How to use the grid:
‘what the literature tells us’ by ‘categories of literature’
The following example may be shared with students but supervisors may also need to discuss a similar case based in their own discipline.
What the literature tells us
There are degrees of certainty in the literature when dealing with any academic area and they can be categorized into at least three levels.
1. There are insights about which we feel confident. We can never be absolutely certain but the degree of certainty is a lot stronger than saying ‘we think we know’. Good examples would be the claims that the earth is a sphere and that micro-organisms can cause illness.
2. There is a middle category where we conclude that we think we know. This usually occurs because of lack of evidence and/or division of opinion. Before the discovery of the HIV/AIDS virus, there was, despite the lack of evidence, a view that a virus was probably implicated. The best researchers could say was ‘we think we know that a virus is involved’. Related to lack of evidence is the uncertainty that accompanies division of opinion. The effects of global warming probably fall into this category: the best the researchers can claim is ‘we think we know …’.
3. When we identify areas where we say ‘we don’t know’, it is usually because of an even greater lack of evidence or because the desire to know has not come to researchers’ consciousness: there is a ‘silence’. Is there life in other galaxies would be a question associated with the former. The latter is captured by the proposition that medieval scholars did not know whether the earth was other than it appeared (ie. flat) because it did not occur to them to pose the question.