Beyond Abstraction: Philosophy as a Practical Qualitative Research Method.

In this paper, I take up a discussion of what philosophic method is, and why it should be viewed as an important qualitative research method. After clarifying the nature of philosophic method within the larger framework of social practices, I argue that philosophy is important to both practice and research, and I suggest that philosophers work in concert with other qualitative researchers. I argue that recently (relatively speaking) philosophy has been viewed with some understandable disdain among both practitioners and researchers as an enjoyable but abstract (and therefore useless) social practice. That perception can be fixed but only if philosophical research becomes once again explicitly relevant to practice (particularly educational practice). Finally, I provide a brief example of how philosophy can indeed be relevant to practice from a recent symposium that I participated in on reflection in service-learning education. Key Words: Philosophy, Qualitative Research, Research Method, John Dewey, Social Practice, Service-Learning, Educational Research, and History of Philosophy Unfortunately, it was some time after the oral defense of my written qualifying examination that it hit me. Actually, John Dewey (and, yes, I did picture him cantankerously crawling from the grave to do so) hit me with it: "abstract." That is what I should have said, and that is exactly what would have explained my "take" on philosophical "speculation" as a qualitative research methodology. Dr. Newman's challenge to my written examination response (wherein I "dismissed" speculation as a tool for philosophical work) set my heart to racing as I "defended" my position. The ensuing rescue by another, more sympathetic, committee member set my mind to working. My rescuer (and committee chair) was, I slowly realized, completely right: speculation is a valuable philosophical activity. It is, rather, the abstract, disconnected, "aloof," purely analytical, "other-worldly" philosophical inquiry that I find troublesome and that gives philosophers a bad name. As Dewey (1958) so clearly put it, abstraction practiced "in a bad sense to designate something which exclusively occupies a realm of its own without contact with the things of ordinary experience" (p. 6) is what allows other researchers to (understandably) tell us philosophers, "you can keep a knockin', but you can't come in." Speculation, on the other hand, remains vital to the conception and practice of philosophy. It is, in fact, an important part of what Dewey called the "mediation" of experience; the stepping back from a problematic situation to hypothesize as to its solution. All successful research (and good thinking generally) has a valuable speculative aspect and philosophy is no exception. I left that examination room with an uneasy feeling--the gnawing feeling that I really did not understand philosophical research method--and this after years of study into the matter! The artificial, contrived, disingenuous problem of explaining to my doctoral committee how philosophy is indeed a useful research method immediately became a genuinely felt problem-to-be-solved. The purpose of this paper is to answer the troubling questions that arose from that examination: What exactly are philosophy's methodological tools and subject matter? And, why should philosophical work be understood, at least in part, as a viable research method? Until I could fully answer these questions, the gnawing dissatisfaction would remain and my academic life would be at a standstill. Philosophy as a Social Practice As with all enduring human enterprises, philosophical endeavors are a part of the social experience that exists when one is born and that will continue on when one dies. Philosophy is, in this regard, an important social practice and further examination of it as such can guide, at least in part, an assessment of its structure and value as a research method. As Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) argues, a social practice is any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. …