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There are two ways in which we can approach this claim. The first is through a generalised falsificationist approach (e.g. Popper 1959). In this sense, no finding of educational research, however robustly conducted, could be true. But this point, dependent on Popperian views of the provisional nature of scientific assertions, is just as true of the results of any scientific enquiry as it is of educational research. Underlying it are two questionable assumptions. The first concerns the unreliability of induction, a Humean concern which Popper appears to endorse (Popper 1959; Hume 1978). Induction, by its nature, cannot deliver deductive certainty, which is not to say that we cannot be certain about many matters established by induction, just that certainty in the cases of robust inductive inferences does not exclude the appearance of counter-examples.

The second objection is closely related to a conception of truth that we had cause to question in the previous chapter, namely that truth attributions are only really justified if they are true for all time. We had cause to reject this view because it appeared to rely on an untenable substantive account of truth, the correspondence theory, whereby correspondence rests on an alignment with a proposition and a (timeless) fact. It also rests on the idea that ‘true’ means ‘true for all time’. The two views are connected. If a proposition is true it is so because it corresponds with reality, and reality in the form of facts is fixed and cannot be changed. However, we are always making new discoveries about reality, and sometimes we are required to revise our views about what constitutes reality. Thus our attributions of correspondence with reality are nearly often fallible and hence invalid. To understand why this objection is not convincing we need to remind ourselves of the criterial account of truth outlined in the previous chapter. Truth attributions are indefeasible but criteria for attributions of truth are revisable (Ellenbogen 2003). This applies to any sort of enquiry, including any sort of scientific enquiry and thus EER is no special case.

However, it may legitimately be objected that EER is especially unreliable, not just for the reasons considered and dismissed earlier on, but also because as a matter of fact it is of poor quality, poorly designed and executed and often of a lofty ambition which is by no means matched by evidence and analysis. This kind of objection must be taken more seriously by anyone concerned with the quality of EER, particularly as there are many instances of poor-quality work which suffers from conceptual confusion, methodological inappropriateness, inadequacy of empirical base and poor analysis. In fact, EER is littered with large-scale theories which suffer from one or more such problems – the theory of IQ, various forms of developmentalism, verbal deficit theory, theories of language acquisition and concept formation and so on. Does the fact that so many educational research programmes have failed, either comprehensively or substantially, tell us anything?

The argument of this chapter is that it does, but not in a way as to justify such practices which, hopefully, belong to the infancy and youth of EER. The very fact that there is good reason to believe that they are false tells us something valuable about the phenomenon that they purport to describe and explain. False educational theories have a great deal of value, even if the intention of those who generated them was not to produce either complete or partial falsehood. Consider a false theory⁶ P. If P is false then its contradictory, not-P is true. This is an important result, which, however, is only the beginning of the need for further investigation.

A theory like P will not only contain many propositions, but some of them may well be true, even though the conjunction of the whole is false.⁷ However, the position is more complex than this since it is highly unlikely that there are no inferential relationships between the propositional components of P. These may be deductive relationships, as when theorems are derived from axioms as in geometry or axiomatic logic, they may be material inferences, as when conceptual relationships between elements of a theory are expanded (a star which is part of a solar system has planets within its gravitational sphere of influence) or inductive, when well-established empirical connections are embedded within the theory (societal economic breakdown is followed by famine). It is thus often the case that the falsity of one element of a theory has implicational ramifications for the truth of other parts.⁸ In order to understand the real significance of a falsified component of a theory, the theory needs to be well understood by those who seek to establish that significance.⁹

In other words, falsification of a theory or hypothesis is not the end of an enquiry, but a prompt for further investigation and more refined explanation. While it is wrong to put poorly evidenced empirical theories into practice, it cannot be an objection to EER as such that it is fallible and often falsified. In this respect it is much like other forms of scientific enquiry. As we shall see, however, in later chapters, there is a need to have a clearer account for what counts as criteria for truth in educational research and also for the standard of warrant needed (and the necessary qualifications) for accepting that research has a bearing on educational practice.

A further issue of great importance for our investigation concerns the scope of empirical theories, or the contexts in which they are true or false. Why is this an issue? The brief reason is that social practices are not governed by regularities which have law-like features in the way in which natural phenomena are. Adopting the language of efficient causality, we could say, following Mackie (1965, pp. 248–249) that social reality is not a uniform causal field and that it is necessary to carefully specify the background factors which set the scene for an explanation in terms of causes and conditions. Thus one might reasonably assume that non-biological physical reality forms a unified causal field in which the same laws apply irrespective of local circumstance. As Mackie points out, we need to be pragmatic about what constitutes a causal field relative to any particular enquiry. We would need to be more circumspect in terms of biological reality; we cannot assume that the same range of causal factors is operative in animal as in human biological systems for example. In relation to seeking an explanation of the causes of a house fire, the causal field would be constituted by the history of the house and which features constituted the background and which potentially causally active conditions would be a matter for the investigators to determine in accordance with their own explanatory priorities. The same point applies with even more force for reason-type as opposed to causal explanations (see Ch. 4).

Before we leave the issue of falsity we need to make clear the distinction between contrary and contradictory theories.¹⁰ Two theories contradict each other if the truth of one implies the falsity of another and vice versa. Thus for any true theory P its negation not-P is its contradictory and false and not-P is the contradictory of P. However, a very common situation is that various two (or more) explanatory theories are all false, even if the truth of one is incompatible with the truth of the others. Thus both P and not-P are inconsistent with each other and both can be false. In these cases, the falsification of an educational theory need not tell us anything of interest about competing theories which are incompatible unless it is possible to discern common elements within them. It might, for example turn out that two false and incompatible theories both contained elements that were true. The presence of contrary theories is common in EER, but that should not be a reason to dismiss them entirely unless we are convinced that there are no true elements in either, or in what they hold in common.