Revisiting Truth, Beauty,and Justice: Evaluating With Validity in the 21st Century

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When Ernest House published Evaluating with Validity in 1980, he wasn't just attempting to expand the way the field thought of validity in evaluation. He was also proposing a new way of thinking about evaluation itself. The sense of validity House applied to evaluation was the more general sense of argumentative validity. He contended, "one must take seriously the opinions of other people and engage them in serious discourse. This is the realm of argumentation and the proper sphere of evaluation" (House, 1980, p. 94). In doing so, he proposed that we see evaluation as argumentation. This sense of validity does not displace predictive validity or existing validity typologies. Instead, viewing evaluation as argumentation puts the role of predictive validity in proper perspective--as one component of the complex arguments that evaluative investigations produce. The chapters in this issue discuss ways of constructing, organizing, and managing arguments for evaluation. This is not a collection of writings about the logic of evaluation, nor is it a collection of writings narrowly focused on predictive validity. Instead, the chapters here deal with the various elements needed to construct evaluation arguments that are compelling and influential by virtue of the truth, beauty, and justice they express. Through exposition, original research, critical reflection, and application to case examples, the authors present tools, perspectives, and guides to help evaluators navigate the complex contexts of evaluation in the 21st century.