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The writer could then make explicit what his whole paragraph implies, that baseball’s image as a popular pastime in which all Americans can participate is being tarnished by players and owners alike, whose primary concern appears to be making money. In making his evidence speak in this way, the writer would be practicing step 3 above—using the evidence to complicate and refine his ideas. He would discover which specific aspect of baseball he thinks is being ruined, clarifying that the “greedy businessmen” to whom he refers include both owners and players.

Let’s emphasize the final lesson gleaned from this example. When you focus on tightening the links between evidence and claim, the result is almost always a “smaller” claim than the one you set out to prove. This is what evidence characteristically does to a claim: it shrinks and restricts its scope. This process, also known as qualifying a claim, is the means by which a thesis develops.

Sometimes it is hard to give up on the large, general assertions that were your first responses to your subject. But your sacrifices in scope are exchanged for greater accuracy and validity. The sweeping claims you lose (“Greedy businessmen are ruining baseball”) give way to less resounding but also more informed, more incisive, and less judgmental ideas (“Market pressures may not bring the end of baseball, but they are certainly changing the image and nature of the game”).

B. Kinds of Evidence: What Counts?

Thus far, this chapter has concentrated on how to use evidence after you’ve gathered it. In many cases, though, a writer has to consider a more basic and often hidden question before collecting data: what counts as evidence? This question raises two related concerns:

Relevance: in what ways does the evidence bear on the claim or problem you are addressing? Do the facts really apply in this particular case, and if so, how?

Framing assumptions: in what ways is the evidence colored by the point of view that designated it as evidence? At what point do these assumptions limit its authority or reliability?

To raise the issue of framing assumptions is not to imply that all evidence is merely subjective, somebody’s impressionistic opinion. We are implying, however, that even the most apparently neutral evidence is the product of some way of seeing that qualifies the evidence as evidence in the first place. In some cases, this way of seeing is embedded in the established procedure of particular disciplines. In the natural sciences, for example, the actual data that go into the results section of a lab report or formal paper are the product of a highly controlled experimental procedure. As its name suggests, the section presents the results of seeing in a particular way.

The same kind of control is present in various quantitative operations in the social sciences, in which the evidence is usually framed in the language of statistics. And in somewhat less systematic but nonetheless similar ways, evidence in the humanities and in some projects in the social sciences is always conditioned by methodological assumptions. A literature student cannot assume, for example, that a particular fate befalls a character in a story because of events in the author’s life (it is a given of literary study that biography may inform but does not explain a work of art). As the professors’ comments in this section of the chapter make clear, evidence is never just some free-floating, absolutely reliable, objective entity for the casual observer to sample at random. It is always a product of certain starting assumptions and procedures that readers must take into account.

Questions of Relevance and Methodology: A Political Science Professor Speaks

In the following Voice from Across the Curriculum, political science professor Jack Gambino suggests that it is always useful to try to figure out the methodological how behind the what, especially since methodology is always based in certain assumptions as