‘Rigour’,‘discipline’ and the ‘systematic’ in educational research – and why they matter

Research and truth

The first impulse for this paper was a mounting alarm at what we have come to know as ‘post truth’ politics. While there is surely nothing new about politicians lying to achieve their ends, the shame that used to be attached to being found out seems to have been replaced by an arrogant confidence that there is no need to maintain any significant distinction between truth and falsity nor any place for evidence or argument or expertise in distinguishing one from the other. Faced with incontrovertible evidence of the falsity of claims made about the crowds at Trump’s inauguration, Trump’s counsellor Kellyanne Conway famously claimed to have ‘alternative facts’ (though these were never produced); faced with an overwhelming assessment by the scientific community of the reality of global warming, the same political circle claimed ‘alternative experts’. The Brexit campaign in Britain, Russia’s incursions into the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and the campaigns of the far right across Europe have all been marked by the same disregard for truth or falsity. But then, if one opinion is as good as any other, you might as well make it up, so long as you can do so with sufficient brazen self confidence. (See, on this, Horsthemke’s paper in this special issue and Horsthemke, 2017.)

Worse, from my point of view, ‘post truth’ politics seems to have gained legitimacy from an academic world in which social scientists in particular (and including educational researchers) themselves subscribe to a ‘post truth’ epistemology: ‘there is no such thing as truth’ is a warning I hear routinely at educational research conferences – and it is rarely contradicted. Of course, there is no such ‘thing’ as truth, but that does not dispense with the concept; for example, as it is employed by Popper (1968) as a ‘regulative principle’. Like Horsthemke,

I cannot help thinking that particular constructivists, postmodernists and postcolonial theorists, even some feminists . . . and the respective emphasis on locality, subjectivity and standpoint perspectives – have contributed to the current climate in which truth, facts and rationality are treated with disdain. (Horsthenke, 2017: 274)

This disdain appears sometimes to be rooted in a naive subjectivism, at others in an equally naive social relativism. Such sweeping and comprehensive scepticism with regard to the truth or otherwise of particular beliefs is difficult to reconcile, however, with the very evident efforts of researchers of many different complexions to do work which continues to bear the marks of, for example, scholarly engagement with the literature; the systematic gathering, checking and curating of data; and the rigorous analysis and construction of argument. Indeed it is precisely this sort of care, this thoroughness, this ‘systematic and sustained’ work rigorously applied (Stenhouse, 1980) that distinguishes research from other forms of more casual inquiry. ‘Research’ is in this sense what is sometimes called an ‘honorific’ concept: it suggests that the inquiry has satisfied certain demanding standards. ¹

And all this rigour is to a purpose, for it is precisely this that renders the outcomes of research more deserving of belief than those that might issue from thought, inquiry or any other source that lacked these features. Of course, belief can come with different levels of confidence or conviction, which may relate to logical features of, for example, the evidence or to psychological features of the believer. However, ‘believing that something is the case’, believing that p (where p stands for any proposition) also implies believing that ‘p’ (a statement that expresses this proposition) is true (see, for example, Hamlyn, 1971) – even if one allows, as one always must, that one could turn out to be wrong. So, my argument is that if educational research or any other research is constructed with a view to examining what is more deserving of belief than anything else (Smeyers writes in this issue of ‘a conclusion for which there is discernible, appropriate warrant’), then it is inextricably bound up with what in some sense might be described as the pursuit of truth. ² Not that such a pursuit is straightforward or guided by a single set of requirements: if what it means to claim beliefs to be true is at least in part a function of how such beliefs are verified or falsified (see Bridges, 1999, 2017 for an account of different theories of truth), then truth as ‘a regulative principle’ (Popper, 1968) operates in a variety of different ways – which is one reason we have to think in terms of a plurality of different disciplines of inquiry.

There are a number of genres of educational research in which (some) researchers appear uncomfortable with the idea that they are concerned with truth, but I want to argue that they escape neither this concern nor its subsequent obligations.

