Stolen education: Why evidence-based scientism cannot find what it is looking for

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Alfonso A. Gracia Gómez

We find ourselves in Paris in 1844. The police are desperately searching for a letter. It is no ordinary missive: it is a document of considerable political value, stolen from the royal chambers by Minister D., who presumably intends to use it for blackmail. The prefect, charged with locating the object, has organised an extraordinarily exhaustive search, intended to comb every inch of the room where the suspect is staying. His officers have been instructed to probe the legs of chairs with needles, take every piece of furniture apart, and examine the floorboards through a magnifying glass. After several days, there is not a corner of the building that has not been minutely inspected. Yet the letter remains missing.

This is the scenario laid out by Edgar Allan Poe in his famous tale The Purloined Letter, a work that has prompted countless studies because of the clarity with which it exposes an epistemological error prevalent in much psychological and educational research in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The prefect’s approach is doomed to fail because he is fixated on finding a material trace, a clue, through a standardised methodology that seeks to exhaust reality by inspecting even the smallest corner. We might say that the police prefect is an empiricist.

The search defeats itself through its own meticulousness. To show the inadequacy of this approach, Poe’s story introduces the detective Dupin, who follows radically different methodological principles. For him, the effectiveness of an investigation does not depend on how painstakingly it is conducted: looking is not enough; one must also decipher the intentions of the person who has hidden the object. Thus, unlike the police’s technical inspection, Dupin turns to intellectual introspection to answer a key question: how can an object be hidden from someone who is looking at it through a magnifying glass?

This shift in perspective sets two irreconcilable ways of understanding reality against each other. Dupin no longer searches for physical clues; he interprets the scene itself. While the police officer sees only signs (objects defined by their spatial location and endowed with a single, predictable meaning), the detective approaches reality through what might be called a “logic of signifiers”. In this framework, signs no longer have a fixed meaning in isolation; their meaning depends on the wider structure in which they are embedded. In short, Dupin adopts a rationalist approach.

Applying this reasoning, Dupin realises that the thief has outwitted the police by resorting to a simple trick: instead of hiding the letter, as everyone expects him to do, he has left it on display. It lies in plain sight, crumpled and stained, in a letter rack, disguised as a worthless piece of paper. To retrieve it, Dupin need only prepare a similar sheet to replace the original and repeat the trick—this time in front of the minister himself, rather than the police. The letter has been found.

It is no coincidence, then, that Dupin is French, for he embodies the tradition of thought known as Continental philosophy. According to this tradition, knowledge involves much more than a correspondence between words and things; above all, it is an act of understanding through which the subject constitutes reality. The world takes shape for us through this act of interpretation, which imposes a particular logic on experience and gives it structure.

On the other side lies the Anglo-Saxon tradition, marked by the policing logic so characteristic of contemporary empiricism. Within this tradition, the truth of a statement tends to be judged by how skilfully the researcher amasses evidence, as though building a case in court. Far from bringing us closer to what we seek, research can instead obscure the subjective processes of logical construction involved in all knowledge production, particularly those that define the kind of intersubjective relationship that learning entails.

This is the philosophical foundation of approaches that describe themselves as evidence-based: a model inherited from an analytical tradition, perhaps misunderstood, that reduces language to mere verification and claims, on that basis, to be the only fully valid form of knowledge. It asserts this authority by presenting itself as the sole defender of the view that scientific knowledge is provisional and open to improvement. In doing so, it turns its reduction of knowledge to data into a shield against a non-existent “dogmatic enemy”—a mirage that in fact reflects its own inability to recognise that knowledge is never mere data, but necessarily depends on the subjective structures that shape it or, more accurately, constitute it.

Despite its inconsistencies, the belief that any approach other than simply collecting data is dogmatic remains widespread. In response, it is worth pointing out that no major thinker—not even among rationalists—has ever argued that scientific findings are definitive or that experience is irrelevant. Nevertheless, the opposition between “dogmatic” rationalists and “fallible” empiricists has given rise to schematic tables that may be useful for teaching basic concepts, but rest on a tendentious dichotomy. No adequate theory of knowledge can ignore something fundamental to its very definition: scientific knowledge must remain open to correction and further development, and every epistemological tradition has therefore sought to explain how this process works. Rationalists do not overlook this need; those who now advocate the heuristic use of generative artificial intelligence, by contrast, do. These models represent the culmination of empiricist values insofar as they treat knowledge as the outcome of calculating probabilities across disordered sequences of data—a process that dispenses with the subjective logical principles required to make meaning possible.

