Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 2b
Representation, valid knowledge and metaphor
Tuesday 7 September, 4 - 5.30pm
'Metaphorical Imagination: a surrogate methodology for social inquiry' -Dr Muhammad Tanweer Abdullah (University of Peshawar)
This paper introduces Metaphorical Imagination (MI) as a conceptual model for social inquiry. It commends Metaphor and Imagination as our finest intellectual tradition, from poetics to robotics, and views these as eternally linked. This paper examines MI as a 'surrogate' methodology that could allow us to draw upon the strength of ‘tacit’ knowledge for interpreting evidence, when and where empiricism fails to deliver.
This paper invites social researchers to revisit the epistemology and ontology of ‘evidence’. It reviews how ‘evidence’ in the data has traditionally been viewed as ‘physical’. It has weight, a body, or a perfect body. It is hard or soft. For that reason, many social researchers tend to project only its physical profile: the features and figures, and appreciate the trends and styles in a ‘visual’ presentation of the body in indented interview quotations, boxed observations, pie-diagrams, and indexes. Such configurations imply data sanctity by confining the cognitive parameters – as if that were possible, whereby it is very natural for researchers to follow a parallel sense to explore into the hidden realities, a tendency common to all traditions of the sciences and the social sciences. This paper draws support from Polanyi, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, and others, who assert the role and influence of intuitive, emotive and imaginative reflections in social inquiry. This influence, described as ‘tacit’, is substantiated in this paper with the support of contemporary literature.
MI characterizes Imagination as disciplined and reflexive; whilst metaphor unfolds, reinterprets, and transforms the complexity in cognitive processes. This paper highlights how preferring one metaphor over another, crystallization vs. the triangulation, for instance, we configure orre-configure the entire methodology. Thus, metaphorical surrogates allow experiential synthesis vis-à-vis creative interpretation for an ultimate ‘methodological‘ survival. This paper suggests how MI reveals something hidden, across the domains of inter-subjectivity, and inter-textuality and illustrates such inter-linkages as the ‘dotted’ lines that may be connected only tacitly. In creating a surrogate utility to interpret the multidisciplinary subject of evidence, this model takes us beyond disciplines and methods.
Key words: Metaphor, Imagination, Social Research Methodology, Tacit Knowledge,