Evidence Based Knowledge in Practice
A lot has been published in the Social Sciences, and a lot of funding has gone through it too. It has been edifying, and the question is for the benefit of whom? Is it mainly for scholars engaged in an obsessive game of self perennity, promoting elucubrations of the ultimate intellectual kind. Or is it for the benefit of the public in general? Or maybe mostly for professionals engaged in the practice of the subject being researched?
It is certain that the Social Sciences have generated a lot of Stories, Myriads of Stories meant to reflect reality in an articulate way, if not definitive way. It has been a pursuit of Science, a scientific pursuit to make sense of psycho-social life in general. But lately the notion of Evidence Based Practice has been brandied to question the utility of knowledge produced in that way, or rather to evaluate how professional practice is using this knowledge, if at all.
Here I am concerned with Evidence Based Knowledge in Practice. And what I mean by that is more encompassing, not only the practice of/with Evidence Based Knowledge, but also how it is perceived and construed, together with the notion of Evidence being specifically studied in context: Evidence of What and When? How can a Story be evident when it is being Reported, not just Lived, and from Whose Perspectives? Yes plural!
I suppose the more Evidence Based Knowledge connects with other Knowledge to form an elaborate Story reflecting Reality and authenticated by real social facts and real social stories, the better it proves to be, as a framing context to understand this reality. But also the more it influences Social Reality, inspires it, and becomes part of the Social Cognition moving Knowledge. So Evidence is always in Context.
Now all this literature about proving the scientific nature of the knowledge being exposed, is that knowledge per se? One may say yes it is, but if it is, it is about the specificity of the facts being used to prove that knowledge. It is intermediary knowledge about knowledge, not social facts per se? And there's so much of it, so "many" much of it! And one wonders how relevant, how worthwhile as tools to understand reality, how convincing, how definitive? And what it the economy of it? What's the economical ratio of all this intermediary knowledge? Not only in terms of proofs, but also in terms of making the knowledge more palatable, more usable, more determining, more helpful in establishing the veracity of facts in a permanent way, in a significant way, even with the argument that it helps shed light on avenues that understanding could have taken, avenues that it is creating out of the blue most of the time.
Shouldn't real knowledge about real social reality support knowledge about social reality? Statistics are useful, meaningful statistics, mindful of context, the enumeration of real social facts too, being aware of the list/s of social facts that are meaningful to an issue, not just a simple checklist, but an articulate one, logical, comprehensive, one that may be handled as to form elaborate connections with others for the sake of making sense of a social phenomenon or social phenomena.
And then there's the issue of the use of the knowledge by professionals and the public in general, very doubtful one has to admit, thus is the breakthrough of the concept of "Evidence Based Practice. What is worst, you wonder how much Academics themselves are using if they are at all using other research closely enough related to their own research, as ideologies, disagreement over important ideas or what's important at all pervades the scholarly literature. But what I am really driving at, since serious scholars really worry about the thoroughness of their literature review, what I am driving at is the necessity to consider literature about important social facts and stories loosely related to the specific issue being researched but closely related to determining Contexts impacting the understanding of social phenomena, pushing the Idea That Real Meaning Really Comes From That Larger Context: The Story, the Living Story!
So to conclude, what we also worry about is the use of Evidence Based Knowledge in Practice, not only in the Construction of Knowledge. but also in Practice, and how easily such knowledge can be used in a meaningful way, if it is dispersed, not presented as a palatable story that makes sense and that is close enough to the course of things in Reality. It is already a very insuperable challenge to make sense of so many varied elements of knowledge in the Social Sciences, sometimes about many different social facts and social stories that intersect with each other with all kinds of influences, but ever changing and evolving Social Facts and Social Stories also, thus is the importance of Patterns not just in terms of theories and schools of theories, but real Checklists of Social Stories and Facts and the relationships between them, the interactions and the evolution.
