Editorial. Refutation generalisation and well-founded knowledge: how do we train students to evaluate knowledge?

Lack of well-founded theory means many poor decisions leading to weak professions and for students it means poor intellectual fluency and epistemological insecurity. It also makes it difficult for knowledge to build cumulatively. Instead of orderly and progressive paradigm development and shifts you get fashions of thought unguided by the utility or efficacy of knowledge or by the demands of logic proof refutation or evidence. You also get reinvention of wheels. That itself may not be a problem if later wheels are rounder than earlier ones but some are clearly squarer due to discontinuities in thought. The haphazardness of much urban scholarship and professional knowledge also means that the half-life of a graduate’s knowledge is often far too short.