Educational Explanations. Christopher Winch
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but also to those that are themselves the subject of investigation.
We are now in a position to see more clearly how the correspondence view that lies behind the relativism and/or idealism that seems to inform so much EER gives rises to such misconceptions. The starting point is ‘realist’ enough:
p is true iff p corresponds to reality (e.g. a state of affairs).
It is then noticed that, from the point of view of different observers, different states of affairs, events, processes, facts have different degrees of importance. Let us suppose that a teacher is taking a class. Various non-participants are observing: an educational researcher, a teacher colleague, an inspector, a parent. Thus the lesson will appear different from the point of view of the class teacher, another teacher, an inspector, a child in the class or a visiting parent. They may each provide different and, to some degree, incompatible accounts of the lesson. Thus the class teacher might say that she met her very demanding lesson objectives, the observing teacher that the lesson was too ambitious, the inspector that there was not enough pace in the lesson, the child that the lesson went too slowly and the parent that what was taught was pitched at too low a level for the ability of the children. Not all these propositions can be jointly true yet they are all held sincerely by each of the parties involved and different criteria may be invoked by each observer to justify his/her claim. It is very tempting to say that each observer makes a judgement that corresponds to a different reality.
But this is mistaken. First, as noted in Chapter 1, to say that there are different realities here is already to point to a common phenomenon, the lesson observed by each of the parties. So there is an underlying reality to which each of the observers is responding from their own perspective. However, each appears to be applying different criteria to their observation of the lesson. Are we to say that all these criteria are equally valid? If so, we seem to be back to the idealist/relativist position which we wished to reject. It seems that we must stipulate the correct set of criteria and reject judgements that do not rely on those criteria. In practice, this is what happens, for example, the inspector rejects the interpretation offered by the teacher and the child that offered by the parent.5 What of the educational researcher who is also observing the lesson?
In the first place she can note that the different observers use different criteria and make different and conflicting judgements according to those criteria. She will use her own criteria for determining what actually is the perspective of each participant. She may wish to go no further than to establish that different observers approach the lesson with different perspectives, stating what each of these perspectives are. She may provisionally accept their criteria as those operative in the subcultures in which the different observers operate and mark the judgements as true from those perspectives.6 She does so on the basis of truth criteria apt for this type of investigation. In this instance she is applying criteria that are recognised in her educational research community which have been arrived at through a process of dialogue, debate and testing through practice and which have been accepted to be reliable, valid, robust and less prone to error in application than alternative ones. She may, on the other hand, adopt a more normative stance and, on the basis either or previous assumptions or on the basis of previous empirical work, adopt a particular set of criteria as dominant (as the ones to be applied to this and other cases) and form her judgement concerning the observed lesson on this basis. She does not dismiss the sincerity of the incompatible observers or even necessarily deny that their stance has something to be said for it and that their judgements are true in their own terms. Nevertheless, crucially, she rejects their judgements and the criteria they rest on, claiming that hers are better founded, more consistent and robust and less prone to bias and error. We can see, therefore, that multiple perspectives do not entail multiple realities, although they clearly entail multiple points of view which it may be the job of the researcher to understand further.7
UNDERSTANDING, PERSPECTIVALISM AND REALISM
Rejection of the correspondence theory entails that it is not possible to give an account of truth as correspondence with reality in the form of states of affairs etc. It does not follow, however, that the researcher has to proceed as if there is no reality which forms the background of their investigation. The investigation, however, goes forward on the basis of criteria for what is to count as truth or falsity for different kinds of phenomena. These criteria may be different for different kinds of investigation, but they should converge on a set of compatible observations, accounts, explanations or theories. There are no grounds for supposing that there are multiple realities, although there are grounds for supposing that there may be multiple conceptions of reality. But criteria do have to take account of the way in which the world is, even if we discern this indirectly through the application of our criteria.8 Reality tends to outrun our ability to describe it and hence there are periodic revisions of some truth criteria. ‘is true’ and ‘is real’ behave differently (Ellenbogen 2003, p. 109).
It is also necessary to say something about critical realism, a doctrine that is currently influential in social and educational research (Bhaskar 1975). Critical realism holds that it is the task of educational researchers to investigate reality, that there are potentially different perspectives on that reality and that causal processes operate within that reality, which it is the task of researchers to uncover. The argument of this book, however, is that we cannot investigate reality directly in terms of adopting a correspondence account of truth, although we will endeavour to frame our criteria for truth claims in such a way as we can make the best possible attempt that we can to capture what is real. We have problems with perspectivalism which will be discussed in the next section. Finally, in Chapter 4 and beyond we will cast doubt on the claim that underlying processes are always to be subsumed under a narrow form of causal explanation.
How, then, do we accept the ‘truths’ of others? Educational research, in common with much social science research, tells us that there are different and often radically incompatible ways of judging what appear to be the same phenomena. However, there must be something common about the phenomena whose very nature is being disputed.9 For there to be disagreement about whether a process is training or education for example, there must be a consensus that something is going on here. For there to be a disagreement as to whether a witch doctor’s spells are causally efficacious or whether their alleged effects have other causes, there must be a set of events which correspond with the activity of the witch doctor and the individual towards whom their activity is directed.10 Recognising this is a necessary prelude to any kind of interpretive or hermeneutic activity concerned with identifying participants’ understanding of the phenomena that may follow it. Most plausibly, this involves the physical, perceptual reality of unfolding events which are independent of our perception (McNaughton 1988). However, there are also categorial concepts which all members of a society recognise and use in their understanding of their culture and social world, even if they do so implicitly. Thus, two groups may have very different views of the aims and value of their children attending school. However, they do not dispute either that school buildings exist or that there is an officially sanctioned institution of the school. Thus, although schools would not exist if there were no-one to recognise them as schools, the conception-dependence of schools (McNaughton op. cit.,) is not compromised as everyone in the society has some understanding of what a school is. By contrast, if the population disappeared there would be no concept of a school, and hence no schools, but school buildings would still exist.
We can, however, readily admit the following. Participants in practices almost invariably make use of justificatory or assertoric uses of language (Milic and Reining 2017). They talk in terms of truth and falsity of claims (‘this is only training, not education’; ‘A did cast a spell on B; B did not fall ill from natural causes’) and use criteria for determining the truth or falsity of such claims. We cannot begin to understand their practices unless we take into account their understanding of those practices. If we do not, then we run the risk of misunderstanding them. If, for example, witchcraft practices are interpreted as bad science, then we may miss a crucial analogue with practices that