We have been at pains to show in this book that there are problems in the widespread assumption that ‘research’ in education labels an essentially, even exclusively, empirical exercise. We have also given many examples of how educational research has an unavoidably philosophical dimension and, more than this, how the important questions about education often turn out to be philosophical ones. In the previous chapter, for instance, it became plain that there is no single, unitary state called ‘happiness’ or ‘well-being’ that an empirical researcher could measure (perhaps on the basis of people’s self-reports) and correlate with, for example, exercise or number of friends. Talk of what makes us happy has a way of sliding into talk about what we value, but the two are not the same. There is a great diversity in what we value, and one thing philosophy can do (literature and the arts have a vital role here too) is to keep us alert to that diversity. We can interpret a celebrated sentence by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953: §127) as supportive of this point: ‘The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.’ The particular purpose for which we need to assemble reminders here is to avoid the temptation, so seductive to empirical researchers, of imagining that everything we value and find worthwhile can be placed on a single scale, as if it all came down to more or fewer commensurable feelings of happiness.