| Maximum number of words: | 80,000 |
| Words typed so far: | 84,417 |
| Words typed this week: | 1453 |
| Words lost this week: | 0 |
| Total increase: | 1453 |
| Days I managed to write this week: | 4 |
As you can see I have started making progress on the final substantive chapter of my thesis. I probably had more words I could type this week but decided not to I had just got to a natural break in the argument and so I have the next section of the argument to develop on from. This actually means that I have crossed the very difficult part of this chapter. Social Science has a love-hate relationship with science. The problem being that I and I think quite a few other scientists do not recognise their description of how science is done, as the task we do when we do science. It seems to be concerned with things like the nature of truth that most scientist do not spend time worrying about. We are far more like crafts-persons/artists than philosophers and what we are doing is following the discipline we are trained in and seeing where it leads. If you fulfil the requirements of the discipline then your research is valid. Please note that I have used "valid" and not "truth" there. We are often well aware that we are entering a debate about "truth" and even if our research is "valid" that does not mean that the communal consensus will accept our interpretation of it. Validity gets us a hearing only.
However social science also uses science in a completely different way and that is a source of metaphor for understanding knowledge. Some of these metaphors have been used as justification for "scientific methodology", however some have been openly cited as ways of thinking about things. It is this latter line that I am taking in this chapter but in order to get there I also need to take people into the mathematics of the metaphor in greater depth than most social scientists normally do. The reason for this is as we explore the mathematics we begin to understand better the implications of the metaphor and where we need to give our attention within the social science. The metaphors we think with are not neutral but allow us to see some things clearer than others
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