This article argues that traditional, regulative principles of research ethics offer insufficient guidance for research in the narrative study of lives. These principles presuppose an implicit epistemology that conceives of research participants as data sources, a conception that is argued not tenable for narrative research. The case is made by drawing on recent discussions of research ethics in the qualitative and narrative research literature. This article shows that narrative ethics is inextricably entwined with epistemological issues-namely, issues of narrative ownership and the multiplicity of narrative meaning. Finally, practical recommendations are made for the ethical treatment of research participants in narrative research. The article concludes by situating our approach with respect to the broad range of contemporary perspectives on research ethics.In the social sciences, we have been trained mostly according to positivist and logical empiricist canons of science but have begun to explore other research methodologies. If we decided to focus on qualitative life story or narrative research, we learned how to listen attentively and empathetically. We are comfortable with ourselves, intuitive, and self-aware. We are very interested in people and intensely curious about how they make sense of their lives. We are motivated by our passion to
A good deal of confusion marks current accounts of mental imagery and, by extension, other issues related to the representation of knowledge. We have analyzed and tried to resolve some of the confusion. In the first part of the paper we evaluate the pictorial views of imagery of Paivio, Shepard, Kosslyn, Neisser; and the propositional views of Anderson, Norman and Rumelhart, and Pylyshyn, among others. We show that part of the dispute between these groups is based on a misconceived notion of the way pictures may function as symbols, and of the role of symbolization in cognitive processes and in theory construction. Then we develop an alternative to the dispute to show how a properly conceived notion of symbolization incorporates the virtues of both the pictorialists and the propositionalists. We also develop the notion that rather than in a representation-process sort of theory, cognitive processes be understood in terms of skills in the manipulation of symbols and in the relating of symbols to the semantic domains that they map.'We use the term representation in a neutral sense to refer to the interiorized aspect of a person's knowledge; it may be expressed pictorially, linguistically, motorically, or otherwise.'Exactly the same error of attribution made by Rosenberg and Simon is found in a new paper by Anderson and Paulson (1978). Attempting to show that face recognition could be accounted for in propositional terms, they assigned notational status to Identikit features. Despite this, the test outcome was not clear-cut.
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