This book demonstrates the relevance, rigor, and creativity of interpretive research methodologies for the social and human sciences. The book situates methods questions within the context of broader methodological questions--specifically, the character of social realities and their "know-ability." Exceptionally clear and well-written chapters provide engaging discussions of the methods of accessing, generating, and analyzing social science data, using methods ranging from reflexive historical analysis to critical ethnography. Reflecting on their own research experiences, the contributors offer an inside, applied perspective on how research topics, evidence, and methods intertwine to produce knowledge in the social sciences.

Interpretation and Method : Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn

A clutch of '-isms' characterises the approach to consciousness which David Chalmers defends: dualism, epiphenomenalism, functionalism, anti-reductionism, and -probably -panpsychism. (The author would no doubt want 'naturalism' included in the list as well, but as we shall see, Chalmers' predilection to describe his theory as 'scientific' stretches credibility.) While the book does not, as far as I can see, move consciousness research significantly forward, Chalmers succeeds admirably in clarifying the philosophical terrain around and within each of these '-isms' and in questioning the usual assumptions which suggest some of them are mutually exclusive. Because nearly all of what follows is highly critical, I want to be explicit about one thing: I do not think this is a bad book. Throughout, most discussions keep to a very high standard; it's just that they include fatal flaws.

The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory

The cross-cultural program of research presented here is about matters of temporal persistence--personal persistence and cultural persistence--and about solution strategies for solving the paradox of "sameness-in-change." The crux of this paradox resides in the fact that, on threat of otherwise ceasing to be recognizable as a self, all of us must satisfy at least two constitutive conditions. The first of these is that selves are obliged to keep moving or die, and, so, must continually change. The second is that selves must also somehow remain the same, lest all notions of moral responsibility and any commitment to an as yet unrealized future become nonsensical. Although long understood as a problem demanding the attention of philosophers, we argue that this same paradox arises in the ordinary course of identity development and dictates the different developmental routes taken by culturally mainstream and Aboriginal youth in coming to the identity-preserving conclusion that they and others are somehow continuous through time. Findings from a set of five studies are presented. The first and second studies document the development and refinement of a method for parsing and coding what young people say on the topic of personal persistence or self-continuity. Both studies demonstrate that it is not only possible to seriously engage children as young as age 9 or 10 years in detailed and codable discussions about personal persistence, but that their reasoning concerning such matters typically proceeds in an orderly and increasingly sophisticated manner over the course of their early identity development. Our third study underscores the high personal costs of failing to sustain a workable sense of personal persistence by showing that failures to warrant self-continuity are strongly associated with increased suicide risk in adolescence. Study four documents this same relation between continuity and suicide, this time at the macrolevel of whole cultures, and shows that efforts by Aboriginal groups to preserve and promote their culture are associated with dramatic reductions in rates of youth suicide. In the final study we show that different default strategies for resolving the paradox of personal persistence and change--Narrative and Essentialist strategies--distinctly characterize Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth.

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Personal persistence, identity development, and suicide: a study of Native and Non-native North American adolescents

Two studies addressed whether children consider speakers’ knowledge states when establishing initial wordreferent links. In Study 1, forty-eight 3- and 4-year-olds were taught two novel words by a speaker who expressed either knowledge or ignorance about the words’ referents. Children showed better word learning when the speaker was knowledgeable. In Study 2, forty-eight 3- and 4-year-olds were taught two novel words by a speaker who expressed uncertainty about their referents. Whether the uncertainty truly reflected ignorance, however, differed across conditions. In one condition, the speaker said he made the object himself and thus, he was knowledgeable. In the other condition, the speaker stated that the object was made by a friend and thus, expressed ignorance about it. Four-year-olds learned better in the speaker-made than in the friend-made condition; 3-year-olds, however, showed relatively poor learning in both conditions. These findings suggest that theory-of-mind developments impact word learning.

Learning words from knowledgeable versus ignorant speakers: links between preschoolers' theory of mind and semantic development.

The neurophysiological evidence from the Miyashita group's experiments on monkeys as well as cognitive experience common to us all suggests that local neuronal spike rate distributions might persist in the absence of their eliciting stimulus. In Hebb's cell-assembly theory, learning dynamics stabilize such self-maintaining reverberations. Quasi-quantitive modeling of the experimental data on internal representations in association-cortex modules identifies the reverberations (delay spike activity) as the internal code (representation). This leads to cognitive and neurophysiological predictions, many following directly from the language used to describe the activity in the experimental delay period, others from the details of how the model captures the properties of the internal representations.

Simo Vihjanen

Papers

Representation and reality