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Definition (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)
Definition (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary)
Definition (The Cassel Encyclopaedic Dictionary)
General values (Peter L. Berger)
Value premises (Gunnar Myrdal)
Value premises and biases (Gunnar Myrdal)
Freedom from bias (Abraham Kaplan)
Values in inquiry (Abraham Kaplan)
Goals in inquiry (Deobold B. Van Dalen)
Art and craft in research (W.I.B. Beveridge)
Stages in inquiry (John Dewey)
The actual process of investigation (Deobold B. Van Dalen)
Dilemmas in inquiry (Abraham Kaplan)
Rules of inquiry (René Descartes)
Advice on data (Charles Darwin)

 

 

Definition

Reference Books

[1974] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
“Scholarly or scientific investigation or inquiry.”
        
[1983] The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 
“A search or investigation directed to the discovery of some fact by careful study of a subject; a course of critical or scientific inquiry.”

[1904] The Cassel Encyclopaedic Dictionary
“The act of inquiring diligently and carefully into any subject, facts or principles; diligent inquiry or investigation; laborious or continued search after truth.”

 

General values

[1963] Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology 
“... human values ... are endemic to scientific procedures in both the social and the natural sciences. Such values are humility before the immense richness of the world one is investigating, an effacement of self in the search for understanding, honesty and precision in method, respect for findings honestly arrived at, patience and a willingness to be proven wrong and to revise one’s theories, and, last but not least, the community of other individuals sharing these values.”  (Chapter 8, p. 188)

 

Value premises

[1958] Gunnar Myrdal, Value in Social Theory 
Value premises in research have to satisfy the following criteria :
-  Be explicitly stated
-  Specific and concrete
-  Purposively selected
-  Hypothetical in character (i.e. debatable)
-  Presented with sets of alternative hypotheses
-  Selected for their relevance (according to people's interests and ideals)
-  Possessing significance (e.g. social significance)
-  Being feasible
-  Consistent as a whole
(from Appendix 2, pp. 157-158)

 

Value premises and biases

[1969] Gunnar Myrdal, Objectivity in Social Research
“... the logical means available for protecting ourselves from biases are broadly these : to raise the valuations actually determining our theoretical as well as our practical research to full awareness, to scrutinize them from the point of view of relevance, significance, and feasibility in the society under study, to transform them into specific value premises for research, and to determine approach and define concepts in terms of a set of value premises which have been explicitly stated." (p. 5)
"There is nothing wrong, per se, with value-loaded concepts if they are clearly defined in terms of explicitly stated value premises. If they are not so defined but the implied valuation is concealed, they are certainly providing entrance to biases. If this occurs, it is then not the result of their load of valuations but of their concealment of them." (pp. 61-62)

 

Freedom from bias

[1964] Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry
“Freedom from bias means having an open mind, not an empty one. At the heart of every bias is a prejudice, that is to say a prejudgment, a conclusion arrived at prior to the evidence and maintained independently of the evidence. It is true that what serves as evidence is the result of a process of interpretation - facts do not   speak for themselves; nevertheless, facts must be given a hearing, or the scientific point to the process of interpretation is lost.”  
(Chapter X, p. 375)

 

Values in inquiry

[1964] Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry
(1) “To start with, values occur as subject-matter for scientific investigation.”
(2) “Values occur in a second way in science ... as constituting the ethics of the profession; here, indeed, they work to eradicate bias, or at least, to minimize it and to mitigate its effects.”
(3) “Values enter science, in the third place, as a basis for the selection of problems, the order in which they are dealt with, and the resources
expended on their solution.”  “Values make for bias, not when they dictate problems, but when they prejudge solutions.”
(4) “Values also play a part in science, and especially in behavioural science, as determinants of the meanings which are seen in the events with which it
deals.”
“The problem for methodology is not whether values are involved in inquiry, but which, and above all, how they are to be empirically grounded.”
(Chapter X, pp. 377-387)

 

Goals in inquiry

[1979, First Edition 1962] Deobold B. van Dalen, Understanding Educational Research
“The goal of scientists is to improve their ability and success in explaining, predicting, and controlling conditions and events.” (Chapter 2, p. 24)
“'Control' refers to the process of manipulating certain of the essential conditions that determine an event so as to make the event happen or prevent it from occurring.” (Chapter 2, p. 27)
Note : Some phenomena can be explained (e.g. an earthquake) but not predicted or controlled, while some can be explained and predicted with a certain accuracy (e.g. a tornado) but not controlled.

