Martyn Hammersley
CRITICAL OR UNCRITICAL, IS THAT THE QUESTION? ON RESEARCHERS AS PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS ENGAGED IN SOCIAL CRITICISM[1]
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Cardiff University, September 7-10 2000
The word ‘critical’ has become an honorific title used by researchers to commend their work, or the particular approach they adopt. Conversely, the work of others is often dismissed on the grounds that it is ‘uncritical’. However, there are important questions about what the term ‘critical’ means, about what we should be critical of, and about the form that criticism ought to take. These questions are addressed here, both in relation to educational research itself, and in relation to the role of researchers operating as public intellectuals. It is argued that the distinction between these roles is an important one; and has implications for what can be criticised, on what grounds, and in what way. In both cases, there are proper limits to criticism; albeit different ones. Like anything else, criticism is not always a good thing.
Key words: critical approaches, the researcher’s role, the role of public intellectual.
In social and educational research, the word ‘critical’ has become a term of praise, an honorific title used by writers to commend their work, or the particular approach they adopt. Thus, we have: critical theory, critical rationalism, critical realism, critical social research, critical discourse analysis, critical anthropology, critical action research, critical policy research, critical ethnography etc. Conversely, the work of opponents is sometimes dismissed as ‘uncritical’.But what does it mean to be ‘critical’ or ‘uncritical’?
Traditionally, within research, the most basic form of criticism is the assessment of knowledge claims in terms of their likely validity. This is something that researchers engage in individually as part of their work, since inquiry is composed of alternating creative and critical phases. However, criticism also takes collective, and public, forms: it is part of the operation of research communities, where colleagues assess one another’s findings in terms of their likely validity.
This meaning of being ‘critical’ - critical assessment of the likely validity of knowledge claims which are designed to contribute to a disciplinary field - is central to some uses of the adjective, notably ‘critical rationalism’ (see Albert 1985). However, it is not the main meaning of the term today. The scope of criticism, as regards its targets, its grounds, and the nature of the critical act, has become much broader. Thus, to be critical is often held to involve assessing public policies, institutions, and forms of practice, not just knowledge claims; doing this in terms of practical values, such as educational benefit, social justice, or economic efficiency; and the critical act has been expanded to include analysing the fundamental assumptions and social contexts associated with what is being discussed, and/or taking an oppositional stance towards it. By contrast, to be ‘uncritical’ is to fail to engage in these broader kinds of criticism.
An important source of this wider interpretation of what the term ‘critical’ means was, of course, Marxism and Critical Theory. These developed - or sought to ‘transcend’ - the idea, central to the Enlightenment, that our understanding of the world can be distorted or biased by social factors. Marx drew on Hegel in seeing all ideas as products of social development, with true ideas pointing to, or only attainable at, the end of history. And, within Marxism, the critical assessment of knowledge claims came to be closely tied to criticism of prevailing social arrangements, in two respects. First, criticism of society could be seen as itself contributing to the achievement of knowledge, to the extent that it succeeded in progressing society towards the point where truth is ‘realised’; in the complementary senses of being made real and of becoming transparently obvious (Cohen 1982). Secondly, ideas were to be judged as much in terms of their origin, or social functions, as in terms of their cognitive validity. Or, rather, validity was now conceptualised as socio-historically relational, as intrinsically related to social function; located within the context of a teleological meta-narrative which pointed to the eventual realisation of absolute truth. In this way, a strong instrumental element was injected into the notion of validity. The most important result of all this, for my purposes here, was that the boundary between intellectual and political criticism tended to be erased.
Another important element of Marxism and Critical Theory was Hegel’s development of the Kantian notion of critique. As a consequence, criticism of knowledge claims became not simply a matter of assessing them against evidence, but of understanding the whole framework of assumptions in which they operated, and identifying the limits to the validity or value of that framework. For Marxists and critical theorists this meant criticising the ideological character of prevailing modes of thought, these being seen as representing in ideational form the material limits of the mode of social organisation with which they were associated. An important consequence of this was erasure of another boundary, that between scientific and philosophical criticism; both of these simultaneously being merged with political criticism.
The changes in the meaning of the term ‘critical’ generated by Marxism and Critical Theory led to a view of the social scientist as necessarily a politically engaged intellectual; in other words, to the conclusion that research should be, and in some senses could not avoid being, political. In the non-Marxist terms framed by Julien Benda, in his book The Treachery of the Intellectuals (Benda 1969, first published in French in 1928), this involved a move from seeing intellectuals as having an other-worldly concern with knowledge, literature, music, or art, and as making occasional public pronouncements in order to support universal ideals, to a view of them as partisans, indeed as only authentic when acting as organic intellectuals linked to material and political forces.
