Original_To:  JNET%"qualrs-l@uga"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.qualrs-l
Date:         Sat, 26 Sep 1992 15:47:00 EDT
              <QUALRS-L@UGA.BITNET>
From:         ELLISON@UFPINE.BITNET
Subject:      Sifting along the bank of Heraclitus' (was "Hegel's") river

Jim Thomas, please accept my public apology for offending you. It
honestly was not my intention. What was my intention was to suggest
the possibility of disagreement over the concept of "replication."
Your last post clarifies the disagreement some. You state:

    "Replication" is an act, a process, a means of verification,
    corroboration, or re-visiting.  It's a kind of "doubling back," of
    evaluating, and of expanding. The *process* and *techniques* by which
    we replicate are the models and constructs.

Then:

    Hegel's point was that whether one steps into the river once or twice
    is irrelevant. . . . his point is that knowlege derives from concepts
    and reason, not from sense data. Empirical studies give us neither
    concepts nor "truth." . . . [E]mpirical studies give us appearances,
    reason gives us reality.

There's a contradiction here between the "process" and the "verification"
and "corroboration, or re-visiting," and this is precisely the point
I tried to make in my last positing. "Process" is what Hegel wrote
about in 1807; Absolute Knowing, not "knowledge." There is a distinct
and clear temporal implication to Hegel's crtiticism of Sense Data.
That is that interpretation - "Reason" - is an ongoing process pursued
by the self in relation to the ongoing processes of other selfs. Hegel
criticized the idea of static knowledge, in it self. His process in the
Phenomenology emphasized the identifying and overcoming of the
contradictions in the process.

    if one adduces Hegel's philosphy to make a point, it helps to a) get
    it right and b) more carefully lay out the implications of
    (presumably) the Hegelian dialect for contemporary empiricism.

Hegel, Phenomenology, Para. 799, on knowing:

    "The nature, moments and movements of this knowing have, then,
    shown themselves to be such that this knowing is a pure *being-
    for-self* of self consciousness; it is *'I'*, that is *this* and
    no other *'I'*, and which is no less immediately a *mediated*
    or superseded *universal* 'I'. It has a *content* which it
    *differentiates* from itself; for it is pure negativity, or the
    dividing of itself, it is *consciousness*. This content is, in its
    difference, itself the 'I', for it is the movement of superseding
    itself, or the same pure negativity that the 'I' is. In it, as
    differentiated, the 'I' is reflected into itself; it is only
    when the 'I' communes with itself in its otherness that the
    content is *comprehended* [i.e. in terms of the Notion]. Stated
    more specifically, this content is nothing else than the very
    movement just spoken of; for the content is Spirit that
    traverses its own self and does so *for-itself* as Spirit by
    the fact that it has the 'shape' of the Notion in its objectivity."

I respect your position that "it is fully possible to engage in replication
without falling into the trap of assuming invariance." But I can also
disagree with you, or question this. (And my intention is really not
to bicker about Hegel, whom I have also studied. I find some of
Hegel's writings useful, and they pervade academic discourse. But raising some
of Hegel's views in no way commits me to develop a [pure?] Hegelian line
of thinking. My question remains one on the idea of replication.)

I understand that [almost] nobody trusts they are "making an exact replica
of behavior in two separate orgs", or at least that's the stated position.
But, nonetheless, a fundemental assumption of "replication" is just that;
one can re-analyze, re-create a situation, with some degree of accuracy
[measured against?]. It seems to me that developing "similar heuristic
constructs" to understand behavior in different settings is different than
replication. So perhaps there's a question of clarity here. Replication *is*
a model; what, exactly, is being replicated? How will we know if our results
of a later bit of work approximate those of a former? Can we know
the total conditions of the former or the latter? Can we ever, actually,
know "reality" directly enough to replicate? Doesn't the very selection
of methods imply models? The view of value in attempting a "replication"
to begin with is a loaded historical construct. 'Of course we're not
actaully re-creating the original situation.' But we believe we can come
close!

All of this relates to overall assumptions of progress. We
can know the past and the present well enough to perform replications,
thus correcting earlier errors. As was hinted in an earlier post,
ethnographers (perhaps more than other researchers?) quickly run
into problems when their assumptions involve defining reality. That is
partly because reality does seem to be perspectival, from a social and
historical view, and is definitely presentistic. Thus when the subject of
research involves learning other views of reality, there are large
implications to ideas of progress and cummulative knowledge of reality
that are situated in fields of power. If we can know the past *and* the
present better than others (after all, we've done "replications") then
our socially and historically constructed view of reality (in the present)
is more *significant*.

V.Y. Mudimbe recently published _The Invention of Africa_ in which
he outlines European epistemologies in relation to contact with
Africa and Africans over the past centuries. It's interesting the
confidence with which Europeans have acted because of "knowledge" of
reality (rather than an understanding of Knowing, if you will). The
contents of the (vast) histories we have to develop our understandings
in the present should give us pause to reconsider knowledge in
relation to Knowing. "Replication" implies knowledge; Knowing is
something else.

Jim Ellison
anthropology
University of Florida