Thinking through making and doing: sport science as an art of inquiry

ABSTRACT

How best to summarise the professional work of sport scientists? What if we were to view them as artisans? As enskiled crafts-persons who think through and with their materials? What implications would this idea have for how we take up with research and ensuing scientific methods? Here, we explore these philosophical questions – of applied relevance – through Ingold’s process of making. From this perspective, skilled artisans like potters, basket-makers and sport scientists, think through making and doing, as opposed to make and do through thinking. Where the latter imposes form onto matter by way of conceptualisation, the former goes along with materials in active participation, corresponding with what such things have to say with a skilled attentiveness and selective responsiveness. We argue that the implications of these propositions for research in sport science are profound; encouraging a progression from the traditional hypothetico-deductive theory of scientific method (make and do through thinking), towards an art of inquiry (think through making and doing). In the former, phenomena are studied about, (re)producing categorical (sub-)disciplinary knowledge by way of vertical integration, while in the latter, phenomena are studied with, growing storied knowledge of by way of correspondence. These arguments are not to be construed as a call for more ‘qualitative research’ within the sport sciences, but rather to underline the value of situating participant observation at the core of one’s inquiry. Through a prologue and epilogue, we exemplify our arguments in the very process of this paper’s becoming – detailing the careful attentiveness and selective responsiveness to the various invitations to write, emergent while thinking through making and doing.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientific method
• sport performance and preparation
• making
• doing
• knowing
• thinking
• skill

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The difference between an object and thing is not vacuous. Here, the former implies a fixed state; total, complete, bounded, waiting to be known about by being looked at. A thing, however, is dynamic; a going on, a place of entanglement with other goings on in a world continually re-forming (see Heidegger, 1971). In these entangled places, ‘things’ are not connected in a network like ‘objects’, but entwine together in a meshwork (see Ingold, 2011, 2015). Thus, to know of a ‘thing’, is to join with it in its becoming – or, in a word, to correspond (Ingold, 2013).

2 Discussed in detail later, in an art of inquiry, knowledge is grown as one goes along with the ebbs and flows of what it is that holds their attention.

3 By ‘it’, we mean phenomena – like sport performance.

4 A wonderful example of this is shown in Edward Reed’s (1996a) ecological (re)analysis of Darwin’s seminal experimental observations on the behaviour of earthworms. Notably, Darwin carefully observed that earthworms burrowed in such way that resulted in a greater probability of protecting their skin from damage. Drawing on Gibson’s (1979) theory of direct perception, Reed (1996a) then argued (a century later) that this observation could be explained by way of the earthworm’s regulating behaviour through the perception and realisation of affordances. The ‘fact’ that the earthworms regulated their behaviour while burrowing, observed directly by Darwin, was thus explained ‘theoretically’ by Reed (1996a). Theory, in this sense, can help us understand what we directly observe and primarily experience in the world we inhabit.

5 For a detailed insight into works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, we encourage readers to visit Holdrege’s (2005) wonderful paper, titled, Doing Goethean Science.

6 We borrow this phrase from the study by Woods, Rudd, Araújo, et al. (2021).

7 For a wonderful insight into the power of storytelling in philosophy and science, see Thom van Dooren’s gripping book (2014), Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction.

8 While an account of dynamic systems modelling within the sport sciences is beyond this papers direction of travel, we encourage interested readers to consult the work of Araújo and Davids (2016) for a detailed overview.