Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    47/284 (page 35)
    ferring to the arbitrament of “the facts” some ques¬ tion in which we happen to be particularly interested, a question which has all the appearance of strict im¬ partiality, but which is almost invariably what the lawyers call a “leading question”, if only because it is necessarily put in a phraseology involving a par¬ ticular environment or set of conditions. Almost always we find, when we look back upon it after further experience, that the very terms in which the question was couched implied an answer of a par¬ ticular kind, or at least excluded answers of some other kinds, about which we had not been thinking. It is no verbal quibble when the experienced scientist remarks that, if he knew precisely how to couch his question, he would already know a large proportion of the correct answer. At the very least, the mere condensation of our enquiry into a ques¬ tion, or into a group of questions, capable of re¬ ceiving an immediate answer necessarily makes us concentrate attention upon just such conditions, or upon just such an environment, or upon just such factors, as were subconsciously in our minds when we asked the question. We are led to focus our vision, without in the least meaning to do so, upon those facts that we already know, or, worse still, upon such of those facts as accord with the bias which has made us frame the question in such a way. If we assume that for the question to be answered in this way or that involves the rightness or wrong¬ ness of a given social environment or institution, there is an almost irresistible temptation to collect,