Assumptive research

This is called (by the archaeologists) a ruined revetment or dry stone wall, used for loading bluestone monoliths onto sledges or rafts before they were shipped off along a “hollow way.”  That is the assumption.  Geomorphologists, on the other hand, see clear evidence of glacial and fluvioglacial processes that have been at work in a chaotic dead-ice environment.  What is the truth?

This is a quote from a recent letter received from Brian Roberts, one of my old colleagues in the Durham University Geography Department.  He says: “Assumptive research’ is more common than one might expect … and embedded assumptions create vast barriers, dams, holding up research … YET flexibility is unwelcome.....”

This is what somebody at the University of Louisville says about assumptions in research: “An assumption is an unexamined belief: what we think without realizing we think it. Our inferences (also called conclusions) are often based on assumptions that we haven't thought about critically. A critical thinker, however, is attentive to these assumptions because they are sometimes incorrect or misguided. Just because we assume something is true doesn't mean it is.”

This is advice to research students:  “Think carefully about your assumptions when finding and analyzing information but also think carefully about the assumptions of others. Whether you're looking at a website or a scholarly article, you should always consider the author's assumptions. Are the author's conclusions based on assumptions that she or he hasn't thought about logically?”

Another quote:

A good hypothesis statement should conjecture the direction of the relationship between two or more variables, be stated clearly and unambiguously in the form of a declarative sentence, and
be testable; that is, it should allow restatement in an operational form that can then be evaluated 

based on data.  Generally, an assumption refers to a belief. An assumption does not require any evidence to support it. It is commonly based on feelings or a hunch. 

Could it be that the profound differences of opinion and “research behaviour” which come out of my spat with the archaeologists over “the bluestone quarries” are explained by the different research cultures that exist in the sciences and the social sciences?  In science there is the presumption that everything is observable and/or testable, and that hypotheses must be used because (although you hope that they are true) they are falsifiable.  Karl Popper has always been the hero for many of us with science backgrounds.  On the other hand, in the social sciences there is the little matter of human behaviour to be taken into account — and human behaviour, as we know, is sometimes logical and sometimes not.  People do the strangest of things for the strangest of reasons.  The being the case,  we can assume quirky or illogical behaviour, and if something is apparently inexplicable we can always try to explain it as having “an unknown ritual purpose.”  This releases the social scientist from the constraints of science, and allows him or her to get away with much more profound or extensive
assumptions than would be permitted in geology or physics or chemistry.

So what we have in the case of Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog is a “quarrying assumption” rather than a “quarrying hypothesis.”  From the very beginning of the research at both sites, the archaeologists have assumed that they have been looking at Neolithic bluestone quarries because this is what was (in their view) pointed at by the research by geologists Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer.  It was not considered necessary to test a hypothesis — but simply to assemble evidence in order to confirm the correctness of the assumption.  This explains the unscientific methods used by the digging team, making it obvious to all independent observers that they were not interested in testing a working hypothesis, but were intent upon confirming a ruling hypothesis or assumption.

When archaeologists are fixed in this mind-set, they can ignore scientific methods even though they use “scientific” tools in their research. They can claim, as MPP has done, that archaeology is not a science and that it is therefore freed from scientific constraints. So assumptions rule, and evidence and arguments from other disciplines (such as geology, geomorphology or pedology) can be ignored if they are inconvenient.

It is of course deeply worrying when this style of thinking becomes prevalent, and when papers which are deeply flawed scientifically are published in “reputable” journals.  It is even more worrying when people say to me (as they have done) that we should not apply scrutiny to the papers published by archaeologists, because they are always dealing with the erratic obsessions and belief systems of human beings — so if something makes no sense whatsoever, that’s perfectly all right........