Читать книгу Educational Explanations - Christopher Winch - Страница 18

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 we recognise within our own society, namely those connected with religion.¹¹ To some extent, it may be necessary to live within the scope of those criteria, to suspend disbelief and to act as if they were true, in order to appreciate their power and persuasiveness for those who apply them. Neither should we exclude the possibility that such a temporary acceptance of them may give us insights into those practices (and even those of our own culture or subculture) that may otherwise be denied to us. To say, however, that participants in such practices live in different realities does not follow, although it may well follow that their conception of what the world is like differs radically from that of the researcher.¹²

There remains the difficult question as to whose criteria for establishing truth and falsity should be dominant. We will return to this repeatedly.