Chicken and Egg

I have been pondering the 'three rules' of gestalt therapy and am intrigued by their possible application to data gathering/imposition of theory:

1) Rule of epoche - set aside biases, suspend judgement, expectation and assumption.

2)Rule of description - describe not explain.

3) Rule of horizontalization - each item of description has an equal value or significance.

It is, of course, very tempting to gather evidence that fits your hypothesis and ignore the material that doesn't. Gestalt theory encourages us to let the pattern (hypothesis) emerge from the evidence. But it is very difficult to know what data to gather without having some sort of hypothesis in mind, and having one in mind is a hair's-breadth away from imposing it on the data-pool! Chicken and egg.

I found an amusing quote in Simone de Beauvoir's The Prime of Life that seemed appropriate (and wryly comforting) in the circumstances:

'The fact that we had very little idea what to do with the information we amassed did not make its collection any the less valuable per se.'