Universality in Particularity
Posted by David Corfield
To keep me from brooding on the pleasure I’m missing out on by not being with my Café co-hosts in Toronto, let me try out a blog post.
In just about every academic endeavour to which I’ve applied myself, I have run up against the problem of striking the right balance between specificity and generality. When you’re looking to capture some complex entity and there are many possible instances to choose from, should you opt for a few highly detailed case studies, or are you better off selecting a few aspects of a multitude of examples, perhaps to submit them to statistical analysis?
Take the entity ‘episode of mathematical reasoning’. Should one take as central what is common to all such reasoning, or should one devote many pages to a detailed account of a handful of case studies? Differences of opinion on this score as regards science have occurred frequently in the philosophy of science, and in philosophically-minded history of science. In Image and Logic, Peter Galison criticises Kuhn for imagining that there might be a structure to scientific revolutions. He likens this to seeking to understand the structure of European civilisations by a case study of France. On the other hand, many analytic philosophers would find Kuhn far too interested in the specificity of historical cases, and seek some universal insight into inductive reasoning.
In the field of the mind’s influence on human health, while writing Why Do People Get Ill?, what was so very striking to us is the decline almost to extinction of the case study. While when psychoanalysis held sway one would hear the life stories of patients, today everything is about the search for correlation between personality factors and measures of disease.
Anyone who knows my work will recognise my penchant for the case study end of the spectrum. So I’ve been greatly enjoying recently a book by Jared Diamond, entitled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. This book attempts to understand what lies behind the successes and failures of societies in terms of their impact on the environment. Why did the Viking settlement in Greenland fail, while, after a sticky start, the one in Iceland succeeded? While Diamond might have been tempted to adopt an exclusively statistical approach, and he does at one point talk about comparing 61 Pacific Island societies in this way, the bulk of the book is given over to detailed case studies. It’s the inclusion of such details as that the Greenland Vikings devoted resources to walrus tusk gathering to pay its tithe to Rome, at a time when elephant ivory was in short supply owing to obstacles put up by the Islamic world, rather then spending every hour making as much hay as possible to sustain the livestock through the very harsh winters, that makes this book. There is a kind of universality in particularity.
Re: Universality in Particularity
It’s interesting that case studies are alive and well in neuropsychology, e.g. for a recent example see The Understanding of Quantifiers in Semantic Dementia: A Single-Case Study by Cappelletti et al (2006) – a detailed study of a patient “A.M.” I wonder what makes this field so different to other studies of brain and mind? Perhaps it’s just that patients with interesting – however that’s decided – combinations of function and dysfunction are difficult to find?
Papers in conversation analysis also comment in detail on the utterances produced people, see e.g. stuff produced by the Loughborough group.
I would love to see a few case studies of people with (DSM-IV) depression. I suspect detailed interviews would help to make better sense of the effect of pharmaceutical and psychological interventions.
Looking forward to your new book.