Abstract

This paper links the history of educational research in the United Kingdom to changes in the philosophy and practice of science. Its thesis is the claim that the lifetime of the British Journal of Educational Studies corresponds to a notable ferment in the social sciences, sometimes characterised as 'post-positivism' or 'post-cartesianism'. After the Second World War, the philosophy of science was subjected to a series of challenging criticisms, many of them directed against so-called logical positivist ideas developed in Germany and Austria during the 1920s and transported, often by refugees, to the UK and elsewhere in the following decade. To accommodate these criticisms, social scientists grappled with new ideas, methods and assumptions. Over the last 50 years, the history of educational research - and educational studies - has been deeply marked by the circulation of these criticisms, by efforts made to surmount them, and by new controversies fostered in the wake of such revisions.