Paradoxically, it is not the rationalist conception but the empiricist one that tends to overlook the provisional nature of scientific knowledge. This tendency is rooted in a classical definition of knowledge, dating back to Plato, according to which knowledge is “justified true belief”. On this basis, contemporary empiricism focuses almost exclusively on justification, which it hastily equates with the scientific method. In doing so, it appropriates the prestige of thinkers such as Descartes and Galileo, while overlooking the true nature of the methodological rigour they practised. For classical rationalism, method serves not merely to justify knowledge, as today’s empiricists seem to believe, but above all as a means of discovery: rationality makes it possible to uncover the truth concealed beneath the appearance of proof. It is not simply that our senses can deceive us; without this “light of reason”, data are devoid of meaning.

Scientific demonstration should not be seen as a “seal of quality” applied to a process of data collection, but as the driving force that reveals what was previously obscure. By reducing method to a merely external means of validating evidence, advocates of evidence-based empiricism forget that the accumulation of clues is, in itself, sterile. It leads to no discovery because it lacks the logical principle that makes the object intelligible. Instead, it turns data into a fetish, overlooking the fact that, without the light of understanding, a trace is nothing more than noise. Hume himself, as a good empiricist, had already observed that the repetition of events does not reveal regularities but, at most, gives rise to habit. Yet habit alone can never amount to a genuinely demonstrative process, let alone an inventive one.

At this point, we need to expose the false friend underlying the misleading rendering “based on evidence”. This expression has been adopted uncritically by contemporary psychology and pedagogy, which have embraced evidentialism as the sole criterion of what counts as valid knowledge. Even supposedly critical approaches have succumbed to a “fetishism of proof”, seeking to convince us that the accumulation of measurable data guarantees educational improvement. In the Continental tradition, however, evident does not mean evidential or indicative, as the English word evidence might suggest; rather, it refers to a clarity grounded in reason. By overlooking this semantic distinction, pedagogical scientism has conflated the accumulation of clues with the rigour of proof, falling into the same trap as Poe’s prefect: believing that a theory of learning can be formulated from objective data alone, rather than by stepping back to examine the logic underlying human thought and action.

We can now answer the question: why does evidence-based science fail to find what it is looking for? The answer is that it suffers from a kind of selective blindness to everything involving motivation and intentionality. The pedagogical “fact” is not simply an objective, neutral and inert piece of data, waiting to be filed away; it is an event that acquires meaning only within a subjective, rational framework. The science of clues fails to grasp what matters most because the essential cannot be captured by statistics: by seeking causes in traces, it overlooks the fact that causes lie in laws—in the regularities that make those traces possible in the first place.

The empiricist’s blindness is the price of replacing an understanding of phenomena with the mere counting of them. By reducing educational reality to observable fragments, the researcher becomes incapable of seeing the “purloined letter” beyond the limited field of vision offered by their magnifying glass. On this view, the evidence-based researcher seems intent on winning a legal case while overlooking the fact that the court itself is in the room. Data are used to overwhelm the jury, bypassing debate and forcing conclusions through sheer weight of evidence. But there can be no trial without a judge, just as there can be no knowledge without reason, with all that this entails.

Ultimately, empiricism alone cannot explain how science actually progresses. Within an evidentialist framework, science risks becoming a totalitarian enterprise sustained by self-referential practices, which may help explain the frenetic pace of academic publishing in recent decades: scientists today spend more time publishing than discovering. By contrast, the great breakthroughs in history have not come from amassing vast quantities of information, but from intellectual work guided by imagination and calculation. Scientists are not concerned with isolated events, but with the patterns that organise them, assuming that nature exhibits regularities. Regularity here does not mean mere repetition, but something closer to the pre-Socratic concept of arkhē: that which is regular is that which regulates—the law itself. We must reclaim a way of thinking that places intelligibility at the heart of our understanding of reality. The empiricist searches in the dark with a magnifying glass and a torch; the rationalist switches on the light. For, as Poe’s story makes clear, the truth is not hidden away in some remote corner, but lies in plain sight, where it has always been, for anyone who knows how to understand it.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

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