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Our dealings with the world express our interests, capacities and points of view, together with our cultural inheritance. Unavoidably, out engagement is perspectival, both in the individual sense but also in a cultural one. It is our way of ‘knowing our way around’ (Wittgenstein 1953) or of ‘being in the world’ (Heidegger 1962).¹³

One of the primary tasks of social researchers is to explore and to understand the perspective of their subjects in order to describe accurately and in detail their dealings with the world of education, a social practice often riven with different perspectives and rival conceptions (Winch, C. 1996). This interpretive or hermeneutic aspect of educational research demands a truthful and accurate account of the perspective of research subjects if any understanding from their perspective is to be gained.

However, acknowledgement of the importance of perspective undoubtedly throws up problems for the educational researcher. These fall into two categories: the competing perspectives of research subjects and the perspective of the researcher. In a sense, the former are relatively unproblematic, since it is the researcher’s task to truthfully and accurately represent the different perspectives of the participants. The position of employers vis a vis their employees gaining qualifications will probably be different from that the employees themselves and different again from that of politicians. These may lead to fundamental disagreements of a conceptual nature: certain practices are thought to be properly educational, whereas others see them as nothing more than training. Such differences of opinion and conceptual framing may be difficult to resolve, but they can be accurately noted, provided the researcher has a good grasp of the relevant concepts as they are used by subjects in different positions.

More difficult is the position of researchers themselves. They will bring their own perspectives to bear on the practices and beliefs under research scrutiny. How do these perspectives mesh with those of the subjects of the research? Very often they will themselves be in tension or even conflict. Researchers will have their own conceptual and normative stances. They will need to be aware of these and even be prepared to revise them in the light of research data. For example, it may be the case that some of the research subjects employ conceptual distinctions which are not recognised by the researcher but which are, nevertheless not only essential for understanding the phenomena under investigation but are also useful in reframing their own understanding of the question.¹⁴ In the last analysis however, researchers will offer their own interpretation of phenomena based on their own point of view (however mediated by careful observation and interpretation) that threatens to misunderstand the practices and beliefs under study.¹⁵ The tension may well grow more acute when the researcher is offering recommendations to those researched or to those who commissioned the research, whose views may differ from those of the researcher.¹⁶

This brings us to an important point. Researchers will not adopt value-neutral stances to the practices and beliefs that they study. The best course is to acknowledge this and any possible concomitant limitations of doing so. One could argue, for example, that the main protagonists of the School Effectiveness Research Programme failed to do this and consequently left themselves open to charges of ideological bias and, perhaps more seriously, to a form of hijacking by policymakers wanting quick results (White 1997).

That said, there is no objection to a researcher adopting a normative stance (for example to what would count as a ‘good teacher’ or an ‘effective school’) and to carry out research on this basis, provided such value commitments are acknowledged.¹⁷

Unavoidable is the need for persuasion. This may take many forms (Durante 2016; Perissinotto 2016). At one level, this may be the kind of dialogical Socratic process described by Wittgenstein when told about the claim that ‘nothing will make us leave the paradise that Cantor created for us’, referring to the discovery of the transfinite cardinals, to which Wittgenstein is said to have replied, ‘I wouldn’t dream of driving anyone from paradise. I would just show them that it wasn’t paradise and they would leave of their own accord.’ (Diamond 1976). Another example would be through the demonstration of a formal or geometrical proof.¹⁸ It can also occur through the kind of ‘paradigm shift’ in a scientific community described by Kuhn (1962), whereby cumulating dissatisfaction may lead to a radical shift in perspective which may involve conceptual upheaval. An example used by Peter Winch (2015) concerns Socrates’s exchange with Polus in the dialogue Gorgias. Here, Winch argues, Socrates is not trying to persuade Polus to change his mind, but to get him to understand what the state of his mind really is (op. cit., pp. 116–117), namely that Polus must really believe that it is better to suffer than to do wrong, despite what Polus sincerely says. It does not involve introducing new facts but by changing Polus’s perspective on facts already known.

Persuasion may also involve more practical considerations, such an appeal to collective or individual interests. At the other end of the spectrum it may involve the display of superior power of a cultural or technological kind (consider the role of Western technology in undermining religious belief both in the West and in countries colonised by Europeans). Finally it may rest on the threat or use of force.¹⁹