Coming from engineering and chemistry, I’m very new to social research. Not only had I put extra efforts to bear with Luker and professor Grimes while exploring paradigms and deeds of human leaders in sociology, but also tried to enter a new state of mind, where promises like “you will not be trying to assess the distribution of individuals … across a known number of categories whose boundaries are clear” will not throw me into confusion. A chemical experiment without boundaries is more of a hobby than science (I was taught). Not that I’m saying this kind of hobby or passion didn’t bring humanity discoveries like penicillin, but still constant curiosity and attentiveness are not the same as conscious inquiry. Fortunately, the happy thing is that I’m becoming interested in researching our “fishiness” and at the same time more and more impatient about how to find categories that you didn’t set to look for; collect not too many and not too little data without aiming for exact data; acquire wisdom to be human (“fish”), but analyze findings without “public” constrains (being “fish”), and be sure that you add to universal knowledge, not only to personal hours worked.
What I want to find after learning this Salsa Dancing methodology is truth. And I believe it won’t deprive people of possibilities to find another truth, and yet another one, because, for me, truth is not complete and absolute in itself but what can help, guide or add to knowledge at the moment it was brought into light.
Every result or claim can be useful even if proved wrong, for then you can study why at the time of its research it was impossible to conclude otherwise. Of course, the researchers have to be good and open-minded students of methods (good: you can’t acquire basic knowledge from mere air; open-minded: roughly speaking, any grand theory can be disproved any time and better to be prepared to do it than not), and have to be the best in every contemporary to them aspect. Then there won’t be any doubt that research, including thinking, could have been done better — not in scale, but in attitude. So, any discovery made by such researchers will become a new brick for what we call research — a building knowledge process spread across years and centuries. All bricks, errors or not, compose research, and our view, and our understanding of the world; all bricks are valuable and truthful when brought to the construction site of knowledge with all possible precautions taken not to consciously or unconsciously deceive.
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