Experimentalist Mode of Inquiry            

Nature of "Knowledge"

The Experimental community holds allegiance to the fundamental positivists assumptions: that the world is an orderly place, a place of non-random causes and effects; that that order exists quite apart from our experience of it; and that the principles of that order are accessible to human inquiry. Specifically, it seeks these principles as they are manifested among the relationships of what it calls variables: "any natural occurrences that exhibit measurable variations in incidence, or rate of occurrence, or rate of change of occurrence."  The communal ambition follows these assumptions: to sort out all the principled cause and effect relationships from the apparent chaos of experience.

The structure of knowledge produces is paradigmatic. It is paradigmatic in that its form corresponds—is assumed to constitute the pattern of—that portion of the orderly and accessible world under study (the phenomenon of writing). A fully formed paradigm would thus consist of the complete set of principles necessary to account for the relationships among all the variables of that portion of the world to which the community's powers of observation and measurement provide access.

What makes this paradigmatic structure workable is an inferential logic—what drives this movement from a loose collection of variables and tentative guesses about their cause/effect relationships toward articulated general principles. It is an inductive logic—a logic for moving from specific facts to general conclusions; as opposed to a deductive logic, where the movement is from general premises to specific conclusions. It is more accurately called "probable inference" (deduction is "necessary inference").

Study the world through measurement and observation, and work back from the specific "facts" (variables and their relationships) toward that systems general principles by a process of trial and error, discounting relationships that seem random and pursuing those that seem to exhibit regular, and so potentially lawful, patterns.

Human beings posit and operate on guesses about cause/effect relationships all the time. What the Experimental method aims to do it to change the status of such guesses. No matter how long the process is carried out, it never establishes an absolute certainty; all Experimental knowledge remains relative, a probability. It is a method that seeks to approach certainty by reducing uncertainty.

Inquiry—Experimental Inquiry

1. Identifying the Problem
2. Designing the Experiment
3. Conducting the Experiment: Collecting and Analyzing the Data
4. Interpreting the Data
5. Drawing Conclusions: Dissemination to a Wider Audience

Experimental design
One needs a variable to observe (dependent); a second to manipulate (independent); some means of observing and keeping track of their interaction (an instrument); and some setting within which this manipulating and observing can take place without obstruction.  The greater the investigator's control over the variables present in a given situation, the greater his paradigmatic powers of inference regarding those relationships actually under study
No control—pre-experimantal
Middle control—quasi-experimental
Full control—true experimental
The role of design is to set things up in a way that maximizes the inferential power of any given study (a function of control and community standards).

Implications/Dissemination

Two of the method's dominant features work against individual visibility. First, it is equipped for certification, not discovery. Second, Experimental inquiry spends its energy disconfirming possible explanations, and so accumulates more "positive" findings rather slowly.  The best way for any particular Experimental study to gain wide recognition is for it to a) be part of a relatively long and well defined line of inquiry; b) build carefully upon, and contribute to, the work of the other investigators in that line; and then c) be associated with that line of inquiry if and when its cumulative findings have finally an impact outside the Experimental community.

Awakening the sleeping giant of Experimental inquiry? Danger of reductivism ever-present in a paradigm-based community.

Leading figures: Lots of experimentalist. Morenberg, Daiker, and Kerek's (on sentence combining), Roland Harris, Hartwell, Rohman and Wlecke, Odell, Hilgers, James Britton, Bridwell, Pianko.

Modes of Inquiry Home
This site contains direct excerpts from The Making of Knowledge in Composition by Stephen North. Portsmouth: Heineman, 1987.
Lirvin Researching | Site created by Lennie Irvin, San Antonio College (2007) | Last updated August 21, 2007