This paper sets out to explain from a Wittgensteinian perspective why quantification within educational research is not only ill-founded but has led to the current poor reputation of the discipline within academe, the teaching profession and society in general. The paper refers to recent reports into the state of educational research today, such as Lagemann (2000) who charts the history of educational research in the U.S. throughout the twentieth century. Lagemann herself espouses a Deweyian approach to education and indeed argues that the three main problems of educational research identified by Dewey in The Sources of a Science of Education (1929), namely academic isolation, poor regulation and what she refers to as educational research's "romance with quantification", are still applicable today, some 76 years later. While Lagemann does identify quantification as a major problem within educational research, this paper goes further in that it offers a reason why quantification is philosophically ill-founded when applied to educational research. This questioning of quantification within educational research is based on the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, and in particular on his work on the inner/outer distinction. This paper argues that quantification in educational research assumes a Cartesian approach to the mind/body problem. Instead Wittgenstein argues that the inner/outer distinction is a misleading metaphor and just one of the many confusions of language which his philosophical method aims to resolve. The research forms part of the author's Ph.D. research which itself features an attempt to construct an empirical methodology on the basis of Wittgenstein philosophy. The paper will thus make reference to research work carried out with student teachers into their views of mind. In this work, the focus is thus not only on the content of the students' responses but also on the status of the data and the form of the presentation of the data. The paper is thus not merely an abstract piece of work, but is an attempt to put the theory into practice. This raises almost as many questions as it answers and this process will be discussed openly. In the final section of the paper there is a consideration of what is left after the confusions of quantification have been removed, or as Wittgenstein puts it in the Philsophical Investigations, after the "houses of cards" have been destroyed. The paper concludes that while Wittgenstein is more destructive than constructive, there is still hope that in reassessing our notions of the inner/outer problem, we can achieve a more clear-sighted view of the world, something which must be reflected through educational research, no matter how counter- intuitive that process may at first appear. Only in this way can the poor reputation of educational research be rescued.