{"id":2498,"date":"2025-10-14T13:41:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T12:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/?p=2498"},"modified":"2025-10-14T13:41:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T12:41:15","slug":"finding-meaning-in-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/2025\/10\/14\/finding-meaning-in-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding meaning in meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recent visit to an exhibition of ice-age art in Keighley<\/a>, part of the Bradford City of Culture<\/a> events, alerted me to the surprising links, but also the obvious differences, between the study of our deepest pre-history and contemporary educational research. The exhibition was a display, collected from all over Europe, of small, \u2018mobile\u2019 pieces of art carved or shaped from ivory, bone or stone. The oldest dated piece was also the most fascinating. The \u2018Lion Man\u2019<\/a> is a 30cm tall sculpture, carved from a mammoth tusk, with what clearly seems to be a lion\u2019s head atop a recognisable (if rather elongated) human body. It was found in Germany and has been radiocarbon dated to about 40,000 years old. The sheer antiquity of this artefact makes it an object of wonder in itself, but I think that what draws 21st<\/sup> century people to such pieces goes beyond that.<\/p>\n

The British Museum catalogue<\/a> offers a number of interpretations, many contradicting each other, on what the Lion Man could \u2018mean\u2019. That the figure is non-representational and is evidence of symbolic thought is an accepted starting point, but beyond that the gates lie open to just about any reading you care to put on it. And, as with the Lion Man, so with the other exhibits. The attraction of such exhibitions stems from our desire to understand what such objects could possibly have meant to their creators: to \u2018find meaning in meaning\u2019.<\/p>\n

Educational research is also concerned with finding meaning in meaning by attempting to enter social actors\u2019 interpretive worlds via its various methodologies. As an area of social science, educational research is confronted with what Giddens terms the \u2018double hermeneutic\u2019: the sociologist of education is studying phenomena that are already constituted as meaningful by the social actors which the sociologist is studying. Social actors make sense of the world through their \u2018first-order\u2019 concepts: the often unconscious, tacit knowledge that they have about the conditions and consequences of what they do in their everyday lives. Such knowledge is essential to our ability to navigate our way through the complexities of the social world. The sociologist tries to understand those concepts through their own analytical apparatus\u2014their \u2018second-order\u2019 concepts. Social class, my own area of research interest, is a good example of this distinction between first-order and second-order concepts. Research participants may \u2018voice\u2019 class in a range of allusive, euphemistic ways while for me it is framed in terms of habitus, capital and field. For the sociologist, the epistemological challenge lies in trying to bridge the gap between the two orders of concept. Can we ever really know what somebody \u2018means\u2019?<\/p>\n

Unlike the study of ice-age art, the sociology of education does, at least, enjoy the benefit that its research participants are alive, and so triangulation methods such as \u2018respondent validation\u2019 offer some measure of assurance that we have \u2018understood\u2019 their meaning. (Although, since society is our ever-present context, Archer\u2019s observation that it is a partly antecedent creation of now deceased ancestors into which we are all born is pertinent here). Professional archaeologists have their own second-order concepts with which they approach their objects of study. Although many of their conclusions are inferences, they are nonetheless educated ones. Ultimately, though, the vast temporal distances between the artefacts that remain to us and their original creators produce a yawning epistemological gulf between then and now. Archaeologists do not really know what the Lion Man \u2018means\u2019 any more than I do. In Giddens\u2019 terms, they can never reach the original creator\u2019s first-order concepts. This, though, I think is the attraction of all prehistorical objects. The huge gap in \u2018understanding\u2019 lends the imagination a free rein to wander. The very many different interpretations of Stonehenge<\/a> are just one such example of this. We will always want to \u2018find meaning in meaning\u2019.<\/p>\n

Dr Andrew Morrisson is a Senior Lecturer in Education in SIOE. His research interests centre on the sociology of education, with a particular focus on social class and theories of distributive justice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent visit to an exhibition of ice-age art in Keighley, part of the Bradford City of Culture events, alerted me to the surprising links, but also the obvious differences, between the study of our deepest pre-history and contemporary educational research. The exhibition was a display, collected from all over Europe, of small, \u2018mobile\u2019 pieces […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10265,"featured_media":2499,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7,424],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","category-teaching-and-learning-in-higher-education"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/files\/2025\/10\/question-mark-374436_1280.jpg?fit=1280%2C893&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7axDP-Ei","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2498"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2500,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2498\/revisions\/2500"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}