A Methodology without Methodological Rules

Abstract

This essay presents a theory of research which has the following properties:

• 1. A methodology without methodological rules. In any goal-directed activity, the situation can yield certain hypothetical imperatives for the agent if he or she appreciates the situation. This essay offers a technique for analyzing and classifying all possible intellectual situations. It describes how in typical intellectual situations typical methodological standards or constraints may guide a researcher. As methodologists we need not impose such rules or standards upon anyone, or even advocate them. Methods advocate themselves.

• 2. This point of view, which may itself be called a methodology, though it is neither purely normative nor purely descriptive, presupposes no special aim or goal of science, either as an activity or as a social institution. Not only do individual scientists pursue science each for his or her own reason, but science as such needs no special goal. Science can be understood against the background of all the usual goals of surviving in and improving upon our material or day-to-day existence. Science is pragmatically justifiable as an activity in which society must invest some resources.

• 3. Nevertheless, my theory of research does not minimise the great distance between the theoretical aims of the practising researcher, and the various practical goals that we may pursue. This distance explains why, at first glance, intellectual activity might perhaps be taken, by some, to be a search for truth “for its own sake” or by others, to be the pointless disputations of people in an ivory tower.

• 4. It dispenses with the reduction of explanation to deduction and all other accounts of explanation as well by denying explanation to be the aim of science.

• 5. It suggests an account of social institutions, and of society more generally, which is neither idealist (in the sense of Hegel, for example) nor materialist (in the sense of Marx). It does this by giving separate accounts of intellectual development and of social development, while allowing for interaction between the two.