Benda’s book is a useful guide here because it brings out some of the complexities in notions of the role of the intellectual. It was prompted by his horror at the way in which some German and French intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had become partisans for nationalism. There were two elements of his opposition to this. First, nationalism is particularistic; in other words, it stands opposed to universal ideals, whereas from his point of view it was the responsibility of intellectuals to preserve and symbolise those ideals. Secondly, these intellectuals had deserted their proper preoccupation with thinking, writing, and creating ideal objects. They had subordinated themselves - and thereby the value of thought, morality, etc. for which they were responsible - to the dirty business of politics.
I think it is fair to say that Benda was ambivalent towards Marxism; and it is not difficult to see why. On the one hand, he applauded its commitment to universal ideals. Indeed, in the 1920s and 30s it offered some of the most powerful opposition to right wing nationalist movements in Europe. On the other hand, it insisted on the need for intellectuals to be politically committed and engaged, in order to realise those ideals. Furthermore, as part of this it seemed to have become tied to more particularistic interests: those of party functionaries and indeed those of the Soviet Union (see Caute 1964). At the very least, from Benda’s point of view, it thereby infringed the autonomy of intellectuals, and often seemed to demand behaviour that ran contrary to universal principles in the name of successful political action.[2] I suspect that, unlike Marxists, Benda believed that universal ideals could never be fully realised; but he also recognised that the new right wing nationalism and its associated ‘intellectuals’ were a threat to the very existence of a world that would tolerate intellectuals in his sense of that term - those who are engaged in autonomous intellectual work and thereby bear witness to universal ideals in a profane world. There are some respects in which my own position is similar to that of Benda, though it differs in others.
Aside from the influence of Marxism, there are some other, more recent, influences that have broadened what it means to be critical in the context of the social sciences and educational research. One of these is feminism. This also treats research as necessarily political, and as properly engaged in pursuit of political goals; albeit different ones from Marxism. While some versions of feminist research rely on a historicist meta-narrative, others do not. Those that do not often draw on another set of ideas that has encouraged a wider interpretation of ‘critical’, which we can label with that much used floating signifier ‘postmodernism’. Despite the differences within and between them, both feminism and postmodernism have tended to reinforce erasure of the boundaries between research and politics, and between empirical research and philosophy. The distinctive contribution of postmodernism, and of those forms of feminism influenced by it, has been widespread abandonment of - or at least increased suspicion of - the very notion of truth as correspondence or representation. Thus, postmodernism undercuts what I treated earlier as the core meaning of the term ‘critical’ in a research context: collective assessment of the validity of their knowledge claims by researchers. It subjects to sceptical criticism any framework that could indicate what would count as more or less convincing evidence. Its logical implication is rejection of knowledge claims on the grounds that none can be judged as valid, or as more valid than others; at least as representations of fact.
One effect of postmodernism has been that, to a large extent, the main target of critique has become the knowledge claims of scientists and social researchers themselves. This reflects the extent to which some postmodernists see the world, and especially contemporary society, as being textual in character; and their belief that the appeal to science, rationality, and knowledge has become the principal means of social legitimation, the currently dominant expression of Power. They challenge this particular ‘regime of truth’, and especially its alleged denial of the validity of any other.
While, in Hegel and Marx sceptical arguments were kept in bounds by a historically emerging philosophical framework, one that was held to be eventually capable of objectively comprehending the true and the good (see Forster 1989), no such principled restriction of scepticism is available within postmodernism. Here, it can only be restrained in an ad hoc fashion, producing what Woolgar and Pawluch refer to as ontological gerrymandering (Woolgar and Pawluch 1985). This is an aspect of the performative contradiction at the heart of postmodernism.[3]
In its currently influential hybrid form, combining scepticism with a commitment to the ideal of equality (see, for example, Griffiths 1998), the effect of postmodernism is to encourage unfettered criticism of the socio-political ‘status quo’ as involving social injustice, and especially of the ideas deemed to ‘rationalise’ this. It involves showing how these ideas reflect economic and political circumstances, and deploying arguments against them that draw on epistemological scepticism.
Yet, postmodernism - like existentialism and structuralism before it - does not provide us with any rational basis for committing ourselves to particular ideals. The sceptical arguments associated with it undercut all claims of rational commitment to practical ideals, just as much as they do claims about truth. In this respect, postmodernism seems to ratify, and perhaps thereby reinforce, what Marcuse referred to as the one-dimensional character of modern society (Marcuse 1964). Indeed, some versions recognise the implication that any criticism is itself necessarily part of, or a product of, what is being criticised.
