"Truth" or DARE: Let's Replace "Transparency" with "Explicitness"
Posted: Wed Apr 27, 2016 8:36 pm
“Truth” or DARE? Let’s Replace “Transparency” with “Explicitness”
The thought I’d like to add to this rich exchange may seem small and pedantic: I’d like to see most or all usages of the word “transparency” in this process replaced by “explicitness.” DART should be replaced by DARE. Trivial though it may seem, I think this change could help. “Explicitness” captures better what we’re talking about. A shift to it might help focus the discussion in desirable ways and could narrow the distance between certain positions.
Let me first note my very rough position on the whole initiative. I like explicitness, and think that it is in fact definitional of “scholarship.” Smart people from many walks of life often make the same arguments that scholars do, but what makes the arguments “scholarly” is that the scholar tries to render explicit how he or she got there. Thus DART is not exactly a new idea in spirit, as many people have remarked. We are already asked constantly and pervasively to be explicit. Still, explicitness is demanding and difficult; like everybody else I have cut corners on it at points. For that reason I’m ready to agree that it is good for qualitative research to be asked even more constantly and pervasively to be explicit—especially if this reinforced call for explicitness is accompanied by some more room in or around journal articles to lay out explicitness. If I can be given some more text space or an appendix to do something that I was already effectively being asked to do, that is a net gain.
But is DART in its current form (JETS and a few journals’ operationalization of this pledge) really just asking qualitative scholars to do things that they were already effectively being asked to do in a scholarly arena of explicitness? Many critics say no—that it advances somewhat carelessly beyond that broad goal in ways that may advantage certain kinds of scholarship and disadvantage others—and I’m sympathetic to many of their concerns. My point of departure here, though, is that if DART could take a form that reinforced and clarified our already-existing demands for explicitness, and recognized that we may need more journal space to do so, then I’d be comfortable with it. I suspect this outcome is possible.
To have any chance to get to that version of this initiative, though, I think we would need to refocus its goal by replacing “transparency” with “explicitness.” Here are two reasons why this shift could help.
1. The main one: “transparency” carries a simplistic connotation of “truth.”
a. To the extent that something is transparent, we can look right through it and see that it is clear. The strongest objections to DART depart from post-positivistic epistemological positions that suggest that such a goal is chimerical in scholarly work. Scholarship passes through too many complex judgments to ever be simply transparent, and even the most technical of those judgments carry meanings and implications that reflect certain values and agendas. Anyone selling “transparency” is thus actually selling something else.
b. “Explicitness” does not have the same connotation. Indeed, it might even lend itself to the opposite kind of connotation in ways that could be well received by the most post-positivistic scholars. An argument that is explicit does not claim to achieve a limpid neutrality; it claims to have made efforts to lay out its choices, revealing its judgments and values and agenda as much as it can. While scholars who seek transparency seem to be declaring a search for claims beyond subjectivity, scholars who seek explicitness seem to be recognizing their subjectivity and declaring the intent to bare it to others as much as possible in the interest of dialogue.
c. The gains that this relabeling holds for making more post-positivist scholars comfortable with the initiative’s goals don’t seem to me to have any costs for more positivistic scholars. The more positivist the position we take, the more explicitness and transparency converge to mean the same thing. “Date Access and Research Explicitness” is a little clunkier as a label, but DART isn’t exactly about elegance.
2. Transparency is not obviously a goal with diminishing returns, but explicitness is.
a. At least in any common-language use of the word, it seems like more transparency would always be good: the more visible, accessible, and lucid our scholarly processes, the better. Of course we can raise arguments that pursuing this good creates trade-offs in a variety of ways—much of the DART discussion is about such trade-offs—but arguments about trade-offs still do not challenge the notion that more transparency itself is always positive.
b. Explicitness, on the other hand, clearly has diminishing returns that eventually turn negative in their own right, irrespective of other trade-offs. At certain points additional explicitness clarifies the commitments and logic and practices of the scholar; in later increments it actually lessens the clarity of the work by burying it in unnecessary process, autistic details, and pointless pedantry.
c. It seems to me clear that the practices being discussed under DART do have diminishing returns that will be negative if pursued too far—at some point actually obfuscating clarity of scholarship and argument in nitpicking process—and thus that an intuitive sense of the plausible benefits from this initiative fits an “explicitness” vocabulary better than one about transparency.
d. I don’t mean to oversell this benefit: it won’t be easy for us to agree where the returns to explicitness turn negative. The same debates over trade-offs with transparency will continue in a shifted vocabulary. But it will be a little clearer.
