Agency and Analysis: Agential Realism's Challenge to the Logic of Inference in Social Inquiry

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: Images of Reason and Inference in Qualitative Research: Posthumanist Innovations

Abstract

Objective: This paper examines the implications of Karen Barad’s (2007) concept of agential realism for practices of reasoning from data to assertion in qualitative research methodology. The paper makes the case that agent ontologies require transformations of practices of logical inference used in studies of the social. Specifically, they require a reconsideration of the centrality of the logical principle of non-contradiction—the principle that “A” and “not A” cannot both be true.
Scholarly Significance. This is significant because the principle of non-contradiction underlies reductio ad absurdum forms of reasoning. Reductio arguments are foundational to the persuasive power of falsifying the null hypothesis in large database research, processes of triangulation in interpretivist research, the exposure of ideological contradiction in critical theoretic work, and the deconstructive reading techniques in postmodern scholarship.
Theoretical Framework: Some preliminary work in developing alternative modes of reasoning within an agential realist framework has been done. Karen Barad (2014, 2017) has published examples of what she calls “diffractive analysis.” These remain more literary than empirical in that she reads various literary and historical texts against one another. Others have applied this analytic technique to empirical social inquiry (Dixon-Roman, 2016; Taguchi, 2012).
This is work is compelling, in that it seeks simultaneously to work a transformation of the subject of the reader in relation to the ontological multiplicity of objects of inquiry. However, these efforts do not exhaust the possibilities agential realism opens for social inquiry. This paper will examine additional methodological transformations made possible (or necessary) by this ontology. It will do so with an unprecedented level of attention to the logic and structure of empirical arguments. To do so it will reach beyond the contemporary philosophy of science literature on agent ontologies (e.g. Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Kirby, 2008) and draw on other philosophical traditions that also feature agent ontologies. Specifically, it will draw on Charles Sanders Peirce’s (1992) pragmatism and semiotic theories (Kohn, 2013; Short, 2007), as well as Indigenous philosophy and methodological literature, (Deloria, 1999; Kovach, 2008; Marker, 2018).
Modes of Inquiry and Data Sources: This paper is primarily conceptual. It works out the methodological implications of a feature of a widely read and cited theoretical framework. It will draw illustrations of the necessity and utility of agential realism’s unique affordances from the author’s recent research on the racial resegregation of a public school district (Author, 2016).
Substantial Conclusions: Agent ontologies, it will be offered, imply that reality is not singular and contradictory statements can be true and warranted. Therefore, reasoning through a process of elimination is not always a viable way of advancing inquiry toward a claim. Understood in this way, agent ontologies do not reject practices of positivist inference and social critique. Instead, they frame such reasoning as a small portion of a broader range of possibilities for inquiry. These additional possibilities include modes of analysis that work within ontological pluralism, offering an image of reasoned inference that is prospective, speculative, and whose validity lies in the futurity towards which they tend.

Author

• Jerry L. Rosiek, University of Oregon