On the spirit of research - Part I. Research and writing: from planning to production

A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, 7th edition - Kate L. Turabian 2007


On the spirit of research
Part I. Research and writing: from planning to production

As we've said, we can reach good conclusions in many ways other than research: we can rely on intuition, emotion, even spiritual insight. But the truths we reach in those ways are personal. When we ask others to accept and act on them, we can't present our feelings as evidence for them to agree; we can ask only that they take our report of our inner experience—and our claims—on faith.

The truths of research, however, and how we reached them must be available for public study. We base research claims on evidence available to everyone and on principles of reasoning that, we hope, our readers accept as sound. And then those readers test all of that in all the ways that they and others can imagine. That may be a high standard, but it must be if we expect others to base their understanding and actions, even their lives, on what we ask them to believe.

When you accept the principles that shape public, evidence-based belief, you accept two more that can be hard to live by. One concerns our relationship to authority. No more than five centuries ago, the search for better understanding based on evidence was often regarded as a threat. Among the powerful, many believed that the important truths were known and that the scholar's job was to preserve and transmit them, certainly not to challenge them. If new facts cast doubt on an old belief, the belief usually trumped the facts. Many who dared to follow evidence to conclusions that challenged authority were banished, imprisoned, and on occasion killed.

Even today, those who reason from evidence can anger those who hold a cherished belief. For example, some historians claim that, based on the sum of the evidence, Thomas Jefferson probably fathered at least one child by his slave, Sally Hemings. Others disagree, not because they have better counterevidence, but because of a fiercely held belief: a person of Jefferson's stature couldn't do such a thing (see 5.5). But in the world of research, both academic and professional, good evidence and sound reasoning trump belief every time, or at least they should.

In some parts of the world, it's still considered more important to guard settled beliefs than to test them. But in those places informed by the values of research, we think differently: we believe not only that we may question settled beliefs, but that we must, no matter how much authority cherishes them—so long as we base our answers on sound reasons based on reliable evidence.

But that principle requires another. When we make a claim, we must expect, even encourage, others to question not just our claim but how we reached it, to ask Why do you believe that? It's often hard to welcome such questions, but we're obliged to listen with good will to objections, reservations, and qualifications that collectively imply I don't agree, at least not yet. And the more we challenge old ideas, the more we must be ready to acknowledge and answer those questions, because we may be asking others to give up deeply held beliefs.

When some students encounter these values, they find it difficult, even painful, to live by them. Some feel that a challenge to what they believe isn't a lively search for truth, but a personal attack on their deepest values. Others retreat to a cynical skepticism that doubts everything and believes nothing. Others fall into mindless relativism: “We're all entitled to our own beliefs, and so all beliefs are right for those who hold them!” Many turn away from an active life of the mind, rejecting not only answers that might disturb their settled beliefs but even the questions that inspired them.

But in our worlds of work, scholarship, civic action, and even politics, we can't replace tested knowledge and hard-won understanding with personal opinion, a relativistic view of truth, or the comfortable, settled knowledge of “authority.”

That does not mean we reject long-held and time-tested beliefs lightly. We replace them only after we're persuaded by sound arguments backed by good reasons based on the best evidence available, and after an amiable but searching give-and-take that tests those arguments as severely as we can. In short, we become responsible believers when we can make our own sound arguments that test and evaluate those of others.

You may find it difficult to see all of this at work in a paper written for a class, but despite its cold type, a research report written for any audience is a conversation, imagined to be sure, but still a cooperative but rigorous inquiry into what we should and should not believe.