On Aug 14, 2007, at 5:53 AM, George Floros wrote:

I said

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the devil is in the details. "A living individual" IMHO disqualifies

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imaginary personas and as long as you can't rule them out, you write off your entire work (even if we talk of just one in a hundred.).

Jeremy responded

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I'm not sure I understand where you are going here? I don't need 'real' people to talk about the things that I need, I just need the results to be created by either humans or created by something that human creates. It is perfectly valid, but then I'm not dealing explicitly with human subjects either. The point is very simple ; unless your results can be traced back to specific individuals then they can't be treated as valid.

that is false, validity is the strength of the conclusions. given the broad expanse of human actions, some of which is collective and not individual, the strength of results is tied to whether they best map onto the world, not whether they map onto individuals, sometimes, perhaps even most times, collective and creative identities may be a better representation of that world then the individual.

In an Internet board for example anyone can log in with multiple aliases and publish opinions. Problem is that the researcher can do that too, create multiple imaginary aliases and force his opinion as something "out there". You do need some very real people in order to prove that your work is valid and not something pulled out of a hat.

so you are saying that your research methods do not account for people lying? or what? because even if you trace it back to the individual, there is no necessity that that person is telling the truth, nor any necessity in the relationship between that person forcing or otherwise coercing or being coerced into representing something falsely. validity has no relationship to data being individual.

I said

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Name one field of research which does not "need" identifiable

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individual subjects. I'm not aware of any.

Jeremy responded

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sociology, anthropology, musicology, literary studies, anything that does not require methodological individualism, which is most fields of research. Even some topics of research that do no sometimes require methodological individualism don't require identifiable subjects. In fact, I'd say those that ''need'' identifiable individual subjects are probably in the minority in terms of research I can't really see that in any of those examples.

ok

All of those fields deal in the study of concrete human cultural output.

hes

You seem to confuse the actual quoting of names with the existence of identifiable individuals.

nope, i make not posited relationship between names and individuals

You can't just say "we conclude on the basis of our observations that x stands and y doesn't", the natural question by any reader would be "so what or whom did you observe, what was his demographics, for how long did you observe him/her, how many times, etc. ?"

that isn't my natural reaction, my reaction is 'how do you know?' and if they say, I observed... then I say 'how do you know?' and if they have an answer to that, i ask, 'how do you know what it means?'

You need not identify them on print but you certainly need to have records of their existence and/or records of you spending time in the field doing the observations, or records of which cultural produce you studied (which again implies creators hence individuals with names).

personally, I don't need that at all. All i need is their artifacts and as a subset, i like to have some rich narratives, preferably shared in text form.

Just because you may be a conscientious researcher don't mean everyone else is.

luckily, in science, it doesn't matter if I or you are conscientious, what matters is that we publish and share our findings. over time, those findings will either be used and shown useful or not, or forgotten.

The recent example of that Korean guy springs in mind.

I don't know who you mean.

I don't really think that research w/o those characteristics can even be considered, in principle, reproducible .

ohhhhh, well there's the thing... most research on human behaviour is only reproducible in the abstract and then likely only in statistical relations. reproducibility as such is not what makes something science or scientific, or even worthwhile. in fact, i'd argue that finding a reproducible thing... most of the time has nothing to do with science per se, but quite alot more to do with organizational theory, but that's a whole other set of arguments.

George _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

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jeremy hunsinger Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (www.cipr.uwm.edu) wiki.tmttlt.com www.tmttlt.com () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments http://www.stswiki.org/ sts wiki http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/ Learning Inquiry-the journal http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/ Transdisciplinary Studies:the book series