On Research Methodology- Insights from Bachelard

1. SCIENTIFIC
PSYCHOANALYSIS

3. NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
Scientific thought is drawn towards 'constructions' that
are more metaphorical than real

4. STAGES OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHTS
1. First, there is the concrete stage
2. II Second, there is the concrete-abstract stage
3. III Third, there is the abstract stage

6. • First, there is the puerile, childlike soul, the modish,
dilettante soul, filled with naive curiosity and marvelling at
any phenomenon instruments produce, playing at physics for
amusement and as an excuse for adopting a serious attitude,
happily collecting things that come its way and remaining
passive even in the joy of thinking.

7. • Next, there is the teachery soul, proud of its dogmatism and
fixed in its first abstraction, resting throughout its life on the
laurels of its schooldays, its knowledge spoken out loud every
year, imposing its proofs on others and wholly devoted to
that deduction which so conveniently bolsters authority,
teaching its servant as Descartes did or middle-class
youngsters as do the proud holders of university degrees.

8. • Lastly, there is the soul desperate to abstract and reach the
quintessential, a suffering scientific consciousness, given over to
ever imperfect inductive interests and playing the dangerous game
of thought that has no stable experimental support; it is constantly
disturbed by the objections of reason, time and again casting
doubt on the right to make a particular abstraction yet very sure
that abstraction is a duty, the duty of scientists, at last refining and
possessing the world's thought.

10. • In any case, the task of the philosophy of science is
very clear: it is to psychoanalyse interest: to turn
the mind from the real to the artificial, from the
natural to
the human, from representation to abstraction

11. science is the aesthetic of the
intellect

12. EPISTEMOLOGICAL OBSTACLE
• The problem of scientific knowledge must be posed in terms of
obstacles.
• Reality is never ' what we might believe it to be': it is always what
we ought to have thought
• Even when it first approaches scientific knowledge, the mind is
never young. It is very old, in fact, as old as its prejudices.

13. • Science is totally opposed to opinion, not just in principle but equally in its
need to come to full fruition
• Opinion thinks badly; it does not think but instead translates needs into
knowledge
• Opinion is the first obstacle that has to be surmounted.
• Nothing is self-evident. Nothing is given. Everything is constructed.
• Knowledge gained through scientific effort can itself decline.

14. • An epistemological obstacle will encrust any knowledge that
is not questioned. Intellectual habits that were once useful
and healthy can, in the long run, hamper research
• Eg. Power to Power Epidemics, habitus to habitat, entity to
assemblage, group theory,…

15. • Ideas will thus acquire far too much intrinsic clarity. And with
use, ideas take on unwarranted value. A value in itself
impedes the circulation of values. It is a factor of inertia for
the mind
• The conservative instinct then dominates and intellectual
growth stops.

16. • a well-drilled mind is unfortunately a closed mind. It is
a product of education
• Critical moments in the growth of thought involve in
fact a total reorganisation of the system of knowledge

17. dialectising this experience (psychoanalysis)

18. Specifying, rectifying, diversifying: these are
dynamic ways of thinking that escape from
certainty and unity, and for which
homogeneous systems present obstacles rather
than imparting momentum.

19. •judge the errors of the mind's past
•dynamize research & abstract beyond
ordinary experience

20. SCIENCE IS EPISTEMOLOGICAL
DIALECTICS
• Historians of science have to take ideas as facts.
Epistemologists have to take facts as ideas and place them
within a system of thought
• It is when we examine the idea of the epistemological
obstacle in greater depth that we shall best discern the true
intellectual value of the history of scientific thought.

21. EPISTEMOLOGICAL EFFICACY
• Epistemologists must therefore make every effort to
understand
scientific concepts within real psychological syntheses, that
is to say within progressive psychological syntheses, by
establishing an array of concepts for every individual idea and
by showing how one concept has produced another and is
related to another. Then perhaps they may succeed in
measuring epistemological efficacy

22. • Primary experience or to be more precise, primary observation is always a first
obstacle for scientific culture
• Immediately after describing the seductions of particular and colourful
observation we shall show how dangerous it is to follow initial generalities,
• Thus, when we go from observation to system, we go from having our eyes wide
with wonder to having them tightly shut.
• This kind of regularity in the dialectic of error cannot come naturally from the
objective world
• We shall be looking in tum at the danger of explaining things by the unity of
nature and the usefulness of natural phenomena

23. VERBAL OBSTACLES
verbal obstacles, that is to say the false explanations
obtained with the help of explanatory words through
that strange inversion that considers itself to be
developing thought by analyzing a concept instead of
engaging a particular concept in a rational synthesis

24. Is language a vehicle of
meaning or conveyer belt
of thought?

25. CONCEPT?
•Shares its etymological root with Conceit!
•To “take in”!
•"take (seed) into the womb, become pregnant,"

26. •Concepts are the constituents of thoughts
•Is ‘non-conceptual understanding’ possible?
•‘referential’? – Networked references!

