The Epistemology of Clark Moustakas's Heuristic Inquiry Method

Heuristic inquiry (HI) is a qualitative social science method designed by the late American psychologist Clark Moustakas. 

In a previous video, I summarized the key steps of HI and promised to cover epistemology in a subsequent video, which I never got around to doing. I was urged by some viewers to complete the series, so I started outlining notes of the promised video. I discovered that (surprise!) I presented a conference paper about the epistemology of HI in 2012. As I was writing my notes, I realized that I had a stand-alone written summary of what I wanted to share in video form. The video will follow, eventually, but here is the gist for now:

 

HI can easily be criticised by experimental psychologists as being too subjective. After all, the HI researcher relies heavily on their unique perspective, values, beliefs, and experiences during the inquiry process. If the goal of research is to practice rational, impersonal, third-person objectivity, the heuristic inquiry makes for a poor method. So, why choose it?

 

The critique that HI is too subjective, however, comes from a position with its own flaws. The detached and objective scientist—the one who stands unfeelingly on the other side of the two-way glass and sees things the world as it really is—doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as a detached scientist. Every perspective belongs to a person who has values, opinions, interests, and so on. This critique of objectivity comes from among others in the mid Century Michael Polanyi and his book Personal Knowledge (and The Tacit Dimension).

 

A critique of the “detached observer” in objective science is important, but I want to keep my focus for now on the epistemology of HI. Polanyi goes past his critique of objectivity and provides a useful model of subjectivist epistemology, which he calles “Tacit Knowing.” He gives the familiar example of recognizing somebody’s face without knowing what it is about their face that is so familiar. In other words, we are surrounded with evidence that we know more than we can tell. I do this all the time whenever I watch a movie and recognize an actor from some other show. “Isn’t that the guy from… that one movie?” My wife and I are used to conversations like this whenever we try to figure out what it is that we know. For Polanyi, my wife and I have a tacit knowledge about who the actors are, but we are unable to put this into words; we are unable to make it explicit. Then eventually the realization dawns, “it’s Sean Connery.” Analyzing tacit knowledge is the goal of HI.

 

Tacit knowledge is further divided into two forms: Proximal Tacit Knowledge and Distal Tacit Knowledge. Proximal (nearby, local, close) tacit knowledge includes the particulars—any individual element that you and I can focus on. Distal (distant, far away, at the edge) tacit knowledge is the synthesis where the particulars fit together to create an integrated insight.

 

I had an experience recently that is helpful for demonstrating these two levels of tacit knowledge. I was preparing for a class to begin when a student I didn’t recognize walked in. Wondering if he was a student who had skipped the first four weeks of the semester, I asked, “And… who are you?”

 

He replied, “I’m a former student of yours.” 

 

His voice was so familiar, but I couldn’t place it. His expression was familiar, too—a sort of timid courage. Suddenly other parts of his physiognomy came into focus: his hair, his posture, the way he waited for me to respond. How did I know him? I wondered. Finally I asked him, “What’s your name?”

 

He told me.

 

“Oh my!” I said. “Did you lose, like, a ton of weight?”

 

He had. The pieces finally came together and I recognized him. I was filled with teacherly pride for being visited by one of my favorite former students!

 

Now, onto the Tacit Knowledge analysis. The bits of this student that I recognized—his particular voice, his expression, his hairstyle—represent proximal tacit knowledge. The psychology of sensation tells me that I am aware of hundreds of stimuli at any given moment, but these particular bits of the student announced themselves to me, even though I couldn’t figure out why they were uniquely important. 

 

But something magical happens when the individual parts combine to create a synthesis, which in this case was the recognition of my former student along with all the memories that came with it. In the language of Gestalt perception theory, the individual parts combine to create a whole that is over and above the added parts. This synthesis of bits of student into the person with whom I share a happy history represents distal tacit knowledge.

 

For Clark Moustakas, the key insights for HI are found in this distal tacit knowledge, which can only occur once we have immersed ourselves in the particulars long enough to understand how they fit together. Writes Michael Polanyi in his book, The Tacit Dimension, “In this sense we can say that when we make a thing function as a proximal term of tacit knowing, we incorporate it in our body—or extend our body to include it—so that we may come to dwell in it,” (1966, p. 16).

 

And that’s HI in a nutshell: examining a lived experience that has familiarity, even though the precise character of the familiarity is uncertain. The HI researcher dwells in their own experiences and/or the experiences of others and waits for the unity to reveal itself. The process is highly personal and requires maximum sensitivity from the researcher.

 

Surprisingly, Moustakas calls this process objective. Writes Moustakas, “Objectivity, in this connection, means seeing what an experience is for another person—not its cause, its reason for existence, nor its definition and classification. It means seeing attitudes, beliefs, and feelings of the person as they exist at the moment, perceiving them whole, as a unity” (Heuristic Research, 1990, p. 93).