Research and the Theoretical Field - Pauldowling.me

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use did not precede research in the natural sciences; the ‘real’ universe did
not come into existence complete with linguistic labels, so, minimally, the
scientists are textualising something; to turn something into text is clearly to
transform it. So, putting the philosophical questions on the backburner for a
while, we can at least say that the astrophysicists are operating within a
textual and so theoretical ‘universe’.
In more general terms (we’re not all astrophysicists), we can refer to the
theoretical space within which a research performance is operating. This is
the ‘universe’ within and about which the researcher is to make claims. This is
going to be defined by that region of the problematic that is theoretically
consistent with the research that is to be carried out. Alexander Luria, for
example, was operating within a theoretical space that consists of the
following:
• Societies that are defined by the mode of material production
(individualised, peasant production or collective production);
• Cultures that are defined as being either non-literate or literate;
• Cognitive functions that are either limited to the participative mode or
that may exhibit both participative and theoretical modes and, in the
latter case, may privilege one or the other.
The question that he puts to this space (and these are my words not his) is:
as society moves between individualised and collective modes of production
and culture moves from non-literate to literate, what happens to cognitive
functions in terms of participative and theoretical modes. The formulation of
this question allows Luria to operationalise it as an experimental design,
because he ‘knows’ all of the variables—these are the objects, processes and
qualities that populate his theoretical space. This is what he did. First, he
decided upon an initial sampling strategy that involved the selection of critical
cases of societies in transition between the two modes of the sociocultural
possibility space, that is, non-literate/individualised production and
literate/collective production; this defined his independent variable. These
societies would consist of some members involved in the more ‘primitive’ form
and some in the more ‘advanced’ form, so that he could find all of his
participants in the same societies (this would involve a second sampling
procedure that he actually doesn’t tell us much about). Just like the physics
example, this allowed him to control for variations between societies. He then
devised an experimental design that consisted in giving the same ‘tests’ to all
of his participants. The dependent variable was the mode of cognition, which
was indicated by the participants’ responses to the tests. The research design
essentially defines which are the independent and which the dependent
variables. Luria might have tried to argue that the mode of cognition
determined the sociocultural mode (ie more advanced thinkers construct more
advanced societies) and that, for example, society develops as the human
species evolves biologically. As a (very broadly) Marxist theorist, though, this
would have been an unlikely line for him to take. In the case of the
astrophysics example, we might infer that the independent variable is the
RESEARCH & THE THEORETICAL FIELD