Ethnographers may be interested in the diversity and culturally embeddedness of social (including educational) thought and practice, and this may support them in resisting facile generalisations that obscure these features, but they nevertheless go to strenuous lengths to observe and portray context and practice in all their cultural diversity and embeddedness accurately, faithfully, respectfully, honestly – and there is a strenuous rigour attached to the fulfilment of these ethical and epistemological requirements. (See reference below to Griaule’s work with the Dogon people of central Africa.)

Another body of social scientific and educational research rooted in a range of disciplines from phenomenography to psychoanalysis focuses on the subjective experience of students and teachers in particular. But this too is conducted not just with sensitivity for the ethical dimension of the conduct of the research, but also with meticulous attention to the eliciting of something more than the merely superficial response. See, for example, Rogers’ (2001) use of poetry to enable teachers to go beyond more superficial reflections on their teaching. The same researchers go to great lengths to create conditions under which participants feel able to speak openly and honestly (a notion that itself has no purchase without some reference to truth) and then to produce representations of these participants’ experience which are fair, accurate . . . true?

Some researchers see their primary allegiance as being to the principle of social justice, but both the analysis and diagnosis of injustice and proposals for its remedy rely not just on commitment to a normative principle, but on a functionally successful command of the facts of the situation – ‘better knowledge’, as Griffiths (1998: 192) calls it. Veck, recounting his own attempts at ‘emancipatory’ research, explains how he came to the conclusion that

in committing to social justice I was logically bound to the pursuit of truth. If the outcome of my research was to uncover injustice, to pronounce what is wrong, then what I had to say had to reflect the reality of that social injustice with the utmost accuracy. (2002: 334)

Even those like Stronach and MacLure (1997, and see discussion of this work in Bridges, 1999, 2017), who have advanced a postmodern approach to educational research, do so with every sign of scholarly endeavour and, for MacLure at least, careful argumentation. ‘Deconstruction’, ‘transgression’ and ‘disruption’ all depend on the questioning and perceptive observation of features of language, discourse and the power structures that are associated with them that other scholars have overlooked. They are not inventions; they are disclosures of what is there in the systems observed. Deconstruction helps us to see what we might otherwise have missed. Like other forms of critical engagement with text, language and discourse, by challenging false belief and assumption it helps us to see more clearly what might be more deserving of belief.

None of the activity to which I have referred – this ‘research’ – makes sense unless one subscribes to the view that there are some accounts, some understandings of these personal, social textual or linguistic phenomena, that are more deserving of attention and belief than others and that the care, rigour, thoughtfulness, scholarship and discipline that are strenuously applied by researchers are precisely what renders what they offer more credible than other accounts that lack these qualities – where ‘credible’ implies deserving to be believed and ‘believed’ implies thought to be true. As Phillips argues:

If we give this up, if we hold that a biased or personally loaded viewpoint is as good as a viewpoint supported by carefully gathered evidence, we are undermining the very point of human inquiry. If a shoddy inquiry is to be trusted as much as a careful one, then it is pointless to inquire carefully. (2008: 61)

All of the research approaches I have indicated here fall within ‘a wide range of interconnected interpretive practices’ that Denzin and Lincoln loosely define as qualitative research – but even Denzin and Lincoln acknowledge that these are ‘hoping always to get a better understanding of the subject matter at hand’ (2011: 4). And, though they do not explicitly draw this implication, a ‘better understanding’ must surely have some connection with what is true rather than what is false: it is a misunderstanding rather than a better understanding if it rests on all sorts of false information or inappropriate inferences.

In advancing these views I am positioning myself neither with the social relativists or subjectivists nor with what are sometimes called the foundationalists, but rather, like Hammersley, with the fallibilist tradition in epistemology which he associates with, in particular, Peirce, Dewey and Wittgenstein. As Hammersley explains:

From this point of view, while all knowledge claims are fallible – in other words they could be false even when we are confident they are true –this does not mean that we should treat them as all equally likely to be false, or judge them solely according to whether or not they are validated by their own cultural communities. (2008: 48)

Phillips, similarly, argues that

[w]hen we abandon foundationalism, we abandon the assurance that we can know when we have reached the truth, but . . . we do not have to abandon the notion of truth, and we do not have to abandon the view that some types of inquiries are better than others. (2008: 60)

Such inquiries do, however, have to be validated by reference to criteria and procedures appropriate to the nature of the claims made – and this brings me to a different plurality, that of disciplined inquiry.

