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Generally, qualitative inquiry in psychology continues to place its work under the rubric of "science." This stands to reason: Insofar as the focus of most qualitative inquiry remains largely "informational"—that is, geared toward generating bodies of knowledge that are essentially "detachable" from the data from which they derive—this placement within the context of science is fitting. There is a political dimension as well: eager to establish its legitimacy within the discipline, it has been important for qualitative inquiry to proclaim its continuity with more traditional, especially quantitative, forms of inquiry. Whatever virtues there may be in conceptualizing and conducting qualitative inquiry in this way, there are problems as well. First, and most basically, doing so runs the risk of losing the very specificity that certain modes of qualitative knowing—in the case to be considered herein, narrative knowing—provide; for, in some of these modes, there is no detachment of the informational content of what is said from the form of its presentation. Moreover, there is an irreducible particularity to language itself that renders such modes of knowing different in kind and order from the kind of knowing that science, as customarily conceived, generally relies upon. In view of this situation, one might move in the direction of what has been termed "poetic science" and seek to establish a more capacious view of what science is and does. Valuable though moving in this direction may be, it is questionable as well. Indeed, there are, arguably, circumstances in which it may be more sensible to abandon the scientific project altogether and more readily avow the artful nature of the work in question.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-21094-0_21

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