I'm going to comment on something from Wilson (2010) which I ran across in PDF form the other day. I'll post a link when I find one. Meantime, his words are in black, mine aren't. I want to stress that this is a good book & I am in sympathy with a lot of it; but I think he is spoiling a good case with bad argument.
There can be no doubt that in the modern world we are reliant on ‘best
evidence’.
I think there is a great deal of doubt, in fact I imagine that very few people would agree. "Best evidence" is a rhetorical tag, which get used to justify decisions and conceal the inevitable politics of those decisions. Increasingly persuasive work in cognitive psychology supports the view (which you can find in Hume - and Dodgson -, if not earlier) that the decision comes first and the arguments second.Governments act on the basis of what the science tells them –
No they don't. Governments balance a large number of competing interests; one of those may be "the science" but it is quite likely that each of those interests will come armed with its own "the science".
in the UK, for instance, the well-publicised responses to outbreaks of mad
cow disease, foot and mouth disease and avian flu in the last ten years or
so have all been relayed to the general public as the government acting
on what the scientific evidence says.
Perhaps, although I recall a degree of "we must re-establish confidence in ourcusomers in the global marketplace" as well.We see it in the way that medical
practitioners are advised to prescribe medication on the basis of economy
Is "economy" included in "best evidence"? through a meta-analysis of clinical trials and surgical techniques, and we
are now beginning to see it with regard to climate change
I would have said that climate change provided the best possible counter-example to the idea that there is a monolithic "the science"and the ways
in which energy needs can be best accommodated in the future. This
fixation Curious choice of words with best evidence has slowly but surely entered the various fields
in which people work with other people. This may be direct work that
helps those in need, such as health care, social care or education, or it may
be indirect work, such as observing human beings and their interactions
with the world in order that we may understand ourselves better, as in the
social sciences.
I do not suggest
Actually, I don't see any other way to read the previous paragraph than as an attempt to undermine the idea of "best practice" that we should not work to what is considered at the
time to be best evidence, for it clearly has an important place,
but I would
suggest that focusing so heavily on the ideal of best evidence through
positivism is detrimental to wider notions of learning and understanding,
I don't understand why he spends the first paragraph rabbiting on about best-ness, when actually, it's the nature of evidence that he is concerned with. Suggest away, mate, not many people are going to argue with you on this one. I'm not sure how many people you will find who are prepared to admit to being positivist (although I suspect under rigorous interrogation a lot of constructivists would tun out to be more positivist than they realise). So, anyway, are we talking about the problems with "best evidence", or the problems of what constitutes evidence? My gut feel is that everybody, no matter how unremittingly subjectivist, does what they think is best, on balance, in any given situation. The much more important question is what constitutes evidence, and how is it to be evaluated?
particularly as there are only a limited number of research approaches
which are considered to be scientifically ‘sound’.
Should there be an unlimited number of research practices? I'm pretty sure you can find a research practice to justify any decision you want to take, if you are sufficiently broad-minded in accepting research practices.We have even seen this
in recent years in the UK higher education system, once a bastion of new
knowledge and academic endeavour
Now that's the rosy tint of nostalgia, untroubled by narrow ideas of evidence , whereby universities have been
scrutinised through the Research Assessment Exercise and any published
works are subject to, and only considered valid if they are grounded in,
scientific rigour
As opposed to the idea of, say, "scholarly rigour", whatever that meant, or general "soundness". In short, the practice of recording what is
observable and
narrow I'm assuming this is what "scientific rigour" is being taken to mean? I guess science will be surprised to hear that its narrowness has prevented it from opening up new fields. is prioritised over more theoretical work that could open up a field
of inquiry rather than close it down. The field of health care, more so than
social care or education, has historically wrestled with the issues in the
debate on art versus science, but the question is now spreading into these
other domains too.
I'm not really in a position to dispute this, but I'm a little surprised that engineering & architecture have been left out of the discussion. I would have had my money on them for the earliest practitioners of evidence based inquiry, and probably the first to concern themselves with the art vs science question as well.
All this boils down to is that the ways of constructing evidence in science may not be appropriate, or at least, may be unduly limiting, in education. I don't see much mileage in attacking the idea of "best". Even if you have the philosophical ingenuity to make it work, are you going to win a funding war by asking people to do not the best?
