Philosophy and the Sciences of Exercise, Health and Sport

Critical Perspectives on Research Methods

Mike McNamee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134421435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Sports Medicine

Philosophy and the Sciences of Exercise, Health and Sport is a unique interdisciplinary study that calls on researchers in these disciplines to reflect more critically on the nature and aims of scientific enquiry. In doing so, the book questions the underlying assumptions and development of science itself.

Written by a range of internationally respected philosophers, scientists and social scientists, each chapter addresses a key issue in research methodology. Questions asked by the authors include:

• Do natural and social scientists need to understand the philosophy of science?
• Are statistics misused in sport and exercise science research?
• Is sport science research gender-biased?
• How do external and commercial interests skew professional guidelines in health and sport reserach?
• Should scientists focus their attention on confirmation of theories, or on attempts to falsify them?

Philosophy and the Sciences of Exercise, Health and Sport serves notice to exercise, health and sport researchers to think more philosophically about their subject and its scientific bases. It is essential reading for postgraduate researchers seeking to establish a sound theoretical foundation for their work.

1
Positivism, Popper and Paradigms: an introductory essay in the philosophy of science

Mike McNamee

Philosophical questions in natural and social scientific research

That we need science to understand matters of disease, exercise, fitness, health, illness and so on is undisputed. Whether any empirical or scientific enterprise could properly proceed without philosophical reflection is not universally agreed. A simple thought, however, should arrest any potential dispute. How, we might well ask, could scientists investigate exercise, measure fitness, or evaluate health and illness without first clarifying the very concepts that they sought to research? Are exercise benefits objective or subjective? What type of fitness do we wish to measure? Shall we use broad or narrow conceptions of health? What are the logical relations between disease and illness? All these simple questions are essential to scientists and other professionals in the sphere of exercise, health and sport. And they are, of course, all philosophical ones pertaining to the concepts we employ, whether as students, or lecturers, or researchers, in our professional lives.

What is less obvious, perhaps, is the array of questions that are assumed in the very nature of the methods, reasonings or theories that underlie the activities of scientists. Why ought we to consider philosophical aspects of the production of knowledge in science? For researchers, and well-published ones at that, the kinds of reflections on fundamental questions seem a mere annoyance: Are there are any absolute truths? Is relativism the only alternative to absolute truth? Can science be interest-driven and objective? Are theories incommensurable? Is there a unity of method in science? Is and ought scientific enquiry to be viewed as amoral? These are questions that certainly get in the way for some. To what extent are they an obstacle to be overcome in the production of knowledge? Are they merely of antiquarian interest to the modern researcher? In short, is there a need for a Philosophy of Science in exercise, health and sport research?

It is my contention that philosophical reflections on the natures and methods of sciences is simultaneously critical and, sadly, marginalized. In the course of 20 years of lecturing I have found, in the various universities where I have taught, conditions favourable and unfavourable to philosophical reflection. Every year, in research methods courses, I have been called upon to perform two apparently valued tasks. I am sure my experience is not an isolated one. First, typically in Lecture 1, the resident philosopher, if one’s department is still lucky enough to employ one, will need to romp through the entire history of the philosophy of science. In this vein, I well remember a colleague complaining in a course planning meeting for a postgraduate research methods module, that they could not possibly fit into 3 hours an introduction to a certain software package. Is it not remarkable then, that one should be required to traverse—at speeds that the term ‘breakneck’ hardly begins to describe—the entire terrain of philosophy of science to students equally in/experienced in both science and philosophy. My colleague was impervious to the irony. Second, and increasingly these days, the philosopher is wheeled in to speak about research ethics in the conduct of scientific enquiries and to interrogate issues such as anonymity, confidentiality, privacy, the ab/uses of ‘gatekeepers’, voluntary informed consent and so on. These two functions are critical to the education of researchers and not merely their training. The cultivation of broader concerns to inform their knowledge and understanding of scientific research is critical to their becoming reflective practitioners as opposed to mere scientific technicians. Nevertheless, these two contributions aside, the remainder of such courses, typically, is a mixture of methods and techniques of data gathering and analysing, dissecting and disseminating. (And all shall worship at the wonders of scientific method and its techniques.) Yet, is this not proper? Ought one really to expect anything else in courses typically called ‘Research Methods’?

Over the time of teaching such material, I have come increasingly to believe that most of the students, from doctoral to undergraduate programmes, could not give a coherent account of the distinctions between research methods and research methodologies. And their dissertations and theses often bear testimony to this assertion. Perhaps it is the fault of the supervisors, who may well stand in similar ignorance. Yet the ability to articulate one’s methods is one thing; to justify them is another. To show how this problem may or may not have been conducted otherwise, and to show that the manner in which it was conducted was appropriate or even optimal, to show how observation is theory-laden, to appreciate how data can be a hostage to method, is crucial and all too often ignored. Even where it is not overlooked it is not taken seriously. This is a strong claim. Let me say a little more then about how I think this happens.

