The Science of Evaluation by Ray Pawson

Author:Ray Pawson [Pawson, Ray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446252437
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2013-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

6. The trust–doubt ratio

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We now arrive at the point of principle that acknowledges and seeks to accommodate the harsh truth that evaluative knowledge is always partial knowledge. I have repeated, becoming blue in the face, that in all policy analysis the problems addressed and the solutions posited are endlessly complex. VICTORE can never be vanquished. Placing theory at the pivot of evaluative inquiry changes this not one jot. Programmes harbour all manner of activities and influences along their length and breadth. We will always have an excess of contending theories to explain the unfolding of an intervention. An evaluator might make some headway in refereeing between rival accounts of one aspect of the intervention. Collectively, the discipline might then go on to adjudicate between another pair of hypotheses and then go on to rule in or rule out several further explanations for programme outcomes. But, just as surely as day follows night, there will always be further hypotheses, and plausible ones to boot, waiting in the wings.

The way to deal with this predicament is to live with it. Whether the field is natural science or engineering or policy analysis or common sense, we inhabit a world of partial knowledge. Against expectations, we discover that molecular particles travel faster than light (seemingly), that cruise liners topple over, that programmes meet with patchy success, and that true love never runs smooth. Nescience is itself multi-faceted. Smithson’s (1989) ‘taxonomy of ignorance’ runs through the subtle differences between error, irrelevance, untypicality, taboo, undecidability, distortion, incompleteness, confusion, inaccuracy, uncertainty, absence, vagueness, probability, ambiguity, fuzziness and nonspecificity. This list provides a horribly familiar characterisation of much policy discourse. Uncertainty is the norm and in all cases we learn to live with ignorance by reducing it rather than eliminating it.

This is Campbell’s (1988: 318) solution to the complexity problem and his exposition of the idea carries several distinctly Campbellian labels, my favourite being the notion of ‘squishy foundationalism’, explained thus:

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