Military Review English Edition November-December 2014 | Page 108

to understand the physical world, the logico-scientific
knowledge structure is often judged objectively by its
orderliness, coherency of theory, rationalized categories and taxonomies, analytic theories of causality, and
so forth. To objective purists such as Paul and Elder,
emotions and intuitive processes are not only invalid
ways to judge knowledge, but they reflect biases that
must be overcome. To an interpretivist, epistemology
is recognized to be tentative knowledge representing
man-made, flexible conceptualizations of reality. Here,
epistemology is necessarily an unsettled, Heraclitean
process of “never stepping into the same river twice.”7
Beyond cognitions, interpretations are narratives that
also spawn feelings such as surprise, irony, déjà vu,
paradox, tragedy, artfulness, excitement, creativity,
comedy, and so on. Intuition and emotions are intertwined to constitute a subjective epistemology; hence,
judgment of interpretive forms of knowledge cannot be
divorced from either of them.
The third ingredient of a paradigm, methodology,
involves how knowledge is legitimized. The logico-scientific paradigm would include the objectivist’s employment of the scientific method, where, typically,
the steps are—define the problem based in a coherent
theory, search for possible answers, test them objectively for generalizability, and apply the best answer which
feeds back into a nomothetic (lawful) knowledge structure, traditionally known as science. From the world
view of the subjectivist, the interpretivist employs
idiographic methods—such as the use of metaphors,
hermeneutics, rich description, or creation of neologisms—for the purpose of deep, situationally specific
learning. The idea is to develop distinctive meanings in
appreciation of the complex experiences at hand.8 Note
that the logico-scientific paradigm seeks context-free
methods designed around sameness while the interpretive seeks context-specific methods designed around
uniqueness.

American Football: An Allegory for
Military Operations
As social beings, we are not stuck in a single paradigm; we experience the world seamlessly between
logico-scientific and interpretive ontological assumptions. We can note that what makes professional
football interesting is that no two plays, games, or
seasons are alike—uniqueness being a key feature of
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idiographic-based knowledge. Yet, there are logico-scientific repetitions offering a generalizable sameness
as well. When we watch a football game, we enjoy it
because we have learned to understand the relatively
consistent rule structure (sameness) and appreciate
that those rules interact with the playing of the game
at hand (uniqueness). We know that the rules (a key
feature of football epistemology) are a subjective
creation because we notice the league changes them
as conditions change. We observe how the rules are
enforced—in the most unbiased way possible—followed by methodical, physical hand-and-arm signals
by well-experienced, objective referees. We also couple
those observations with our subjective interpretations of
what just happened—our agreement or disagreement
with the assessment of penalties—and may actually
disagree with the supposedly objective play-review video
system.
While we observe and analyze the physical prowess
of the individual players and their integration of their
positional tasks into a team effort—using objective
measurements such as yards gained and passes completed—we interpret individual and team performance
from an emotional basis as well (e.g., we become fans).
We also are intrigued by how the coaches and quarterback seem to subjectively know when to run, pass, or
even intentionally ground the football. We listen to the
commentators judge what play should be run and how
they criticize plays that did not work as planned. We
watch the dynamic physical interactions of the opposing teams while reflecting how both sides can surprise
each other. In our own minds, surprise (an emotion)
seems a very subjectively interpreted experience as a
surprising play is only a shock to the other team, the
announcers, and the audience. Sometimes even the
team making an unexpected play seems to surprise itself as to the degree of its success or failure, particularly
if the play did not unfold as practiced.
In football we reflect on the passage of minutes
and seconds—both subjective measures invented by
humans and, yet, measures that have become socially
objectified as we equate time with physical events. We
notice time is controlled by seemingly objective categories: starts, timeouts, halftimes, resets, two-minute
warnings, overtimes, and finishes. The subjectivist in us,
however, recognizes that these times may vary among
college or high-school football conferences when
November-December 2014  MILITARY REVIEW