data credence or its value or even existence will be denied. It is common for strange or disliked observations to get ignored, denigrated or actively suppressed, as with most parapsychology experiments but also in a discipline as concrete and mainstream as chemistry: see Example.

  Example:  BZ Reaction

  In 1958, Boris Pavlovich Belousov discovered an oscillating chemical reaction revealed by surprising colour changes. It is now called the BZ reaction. However, he could not publish findings because the editors were incredulous and declared the reaction was impossible. He took this very hard and quit science. He died in 1970. In 1981, his findings were finally accepted, and gave birth to the field of non-linear chemical dynamics. You can learn more and view the impossible happening here.

Outer Circle: Personal Auspices

The outer circle traces out methods whose application is a matter for the interests, beliefs and even the conscience of the researcher. Collegial affirmation is not required and scientific rejection is manageable. Rejection is unavoidably unpleasant if social standing suffers and employment or funding is blocked. Nevertheless a dedicated scholar, capable and desirous of using these methods, gives little weight to peer pressures. Fortunately, burning at the stake has gone out of fashion.

Certain distinguishing features of outer circle methods can be noted:

• These methods may be valued, devalued or ignored in any particular discipline. For adherents, investigation is much easier and faster where they are valued.
• The abstract nature of these methods is such that their use is not readily subject to social rules or peer pressure.
• These methods are noticeably more complicated and difficult to sustain intellectually. So supportive research partners may become important.
• Once the findings gain acceptance, inner-circle collegial methods are applied by others, and this is encouraged and welcomed.

• Analytic methods operate under personal auspices because concepts may be defined as the researcher desires in order to pursue the argument. Those using this method unfailingly take the argument wherever evidence and reasoning leads. Such analytic inquiry may end up creating a new ideology or challenging theories and even paradigms, and these accounts will stand even if they are hotly disputed by others.

• Contemplative methods operate under personal auspices because the high degree of conviction is not socially shareable. It is not realistic to expect others to have the faith needed to sustain wild intuitive leaps and unaccepted or unacceptable conclusions during the emergence of a radically new insight.
• Holistic methods operate under personal auspices because there are so many problematic judgements and assumptions e.g. specifications for the boundary of the system, the relevant context, active factors, structuring into levels, influences and interactions, handling of inputs &c.

• Explanatory-falsification methods operate under personal auspices because these are matters about which the collegial environment should have no say. The consensus is being actively targeted and the comfort of plausibility and verification is being rejected as insufficient. The individual researcher must put considerable effort into ensuring that every possible confounding factor is handled. That may demand a team, all of whose members should be committed to implementing a fair rigorous test.

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• The next step is to recognize differences in the two diagonal sets.

• The diagram above shows arrows within quadrants representing a tendency for a movement from a more central collegial method to a peripheral personal method. See more in the quadrant analysis.

Originally drafted: 27-Apr-2015. Last amended 21-Feb-2022.