Military Review English Edition November-December 2014 | Page 109

CRITICAL THINKING

compared to those at the paid-professional level, again
indicating time is a human invention. Also of note to
the interpretivist is that there is a certain irony that
an hour of official play time often involves more than
three hours for a single game.
Football statistics give us the impression of objective
fact; hence, predictability. Predictability is the quintessential goal of the logico-scientific paradigm. Measures
of player and team performance may give clues as
to which teams will make the playoffs. Measures of
effectiveness, such as scores at the end of a quarter, half,
or game are partially reliable predictors of an overall
season victor. However, we cannot imagine looking
only at a computer screen with ongoing statistics to
fully appreciate what is happening a game. We want to
appreciate and emotionally involve ourselves in what
is happening on the ground. When viewing the game,
we interpret how it is going and realize that strictly
monitoring “objective” statistics is not satisfactory. We
celebrate (with emotion) when underdogs surprise us
by winning games that probability and statistics would
deny—and we experience heightened morale (also an
emotional state) when the winning team surges.
We are aware, outside the conduct of a game, of ongoing, behind-the-scenes, complex emotional tensions
among the players, managers, and owners of the teams.
These require subjective judgments as to whether the
players will be fined, go on strike, be provided disability pensions, be recruited, or be traded to other teams.
We interpret how outside interactions might affect
the game at hand and the season ahead. Finally, taking
ourselves outside our comfort zone, the interpretivist
in us contemplates why culture in the United States
has created a very different epistemology of football
from most of the rest of the world, whose game we
Americans call soccer. We should critically wonder
why we call our game football at all. Objectively, the ball
is kicked far less than it is carried or thrown.
With this short allegory, we demonstrate that the
reality of professional football may simultaneously be
ontologically objective and subjective, that the epistemologies (knowledge structures) of football vary
along the logico-scientific—interpretive continuum,
and that methods of meaning legitimation in the sport
are heterogeneous. Making sense of football strictly
from the logico-scientific paradigm would certainly
constrain our overall interpretations of its complexity,
MILITARY REVIEW  November-December 2014

highlighting the need to derive an aesthetic-subjective
appreciation of the game. We learn from this allegory that with complexity there must be a great deal of
room for interpretation, a respect for other knowledge
forms, and other methods of knowledge formation that
are equally important to produce richness in our sensemakings about what we are observing.
Indeed, our military sensemakings would become
disabling if we were to employ only the logico-scientific
paradigm to study the complexity of our recent experiences in Afghanistan, observing the messiness of Syria
and Iraq, and in the wake of Russian involvement in
the Ukraine. Obviously, such complexity demands even
more concoctions of ontological, epistemological, and
methodological ingredients than would football.

Dual Paradigms Offer
Complementary, Critical
Perspectives
Logico-scientists criticize interpretivists as too
speculative, violating such notions as Paul’s and Elder’s
“universal intellectual standards” which offer the
promise of removing ambiguity and imprecision. These
standards suggest only the logico-scientific paradigm
provides a legitimate basis for critical reasoning. That
is, the military practitioner should seek to remove all
subjectivity about the situation at hand; apply a generalizable epistemology of proven tactics, techniques, and
procedures expected to work again and again; and use
scientific methods to further legitimate those tactics,
techniques, and procedures and add new ones (deducing the rigorous application of authoritative practice
and inducing so-called lessons learned and best practices into those doctrines).
Conversely, interpretivism provides a vehicle to
criticize logico-scientism. The interpretive purist sees
logico-scientism as a collection of socially constructed objectifications that habitually distort reality.9 As
veterans of recent military operations will appreciate,
to remove subjectivity, using the intellectual standards
suggested by Paul and Elder is inadequate when dealing
with befuddling complex situations where subjective
appraisals are vitally important. Such confounding
situations tend to present themselves at the opposite
end of the continua—infusing us with senses of ambiguity, inaccuracy, or imprecision. Equipped only with
logico-scientific epistemology, we will hopelessly try
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