New Materialist Ontologies of Chance: How Research Methods Theorize Indeterminism

• In Event: What Methods Do: New Materialisms and the Consequences of Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper examines how chance and indeterminism are theorized in both qualitative and quantitative research methods in educational research. I focus in particular on new materialist ontologies that reference quantum physics as a provocation to rethink the nature of social life and subjectivity (Barad, 2007; Coole & Frost, 2010; Kirby, 2011). Secondarily, I draw on pragmatic philosophy’s ideas about the irreducibility of chance in experience (Hacking, 1990). I argue that a historical understanding of how chance and indeterminism have been theorized has important implications for the social sciences. I show how new materialist and pragmatic ontologies offer radical alternatives for revisioning fundamental research constructs such as causality and measure.

Theoretical framework:
This paper draws primarily on feminist science studies scholarship of Karen Barad (2007). Barad takes the side of physicist Neils Bohr in his disagreement with Werner Heisenberg over the Uncertainty Principle. She, like Bohr, maintains that quantum indeterminism is not about epistemic uncertainty, nor merely about the interference of instruments and language in coming to understand nature, but rather reflects an objective quantity of chance within matter itself. This paper examines the consequences of this assertion for research methods in education, showing how fundamental ideas about causality and measure must be reconceived in light of this ontology.

Methods:
I use a historical method to analyze the field of educational research. Research methods in the social sciences were formalized in the nineteenth century, as more centralized data collection became possible within institutionalized bureaucracies, and the application of statistical methods allowed for sociological patterns to be studied. During the Enlightenment, probability was considered merely a defective tool of man groping towards the inexorable laws of nature. The mathematicians who contributed to the emergent mathematics of probability in the nineteenth century – de Moivre, Laplace - believed that there would still be some underlying causal explanation or law that would supersede their work. Laplace said: "The word 'chance,' then expresses only our ignorance of the causes of the phenomena that we observe to occur..." And yet by the twentieth century, pragmatists C.S. Peirce and W. James, among other scientists and philosophers, would argue for an “absolute chance”. The contributions of Peirce in particular – in his tychism - reveal links between pragmatism and new materialism. This transformation in the Western relationship to chance and in/determinism will be analyzed for how it might be better taken up and put to work in educational research methods.

Scholarly Significance:
Recent interest in new materialist ontologies in educational research demands a more careful consideration of their historical lineage and relation to the history of science more generally. The revisiting of quantum physics in this literature provides an impetus to shift our conceptualization of chance, from less as an epiphenomenal consequence of the laws of nature, to more of a substantive unruliness integral to the nature of materiality. This in turn holds promise for moving social science methodology beyond an enlightenment conception of the individual humanist subject, to a posthumanism that retains a substantive material realism.

Author

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Adelphi University