Hi
On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, Paul Smith wrote:
> I enjoyed all of the responses to Sylvester's latest, but I don't
> yet see the point that I think is the most important. He wrote:
>
> > >From the info from that PsyInc search,it seems like researchers
> > think that they can go to other countries and just transfer
> > their tools and come to valid conclusions.
>
> I respond:
> And those researchers would be correct. Of course.
> Sylvester repeats what by now seems to be his fundamental confusion:
> contrary to his belief, the fact that you cannot simply transfer the
> _conclusions_ [true] does NOT imply that you cannot transfer the tools
> [scientific methodologies]. Major league non sequitur.
>
> If he has an argument to the contrary, I'm quite certain that
> TIPSters would love to hear it.
But not everyone would agree that research tools can be
transferred. There is a _huge_ debate questioning whether
scientific methods are eurocentric, and that other cultures can
(and should) rely on their indigenous ways of knowing. Example
works would include: Smith (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies:
Research and Indigenous Peoples, Harding (1998) Is science
multicultural? Postcolonialisms, feminisms, and epistemologies,
and Duran and Duran (1995) Native American Postcolonial
Psychology.
The debate is an extreme version of the etic/emic distinction in
cross-cultural psychology. Essentially that distinction concerns
whether knowledge about cultures is best developed by applying
well-founded concepts and measures from outside (etic) or whether
indigenous measures and theories need to be developed
(emic). Add methods to the list, and you can see the issue.
I predict that this could be the most significant challenge yet
to a scientific psychology, against which the postmodernism
travesty will pale by comparison. The challenge will be
significant, I believe, _not_ because the ideas are of any great
substance, but because of the tremendous moral pressure to
accommodate other, previously excluded "voices" and because the
ideas are so intimately connected with other challenges to
scientific psychology (e.g., radical feminist epistemology,
alternative research methods, new age spirituality and humanistic
psychology, postmodernism, ...).
I believe that those of us committed to scientific psychology
will increasingly find ourselves having to justify not only our
findings and theories, but also our scientific methods. And we
will have to do so in an environment where people increasingly
value such things as traditional beliefs and intuition, where
there are abundant academics (mostly outside psychology, but
perhaps increasingly inside as well) who support their point of
view, and where even things like reason and logic are questioned
as part of the eurocentric hegemony.
Best wishes
Jim
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James M. Clark (204) 786-9757
Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax
University of Winnipeg 4L05D
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark
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