Becoming research versus Being research? Philosophical positions in science?

I'll post more later when I get a break at work. Literally today I'm submitting a journal article for publication on top of a full clinical day.

In medical and in scientific research contexts I've never heard the distinction raised between "being" and "becoming", but it's an interesting way of organizing it.

Briefly, prospective studies that are controlled allow much greater inference about causality. For example, taking two identical cohorts with a disease, giving one a drug and the other a placebo, and following them over time to a pre-determined outcome measure will help you determine whether the drug is responsible for therapeutic or adverse events. There are various kinds of prospective trials.

Cross-sectional research and retrospective research only allows correlations to be made, and thus causality is much more difficult to establish.

This figure is from a great series in The Lancet on research methods. I know one of the authors. There is a lot of good info in this series that I could link.

Paul,

Thanks for your comments, and I'm eagerly awaiting you getting back to this. Congrats on the submission--maybe you could add some details about that in your profile. Are you near Asheville?

I think my question is much more philosophy than science, and Philosophy of Science probably has not integrated these two different philosophical perspectives (Being vs. Becoming) for any discussion yet. So we're left with the unacknowledged reality that the Becoming paradigm dominates science.

I am not concerned with whether there are actually two separate kinds of "time". My concern has to do with the separate experiences of time, how they influence how you do research, and whether these two philosophies which influence temporal experience have influenced the philosophy of science in some distinct bifurcated way.

We have the reality of how a researcher (for example, Stern), sitting firmly in his Being philosophical perspective instead of simply bending to the research methods (and Becoming perspective) which have been handed down by "science authorities". Before him, people examined the mother-infant dyad for centuries, but until Stern in the 1960s filmed the dyad interacting and repeatedly examined the interaction sequence, slowing it down, as if under a microscope, they never saw how much was going on in a 2-3 second interval. The Being view is related to an expanded present moment where a LOT occurs, whereas for the Becoming view, it's barely a filmic frame passing from the future into the past.

Stern's observational research does not fit into any of the categories listed as Becoming. It's a different paradigm for research, a Being paradigm in a field dominated by the Becoming paradigm.

The early philosophers took their own phenomenology of time and acted as if it were ontology- or the reality of time.

My original question was: Does anyone have a definition of (or further information about) Becoming research versus Being research? Any information about these philosophical perspectives as they relate to Science and research? I want to discuss it further.

billy

Certainly there is an "objective" time, and for those who subscribe to a Becoming philosophical view, that suits them very well.
I guess this is much more about the different experiences of time than any "reality" of time. And it seems throughout the ages, philosophers have discussed the two different experiences of time (though they spoke of these experiences as reality, I think incorrectly).
It may have more to do with the Being view having a greater APPRECIATION for the present moment, whereas the Becoming view having a greater appreciation for history and anticipation.
Dean Wareham, frontman for indie bands Luna and Galaxie 5oo told his therapist Bernie about his struggle to be in the here and now:
Dean: Jack has this incredible ability to enjoy the moment. He's always smiling and laughing and having a good time, while I'm sad about the past and worried about the future. ....
Bernie: You're pissing on the present
Dean: What?
Bernie: If you have one foot in the past and one in the future, then you're pissing on the present. [from Black Postcards: A rock and roll romance, by Dean Wareham, 2008]
Of course, in this passage, their both revealing their bias against the Becoming view, though Dean may be unhappily stuck with it. There is no connection between either view and dissatisfaction, and it's no better to piss on the past & future.

Try the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician coauthor with Russell of Principia Mathematica and Harvard philosopher.

Also the notion of quantum events or quantum observations instead of quantum particles. In fact a great deal of modern theories of everthing string theory, M theory and quantum theories of gravity imply that space time is not continuous but discrete and quantitized and that reality is composed of events (moments or droplets of experience) not discrete interacting objects with fixed properties.
Reality is continous flux and change not static fixed being.

"Science and the Modern World"
"Process and Reality" both A.N. Whitehead

That is a powerful argument that puts realism back into its proper place as an oversimplified reduction whose purpose is to allow us a false but useful understanding of the world.

Aristotle's theory of scientific knowledge was the first to resolve the possibility of change in a formal Platonic world. He sliced the world into fixed segments which sequentially follow. This was the original picture theory of the phenomenal world. Objects can be designated and relations can be measured in each picture as the "state" of a static world. Most of science is still fully Aristotelean in this respect.

One can look at the sequence of pictures from the past and use induction to make guesses about the future. Example: in picture 1 it is cloudy and the rock is cool; in picture 2 it is sunny and the rock is warm. Problem: will picture 3 show a cool or a warm rock? Problem: Where did time disappear (see Augustine)?

Galileo had Heracleitan science figured out. It is this that made him the father of modern mathematical Heracleitan science. Berkeley took full advantage of this understanding of objective physical relativity to demolish both direct and indirect realism in his Dialogues.

Problem is that Galilean relativity seems to be *the* most significant secret in all of philosophy. Just look at the pathetic entry in Wikipedia, and its missing even from Russell's chapter on Galileo in his History. This is the single biggest reason why philosophy and science are in conflict. Science is 400 years ahead. But hopefully, philosophy will catch up in the next fifty years.

Absence of time is characteristic of Aristotelean science. Historical research is like that.