27. OUR HABITAT

28. OUR METHODOLOGICAL ORIENTATION

30. PATH DEPENDENCE

32. IT BECOMES AS WE SHAPE IT!

33. With concepts we classify
particulars!

34. Concepts are methodologically (?)
arrived from observing or analyzing
sources

35. Cloaks’ of senses?

37. QUESTIONS WE ASK : METHOD
• Method: Methods are means by which concepts are
either discovered or invented from sources ?
• The procedure by which we weave meaning?
• A procedural means to uncloak?

48. Rene Magritte

51. Sources, Method and concepts are
mutually related and they reinforce/
torpedo each other

52. 1. Sources don’t lie out there to be discovered. Even their existence
can’t be recognized or acknowledged without the means of
concept or method.
2. Methods are not merely neutral tools available there. They have to
be invented and sharpened as we grasp our research problems
better. They have to be reinvented as our political conscience
improves with research acquaintance.
3. Concepts are not truth statements. They are habituated patterns of
organizing facts influenced by our political sensibility and exposure
to other concepts. Concepts are method dependent. Though
ideally concepts are arrived as the result of a research process,
without a conceptual a priori we cannot approach a research
problem.

53. the first impression is not a fundamental truth. In point of
fact, scientific objectivity is possible only if one has
broken first with the immediate object, if one has refused
to yield to the seduction of the inicial choice, if one has
checked and contradicted the thoughts which arise from
one's :first observation. Any objective examination, when
duly verified, refutes the results of the first contact with
the object.
-Gaston Bachelard (Psychoanalysis of fire)

54. RESEARCH ENDEAVOUR?
• Research gap?
• Concept creation? Establishing truth?
• Methodological precision?
• Appropriating Source?
• Exposing error?
• De-cloak meaning?

57. HABITS DIE HARD!

58. ASSOCIATIONS

59. Santa Muerte (Spanish for Our
Lady of the Holy Death)

65. There is always a further!

66. ESTABLISH-THROUGH-
TOWARDS?
BURST-THROUGH- TOWARDS?

67. • Usually we begin our research process from our conceptual a priori.
Conceptual a priori is the positive unconscious of knowledge of the
individual researchers or the research field. The objective of our
research, I would recommend, should not be reproducing our
conceptual a priori by means of readymade methods justified with data
sources, approaching all the three uncritically.
• The research process is also the process in which the researchers gain
ability to handle source, method and concepts dexterously. The greater
research processes take researchers to break away from conceptual a
priories the dexterous they are.

68. • A refined research process begins with explaining or
understanding the source, using the best possible method.
• Methods are better to the extent they challenge the
conceptual a priories. The coarsest of research endeavor on
the other hand would be reproducing conceptual a priories. A
still worse research process may not even be aware of the
existence of the conceptual a priories within which researches
are problematized.

69. • Most of the hypothetico-deductive research projects
reinvent the conceptual bias with which they started their
truth-game. Conceptual a priories though are inevitable,
research projects of greater authenticity move ahead by
prioritizing methods over concepts. By prioritizing
methods over concepts I mean challenging a priori
concepts by critiquing methods by which they were
produced.
• Precisely, this is called methodological critique. Such a
critique may free research endeavors to look at the
sources in a new light

70. • Research endeavors of greater authenticity critically examine
the methods in relation to their efficacy in understanding the
source. Understanding or explanation of the source through
undergoing into spirals of methodological reflexivity is pivotal
to research endeavors of greater authenticity. The idea is
diagrammatically expressed in the Figure given above.
• The diagram exposes the tentative reflexive spiral researchers
may go from a priory concept to methodologically refined
concept.

71. Of the three, among the trio: source, method and
concept, I suggest, we need to be more cautious and
guarded about ‘concept’. One has to be aware,
concepts are not truth statements, but they are results
of our attempt to systematically understand the source
through a set of methods.

72. • Commitment to methods over understanding the
source is an error we often commit. The error of
committing to one or another set of methods
understanding the source however, may not be fully
avoided.
• Nevertheless, the awareness regarding inevitable
fallaciousness of methods in understanding the
source may enhance our caution against reducing
truths into concepts

73. Research is a never ending endeavor of making sense
of the source with reflexively produced methodological
engagement.
The moment, we declare the concepts we have drawn
as pure truth, we should know, is the moment our
research and scientific temperament is lost to dogmas
and prejudices

74. • Disappropriate
• A-signifying Puissance!
• Potency
• Void
• Event
• Entity or group?

76. There is no end….