Research as disciplined inquiry

Disciplines are essential structures for systematising, organizing, and embodying the social and institutional practices upon which both coherent discourse and legitimate exercise of power depend. (Lenoir, 1993: 73)

I have argued that research suggests inquiry that comes up to certain standards or requirements in terms of the way in which it is conducted. The ideas that research requires systematic inquiry and that its hallmark is its rigour sit with the complementary propositions that research is disciplined inquiry and hence located within the frameworks of such forms of disciplined inquiry that have evolved and been developed (primarily but not exclusively in the academy). Some of the requirements placed on research are generic and may be applied across different forms of inquiry – for example, the inquiry is sustained; it is careful and thorough; it is respectful to those who participate. Others start to point to different forms of inquiry – for example, it is systematic, but the ‘system’ may well be different for different forms of inquiry; it is rigorous, but this rigour may make different demands depending on the research focus and the research questions; it is concerned with what is most deserving of belief (perhaps what is true), but that which renders as deserving of belief a claim about the origins of church schools in the 19th century will be rather different from an argument for the inclusion of the creative arts in the school curriculum, an account of racist behaviour in a classroom, an evaluation of strategies for widening participation in higher education or an analysis of the silences and evasions in an official report. Hammersley argues, for example, that

[v]alidity is a crucial standard by which the findings of research should be judged, and it is a single standard that applies across the board.. However, what is required for assessing likely validity varies according to the nature of the findings, and also according to the research methods employed. (2008: 45)

Such differences provide the basis for a view of educational research as differentiated, as drawing on a number of significantly different forms of inquiry, each with its own ways/rules for investigating educational experience, policy and practice, each with perhaps its own ways of verifying or contradicting claims to belief, their own rigour, its own discipline. Hence what we sometimes call the ‘disciplines’ of educational research.

I do not see education as constituting itself such a discipline. As Hirst (1966: 55) argued in his classic paper, educational research ‘is not itself an autonomous “form” of knowledge or an autonomous discipline. It involves no conceptual structure unique in its logical features and no unique test for validity’. Rather, it is a field of inquiry to which a number of disciplines drawn from the wider academic community are applied. How these themselves are identified is itself a fascinating study in the history and sociology of knowledge, for different disciplines seem to emerge and gain ascendancy in different places over time. More than 50 years ago in the UK, Tibble (1966) confidently identified them as psychology, philosophy, sociology and history of education. Since the 1970s, educational research in the UK, the USA and elsewhere has drawn on more diverse sources from the academy and particular disciplines have fragmented and re-combined to the point that they present a perhaps bewildering array of possibilities. When Robert Donmoyer became features editor of Educational Researcher, the journal of the American Educational Research Association, he wrote a piece under the perplexed title ‘Educational Research in an Era of Paradigm Proliferation: What’s a Journal Editor to Do?’ He observed: ‘Ours is a field characterised by paradigm proliferation and, consequently, the sort of field in which there is little consensus about what research and scholarship are and what research reporting and scholarship should look like’ (Donmoyer, 1996: 19). Though there were certain parallels with the construction of educational research in other parts of Europe and the world, educational research also took on different forms rooted in different national cultures and traditions. We have not set out to offer a comparative study of these different traditions, but contributions to this special issue ‘by Conti, Kvernbek and Janning, and Fimyar et al.’ will illustrate such differences and perhaps too something of what we share – for without some sharing in a common language, without shared subscription to some rules, our sustainability as what Hunt (1991: 104) calls ‘a community of arguers’ in ‘a European educational space’ or elsewhere is impossible.

