In a previous publication (Smith, 2008) I noted it can be helpful to ask what confidence we can place in educational research. This draws us to a different set of answers than if we ask what constitutes ‘sound’, ‘robust’ or ‘good quality’ educational research, of the sort that supports evidence-based policy-making. The latter question always threatens to reinstate modernist, scientistic – and systematic – ways of thinking. The question about confidence can release us from the debilitating assumption that there is just one, hegemonic, kind of educational research. It permits us to see that we can have confidence in – and so contemplate building policy on – ways of thinking and researching that are quite different from the (supposedly) scientific paradigm. This paper takes ‘interpretation’, in its many forms, as the central characteristic of research that rejects the scientific paradigm. What are the qualities of good interpretation? I argue that ‘Our philosophy is grounded in only half a language, in which the power of discourse is deployed while the strength of listening is ignored. We inhabit a culture that knows how to speak but not how to listen’ (Fiumara, 1990). A fuller paper would argue for a largely dialogic notion of truth and truthfulness in which the distinction between proving and persuading, philosophy on the one hand and rhetoric and poetry on the other, is less than firm. I suggest that listening, always the poor relation of the proceedings, needs to be redeemed from the obscure and marginal status it currently occupies. At the same time it is important to distinguish listening that is serious-minded, facilitative of dialogue and oriented to an ideal of truth from the listening that is a matter of entertainment and self-indulgence, and that relishes mere word-play. Some of Plato’s early and middle dialogues are helpful here. The paper attempts roughly to distinguish a kind of philosophy of education that is genuinely educational in foregrounding the process of philosophising as opposed to any ‘outcomes’ or ‘results’ that might be supposed to emerge. It touches on some of the distinctively wrong turns that modern philosophy of education has taken in the Anglophone, analytical tradition, and suggests that elements of a more helpful approach can be found in those (largely continental European) writers such as Gadamer who question the empiricist, scientistic, Enlightenment heritage and relish the play of theory and of text.

Philosophical, drawing on European traditions and offering critique of Anglophone, analytic approaches.

We have systematically undervalued the importance for educational research of a kind of philosophising that foregrounds good dialogue, interpretation and listening. These, properly conceived, can give confidence in the quality of research. The idea of listening is under-theorised, particularly in Anglophone traditions, and more philosophical work needs to be done on it.