The processes whereby scientists typically become technicians is a complex one and I am not fit to tell the story especially well. I will therefore restrict myself to a few observations that will yield at least part of the context for the justification of this text as well as the provision more widely of philosophical reflection across the range of scientific domains.

The idea of the lonely scholar conducting experiments may find its romantic home in Galileo’s tower, but it scarcely comes near the modern reality of scientific research in exercise, health and sports as elsewhere. Researchers typically hunt in packs. At the postgraduate level generally, but especially at doctoral level, research teams in and out of laboratories focus on specific issues and techniques. Those teams and laboratories become reputed for certain types of research: department X is brilliant with certain biochemical assays, department Y is more focused on epidemiological work; research unit Z is excellent on survey work; team F focus on high performance, department A on individualized qualitative work (or post-structuralist feminist critique, or figurational analysis, and so on). Their funding is generated by key publications which then secure private or governmental monies in order to produce more research, and so the cycle goes on. The mix can be either methodological and/or theoretical. And ‘paradigmatically’, as I shall note below, this all operates at a level below conscious consideration or reflection.

Scientific labour has necessarily become specialized. Teams divide their labour from the mundane blood collection techniques, the assays, or the questionnaires or interviews, the drafting of data tables and so on. The statistical analyses will typically be done by a specialist. Other critical tasks, whether writing the funding proposal, the review papers (state of the art [science] summaries), final versions of international journal articles, or the keynote lectures, will be assigned. That fragmentation of the process is now essential to much modern science. And, lest it be thought that I am biased, while this has been the norm in natural sciences for a long time now, it is increasingly becoming the norm in the social sciences too. Departments are rated more highly where their research themes are tightly focused and where their colleagues collaborate in shared ends and agreed methods. The benefits of such managed research are too obvious to recount, the drawbacks more subtle. I have often met PhD students who have already completed one or more experiments but performed no literature review. When asked how they decided upon the methodological approach they simply said—without a whiff of disquiet or even unease—that all that had been set out by the lab director or principal researcher or that the method was so obvious that no serious reflection was required on it. Equally, I have met funded PhD students in the social sciences who had failed to appreciate that their funding was predicated upon particular theoretical approaches that, mid-way through, they had come to challenge with great discomfort. Perhaps most pernicious of all, and increasingly prevalent in the days of ‘publish or perish’, is the attribution of authorship: whose name gets on to the published research—and often in what order—reveals hierarchies of power that seem ineradicable in much modern science. Yet the inputs to the research are often so varied in quality and quantity that there are real and pressing questions to be asked about the researcher’s names on papers no less than the appearance of signatures on the originality clause at the front of every thesis. We can also ask questions of scientific integrity and the im/proper socialization processes of future generations into a particularly cynical conception of science. Such are the prices of modern, managed research and the efficient production of knowledge.

These sketchy scenarios raise questions about the relations between values, theory, method and data, about research funding, and about editorial biases in certain forms of research or historically privileged conceptions of scientific questions and solutions. They are every bit as important for researchers as the selection of case study or survey, or of invasive versus non-invasive techniques for the measurement of aerobic and anaerobic metabolism. These are the types of questions that I have asked the authors of this text to address. In the process of the book’s history, I set out to find authors who had genuine authority in their fields and to offer them a question that was of some scientific and professional moment. I did not want a chapter written merely on a fascinating philosophical puzzle within a scientific context. I wanted to display the urgency and privilege of philosophical reflection in answering scientific questions. Very often, in the process of drafting and redrafting, that question became revised and refined; some authors fell by the wayside, others joined in. Equally it was my contention that the type of reflection we called ‘philosophical’ in scientific matters was not the exclusive province of philosophers. Every good scientist in their activities needs to address conceptual questions just as much as they must address epistemological ones. Ought not every scientist to consider the alternative conceptions of the phenomenon they are researching before they operationalize their definitions of the subject they propose to investigate? Ought not every scientist to reflect on the relations of theory, method and data? My contention that they should is carried into the choice of authors for the text. Only three are professional philosophers. Yet each of the natural or social scientists that have contributed to the text has, as is demonstrated here, thought deeply and philosophically about the nature and methods of their enquiries. I also confess to a deeper, political, motive. Were a philosophy of science text to be written merely by a philosopher or philosophers, I sceptically assume that it would not be received as well by the multiple audiences whom I have targeted. Indeed, it may not even be read by them nor reviewed in the natural and social scientific journals of exercise, health and sport. External criticism can often be dismissed as impractical and/or irrelevant, outdated, uninformed, and these are the most polite of the disavowals. Criticism from within the quarters of scientific domains, from authoritative voices, cannot be dismissed ad hominem with a clear conscience: whether the proposition a person propounds is true or false, it will not be so merely because it is the view of this or that particular person. Were mere philosophers to propound some of the views set out here, my intuition is that swift rejection might well follow.