Perhaps the fundamentals of inquiry represented by, for example, ‘les sciences de l’éducation’, ‘Allgemeinewissenschaft’ or ‘pedagogik’ are not after all so different. It is significant that the European Educational Research Quality Indicators (EERQI) Project (2011), in spite of its diverse membership from countries across Europe, experienced little difficulty in agreeing on at least the main generic criteria of quality for educational research (rigour, of course, and originality and significance). To take a more specific example, Bengsston’s account of the development of pedagogy as a ‘scientific and separate discipline’ (2002: 7) in Sweden describes how Bertil Hammer, the holder of the first chair in pedagogy in Sweden, provided in his inaugural lecture in 1910 an account of pedagogy divided into three main branches, which will be remarkably familiar to later students. Hammer (1988) distinguished (in Bengtsson’s own translation):

So, in spite of the embeddedness of ‘pedagogy’ in different academic and social traditions, it nevertheless reflects the key disciplines that constituted educational theory and inquiry in the UK and elsewhere for at least two decades. And there is, perhaps a good reason for this: at a minimum, you cannot really engage in educational policy or practice without dealing with some of the fundamental normative questions about aims and principles (i.e. philosophical questions?); you cannot really address questions about how to develop students’ learning without some understanding of the nature of learning and processes that support it (i.e. psychological questions?); nor can you really address educational questions without understanding how the practice of education is embedded in wider social and cultural conditions (i.e. sociological and historical questions?) Of course, there are other sorts of questions and approaches that can and do illuminate educational phenomena, but the persistence over many different societies of these central disciplines (in their various forms) is no accident: their contributions are a logical requirement of any comprehensive theory and practice of education.

Of course these ‘disciplines’ themselves become objects of inquiry, critique and challenge; the boundaries between them are crossed (‘cross disciplinarity’); they are harnessed together for particular kinds of inquiry (‘multi-disciplinarity’); they sub-divide and are sometime hybridised – all of which is consistent with the requirement for some form of ‘discipline’ in research (Bridges, 2017; Furlong and Lawn, 2011). More challenging are the claims for ‘post-disciplinary’ research. If this is simply a way of observing (as I have also done) that educational research has extended itself beyond the 4 disciplines that characterised the field 50 years ago, then that is clearly the case. Similarly, if it is intended to suggest that educational research needs to be multi-disciplinary, then I also have no problem. If, however, ‘post-disciplinarity’ is intended to convey an inquiry which is lacking in ‘discipline’, in any form of rigour, scholarship, care, thoroughness or argument, then it seems to me to collapse into incoherence: its very claim to the honorific title of ‘research’ falls.

Alternative epistemologies?

Perhaps sometimes the differences between ways of understanding the world and the bases for determining what to believe are so great that they constitute an unbridgeable divide such that a ‘community of arguers’ is indeed impossible. Something of such a radical challenge to a shared practice of inquiry is suggested in the notion of ‘alternative epistemologies’.

I shall explore four possible claims that might be made on behalf of what are referred to as alternative epistemologies. Kai Horsthemke’s paper, elsewhere in this special issue, develops some of this argument very richly.

There is one level at which it is difficult to make sense of the idea of alternative epistemologies. ‘Epistemology’ after all simply refers to that area of philosophy in which issues about the nature of and grounds for knowledge, belief and understanding are explored. This does not prejudge any specific claims as to what we can know or how we can know it: such debates – including debates about colonial and post-colonial, feminist and post-feminist, modern and postmodern perspectives on knowledge and understanding – are precisely what constitute the field. Or, to take another example, ‘constructivist epistemology’ may be an alternative to crude empiricism, but its claims are long established within the scope of epistemology viewed in the terms that I have suggested, not something outside this field.

So, on the whole, claims for ‘alternative epistemologies’ are talking about something else.

