[statement] this article is from Andrew Abbott's book: Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences
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Conventions and the problem of knowing them bring us to the matter of taste. Judging one's ideas becomes much easier when one begins to acquire scholarly taste. By taste, I mean a general, intuitive sense of whether an idea is likely to be a good one or not. It is of course important not to become a slave of ones' taste, to try new things as one tries new foods. But developing a sense of taste makes things a lot easier.
The foundation of good taste -- like the foundation of good heuristic -- is broad reading. It is not necessary that all the reading be of good material, only that it be broad and that it always involve judgment and reflection. A musical metaphor is again useful. A good pianist always practices not only technique and repertoire but also sight-reading for pianists. A pianist practicing sight-reading grabs a random piece of music and reads it through, playing steadily on in spite of mistakes and omissions. So, too, should you just pick up pieces of social science or sociology or whatever and just read through them, whether you know the details of the methods, see the complexities of the argument, or even like the style of analysis. The obvious way to do this is to pick up recent issues of journals and quickly read straight through them.
You learn many things from such broad reading. You learn the zones of research in the discipline. You learn the conventions of each zone, and you figure out which you like and which you don't like. You learn what interests you and what does not. Of course, you should not let your interests dictate your reactions, just as you should disregard, when you are "sight-reading," conventions with which you disagree. When you find you don't like a paper's methodology and you think its concepts don't make sense, force yourself to go on and ask what there is that you can get out of it -- perhaps some facts, a hypothesis, even (in the worst case) some references. In the best disciplinary journals, every article will have something to teach you, even those articles that lie completely outside your own preferences.
This is also a useful rule for seminars and lectures, which are another useful place to develop your taste. There is no point in sitting through a lecture or talk whose methods you hate, self-righteously telling yourself about the "positivist morons" or the "postmodern bullshit" or whatever. All that does is reinforce your prejudices and teach you nothing. Judge a talk or a paper with respect to what it is itself trying to do. This is hard, but by working at it, you will gain a much surer sense of both the strengths and weaknesses of your own preferences. You will become able to gather useful ideas, theories, facts, and methodological tricks from material that used to tell you nothing.
You will, of course, run into plenty of bad stuff: bad books, bad papers, bad talks. The symptoms are usually pretty clear: pontification, confusion, aimlessness, overreliance on authorities. Other signs are excessive attention to methods rather than substance and long discussions of the speaker's or writer's positions on various important debates. But even bad material can t each you things. Most important, it can teach you how to set standards for an article or talk on its own terms. What was the writer trying to accomplish? For the truly terrible, what should the write have been trying to accomplish? This last is the question that enables you to judge material on its own grounds, by imagining the task it should have set itself.
Of course, it is also important self-consciously to read good work. Oddly enough, good work will not teach you as much as will bad. Great social science tends to look self-evident after the fact, and when it's well written, you may not be able to see what the insight was that instituted a new paradigm. What you take away from good work is more its sense of excitement and clarity, its feeling of ease and fluidity. Not that these are very imitable. But they set an ideal.
How does one find such good work? At the start, you ask people you know -- faculty members, friends, fellow students. You also look at influential material, although -- again oddly -- there is plenty of influential material that is badly argued and opaque. Soon your taste will establish itself, and you can rely more on your own judgment. There is no substitute for practice and, in particular, for "sight-reading." You just need to learn to read and make judgments, always working around your own prejudices to separate bad work from work you simply don't like.
Developing this taste about others' ideas is a crucial step toward judging your own. Even given all the hints scattered throughout this chapter, judging your own ideas is the hardest task of all. The only way to become skilled at it is to acquire general taste and then carefully and painfully turn that taste on your own thinking. The skill of learning to find good and bad things in the work of others can be the best help in finding the good and bad things in your own work.