Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 131.
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        Date: 2025-09-12 08:34:16+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: what is research?

In response to the CFP Friday last, some memories of situations 
provoking that question.

One is a statement of a colleague some years back, himself a fine
researcher, who considering his department of many colleagues, exclaimed
that no one was doing 'research'. From my perspective, he was wrong, but
in a sense worth some thought.

The other memory is of a conversation with a colleague in computer
science, a computational linguist. I sat in his office describing what I
was interested in and how I was investigating it. As I noticed he was
not paying much attention, I felt as if I were a small insect that had
flown into the room and was buzzing about almost inaudibly. Now and then
he would notice something unidentifiable, then return to his musings,
whatever they were.

'What is research?' is an excellent question. It seems to me that the
starting point of any investigation into an unfamiliar discipline begins
with it, or rather, with the question of what that discipline's members
regard as research. We must ask, 'what is research in this or that 
discipline?'

Comments?

Yours,
WM


--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
   Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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