Already Counter-Inductive: Feyerabend, Phenomenologically Inspired Methods, and the Unrealized Epistemological Potential of Qualitative Health Research

Vollständiger Abstract

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Phenomenologically inspired qualitative methods in health research have spent decades seeking legitimacy within the evidence hierarchy by presenting themselves as rigorously inductive. This pursuit of legitimacy, we argue, has come at an epistemological cost: it obscures what these approaches actually do when they work at their best and forecloses their most radical potential. Drawing on Feyerabend’s philosophy of science, and specifically on his concept of counter-induction, this paper proposes a reframing. Counter-induction, for Feyerabend, is not an alternative method but a discovery revealed by the history of science: major scientific advances have often proceeded not by building on established facts and theories but by maintaining hypotheses that actively resist and challenge them. We argue that phenomenologically inspired qualitative health research is structurally counter-inductive: it proceeds from lived experience as potential counter-evidence against established clinical constructs, nosological categories, and biomedical models. This counter-inductive character operates differently across two families of approaches: methods grounded in suspension (epoché, bracketing) enact counter-induction retrospectively, in analysis and discussion; and methods grounded in front-loading of phenomenological concepts (phenomenologically grounded qualitative research; front-loaded phenomenology) can enact it prospectively, at the design stage, provided the choice of concepts is motivated by their capacity to reveal what dominant clinical constructs cannot see. Making this counter-inductive logic explicit, we contend, transforms the epistemological standing of qualitative health research, not as a complement to evidence-based medicine, but as an irreplaceable mechanism for the revision and critical interrogation of clinical knowledge.