Sometimes it seems as if the claims are simply claims about the possibility of different interpretive frameworks for the researching, examining and analysis of experience, observation or inquiry. Few educational researchers would, I imagine, deny that (a) a preference for different kinds of data (e.g. metrics or auto-ethnography) might produce significantly different accounts of the same events or experience; or that (b) if you offer any two people the same data sets, the interpretive frameworks they bring to this data may produce rather different pictures of the same events or situation (Dillon’s 1988 project on classroom discussion exploited precisely this possibility by inviting researchers from different disciplines to offer interpretations of the same data). An interest in (even in some academic circles a requirement for) the ‘biographical positioning’ of the researcher is an indication of the significance that is attached by some to the personal and/or social embeddedness of the interpretive frameworks they bring to their research,

Such differences are not, however, necessarily problematic to my account of research or my defence of the role of truth in such inquiry. The International Handbook on the Role of Interpretation in Educational Research (Smeyers et al., 2015) illustrates with reference to eight different genres of educational research how an acknowledgement of the multiple roles of interpretation in research can be consistent with attention to scholarly rigour. Different kinds of data will of course produce different kinds of insight into the same topic. These are not necessarily contradictory: they simply enrich our understanding. So too do different people’s readings or constructions of the meaning of the same evidence. In both cases too there is room for checking the readings against the evidence; testing the logical consistency of inferences that are drawn; challenging the ignorance, prejudice or myopia of the author; examining the consistency of what is claimed against what is separately known about the context or the behaviour of those inside it; examining the way a particular set of sources (quantitative or qualitative) has been selected and ways in which discarded data may contradict the interpretations that are offered, etc. The acceptance of the possibility – indeed the desirability – of different interpretive frameworks is entirely consistent with the requirement for rigour in such interpretation. Such different interpretations do not necessarily stand in contradiction with each other but rather enlarge and enrich our understanding(s). Even when they do involve contradictory ‘readings’ of the same events or phenomena, we can accept that indeed it is a fact (a true belief) of some relevance that different people may take different views on the same phenomena – and perhaps begin to explore why, or to enter into dialogue with a view to establishing common ground (practices well established in the field of ‘democratic’ programme evaluation – see MacDonald and Walker, 1974). So the fact that researchers applying different methods and methodologies or bringing to bear different interpretive frameworks to the same phenomena or experience may provide different understandings of that those phenomena or experiences does not contradict the perspective I have offered on the crucial importance of rigour and discipline in educational research or the good sense in regarding some beliefs as more deserving of belief than others.

One extension of this argument about different ways of seeing and interpreting the same phenomena has provoked a huge literature in the form of, in particular, feminist social epistemology and post-colonial theory. What both have in common, I think, is the observation that since knowledge is in an important sense socially constructed then the nature of the social relations and social structures within which it is constructed is pertinent to what is constructed and maintained. Thus, for example, in a context of colonial oppression one might not be surprised to find that the belief systems of the oppressor dominate and suppress those of the oppressed. Such has been, for example, the experience of indigenous populations in North America, Australia and New Zealand (but also China and the Soviet Union) in each of which indigenous languages and beliefs were systematically destroyed in favour of the beliefs and world views of the imperialistic power. Similarly, it is argued, in what have been for centuries male-dominated societies, women’s contributions to knowledge and with these their distinctive perspectives have been subordinated and marginalised. Elizabeth Anderson characterises feminist epistemology as properly belonging within social epistemology, describing it as ‘the branch of social epistemology that investigates the influence of socially constructed conceptions and norms of gender and gender-specific interests and experiences on the production of knowledge’ (1995: 54; my italics), though this is not the only characterisation on offer, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy warns that ‘there is a great deal of variation in the theories and approaches constituting feminist epistemology and few generalizations can be made across the field’ (Grasswick, 2016).

Such analysis – and I am aware that I have stated it very crudely – carries a number of different implications. In particular, first, it requires us when looking at any ‘production’ of knowledge to examine and to take into account the social circumstances of its production and the positionality of its producer and to look critically at the biases, distortions or exclusions that may have resulted from these conditions. Secondly, it requires us, not just in the interests of justice, though this is also an important consideration, but also in the interests of ‘better’ (fuller, richer, more inclusive) knowledge and understanding, to seek out alternative accounts and interpretations (I see no reason to call these ‘alternative epistemologies’) generated by people who stand in different positions and relationships within the social structures that provide the context for our inquiries.