The text is not an original one in the ‘philosophy’ of science. Nor is it even a typical one. And so for those who seek detailed discussions on the nature of causality, or of explanation, or of inference to the best explanation, realism and anti-realism in science, will be disappointed with the range of the material covered here. First, it is not intended that the authors especially challenge or add to the parent discipline. Rather the more modest aim is that they illustrate a range of philosophical questions that have grown in the fields of our professional endeavours. Second, the cut between natural and social scientific research makes these areas ripe for enquiry. In this way, the term ‘fields’ of enquiry takes on a more literal meaning. Typically, exercise, health and sport do not form single disciplinary contexts. They are properly to be understood within a matrix of disciplines from anatomy, biochemistry, biomechanics, philosophy, physiology, psychology, sociology and beyond. The book, I hope, instantiates the need for, and the benefits to be had from, a spirit of tolerance of the multidisciplinarity of contributions to our fields. What I shall do in the remainder is to further sketch out in a superficial way a selected portion of the philosophical terrain that provides little more than background notes to the chapters herein.

Two cheers for positivism and the scientific method

‘What are the objects of scientific enquiry?’ we might ask. Recognizing that exercise, health and sports research have offered fruitful fields of scientific labour, could there be a science of anything or indeed everything? Well, of course, the idea that anything might be scientifically understood is a con testable claim. Not that long ago, however, it would have been clear that what designated a scientific enquiry was the method adopted. It is worth considering some historical aspects of this idea.

It is widely held that, until the seventeenth century, the term philosophy was used to refer to any systematic enquiry of any subject after which certain methods of enquiry, certain ways of arriving at knowledge, come to be privileged. A particular picture of rationality replaces the ancient tests of reasonableness (Toulmin: 2003). In the wake of the Copernican revolution, which dislodged the earth from the centre of the known universe while replacing it with the sun, came Galileo’s use of a mathematical vocabulary to help to describe the physical world. Crucially, we witness the rise of the experiment to support careful observation and develop generalizations, hypotheses and theories for scientific explanations. Whether we are to label Bacon an inductivist¹ or not, there are clearly the seeds here of the patient accumulation of facts that are tested against experience in a controlled manner so as to become more certain of the order of the natural world. It is in the seeds of these loosely collected ideas that the term ‘positivism’ is typically situated.

It is something of a surprise then, that the term ‘positivism’ is not a hostage to the history of natural science itself. The term ‘positivist philosophy’ was first coined by the French sociologist Auguste Comte in the early nineteenth century. In the wake of the success of experimental methods, scholars typically cite the earlier empiricist influence of David Hume in his An enquiry concerning human understanding (1739) who rejects the reasoning from ‘first’ principles. He writes:

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make. If we take in our hand any volume; of divine or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask: Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. (Cited in Hacking 1983:44.)

Among the things that Hacking notes from this quote is the positivistic penchant for slogans. That spirit survives today in those who assert blindly that unless problems have some quantificationist or experimental basis, they cannot claim scientific status. That which is not wrought from the scientific method must therefore surrender all pretence to science (thereby to proper objectivity). Of course a whole host of unscientific biases are in operation here (see Parry, Chapter 2, on the ideological elements of positivistic thinking). What we can retain here is the positivist’s strong sense of antipathy to metaphysics, on which I shall comment below.

Of the term ‘positivism’ specifically, Halfpenny (1982:15) notes not one but three senses or conceptions of the term in Comte’s writing. First, positivism refers to a theory of historical development in which the growth of knowledge contributes to the development of progress and social stability. This conception of positivistic philosophy sounds very much a product of its age, while the second and third conceptions have a more modern ring.² Second, positivism refers to a claim that only a certain kind of knowledge counts as scientific and that it must be based upon observation of publicly available entities. Finally, positivism entails the claim that all science proper can be integrated into a unified system.

Even if academics were faithful to Comte’s original work, confusion might arise in the applications of a term that slid between the three different senses. Yet modern natural and social scientific research methods talk in exercise, health and sport research is sometimes so loose that the term itself falls into disrepute. Nowhere is this more the case than with the all-pervasive term ‘paradigm’ (discussed below), which is typically cited without any precise meaning in mind. Likewise, calling a researcher or research design ‘positivistic’ often indicates little more than mild and unspecific abuse. When content seems to attach to the ascriptio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1: Positivism, Popper and Paradigms: an introductory essay in the philosophy of science
• 2: Must scientists think philosophically about science?
• 3: Can physiology be both Popperian and ethical?
• 4: How does a foundational myth become sacred scientific dogma?
• 5: Why doesn’t sports psychology consider Freud?
• 6: Do statistical methods replace reasoning in exercise science research? How to avoid statistics becoming merely a solution in search of a problem
• 7: What are the limitations of experimental and theoretical approaches in sports biomechanics?
• 8: Can we trust rehydration research?
• 9: Is sport and exercise science a man’s game?
• 10: Autoethnography: self-indulgence or rigorous methodology?
• 11: Is investigative sociology just investigative journalism?
• 12: Is research with and on students ethically defensible?
• 13: Obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus and the metabolic syndrome: What are the choices for prevention in the twenty-first century?