Abstract
Progress in science – what is it? More importantly for the readers of this journal, has there been progress in childhood studies? Is the field currently making progress? What criteria should we use to assess progress in childhood studies? And how might the idea that the field has taken various ‘turns’ be linked with the notion of scientific progress?
There is nearly unanimous agreement that science itself is a progressive undertaking (Dellsén, 2015; Losee, 2004; Niiniluoto, 2015). However, progress in science is an issue widely discussed and debated in the philosophy of science. The Cambridge English Dictionary explains the term ‘progress’ to mean ‘movement to an improved or more developed state, or to a forward position’; progress is Fortschritt. It is thus an axiological or normative concept, which should be distinguished from neutral terms such as ‘change’ and ‘development’. To say it more accurately, a step from A to B constitutes progress on the condition that B is an improvement over A in some respect, that is, B is better than A relative to some standards or criteria. Hence, as Niiniluoto (2015) writes, a theory of scientific progress is not merely a descriptive account of the patterns of developments that science has followed. Rather, the theory should specify the values or aims that can be used as the constitutive criteria of good science. Thus, a science or scientific theory progresses when its values/aims are actualized in scientific practice and in its results.
Philosophers of science, however, differ in what they take these values (aims) to be and thus how improvement is to be accounted for. Three main conceptions have been proposed, with the first two of the following views dominating the debate. According to (1) the ‘epistemic’ view the aim of science is accumulation or growth of knowledge; science is a knowledge-producing activity. Accordingly, any episode in science is progressive when at the end of the episode it shows accumulation of scientific knowledge. 1
The (2) ‘semantic’ view of progress in science underlines instead the nature of science as a truth-seeking activity: thus, progress means accumulation of true beliefs or increased truth-likeness (verisimilitude) in the generated knowledge. Finally, in the (3) ‘functional’ conception science is viewed as a problem-solving activity, and hence, progress is made when the number of scientific problems that are solved increases.
These three conceptions, here presented severely abstracted from their respective broad philosophies of science, may only very vaguely aid in assessing progress in some particular discipline or research field, such as childhood studies. A different starting point for querying whether we can see the field progressing is hinted at by the other term in the title of this editorial: ‘work-in-progress’. The Cambridge English Dictionary gives its meaning as ‘something that is being developed or suggested but that is not yet complete’. The Collins Compact Thesaurus (1999) lists as synonyms for ’in-progress’ the following: ‘going on, being done, happening, occurring, proceeding, taking place and under way’.
The questioning of what is happening in a research field is relevant at any time and within any scientific discipline. It however becomes particularly topical in times when several (new) directions to turn to are being generated and proposed across humanities and social sciences. Since the beginning of the post-positivist era in the social sciences, this has been the case, as new paradigms, new theories, new concepts and new methods have continuously been invented and also enthusiastically adopted and adapted in various disciplines and research fields. In childhood studies, being one of the new research fields emerging in the post-positivist decades, the call for taking one or another ‘turn’ has frequently been received approvingly, as many of the articles published in this journal over its 25 years demonstrate, as do also the views of many participants in the four round-table conversations published in the 25th Anniversary volume (2018) of this journal.
What commentators often give as the justification for the need to take a fresh ‘turn’ in childhood studies is a sense of the field being ‘stuck’ – apparently meaning that the field is not moving in any direction. 2 The perhaps most emphatically announced problem case seen to impede the overcoming of this stuck-ness is the notion of (children’s) ‘agency’. It seems though that stuck-ness has been declared mainly from within what is sometimes called the ‘British tradition’ in childhood studies. Less worries about ‘stuck-ness’ have been heard from within the research ‘traditions’ prevailing in other language areas. 3
Various ‘turns’ – linguistic, cultural, constructivist, interpretive, spatial, dialogic, bodily, affective, material, relational, praxeological and others – have been promoted and announced in recent decades and in many fields of social research, inspiring researchers to try out the capacity and promises of the new idea(s) in their own fields. As worthwhile as these efforts may prove to be, there are also some stumbling blocks on the way to consider.