As I have noted, these requirements arise out of a social/political commitment to justice and are frequently linked to projects aimed at ‘giving voice’ to excluded people or their ‘empowerment’. But they arise too out of what is after all the central epistemological project of any research/inquiry, which is to understand as fully, as sensitively and as accurately as possible whatever is the object of our inquiry. It is this project that may lead us in educational research, for example, to employ different research methods (because, perhaps, numbers, words and images will give us different perspectives on the same phenomena), and it will lead us to seek to engage in any inquiry both as researchers and participants people who stand in different social relationships to what is under investigation. But I see all this as part of the proper conduct of inclusive, vigorous and rigorous mainstream research – not as something standing outside as an ‘alternative epistemology’.

Anderson, again, suggests that what she calls feminist epistemology has two aims. First, an adequate feminist epistemology must explain what it is for a scientific theory or practice to be sexist and androcentric, how these features are expressed in theoretical inquiry and in the application of theoretical knowledge, and what bearing these features have on evaluating research (Anderson, 1995: 51).

Secondly, ‘[a]n adequate feminist epistemology must explain how research projects with such moral and political commitments can produce knowledge that meets such epistemic standards as empirical adequacy and fruitfulness’ (Anderson, 1995: 51). Anderson herself argues that these aims can be satisfied while retaining commitments to a modest empiricism and to rational inquiry, and I do not see myself how either of these aspirations takes one into what I would understand by ‘an alternative epistemology’. The critique of embedded prejudice in research (even when such prejudice is embedded in a systematic way) and standards of ‘empirical adequacy and fruitfulness’ have or should have a natural and proper home in any standard epistemology: it does not require an ‘alternative epistemology’.

So far I have stayed, broadly speaking, within the territory in which claims for belief or the credibility of belief have rested on some form of reasons, or evidence and hence argument, albeit that this allowed scope for differences of understanding and interpretation. There is a more radical claim for an alternative epistemology that points to belief that is sourced in, perhaps, tradition, a particular authority, even magical signs. These are sources often associated with (some but not all) traditional or ‘indigenous knowledge systems’, though they function too in any society.

These sources are not, however, all of a kind. In recent years in particular, international pharmaceutical companies and agronomists have developed a new respect for indigenous knowledge systems because they have realised that these are a source of insight into agricultural practices and therapeutic treatments which turn out to be good practices judged in their own scientific terms. In these cases, what might today be regarded as knowledge handed down as part of a tradition is what has simply stood over time the pragmatic test that ‘it works’. The scientists may offer a particular story about how and why ‘it works’ but essentially the authority of the knowledge in the local community owes its enduring status to this empirically grounded pragmatic test of experience even if this has become enshrined as tradition.

But traditional knowledge does not always ‘work’ in this pragmatic sense. ³ A report by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (2016) on the Ebola outbreak in New Guinea describes how traditional healers came to recognise the limitations of their own remedies, which were impotent in the face of this cruel and rapidly spreading disease, and they were rallied as a resource to guide and lead local communities in the scientifically derived safeguarding practices set out by international agencies. The sadly ironic outcome was that, having introduced local people to modern medical practices, the traditional healers are now having difficulty earning their money. I am not sure that I should celebrate this outcome as the triumph of Enlightenment.

And what is one to make of the ‘educational magic’ practised in traditional communities in Ethiopia? Haile-Gabriel Dagne (1971) describes how, according to traditional beliefs, the world of spirits can be controlled through the use of special secret words (asmat) handed down to particular people from God, embodied in incantations and sometimes combined with special foods to assist perception, cognition, skill, retention, understanding and even (this requires the consumption of a particular bird’s nest) the development of a singing voice much prized in the Ethiopian Orthodox church (Bridges, Asgedom and Kenaw, 2004). In the Chinese world, students and their parents flock to the Confucian temples at examination time to pray for success. My mother used to make an otherwise rather rare visit to the local Catholic church to light a candle for the same purpose – not always with success, and who is to say whether when success did come it was the product of prayer or hard work? My mother would have answered that ‘God helps those that help themselves’ – thus unwittingly achieving something like a fusion of ‘alternative epistemologies’?

