Post-positivism.

A theory of knowledge, underlying a research methodology.

And I’ve been assigned to research it.

So I slog through articles on research paradigms in nursing, sexology, education. Read encyclopedia articles about Kuhn, Popper and Feyeraband. Studying the topic is like attending a college reunion with the folks I least want to see.

Post-positivism is empirical, objective, etic, nomothetic and yawn…my motivation for this assignment hovers between zero and negative one.

Here comes Keely Kitten to the rescue!

Everything makes sense when you see it in terms of kittens.

Books in hand, I let ten week-old Keely outdoors for the first time. She takes a few tentative steps out onto the back deck. She sniffs the threshold, the door, the rock doorstop. She circles around under my chair and sniffs again: threshold, door, door stop. Wild-eyed, she circles round and sniffs again.

And I realize: she doesn’t have names for anything that she is smelling. She doesn’t have a critical mass of experiences to relate to the smells. No visual images, sounds, or emotional impressions. She doesn’t yet have the relevant cat concepts.

But she will. Soon she will recognize raccoon, squirrel, crow, dragonfly, Hudson the cat, Noah the teenage boy, and more.

Our shared external world awaits her.

Of course her experience differs from mine. She’s a baby! And she’s a cat. She will never respond to Hudson or to dragonflies as I do. Moving things will look different to her; the grass won’t feel the same underneath her feet. But we will know, with confidence, that we are in the world together. In time, we’ll exchange glances when Hudson shows up; she’ll know I disapprove of dragonfly hunting; I’ll know she doesn’t mind raccoon’s visits.

We will learn to tolerate each other’s opinions about the world. We may even learn from them.

Now that’s post-positivism!

Post-positivists believe that an empirical reality exists. We come to know it through research. Every researcher has a position. The researcher’s background knowledge and tools of data collection colour the results. But the more we understand the biases a position brings, the closer we get to objective knowledge. Truth is constructed by a community of knowers: the more researchers, the more perspectives, the more knowledge.

Positively eye-opening!

Never before could I have imagined myself as any sort of positivist. Instead, I was a phenomenologist, asserting that we construct reality with our consciousness. Each of us, I believed, constructs multiple realities – empirical, emotional, intellectual, imaginal – and lives in them simultaneously. When sketching models of the psyche, I placed consciousness at the center, and imagined ways of knowing emanating from there.

As a post-positivist, I place the world at the centre, imagining a transmitter spewing out data caught by a great variety of receivers.

Same picture, different interpretation!

Post-positivism recognizes multiple modes of consciousness. So does phenomenology.

For post-positivists, every mode of consciousness offers a perspective on empirical reality. For phenomenologists, only one mode of consciousness traces experience back to a stable empirical reality; others take at face value ephemeral dreams, changing emotion, morphing memories.

When I reflect honestly on epistemology, I feel myself rooted sometimes in post-positivism and sometimes in phenomenology. It’s not too hard to shift; each theory’s diagram holds a circle open for the other.

Isn’t shifting perspective part of the fun of adopting Keely? To laugh with delight as she discovers everything with body, mind and senses? To imagine the world as she experiences it within our safe laboratory of love and learning? Yes, yes, yes!

As she grows up, will her kitten consciousness come back to her in flashes of memory? Will she remember her experience unformed by concepts, or will her more learned self revise it? Will she laugh at her old perspectives? At how real they were or at how biased they were? Will she be a phenomenologist or a post-positivist?

I look forward to watching her grow.

Images: Eli K. with Keely K by LDK; 123rf.com