Every scholar writes with a jury in mind. Historians answer to historians, chemists to chemists. A discipline supplies the question, the method, and the standard by which the answer gets graded. Richard Davies, a philosopher of education at De Montfort University in Leicester, wrote a book chapter that had no such jury. Then he wrote a second paper asking what to do about it.
That paper, “Polygamy in Educational Research,” reflects on his own chapter, “After School: The Disruptive Work of Informal Education.” Davies asks two questions: is the chapter any good, and how would anyone know? The questions sound modest. They are not. A discipline answers them by default; work that crosses disciplines must answer them from scratch.
The chapter under review
Davies works in informal education — the practice of youth workers and community educators, who teach outside classrooms through relationships rather than curricula. In England the two professions once shared a qualification. The split in training in 1988, and the arrival of the national curriculum, drove them apart. Labour governments after 1997 pushed them back into the same buildings without restoring the old synergy. Davies wanted to know why they still fail to get along.
His answer runs through space. Three features of the school, he argues, divide the two groups. The boundary: for teachers it marks the edge of useful work, a perimeter within which students travel “portal to portal” toward the next institution. For youth workers it is precisely what education should help young people cross. The internal layout: schools are segmented for teaching, so youth work gets pushed to the margins, physically and symbolically. And the body: schools quiet the physical so the cognitive can work, while youth workers treat young people as embodied beings irreducible to minds.
To link environment with perception, Davies borrows “sensemaking” from the organizational theorist Karl Weick, who described how people build plausible accounts of situations they are already inside. To link perception with professional identity, he draws on Wittgenstein’s “forms of life,” Thomas Nagel’s question of what it is like to be a bat, and Alasdair MacIntyre on how settings foreground some parts of who we are and screen off others. He closes by recasting the school as a “geo-social space” hosting several practices at once, which lets one person hold different roles without contradiction.
Fitness for purpose
Lacking a disciplinary standard, Davies imports one from design: fitness for purpose. Does the work function? Is it elegant and simple? Does it sit intelligibly within a tradition? He grants that functionality alone will not do — a contraption can work and still be badly designed.
The criterion is attractive and, as Davies half concedes, underspecified. Fitness for purpose presumes a settled purpose. Yet his own argument insists that inquiry of this kind lets practice set the agenda, so the purpose emerges during the work. Applied afterward, the criterion invites the scholar to name whatever purpose the finished product happens to fit. Davies sees the danger and answers with a promissory note: transdisciplinary writing needs the shift qualitative research made, from validity and reliability toward dependability, credibility, and auditability. That is the right instinct and the paper’s largest unpaid bill.
A smaller friction goes unremarked: Davies indicts disciplinary research for abstraction, then lists simplicity among his virtues. Simplicity is what abstraction buys.
MacIntyre on both sides of the desk
MacIntyre does double duty here, and the doubling deserves attention. Inside the chapter, his theory of social practices — coherent cooperative activities with goods and standards internal to them — supplies the explanatory machinery. Outside the chapter, the same theory supplies the yardstick: scholarship counts as good when it tracks practice rather than theory. Davies presents this as consistency. It is also close to a circle, since the standard comes from the theory under test.
A neo-Aristotelian will reply that the circle is unavoidable, because all standards of excellence are internal to practices and there is no view from nowhere. Fair enough. But then the criterion cannot adjudicate between rival accounts formed in different traditions, which is what evaluation is for. MacIntyre devoted a later book, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, to precisely how traditions confront one another and how one may be judged the better. That book would have closed the gap. It goes uncited.
Davies also recruits MacIntyre’s lament for the vanished “educated public” as a witness for transdisciplinarity. The reading is generous: MacIntyre described a lost eighteenth-century Scottish culture of shared argument, not a research method. An irony sits in the footnotes too, where Davies records that his university formed a transdisciplinary group partly to chase funding-council “grand challenges.” MacIntyre is the philosopher least likely to bless that arrangement.
Collingwood, Vico, and the beauty of an argument
The paper’s most interesting move is its defense of aesthetic judgment. Can the beauty of an account bear on its truth? Davies turns to R. G. Collingwood, the Oxford philosopher and archaeologist, whose Speculum Mentis (1924) treats beauty as the pre-conceptual ordering of experience — what you sense on a mountaintop before you say anything about it. Behind Collingwood, Davies places Giambattista Vico, the eighteenth-century Neapolitan who distinguished imaginative from intelligible universals: thinking in figures versus thinking in concepts.
Davies disclaims fidelity to Collingwood’s details, which is honest. Still, the borrowing runs against its source twice. Speculum Mentis is a ladder, not a map: art is the lowest and most error-prone form of experience, corrected in turn by religion, science, history, and philosophy. Davies converts the hierarchy into a set of coexisting lenses. More pointedly, Collingwood’s later The Principles of Art argues that art is exactly not craft — not the execution of a preconceived plan toward a specified end. Fitness for purpose is the craft criterion. Davies grounds a craft standard in the philosopher who built his aesthetics on rejecting it.
Vico gets one sentence, and the compression costs something. The imaginative universal is not raw sensation; it is a mode of thought, a way of knowing in figures. More useful still, Vico’s verum factum — we know truly only what we have made — offers the strongest available warrant for Davies’s central claim. If social practices are human makings, then practitioners’ knowledge of them is knowledge in the fullest sense, and scholarship that tracks practice tracks something genuinely knowable. Vico’s defense of prudential judgment against Cartesian method makes the same case. Davies had a better ally than he used.
The partners not invited
The title promises polygamy, and the paper does take several partners. It leaves others waiting. Davies writes at length about what cannot be articulated without citing Michael Polanyi on tacit knowledge. He explains professional perception without the sociology of professions or the literature on communities of practice. And he does geography without geographers: no Lefebvre on the production of space, no Massey on relational place, no Foucault on enclosure and the disciplined body, though all three wrote directly about boundaries, segmentation, and bodies in institutions.
The metaphor may explain the omissions. Polygamy names a set of separate bilateral marriages — which is multi-disciplinarity, the thing Davies wants to be distinguished from. Read charitably, the title is a joke against itself, and the paper knows it.
Why it holds up
“Selfish reflections” is Davies’s own subtitle, and the essay earns the adjective in the best sense: one scholar auditing his own habits in public, reasoning left visible, conclusions left open. Its central claim — that scholarship can take its coherence from the practice it serves rather than the theory it applies — deserves a hearing. Its closing demand, that writers who work between disciplines show the work, the field still has not met.
Davies, Richard. “Polygamy in Educational Research: Selfish Reflections on ‘After School: The Disruptive Work of Informal Education.’” Unpublished paper, n.d.
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