foundationsmethods cannot be transferred freely from one discipline to another because they may
lose their context- dependent meaning. give a poem to astronomers and they would
be deeply dissatisfied with it as an answer, and the same can be said for the creative
practice community who would be deeply dissatisfied with an answer involving rocks
and orbits. Beyond the interests of particular disciplines, the answer to a question is
also dependent on the general nature of questions: what it is to ask something and,
particularly, what it would be like to answer this question, i.e. what would satisfy us
(Wittgenstein 1958).
in a community, the understanding of what is the general nature of questions is
perceptually determined, which means that it is connected to the understandings of
the audience. Because there is a difference in audience for the production of academic
research and for the production of creative practice, the notion of what is a relevant
question and answer varies as well. The audience for academic research consists of a
group who share a belief that the argument- based answer to a question is significant.
They expect to receive the outcomes of the research in a particular form, usually
linguistic, and the form is designed so that the audience will all find in it the same
content and thereby accumulate the same knowledge. on the other hand, the audience
for the creative practice outcome shares an interest in having experiences based on
exposure to a singular event, i.e. the particular type of work presented at the concert
hall or in the exhibition. They will have different personal experiences resulting in
different perceptions of content, and consequently they will each take away something
different from the encounter. There is a whole field of inquiry called ‘interpretation’
that investigates whether there is fixed content in a particular work. We do not have
to come down on one side or the other of this discussion because what is relevant here
is to note the difference in activity between the two communities regarding content.
owing to the academic interest in accumulation, their activities have as an objective
a singular shared interpretation of content. This is aided by a preference for textual
communication owing to its explicitness and generalizability. on the other hand,
creative practices, through preferring non- linguistic communication, select forms that
tend to promote plurality of interpretation and therefore diversity of content.
in the academic model, method relates to the concept of question and answer.
There is initially an overlap between question and answer, because a well- formulated
question implies its answer within an audience- led context: a philosophical question
begs a philosophical answer, a causal question begs a causal answer, and so on (Biggs
and Büchler 2007). different disciplines have discipline- specific interests for which
discipline- specific answers are required and for which discipline- specific methods
must be used. There is a linkage that is represented by the overlap between question
and answer, and method provides a further connection, i.e. if one is interested in this
particular question, then only certain routes would be acceptable in order to find
out something or develop the interpretation of this issue and precipitate a significant
outcome.
This way of describing the connection between the expectations for academic
research reveals that method is judged to be appropriate according to the established
convention in that discipline. This expectation does not arise in such a prescriptive
way in the creative practice community. nor does the creative community follow a
single specific or dominant model of enquiry, as happens in other subjects. in chemical