Humans and Nature

Abstract

As part of our graduate student recruitment process, we routinely send copies of key articles to prospective students. It gives them an opportunity to see current work and anticipate what they might do as graduate advisees. Over the years, some students have taken a rather dim view of our work on transactional world views and philo­sophical underpinnings of research, describing it variously as “not my thing,” “a real snoozer,” and the like. We also find this lack of interest in philosophical issues to be true of some of our professional colleagues. For understandable reasons, they are usually more interested in formulating specific research questions, designing research paradigms that will be robust, probing their data and results, learning new statistical techniques that will help them find outcomes that are interesting (and publishable), and rounding out the Discussion sections of their papers with ideas for specific future research projects. It is the tangibles of research, not the philosophical underpinnings, that are immediately rewarding and relevant to researchers’ everyday interests and careers.