Theory is exciting. I like reading about
theory. Trying to define theory feels very much like an excercise in
generalizing previously made generalizations further and further, feeling with
each iteration like you managed to include yet another facet of the concept in your
definition-dough.
During the week I was inspired to, once again,
revisit old course literature in philosophy of science and read about the
hypothetical-deductive method and epistemology. I feel like I’ve gained some
new perspectives from which to look at theory. For instance the idea of
every theory bein born a hypothesis that then eventually matures into theoryhood by the process of deducing consequences from the child and then confirming every one in turn.
Also, the ontological bit is tricky. My
understanding is that theory has to identify objects before it can stipulate
och describe any sort of (causal or other) relationship between them. This is
either done by the theory itself, by referring to other theories or by
implicit, not mentioned, help-hypotheses. To think about how a specific theory
treats the objects of it’s claims is something that I’ve done (and probably
most of my peers as well) for a long time, but I haven’t thought about it in
those terms before.
When it comes to research, some of these
trains of thought are great stretching-excercises for the brain as well as
excellent reality checking tricks, but oftentimes not much more. It’s easy to
get bogged down in thinking and forgetting to stay pragmatic and actually
produce something concrete. (If your’re into that sort of thing… which I guess
engineers should be.)
The paper I read this week was really good as
well, and I got some good discussion out of it at the seminar. Dear diary, it
was a good week. I think I learned something. Now I need to start reading next
weeks texts.
Hej Edvard, I perfectly agree on your point about how theory and research could merely turn into brain exercises.
ReplyDeleteThus the opposite behaviour towards research is in my opinion even worse, hence just caring about the result without any or little knowledge on how and why our goal is achieved.
First I just want to say that I think you need to get out more if reading about theory excites you!! ;D Now on a more serious note I completely agree with your sentence "It’s easy to get bogged down in thinking and forgetting to stay pragmatic and actually produce something concrete". The frustration I had this week when viewing some papers were that they set out to answer a set question and didn't quite manage it in the end due to many contributing factors. Mostly they all produced something relevant to the field in the form of other areas that need to be further explored, but when promised and answer to a question which is unfulfilled it gets annoying!
ReplyDeleteI thought it was very interesting what we did in the second seminar this week when we looked at the course wiki for the question on "what is theory" and we were trying to change it in some manner to define theory in a better way. It feels like you can do it over and over again, trying to change different words and implement new views. You are not sure though if you improve the definition or just make it more confusing or misguiding.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that you mention that all theories come from an hypothesis. That reminds me of a discussion on the seminar about who is to say that a theory is valid for it to get recognition. Maybe it needs to be experts from the field and not a KTH student, but an expert may have been a KTH student before so why couldn't we come up with a theory that everyone will believe. Though i think you need the experience and knowledge from the moment you are a KTH student until you have researched for many years in a subject and thus become an expert.