Shifting to a vocabulary of explicitness won’t be revolutionary—it won’t resolve most of the debates we’re having—but it might at least couch the discussion in terms that a wider range of scholars could accept.
The thought I’d like to add to this rich exchange may seem small and pedantic: I’d like to see most or all usages of the word “transparency” in this process replaced by “explicitness.” DART should be replaced by DARE. Trivial though it may seem, I think this change could help. “Explicitness” captures better what we’re talking about. A shift to it might help focus the discussion in desirable ways and could narrow the distance between certain positions.
Let me first note my very rough position on the whole initiative. I like explicitness, and think that it is in fact definitional of “scholarship.” Smart people from many walks of life often make the same arguments that scholars do, but what makes the arguments “scholarly” is that the scholar tries to render explicit how he or she got there. Thus DART is not exactly a new idea in spirit, as many people have remarked. We are already asked constantly and pervasively to be explicit. Still, explicitness is demanding and difficult; like everybody else I have cut corners on it at points. For that reason I’m ready to agree that it is good for qualitative research to be asked even more constantly and pervasively to be explicit—especially if this reinforced call for explicitness is accompanied by some more room in or around journal articles to lay out explicitness. If I can be given some more text space or an appendix to do something that I was already effectively being asked to do, that is a net gain.
But is DART in its current form (JETS and a few journals’ operationalization of this pledge) really just asking qualitative scholars to do things that they were already effectively being asked to do in a scholarly arena of explicitness? Many critics say no—that it advances somewhat carelessly beyond that broad goal in ways that may advantage certain kinds of scholarship and disadvantage others—and I’m sympathetic to many of their concerns. My point of departure here, though, is that if DART could take a form that reinforced and clarified our already-existing demands for explicitness, and recognized that we may need more journal space to do so, then I’d be comfortable with it. I suspect this outcome is possible.
To have any chance to get to that version of this initiative, though, I think we would need to refocus its goal by replacing “transparency” with “explicitness.” Here are two reasons why this shift could help.
1. The main one: “transparency” carries a simplistic connotation of “truth.”
a. To the extent that something is transparent, we can look right through it and see that it is clear. The strongest objections to DART depart from post-positivistic epistemological positions that suggest that such a goal is chimerical in scholarly work. Scholarship passes through too many complex judgments to ever be simply transparent, and even the most technical of those judgments carry meanings and implications that reflect certain values and agendas. Anyone selling “transparency” is thus actually selling something else.
b. “Explicitness” does not have the same connotation. Indeed, it might even lend itself to the opposite kind of connotation in ways that could be well received by the most post-positivistic scholars. An argument that is explicit does not claim to achieve a limpid neutrality; it claims to have made efforts to lay out its choices, revealing its judgments and values and agenda as much as it can. While scholars who seek transparency seem to be declaring a search for claims beyond subjectivity, scholars who seek explicitness seem to be recognizing their subjectivity and declaring the intent to bare it to others as much as possible in the interest of dialogue.
c. The gains that this relabeling holds for making more post-positivist scholars comfortable with the initiative’s goals don’t seem to me to have any costs for more positivistic scholars. The more positivist the position we take, the more explicitness and transparency converge to mean the same thing. “Date Access and Research Explicitness” is a little clunkier as a label, but DART isn’t exactly about elegance.
2. Transparency is not obviously a goal with diminishing returns, but explicitness is.
a. At least in any common-language use of the word, it seems like more transparency would always be good: the more visible, accessible, and lucid our scholarly processes, the better. Of course we can raise arguments that pursuing this good creates trade-offs in a variety of ways—much of the DART discussion is about such trade-offs—but arguments about trade-offs still do not challenge the notion that more transparency itself is always positive.
b. Explicitness, on the other hand, clearly has diminishing returns that eventually turn negative in their own right, irrespective of other trade-offs. At certain points additional explicitness clarifies the commitments and logic and practices of the scholar; in later increments it actually lessens the clarity of the work by burying it in unnecessary process, autistic details, and pointless pedantry.
c. It seems to me clear that the practices being discussed under DART do have diminishing returns that will be negative if pursued too far—at some point actually obfuscating clarity of scholarship and argument in nitpicking process—and thus that an intuitive sense of the plausible benefits from this initiative fits an “explicitness” vocabulary better than one about transparency.
d. I don’t mean to oversell this benefit: it won’t be easy for us to agree where the returns to explicitness turn negative. The same debates over trade-offs with transparency will continue in a shifted vocabulary. But it will be a little clearer.
Shifting to a vocabulary of explicitness won’t be revolutionary—it won’t resolve most of the debates we’re having—but it might at least couch the discussion in terms that a wider range of scholars could accept.