By Leon James 1976
not-out-given
Article
AN-EC-DOTE
<========> Pre-publication draft
un-published
Not for quotation
|
Based on: Leon James, NES , 1975 © PSYCH. 705R: Ethnosemantics, UH, Spring 1976 |
An EXPERIMENT is a representative anecdote offered as
substantiation of a (scientific) hypothesis (the latter is in turn, offered as
substantiation for priorly reported anecdotes. ) Thus, the aggregate, accumulated
collection of experiments in a defined field of publication (non-an-ec-dotal: see
scientific "literature") is a collection of anecdotes that serves to
substantiate current scientific theories and views of reality.
ANECDOTES function to provide an operational terminology for
stating hypotheses and hypotheses about interconnecting hypotheses--or
"theorizing". Therefore, different types of theorizings in a science
(called "Schools") are derived from different collections of anecdotes (as a
result, specialities use characteristic differentiating experimental methods in their
"research".
Anecdotes are informative about terminology in so far as they are
representative of other anecdotes in a specialty (see STANDARDS within an area in
a field used in evaluating research proposals and articles for publication in experimental
journals). However, anecdotes are not necessarily representative of what they
topically claim they represent: e. g. many experiments in the literature known as
"Developmental Psycholinguistics" informative about the terminology used in talking
about the speech of children contributed to by psychologists and psycholinguists; but
they are not representative of the speech of children as we ordinarily understand
this human experience through our contact with children as a daily-routine setting that
spans years of parental exchanges with their offspring. Thus, a terminology based
and maintained upon an experimental literature must necessarily be reductionistic or
non-representative of the human experiences they purport to explain or account for.
Strict scientific understanding is thus logically separate from understanding human
experience. The former is contained within the latter by being a human endeavour, an
organized institiution, a context based instrumentality, hence a socio-cultural dynamic.
Scientific understanding of human experience becomes the
dialectical anatomy of the understanding of human experience when it is claimed by
scientists that science can explain experience; since that claim reverses what contains
what: it asserts boldly (but with what justification?) that scientific understanding
will explain what understanding is. But that is a logical fallacy, since it is plain
to our ordinary understanding.