Huron, David. (1999).
On Finding Field-Appropriate Methodologies at the
Intersection of the Humanities and Sciences.
Ernest Bloch Lecture,
University of California, Berkeley, 1999.
Full text.
Skepticism is the foundation of scholarship. We should approach all ideas with a certain degree of wariness -- including our own ideas.
There are two kinds of mistakes we can make when we make claims related to knowledge and knowability. We might think that something is true or useful or knowable when it is actually false or useless or unknowable. Conversely, we might think that something is false or useless or unknowable when it is actually true or useful or knowable. From this, two types of skepticism can be identified:
Theory-discarding Skeptic: "There is insufficient evidence to support that."
Theory-conserving Skeptic: "There is insufficient evidence to reject that."
A theory-discarding skeptic looks for reasons to discard theories. A theory-conserving skeptic is wary of evidence purporting to disprove a theory.
How do we know which form of skepticism to adopt? The answer is it depends on the moral (and aesthetic) repercussions of the claim.
To engage in research is to utilize public and private resources to formulate and assess knowledge claims. These resources are squandered when scholars make mistakes: that is, when we think something is true or useful or knowable when it is actually false or useless or unknowable; or when we think that something is false or useless or unknowable when it is actually true or useful or knowable.
In making any claim related to knowledge or knowability, we are forced to negotiate the tricky and dangerous path between false-positive and false-negative errors. To embrace solely theory-discarding skepticism is to entice innumerable false-negative errors and condone ignorance. To embrace solely theory-conserving skepticism is to entice innumerable false-postivie errors and condone superstition.
There is no algorithm for research. That is, there is no fixed method that will guarantee that the researcher doesn't make a potentially onerous mistake.
However, scholars in innumerable disciplines have identified common failings in the pursuit of research. These research "heuristics" form useful "rules-of-thumb" to help researchers avoid making well-known mistakes.
Since research is an ethical endeavor, scholars are morally obliged to learn about methodological problems.
Two common mistakes in research pertain to the volume of data available for study.
One mistake is to consider the volume of evidence insufficient to be able to form any view regarding a phenomenon. Historians, for example, often wrestle with minute amounts of evidence; a conventional scientist may feel that it is impossible to form any conclusions about history based on such scant evidence. However, we must weight this trepidation against the moral danger of failing to attempt to learn from history.
A second mistake is to fail to increase the volume of evidence pertaining to a phenomenon, when the amount of pertinent evidence can be readily collected. Humanities scholars, for example, are often content to form generalizations based on single cases or small morsels of evidence -- even when large amounts of evidence are readily available.
The prospect of gaining access to increased data is not merely an opportunity to be taken or ignored, as one pleases. Where data is readily available it is morally reprehensible not to use it since failing to use the data is to increase the likelihood of making both false-positive and false-negative errors. In short, empirical data deserves our attention for precisely the same reasons that small amounts of historical data warrant the historian's best interpretive efforts. Failing to attempt to learn from the information at hand is to condone ignorance.
Fields of study differ with respect to the volume of available data, whether the evidence is historical or predictive, whether the theories are inherently risky (such as in medicine) or not (such as historical musicology), and so on. Methodologies