Some traditional beliefs, as we have seen, can be entirely consistent with, for example, modern science and even contribute to its development (see, for example, Barkin, 2005). Authors like Barkin sometimes treat traditional beliefs and alternative epistemologies as the same, which is, I think, confusing when the traditional beliefs are essentially, like modern technology, experientially and pragmatically grounded. But there are whole systems of belief that tell a very different story from one that we might gather from science or, for that matter, scholarly history or anthropology. What are we to make of the account of creation in the Book of Genesis in the Judeo/Christian tradition? If this is to be regarded as ‘true’, this is clearly true in a sense far removed from that employed by geologists, paleontologists or historians. Is this ‘an alternative epistemology’? But if it is offered as, let us say, a myth, then it can be regarded in much the same way as literatists, psychoanalysts, cultural anthropologists, theologians and others treat such mythological accounts and subject to the same kind of scholarly analysis. But would the same principle apply to the ‘deep knowledge’ of the Dogon people eventually set out by the Dogon elder Ogotommȇli in his 33 conversations with the anthropologist Griaule? For this was knowledge which underpinned every aspect of their daily lives: ‘for these people live by a cosmogony, a metaphysis and a religion which put them on a par with the peoples of antiquity, and which Christian theology might indeed study with profit’ (Griaule, 1965: 2) – this, the assessment of an anthropologist described by Dieterlen as one who ‘combined with the most rigorous pursuit of objective and scientific observation of the facts observed an active participation in the life of the people studied’ – among whom, after 35 years of research, he was eventually buried (Griaule, 1965: xiii). It is difficult to resist, in such an account by someone who was himself clearly deeply rooted in a scientific tradition, the conclusion that the Dogon people had a way of seeing, knowing and living in the world that was radically different from the scientific tradition and impervious to its critique, even if, with sufficient sensitivity, patience and perseverance it became accessible and intelligible to someone coming from that tradition.

Thus, such ‘alternative epistemologies’ or systematic metaphysics offer alternative interpretive frameworks through which people make sense of experience, and they can be researched (using, for example, the tools of anthropology, philosophy, theology or perhaps literary interpretation), but it is more difficult to see how they might themselves constitute a form of inquiry, let alone research, unless one might consider a consultation with a wise and authoritative elder as such, for these are systems that function primarily to sustain and hand down established belief rather than to create new and better understanding. It is not only the belief systems that provide a radical challenge to those of the post-Enlightenment era, but the very ways in which they are sourced, maintained, given authority and passed on.

A rather different challenge to more orthodox assumptions about knowledge is provided by Maffie in his critique of Goldman’s (1999) Knowledge in a Social World. Maffie acknowledges that truth is undoubtedly the prevailing goal of cognition in the history of Western epistemology – Nietzsche, Dewey, James and Quine being notable exceptions – as it is for South Asian, post-Han East Asian and many African epistemologies. He claims, however, that the pre-Columbian Nahuas, among whom were the Aztecs, not only appear not to have been concerned with truth, they appear to have lacked the concept of truth altogether:

The Nahuas conceived the aim of cognition not in terms of truth, true belief or truthful representation, but in terms of living wisely. Knowledge (tlamatiliztli) did not consist of theoretical or propositional truths about the world but rather practical skills or know-how which enabled human beings to keep their balance as they walked along the twisted, jagged path of life. (Maffie, 2000: 248)

Of course, many in the Western philosophical tradition from Aristotle onwards have attached significance and value to such different kinds of knowing, but, nevertheless, these examples (the Dogon and the Nahuas) drawn from populations embedded in traditions largely untouched by the knowledge systems of colonising powers (from East or West), but also those like the creationists who retain a pre-Enlightenment cosmogony, seem to me to offer the most compelling case for an alternative epistemology incommensurate with the epistemology of post Enlightenment inquiry of any kind in the sense that, though they may be inquired into and in some measure understood using the tools of, for example, anthropology, they cannot be engaged with through an available critical discourse aimed at agreeing what is true: there is no ‘community of arguers’ or shared set of rules or procedures for resolving differences.

