Experimental Research and Social Policy: Must It Be Rigor versus Relevance?

Abstract

… the acquirement of knowledge was interesting and attractive but it could only give clear and exact results in proportion to its inapplicability to the question of life. The less it had to do with these questions, the clearer and more exact it was; the more it took the character of a solution of these questions, the obscurer and less attractive they became….(Tolstoy, 1887, p. 41)