What should educational research do, and how should it do it? A response to “Will a clinical approach make educational research more relevant to practice” by Jacquelien Bulterman-Bos

appropriate focus would be that of actually moving people—teachers, teacher educators,
school administrators, policy makers, etc.—to action (Wiliam & Lester, 2008).

This is the heart of the argument made by Bulterman-Bos—a call for a change in focus in
educational research from what is correct, to what is good. This echoes the arguments made
by Bent Flyvbjerg in his book Making social science matter. There, Flyvbjerg argues that
social enquiry is at its least successful when it attempts to emulate the natural sciences,
adopting as its central criterion analytic rationality. In contrast, social enquiry is at its most
successful when it focuses instead on value rationality (Weber, 1914/1978).

In framing this argument, Flyvbjerg draws on the three principal intellectual virtues
proposed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, (Aristotle, 1976): episteme, techne, and
phronesis. Episteme (ε∏ιστημη) concerns knowledge of eternal and universal truths, such as
the fact that the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal. Once one has established, for
example by reasoning from Euclid’s postulates, that the base angles of an isosceles triangle
are, indeed, equal, there is no need to re-verify that it remains the case on another occasion.
As episteme, it will be true for all time and all (Euclidean) space. Episteme equates to what
we call scientific knowledge, and according to Aristotle:

is a demonstrative state, (i.e., a state of mind capable of demonstrating what it knows)...i.e., a person has
scientific knowledge when his belief is conditioned in a certain way, and the first principles are known to
him; because if they are not better known to him than the conclusion drawn from them, he will have
knowledge only incidentally. This may serve as a description of scientific knowledge. (Aristotle, 1976
1139b18-36)

Episteme therefore embodies the notion of scientific detachment. The privileging of
scientific detachment is not necessarily a philosophical choice—it could be driven simply
by a concern for parsimony. On the grounds that parsimonious explanations are to be
preferred to more complex and convoluted explanations, all other things being equal, then
the attraction of scientific detachment is clear. If we can establish that something is always
the case, then once this has been done, we can rely on the same truth forever, and in all
contexts. However, scientific detachment delivers the goods only when there such timeless
universal truths exist. Where they do not, different intellectual virtues are required.

Techne (τεχνη), in contrast, is the virtue of being able to bring into being those things that
are contingent and variable. It differs from episteme in that episteme is concerned with
things that are the way they are of necessity (otherwise they would not be eternal truths),
whereas techne deals with things that could be different from what they, in fact, are.

Since (for example) building is an art [techne] and is essentially a reasoned productive state, and since
there is no art that is not a state of this kind, and no state of this kind that is not an art, it follows that art is
the same as a productive state that is truly reasoned. Every art is concerned with bringing something into
being, and the practice of an art is the study of how to bring into being something that is capable either of
being or of not being....For it is not with things that are or come to be of necessity that art is concerned

[this is the domain of episteme] nor with natural objects (because these have their origin in themselves).
... Art . . . operate[s] in the sphere of the variable.

Although Aristotle discussed techne in terms of the ability to make things such as tables
and buildings, the ability to bring into being, for example, an effective tax regime would
also be regarded as techne. It is the ability to bring into being those things that need not be

<<   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   >>

More intriguing information