circumstances, however, all findings need to be considered in the light of teachers’ own objectives and circumstances before their relevance to their own work can be properly assessed. This means that teachers need to have a critical sensibility vis-à-vis EER, and this needs to be developed within both initial and continuing teacher education. The claim that teachers can and should themselves be educational researchers is critically assessed and a form of partnership between teachers and researchers is argued for.
Notes
1 1 The total education and development research spend funded directly or indirectly by the government in the third quarter of, 2018 was £2.029 billion. By contrast in Q1 of 1997 it was £590 million. Source: DfE (2019) https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/timeseries/efx4/cxnv .
2 2 We presuppose it in the sense that we act as if there is, without in any way articulating that belief (Wittgenstein 1969).
3 3 Wittgenstein (1953) IIxi, p. 225, for example.
4 4 Education as a preparation for life is offered as a primary characterisation of the significance of the concept in human life. It is not a definition and is certainly not meant to exclude such phenomena as higher, further and adult education.
5 5 See Peters (1981) for a similar view. Peters modified his views on education considerably at the end of his career. In my view, this late approach was a potentially most fruitful one which was, unfortunately, not developed.
6 6 Societal values do usually also contain an empirical element as well, for example, beliefs in the abilities and moral standing of different elements of the society.
7 7 Which is to say that curricula, whether formal or informal, have normative force.
8 8 The term ‘worthwhile’ is used because alternatives like ‘flourishing’ may not capture what is aimed for in education, which cannot be assumed to be a flourishing adulthood, whatever that may mean. ‘Worthwhile’ implies a form of living worth striving for for an individual or group, crucially even if that individual or group may not recognize its worthwhileness for them. It may or may not encompass a notion of flourishing and here again, what counts as flourishing for X may not, from X’s perspective count as flourishing for Y, even if it may count as such for Y.
9 9 A related debate concerns whether or not careers guidance should properly be counted as a form of education. See Winch P. (2015) for more on this.
10 10 Relativism does not, per se, entail the equal validity of all perspectives. For more on this see Wreen (2018).
11 11 See for example the discussion of different conceptions of know-how in Chapter 10 .
12 12 As Mulder points out, this could not happen without the efficient cause, or some of its elements, having appropriate structural properties.
2 A Criterial Conception of Truth and Objectivity: Its Relevance to Educational Research
INTRODUCTION
Empirical educational research (EER) lies in the region of social science. As such, many of the problems and disputes concerning its aims, presuppositions and methods are held in common with the other social sciences. It is, however, distinctive in three ways. First, although there is a field of study, namely educational practices in all their variety, there is no distinctive educational methodology for investigating them. Typically EER uses a selection of sociological, economic, historical or psychological methods whenever they are thought to be appropriate. Second, philosophy has always been one of the central educational disciplines and, even if empirical researchers try to ignore the philosophical issues that arise in the interpretation of central educational concepts, those which structure our understanding of education (see Ch. 1), that does not mean that they go away. Finally, EER usually has a practical objective based loosely around the idea of improving an educational practice or educational performance. These three features make it distinctive among the social sciences. In what follows, some issues will be peculiar to education while others apply more generally to the social sciences.
One of the greatest challenges in outlining a systematic enquiry into human practices is to commit oneself to pursuit of the truth, not just in a quixotic sense, but in a way that is responsive to a set of demands that arise outside the opinions and desires of researchers; in other words, a set of demands that are objective rather than subjective. Failure to do this can lead one either into the pursuit of an impossible ideal of truth that can never be attained and thus lead to disillusionment and scepticism, or it can lead to an abandonment of the search for objectivity and a lapse into a validation of a more or less subjective view of what constitutes truth. In the following section, such an objective but non-absolutist view of the conception of truth proper to empirical educational enquiry will be set out. This is particularly important as the reality of different and often contesting perspectives on educational phenomena is such an important element in educational research and it needs to be acknowledged without surrendering to subjectivism, even in a disguised form. Subsequent to that, a suggestion for how to deal with the reality of multiple perspectives can be attained without a commitment to multiple realities.
OBJECTIVITY AND TRUTH CRITERIA
I maintain that EER should, and very often does, strive for objectivity, the claim that there are true or false propositions to be learned about educational practices whether or not anyone happens to believe them at any given time.1 This is a stronger claim than the claim that truth is constituted by intersubjective agreement about educational states of affairs. There can be false intersubjective agreement about such things. Rather, it is the claim that there are ways of determining truth and falsehood about educational matters which have deeper roots than what any body of researchers happen to think is the right way to do so at any given time. These roots lie in social practices of determining the truth or falsity of claims about educational practices and they in turn rest on criteria for truth and falsity. Truth conditions for such claims get their significance from the existence of such criteria. These criteria are embedded in practices of training, habituation, education, evaluation and judgement, which are more than intersubjective agreements: they have institutional foundations with their own set of practices embodying formal and informal rules for making distinctions between true and false propositions. They cannot be changed arbitrarily by any particular group of researchers, although they may change gradually over time. In this respect, educational research is no different from the other social sciences or indeed other truth-seeking practices. But we need to look at possible objections to this way of seeing things in order to appreciate its importance.
A criterial conception of truth is to be distinguished from correspondence accounts whereby