 

Art and craft in research

[1957] W.I.B. Beveridge, The Art of Scientific Investigation, third edition.
“No set rules can be followed in research. The investigator has to exercise his ingenuity, originality and judgment and take advantage of every useful stratagem.” (p. 175)
“When I asked Sir Alexander Fleming about his views on research his reply was that he was not doing research when he discovered penicillin, he was just playing.” (p. 204)

 

Stages of inquiry

[1903] John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
“... every scientific inquiry passes historically through at least four stages."
"(a) The first of these stages is, if I may be allowed the bull, that in which scientific inquiry does not take place at all, because no problem or difficulty in the quality of the experience presents itself to provoke reflection."
"(b) After the dawning of the problem there comes a period of occupation with relatively crude and unorganized facts-hunting for, locating, and collecting raw material. This is the empiric stage ..."
"(c) Then there is also a speculative stage: a period of guessing, of making hypo- theses, of framing ideas which later on are labelled and condemned as only ideas."
(d) Finally, there comes a period of fruitful interaction between the mere ideas and the mere facts: a period when observation is determined by experimental conditions depending upon the use of certain guiding conceptions; when reflection is directed and checked at every point by the use of experimental data, and by the necessity of finding such a form for itself as will enable it to serve in a deduction leading to evolution of new meanings, and ultimately to experimental inquiry which brings to light new facts.”
(Chapter III, pp. 88-89)

 

The actual process of investigation

[1979, First Edition 1962] Deobold B. van Dalen, Understanding Educational Research
“Research is often a confused floundering process rather than a logical, orderly one. In an investigation, one does not tackle one step at a time, complete that process, and then move on the next step. One may tackle the steps out of order, shuffle back and forth between steps, or work on two steps more or less simultaneously. Some steps may require little effort; other steps may absorb a disproportionate amount of time and effort.”
(Chapter 1, pp. 13-14)
“During an investigation, you move back and forth from one problem-solving task to another: searching, evaluating, changing, and clarifying.”
"Research work is inventive and individualistic rather than routine and mechanical. No two investigators work alike. Research is not a completely haphazard undertaking, however, for all creative work entails necessary disciplines and procedures.” (Chapter 7, p. 167)

 

Dilemmas in inquiry

[1964] Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry
“In the conduct of inquiry we are continuously subjected to pulls in opposite directions: to search for data or to formulate hypotheses, to construct theories or to perform experiments, to focus on general laws or on individual cases, to conduct molar studies or molecular ones, to engage in synthesis or in analysis.
It is seldom of much help, in the concrete, to be told that we must do both.”
(Chapter 1, p. 30)

 

Rules of inquiry

[1637] René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode 
- “The first rule was to accept as true nothing that I did not know to be
self-evidently so; that is to say, to avoid carefully precipitancy and prejudice, and to apply my judgments to nothing but that which showed itself so clearly and distinctly to my mind that I should never have occasion to doubt it.”
- “The second was to divide each difficulty I should examine into as many parts as possible, and as would be required the better to solve it.”
- “The third was to conduct my thoughts in an orderly fashion, starting with
what was simplest and easiest to know, and rising little by little to the
knowledge of the most complex, even supposing an order where there is no
natural precedence among the objects of knowledge.”
- “The last rule was to make so complete an enumeration of the links in an
argument and to pass them so thoroughly under review, that I could be sure if I had missed nothing.” (pp. 59-60)

 

Advice on data

[1983, Written 1876] Charles Darwin, Autobiography 
“I had, also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory, than favourable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.” (p. 73)

 

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