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 a proposition is true if it corresponds in some way to a state of affairs (Ellenbogen 2003; Vision 2005). We might ask whether or not a proposition does correspond to a state of affairs and we would need some criterion for saying whether or not it did. A coherence account of truth would broadly claim that a proposition is true if it coheres with or perhaps is consistent with other propositions taken to be true, or better, if it belongs to a set which provides mutual explanatory support (Young 2018). While coherence accounts attempt to provide a sufficient account of what it is for a proposition to be true, this can only be the case if it is possible to advance satisfactory criteria for coherence and there is often substantial disagreement about what these are.

Pragmatism in its simplest form holds that truth (with some qualifications) is determined by utility (James 1907).^{2 , 3} This claim has obvious drawbacks and it is much more common for pragmatists to think of ascriptions of truth in relation to whole systems of belief and in particular to those fundamental propositions on which the truth conditions of less fundamental ones depend, but which are themselves subject to revision when our practical concerns appear to require it. Quine is sometimes thought to be a pragmatist in this sense (Quine 1951, see p. 43; Godfrey-Smith 2014). These are difficult to themselves justify empirically, as few or no propositions could count against them (Locke 1689), but which can in principle be overturned. Such propositions are, in principle, defeasible;