How Things Work - Doha Academy of Tertiary Studies

Writing the Final Report 195
attention to the particular values of each situation. And the meaning
of each situation is related to situations even earlier. Many generalizations
are rooted in personal experience, not so much drawn from what
people have said. (Deborah Trumbull and I [Stake and Trumbull, 1982]
called them “naturalistic generalizations.”) The more important of these
experiential roots need to be remembered in detail and in context. Just
as much as abstract generalization, experiential knowing is essential to
the epistemology of individual people and agencies. The study of human
activity often loses too much value for practitioners when the reporting
primarily tells what is common among the several and universal across
the many and too little of the individual and personal.
Aristotle did not call it “prudent knowledge,” “purposive knowledge,”
or “experiential knowing”—he called it phronesis. Philosopher
of science Bent Flyvbjerg used Aristotle’s term too. In criticizing Socratic
social science and researchers’ hankering for grand laws to guide human
affairs, Flyvbjerg (2001) said:
Phronesis goes beyond both analytical, scientific knowledge (episteme)
and technical knowledge or know-how (techne) and involves judgments
and decisions made in the manner of a virtuoso social and political actor.
I will argue that phronesis is commonly involved in social practice, and
that therefore, attempts to reduce social science and theory to episteme or
techne, or to comprehend them in those terms is misguided. (p. 2)
In his book Making Social Science Matter (2001), Flyvbjerg claimed
that social science has been insufficiently helpful to human problem solving.
Its intent to generalize has contributed too little to fixing what is not
working.
The weakness of traditional science for studying an individual person,
group, episode, or policy was put forth long ago, and again by Barry Mac-
Donald and Rob Walker (1977) and by Robert Yin (1981). Knowledge of
the particular flows from an inquiry tradition described by Georg Hendrick
von Wright (1971) as the search for understanding. We talked about it in
Chapters 1 and 3. You probably figure it’s old hat by now. Researchers, lay
persons and philosophers, and professionals often need to know the particularity
of a case, its situationality, and its social context.
I am fond of particularization, but another quote from William
Blake goes too far. In “Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Disclosures,’
” he said: