Educational Research: Pursuit of Truth or Flight into Fancy?

Abstract

The question addressed in this chapter is: is educational research con-cerned in some sense with the truth in relation to the matter(s) which are the focus of its inquiry or is it not, as Guba and Lincoln among many others seem to imply? My answer is that either it is so concerned or it probably collapses into incoherence. If this seems rather starkly simple, it is important to remember that even in textbook philosophy there is more than one account of what it means to claim the truth of a proposition, and that these come with significantly different epistemological bag-gage. In this chapter I shall outline some of these different accounts; map different theories of truth against different models of educational research; and then discuss two particularly influential sources on educational research methodology that struggle—but fail, as I argue—to jettison the idea of truth as a principle governing educational, or indeed any other, inquiry. We regard our work as simply another construction. We hope the reader will find it reasonably informed and sophisticated, but it is certainly far from universal truth. Indeed there is no universal truth to which our construction is a more or less good approximation. We trust that continuing dialectic dialogue about what we have to say will lead to recon-structions of greater power and worth but not of greater truth. (Guba and Lincoln 1989: 16) Scoff at all knowledge and despise