Let's learn some hard words
On ontology, and its impact on collaboration.
I didn't understand what the word 'ontology' meant until about the sixth time I tried to, when somebody actually explained it to me. It turns out to mean, broadly, the study of what counts as truth. Is there one 'truth' that just exists, ready to be found, or are there multiple truths, socially constructed and changeable?
Epistemology is similar but not the same: it's about what constitutes knowledge. How do you find out the truth(s)? Is a double-blind randomised controlled trial the only option you'll accept, or will 10-15 semi-structured interviews do the job?
The interesting thing about this for me, and the reason I bring it up, is that these are two very different ways of seeing the world. They're embedded in the way we're taught and the professional contexts we're immersed in and the identities we hold. And they're not really something we're consciously aware of, probably because it's nearly impossible to retain the meaning of the word ontology for any normal human. But they do get in the way, quite a lot.
Where this shows up most in my work is on health-related projects. Medicine is classed as a natural science, meaning that it's grounded in the belief that there is a natural world that we can fully understand if we look at it hard enough and in the right way. And the 'right way' in medicine is a double-blind randomised controlled trial with a representative sample and a robust, recognised methodology for statistical analysis, from which the results can be generalised to population level and used to inform things like national guidelines. Which is as it should be; this is how I want my vaccines evaluated, thank you very much.
The problem is that if this definition of acceptability for truth and the means of acquiring it is the basis for all your study, work, continuing professional development – it's really hard to accept that in some cases, there are probably a few versions of 'true', depending, and you can pretty much find them out by having not very many nice chats. (This is what we in the trade call qualitative research, and while there is clearly a lot more rigour involved that this picture paints, this is how it seems to look from the outside, not unjustifiably.)
I remember, in a doctoral study group run by professors in the social sciences, sitting across from a pharmacist and her absolute horror that this, the transcript of a conversation, counted as research data, and that what we were doing with it (having a conversation) counted as meaningful analysis. To engage with it as a valid approach to finding the truth of the world was a serious violation of almost everything she held dear. I know, because she said so.
Meanwhile, my training (and continued belonging in a professional group) requires me to acknowledge the existence of multiple, contingent, socially-inflected truths, and to do only as much research as I need to be reasonably certain, and to adjust my methods and hypotheses as the findings suggest, and to involve non-experts in the design, execution and analysis of the research. All those things make me a good designer, but a terrible pharmacist.
Which is fine, if design and pharmacy (or psychology and psychiatry, or health care and social care, or any other two fields from opposite sides of the ontological divide) never have to meet, or work together. But that's not the case today. I can't remember the last project I worked on that didn't bring together at least three disciplines who weren't used to collaborating.
We're still coming up with ways to articulate and usefully work with the problems that this kind of collaboration brings up, I think. It's easier to work with something when you can name it; I give you 'ontological divide'.