Methodology

I'm bubbling and ecstatic. i'm playing with a new structure for my philosophical/policy/publichealth/whateverthefuck it is paper:

Narrative!

This is delicious. And challenging. It is another complexity to add to the brew, but it may be the mechanical trick that is the perfect central cog, the saving grace, the engineering coup.

I am substantiated by this professional philosopher in his own book:

"My argument belongs to no specific philosophic tradition, although it has affinities with all the major traditions...Mainly, however, my argument proceeds not from a general theory to particulars but rather from an interpretation of our actual social, ethical, and legal practices to a philosophical conception that explains, justifies, an criticizes those practices. Thus I will frequently make claims about what people say, feel, or do in specific circumstances. Sometimes I will substantiate my claims by drawing upon fiction and memoir. The epistemological authority of writers may be no greater than that of professional philosophers; but, as Bernard Williams has remarked, the result of substituting the philosopher's imagined examples for those drawn from literature 'will not be life, but bad literature.' It is true that the attempt to draw argumentative support from literature comes up hard against the resistance of imaginative writing to the extraction of a single thesis or interpretation. But the very refractory nature of literature makes it well suited to ethical study. For the problem of extracting interpretation from literature is similar to the problem of assigning moral or legal responsibility in life. Both seek to reduce particularity to a procrustean set of categories of meaning and motive."

The audaciousness is that i am both the the literarian and the philosopher, the policy brief and the legal scholar. On a topic that has no precedence in philosophy (theories of action in loosely coordinated collectives), public health (a novel infrastructure loss of human labor and the scale of migration), economics (the rampant global marketplace for brains and skills), politics (the degradation of the nation state), and pretty much any other way you slice it. Oh this brave new world, and the ambitions of a piddly master's thesis.

Come to think of it, now i am discouraged again.