Poverty

Re: Discourse


Of course you can't measure things like that. However, your post puported to be about the poverty of Jamaicans. You wrote:



Allocation and distribution of resources is something that can be measured.

You're conflating issues now, and I'm convinced it's due to your obsession with abstractions. You rely heavily on generalizations, such as the one that informs your most recent reply: you seem to suggest that since positivism can't explain everything, it shouldn't be used to explain anything.

The more abstractly you speak, the more you lose sight of details. The common thread of everything I've been saying here is that you have to take things on a case by case basis. What I find unconvincing in both your description of Jamaican economics and of scholarly methodology is that you favor big blanket concepts that try to account for everything under the sun. Things just don't work that way.

We've got two threads going now. As far as Jamaican economics go, you can't possibly expect to persuade anyone of your anlaysis of Jamaican poverty without citing specific (yes, positivistic) evidence. Whatever feelings you might have about positivism won't relieve you of the responsibility of backing up claims about economics with numbers.

As far as scholarly methodology goes, you're certainly not alone in thinking that



This has been a widely held view since the French intellectuals of the late 60s. It's waning now--even its most ardent practitioners, like Terry Eagleton, are now retreating from it because of the rampantly outlandish things it has produced--but it remains strong to this day. And I bet I know why: to do away with "testabilitiness" is to do away with accountability; and to do away with accountability means you can't ever be wrong.

Or right. It's hard to see, then, what is accomplished by this approach. Nothing is at stake; you gain as little as you lose. The reason this paradigm has lasted as long as it has, I'm willing to bet, is that it's safe and easy.

It is also, I imagine, the only paradigm that would allow anyone to claim:



I have little doubt that you actually believe this absurd statement. The natural environment is abstract? There is, fortunately, a way to verify this: spend some time in the jungle with no practical supplies but a versatile command of philosophical concepts. You'll find out very quickly how abstract or real the natural environment is.

Interpretivism
By Paul Andrew Bourne

Many social scientists, in particular anthropologists, have established plethoria of social phenomena that can be used to measure qualitative issues, instead of the old tradition postivistic approach to the study of human behaviour in his/her environment. They argue that man is a social animal and so the principal assumption of rationality based on positivism is irrational in itself despite its acclaim to scientificness.

Hence, critical participatory science and interpretivism are methods in the social science which have been developed to measure issues such as sexual satisfaction, pleasure, hate, and love for example. In addition, discourse analysis employs the principles stated earlier to examine issues instead of the dogma of positivism.

A discourse is not a discussion. As a result, I am requesting that readers peruse a few methodological text in order to make a distinction between discourse and postivism and the biases in each method. This will allow us to better comprehend some of the methodological fallacies that exist between quantitative and qualitative research.