But note that the same cannot be said of many of the different interpretative frameworks which are similarly badged as ‘alternative epistemologies’ where more conventional notions of disciplined inquiry, rigour and even truth may still apply.

We do not have to have research as a source of knowledge and understanding in education. We have a plentiful supply of both in experience (ours and others), in tradition (perhaps the accumulation of experience) and in the authority of those whose combination of experience, standing and recognition earns them respect. ⁴ As teachers, parents and citizens we all draw on these for much of the time even in the world of modern science and technology. In communities less infused by this science and technology they are perhaps relied on more heavily, and there is little place for innovative thinking, let alone ‘research’.

However, ‘research’ in its many forms (and not just quasi-scientific) provides us with the means to question, check and challenge these other sources of knowledge – perhaps confirming their wisdom, perhaps confounding it. This is its function, and it is an absolutely central one once you take the step that Popper took ‘to replace . . . the question of the sources of knowledge by the entirely different question: How can we detect and eliminate error?’ (Popper, 1968: 25; italics in original). This is the legacy of the Enlightenment, and one that I suggest is ultimately a beneficent one.

I am convinced that this is so, but, of course, it would be in contradiction with my own fallibilist or corrigibilist position (i.e. one psychologically open to and logically exposed to correction) if I did not also acknowledge that I might be wrong. But how would I know that I was wrong, unless I am shown good reasons, evidence or argument that demonstrate this to be the case? And what would count as such good reasons evidence or argument . . .? Scepticism requires its rigour too.

The papers that follow

This special issue of the European Educational Research Journal is mainly derived from a double symposium convened at the 2017 European Conference on Educational Research

(ECER) in Copenhagen in the Philosophy of Education Network (Network 13). All the papers presented at the conference have been revised and two papers by Horsthemke and Smeyers added to the original set of seven. Though a core of the papers are mainly philosophical in character, others might be characterised as historical, sociological and/or, in one case (Fimyar et al.), in the form of discourse analysis. The issue is to this extent multi-disciplinary in character.

All the papers address questions about the nature and formation of educational research, the bases of its claims on our credibility, the place of rigour and discipline in its construction, its disciplinary organisation and its encounters with various forms of social relativism and subjectivism. (See especially this paper and Horsthemke’s, though the views expressed in these are treated critically by Conti, Keiner and Standish.)

The papers seek to engage with these issues in ways that are sensitive to the fact that both the disciplinary structures of research and the language in which these debates are articulated vary across the European educational space in ways which may sometimes defeat consistent translation and challenge attempts at a coherent conversation. Standish develops this argument which is further illustrated in Keiner’s contribution and also in the studies of Norwegian research by Kvernbek and Jarning and of the construction of pedagogika in Ukraine by Fimyar, Kushnir and Vitruckh. It is, however, also interesting to observe how authors writing in English find they need to invoke other languages to express properly what they are trying to say. Smeyers, for example, invokes the distinction between Verstehen and Erklärung and their relationship with the neglected concept of Geisteswissenschaften. Some terms – bricoleur, for example – seem by now to have been incorporated into the English language along with that armoury of Latinate terms – non sequitur, status quo, etc. – that are part of a shared linguistic heritage across much of Europe.

The contributions acknowledge, too, the power relations that, on some analyses at least, underpin and are maintained by these disciplinary structures (see Conte and Keiner) and these and other papers problematise and ‘historicise’ (Fendler and Priem) the significance of traditional notions like rigour and discipline.

The authors have sought to write in what they hope will be a style accessible to the wider educational research community and not just philosophers – and they look forward to continuing dialogue with that wider community.