Philosophically Speaking...

Abstract

I like nothing so much as a good philosophical discussion. For one thing, it just feels so delightfully scientific to be bandying about high minded terms like "epistemology," "ontology," "realism," "relativism," and "paradigm" with great abandon. For another thing, it is simply essential in my view of the world of science to which I enjoy belonging that one should be fully engaged in the ethical and normative underpinnings of scientific practice. That, to me, operationally characterizes philosophy of science. Our scientific philosophies facilitate the debating, codifying, and explicating of our "agreed-to rules of the road" for doing our work. They are our scientific code of conduct, so to speak. In my way of thinking, the rules of the road are important for all good researchers to understand and share if we are to hew faithfully to our paradigms and do good normal science research. The problem for me is that I see the emerging debate over whether our field is a science or not through two distinct lenses, and I'm getting some parallax out of it. I've earned two doctorates at two different stages of my career; one in marketing when I was much younger, and one more recently in information systems. That does not make me any smarter than the average bear, and it could certainly be argued that it's a sure sign of not being smarter, since one could say I had to do it twice to get it right. Yet, it has afforded me a very unique perspective on the emerging ontological debate about our discipline because, quite literally, I Have Been There Before! I've studied the Philosophy of Science two fulsome times in my career, and I've gotten some interesting perspectives each time as each was in the midst of an existential debate over status, and both of these experience bear upon my agenda-setting here, as an editor. While learning my scientific craft as a first-time doctoral student in marketing, I reveled in the debate that much of academic marketing was enmeshed in during the 80s on whether marketing was a science or a technology and if a science, how best to be practiced. We future scientists all read Kuhn (1970) in our philosophy of science seminar, as well as Dubin (1978) and a flock of excellent philosophical essays collected in a tome edited by the redoubtable Jagdish Sheth (Sheth & Garrett, 1986) - a philosophy of science volume that many in marketing and elsewhere still use, aged though it might be. We marketers also saw a collection of philosophical essays by thought leaders of the field under such titles as "Marketing, Scientific Progress, and the Scientific Method" (Anderson, 1983), "On Making Marketing Science more Scientific" (Arndt, 1985), "Paradigms Lost" (Deshpande, 1983), and "Metatheory and Metamethodology in Marketing" (Leong, 1985). The debate in marketing continued well past that point and has extended into recent years (e.g., Brown, 1996; Easton, 2002), indicating that the debate we have now in information systems has years yet to go. It is not a simple question we deal with, and the answers take time and fulsome consideration.