In the face of the performative contradiction intrinsic to postmodernism, those influenced by it often restrict the purpose of criticism to disruption or subversion, in the manner of ‘negative critique’. Given belief in the textually constituted character of reality, and/or in the essentially legitimatory function of appeals to knowledge, they see a key role for what Ball, paraphrasing Eco, calls ‘semiotic guerrilla warfare’ (Ball 1995:268).
These, then, are the trends of thought which have broadened and changed the meaning of ‘critical’, as it has been used in the context of social and educational research in the past twenty or thirty years. In these terms, the researcher’s task is to act as a public intellectual or social critic. Elsewhere, I have argued that the central assumptions of this position are not convincing. While research is political in some senses, it is not and should not be in others. In particular, it is not necessarily, and ought not to be, directed towards political goals. Its only immediate goal should be the production of knowledge. Moreover, the sceptical arguments against knowledge as representation, which are now widely influential, are unsound. The defects of ‘critical’ and postmodernist positions, are obscured by their use of words like ‘critical’, ‘political’, ‘truth’ etc in ways that move implicitly among quite different senses; and by a failure to recognise the implications of a consistent application of the arguments of epistemological scepticism (see Hammersley 1992:ch6; 1995; 1998 and 2000a).
Given that I think it important to retain the distinction between research and politics, in subsequent sections I will look separately at the kinds of criticism that are appropriate in these two contexts; and thereby try to identify their proper limits. I should make clear that this is an exercise in research methodology, perhaps in some respects even in political philosophy. In other words, it is not a description of the form that criticism actually takes in the domains of research and politics, but an argument about what is legitimate in each area.
The role of criticism in research
Starting from the assumption that the sole immediate goal of inquiry is the production of knowledge, criticism in that context should be primarily concerned with whether this goal has been achieved; and, secondarily, with whether it has been pursued effectively. There are other considerations involved in assessing research, of course; such as whether it has been carried out in a way that does not unjustifiably breach the rights of those studied, what the consequences of publishing the findings might be etc. However, these do not relate to its immediate goal. Indeed, the central, though not exclusive, ethical requirement placed on the researcher is a commitment to the effective pursuit, and publication, of knowledge.
Such a view of inquiry carries a number of specific implications for the form that criticism ought to take in a research context. First of all, it makes clear that criticism is a means not an end: it is a means to the collective discovery of truths, or at least to the elimination of errors. This distinguishes it from much criticism in other spheres. For instance, it differs from the kind of criticism that forms part of advocacy in law courts. Thus, while the function of the legal process is to discover the truth, and thereby to produce a just verdict, in the British system the task of the individual barrister is simply to argue the case of his or her client in the most effective way possible within the rules of court procedure. The division of labour between barrister, on the one hand, and jury, on the other, is taken to be the best mechanism for achieving the institutional goal of discovering truth and attaining justice.
This contrasts with what happens in research. While advocacy, like criticism, plays a part here, it is very much a subordinate one. The researcher’s task in writing a research report is to present a line of argument that he or she believes to be true, and to do this in the most persuasive way that is legitimate. However, researchers are expected to judge counter-arguments in a different manner from lawyers: not in terms of how these can best be rebutted but according to whether they do indeed throw doubt on the original knowledge claims. And researchers are required to change their views if the evidence becomes convincing that these are wrong. Similarly, critics are expected to put forward criticisms that are based on genuine doubts about the validity of what is claimed, not to engage in criticism for the sake of it, or in order to discredit the researcher or the line of argument being pursued. And they are to respond to any defence presented by the researcher not in terms of how best to undermine it but according to whether it resolves the problems they previously identified, and/or raises any further ones. Most importantly, there is no fixed division of labour: researchers whose work is criticised will on other occasions be critics; and those who are critics will at other times put forward positive knowledge claims. The task of critic is rotated.
A second implication of the fact that the sole immediate goal of research is to produce knowledge is that legitimate criticism is restricted primarily to critical assessment of knowledge claims put forward as contributions to disciplinary knowledge. In other words, the aim of research is not to subject state policies, social institutions, occupational practices, or even the views and assumptions of powerful political actors, to critical assessment. Of course, research may challenge ideas that are widely held to be true and/or that underpin policies and institutions. But this is a by-product; it is not the aim to make such a challenge.[4]On the interpretation I am putting forward here, the task of the researcher is not to be a social critic; in this sense research should be non-critical.