One may also get stuck with/in a ‘turn’! In her article so titled, Vasileva (2015) wishes to encourage loosening the ‘cast-iron mould of the “turn” metaphor’ which she sees being forged and fortified particularly in Science and Technology Studies (STS). She critically comments on the fact that novel themes and proposed new ways of thinking within STS are framed in terms of ‘turns’ and observes that they may be good but they may also be fettering.
The first variant of the ‘turn’ metaphor is rotation, or the act of moving something in a circular direction, around an axis, point or centre (Vasileva, 2015: 455). This would imply, Vasileva claims, a belief in a homogeneous entity with a single centre or focal point, around which all activity swirls. Transposed into childhood studies, also this field would then be thought of as an ‘it’ – a unified, internally coherent entity and actor, erasing the field’s heterogeneity and its existence as an uncoordinated network of more or less distinct approaches (or emerging ‘traditions’). This hardly is reality in STS and neither is it (in my view) the case in the childhood studies field.
The second version of a ‘turn’, Vasileva writes, is change of direction or course of movement, the act of turning another way. This sense of turning furthermore implies a unique, coherent entity travelling a singular path or trajectory, visiting new realms, or perhaps curiously wandering, temporarily enchanted, experimenting and exploring (Vasileva, 2015: 456). This might describe the winding travels of some individual researchers and perhaps even experimental research groups, or also paints a full picture of all the temporary enchantments, experimentations and explorations within a research field, such as STS, but can this demonstrate a progression forward, Vasileva asks.
The third version of ‘turn’ announces an alteration, a modification or a development – a change in general, as when things take a dramatic turn, a turn for the better or the worse; a categorical disruption of what is happening, to rectify a crisis or a stalemate, and doing this by introducing ‘a new regime, new rules, a new vocabulary, a new order which are better than in the past’. This ‘transformationist’ variant ‘engenders another STS [read: childhood studies] to be appropriated, barring plurality and multiplicity in favour of imposing one’s own truth, to be made into a hegemonic dogma’ (Vasileva, 2015: 456).
Finally, there is a fourth version: here ‘turn’ is an occasion, the time at which something happens, similarly as when ‘it is one’s turn to speak’. Each actor takes to the stage something energizing and inspirational while the institution only guarantees the turn-taking. Translating this variant to STS [again, read: childhood studies] Vasileva (2015) notes that it affords a heterogeneous, pluralistic, democratic parliamentary world of free associations and partial (party?/LA) connections (pp. 456–457). The author concludes her account of the four variants of ‘turn’ arguing that the three first species of turn all accommodate a ‘turn to’ form which (at least) conveys a definite directness of movement or change whereas the fourth variant does not. Her coda (Vasileva, 2015: 460) is that metaphors are always ‘impure’ and this is to be respected as a condition for a possible emancipation from stuck-ness.
What lessons might there be to learn from these ideas in relation to the high-spirited talk of possible or necessary ‘turns’ currently resounding in the childhood studies field, as well as in relation to the desirable aim of seeing our research field progress? As already hinted at above, I think we should start by accepting that childhood studies field is not nearly as homogeneous or uniform as the ‘stuck-ness’ and the ‘turn’ talk often appears to assume. There are in fact different approaches at work in the field, although as if below the surface of the more mundane ‘work-in-progress’. An effort should be made to identify such approaches, and to clarify their core ideas and aims, in order to make way for them to evolve in the direction of effective ‘research programmes’ 4 in the childhood studies field. As some more ‘mature’ social sciences suggest (see, for example, Pratten, 2005 on economics), also the childhood studies field should strive to bring forward and support a number of sustained research programmes, or projects, which address the same problems or phenomena but come from different angles or perspectives. Once such competing projects have been formulated, their comparative/contrastive analyses would allow us to see more clearly what is essential to the respective projects, what their methodological presuppositions are, what sort evidence would be needed and so on, all in the effort to boost progress in childhood studies.