Metaphysics

By talking of ‘knowledge’, rather than of ‘knowledges ’ or ‘knowings’, we take, albeit implicitly, a stance on the basic metaphysical question, ‘What is? ’ [1]. By extension, our stance favours some epistemologies over others. The metaphysics are not trivial: if knowledge is plural, then intentions, curricula and pedagogies need to afford the development of knowledges; if we prefer to speak of ‘knowings’, we may be trying to suggest provisionality and situatedness, each of which implies rather different intentions, curricula and pedagogies than does ‘knowledge’. A good analysis of a modern sociological approach to knowledge and method is provided by Law (2004), who directly addresses the limitations that traditional research approaches have when confronted by ‘mess’. He begins by saying: This book is about … about what happens when social science tries to describe something complex, diffuse and messy. The answer, I will argue, is that it needs to make a mess of it. This is because simple clear descriptions don’t work if what they are describing is not itself very coherent. The very attempt to be clear simply increases the mess. (p. 2) He establishes the need to distinguish amongst practices and knowings: No doubt some things in the world can indeed be made clear and definite … but alongside such phenomena the world is also textured in quite different ways. My argument is that academic methods of inquiry don’t really catch these. (p. 2