Carl Edward Nicolas
Copyrights © 2018
A lot has been published in the Social Sciences, and a lot of funding has gone through it too. It has been edifying, and the question is for the benefit of whom? Is it mainly for scholars engaged in an obsessive game of self perennity, promoting elucubrations of the ultimate intellectual kind. Or is it for the benefit of the public in general? Or maybe mostly for professionals engaged in the practice of the subject being researched?
It is certain that the Social Sciences have generated a lot of Stories, Myriads of Stories meant to reflect reality in an articulate way, if not definitive way. It has been a pursuit of Science, a scientific pursuit to make sense of psycho-social life in general. But lately the notion of Evidence Based Practice has been brandied to question the utility of knowledge produced in that way, or rather to evaluate how professional practice is using this knowledge, if at all.
Here I am concerned with Evidence Based Knowledge in Practice. And what I mean by that is more encompassing, not only the practice of/with Evidence Based Knowledge, but also how it is perceived and construed, together with the notion of Evidence being specifically studied in context: Evidence of What and When? How can a Story be evident when it is being Reported, not just Lived, and from Whose Perspectives? Yes plural!
I suppose the more Evidence Based Knowledge connects with other Knowledge to form an elaborate Story reflecting Reality and authenticated by real social facts and real social stories, the better it proves to be, as a framing context to understand this reality. But also the more it influences Social Reality, inspires it, and becomes part of the Social Cognition moving Knowledge. So Evidence is always in Context.
Now all this literature about proving the scientific nature of the knowledge being exposed, is that knowledge per se? One may say yes it is, but if it is, it is about the specificity of the facts being used to prove that knowledge. It is intermediary knowledge about knowledge, not social facts per se? And there's so much of it, so "many" much of it! And one wonders how relevant, how worthwhile as tools to understand reality, how convincing, how definitive? And what it the economy of it? What's the economical ratio of all this intermediary knowledge? Not only in terms of proofs, but also in terms of making the knowledge more palatable, more usable, more determining, more helpful in establishing the veracity of facts in a permanent way, in a significant way, even with the argument that it helps shed light on avenues that understanding could have taken, avenues that it is creating out of the blue most of the time.
Shouldn't real knowledge about real social reality support knowledge about social reality? Statistics are useful, meaningful statistics, mindful of context, the enumeration of real social facts too, being aware of the list/s of social facts that are meaningful to an issue, not just a simple checklist, but an articulate one, logical, comprehensive, one that may be handled as to form elaborate connections with others for the sake of making sense of a social phenomenon or social phenomena.
And then there's the issue of the use of the knowledge by professionals and the public in general, very doubtful one has to admit, thus is the breakthrough of the concept of "Evidence Based Practice. What is worst, you wonder how much Academics themselves are using if they are at all using other research closely enough related to their own research, as ideologies, disagreement over important ideas or what's important at all pervades the scholarly literature. But what I am really driving at, since serious scholars really worry about the thoroughness of their literature review, what I am driving at is the necessity to consider literature about important social facts and stories loosely related to the specific issue being researched but closely related to determining Contexts impacting the understanding of social phenomena, pushing the Idea That Real Meaning Really Comes From That Larger Context: The Story, the Living Story!
So to conclude, what we also worry about is the use of Evidence Based Knowledge in Practice, not only in the Construction of Knowledge. but also in Practice, and how easily such knowledge can be used in a meaningful way, if it is dispersed, not presented as a palatable story that makes sense and that is close enough to the course of things in Reality. It is already a very insuperable challenge to make sense of so many varied elements of knowledge in the Social Sciences, sometimes about many different social facts and social stories that intersect with each other with all kinds of influences, but ever changing and evolving Social Facts and Social Stories also, thus is the importance of Patterns not just in terms of theories and schools of theories, but real Checklists of Social Stories and Facts and the relationships between them, the interactions and the evolution.
Carl Edward Nicolas
Copyrights © 2018
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