Noticeable movements: on abductive thinking in educational research.

Abstract

In this article I aim to explore abduction as a scientific tool for the social sciences and for educational research in particular. My ambition is to shed light on abduction as a specific and durable attitude to human life and knowledge construction – an opening of doors into human acceptance of the limitations of our knowledge and the continual change of natural phenomena beyond human truth. The dynamic object of abductive research demands of the researcher a creative mind to be able to withdraw a reasonable hypothesis. Abduction is a sensitive and long-term type of research that offers no determined conclusions or secured methods, but according to the founder of abduction, Charles Sanders Peirce, is the only type of research that can produce new knowledge.

Peirce’s preoccupation with knowledge production and the limitations and possibilities of human knowledge is not educationally contextualised by Peirce himself, although it approaches the same questions about human conditions as the ones troubling pedagogues and educational researchers. From within this coinciding field of interest I would like to emphasise triadic knowledge production as contrasting the dominant position of general, abstract knowledge and put forward sensation as the basis of human knowledge. To Peirce (1891), a feeling is an isolated state of mind, as well as reflecting human reaction to natural and cultural phenomena. The truth of nature is accessible to humans through sensations only. Further on, I describe and reason about the connection between the triadic epistemology of Peirce and abduction as research, thereby translating the role of sensation in knowledge production to the attitude and openness of the abductive researcher. In order to give these connections clarity, the article is built up in three parts.

In the first part I describe the triadic knowledge production structure defined by Peirce (1892) as ‘the law of mind’; a triadic and continuing mental process that starts out with a sensation of a quality (firstness), through an element of reaction (secondness) and ends with generalising or the making of common concepts (thirdness). This triadic mind process is continuous and reflects the continuous changing movements of nature. The human being is in Peirce’s synechistic perspective part of the world’s coherent all, and our sensations reflect the connection we cannot avoid but constantly escape through the conceptualising of thirdness. Firstness is the element that hosts the clue to the truth, and although humans cannot grasp this with their conceptualised knowledge, it represents the element of possibilities. Secondness, on the other hand, is the element that exceeds the duality of feeling and concept, while reacting to how feelings and ideas correspond, or not. With the conceptualising of secondness, knowledge is kept open to changes in line with a changing world and human meaning making.

Inspired by the American philosopher Elizabeth Cooke and her reading of Peirce, I describe and reflect on three steps within abductive reasoning that connect triadic knowledge production with abductive research. A playful attitude, successive questioning and sensitive speculation are all characteristics of abductive reasoning, but also controversial acts in contemporary research. They all seem to match badly with pre-planned research projects, which demand pre-posed aims and questions, as well as pre-viewed and generalisable conclusions. To Peirce, these pre-determined ways of conducting research block the way to new knowledge, while an open, creative attitude makes room for and notices sensations and reactions as parts of human knowledge-making. Cooke (2006, 2018) argued that these seemingly indeterminable phases are marked by reason and direction by way of the experiences and ideals of the researcher.

In the third and final part of the article I aim to strengthen the abductive steps and methods in a speculation about my own fieldwork on preschool children’s journeys on a bus. The young children’s common reactions to the world are here interpreted following the principles of abduction and with the attitude of a sensitive and playful researcher. In this part I describe how questions are formulated successively and according to reactions between people and various phenomena. My attention and questions are in turn characterised by an attitude towards the children’s acts as important to their emergence in the world. The speculation of what is at stake assumes a careful interpretation of the children’s acts as expressions of their experiences of travelling through their city surroundings. From their expressions and my own experiences of the journey I speculate on the event using Peirce’s triadic law of mind and geographic concepts as space, spacing and choreography, to thereby suggest an explanatory relation between the children’s reactive movements, a re-construction of space, and knowledge construction. An educational hypothesis of learning beyond educational places is formulated by putting together and reasoning using the three concepts of social choreography, space making, and room for action.