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Abstract

Abstract Evidence is available to us more readily than ever before. How we use it, however, and how we reliably translate it into practice across a wide range of domains, remains a fundamental challenge. With this challenge in mind—and cognisant of David Hume’s concerns about an ‘is-ought’ gap—we explored the idea that human beings translate evidence into practice through evaluative judgement . In order to clarify what evaluative judgement involves, we first conducted a review of the existing academic literature in which discussion of evaluative judgement is prominent. We then carried out a small-scale empirical study concerned with how, in practice, people make evaluative judgements about strategic decision-making. The study involved semi-structured interviews with 15 leaders, information providers and experts. Through our analysis of the interview data we were able to identify certain ‘explicative practices’ that surface, examine, and make available for discussion the participants’ evaluative judgements, as well as their reasons for such judgements. We discerned four explicative practices of particular interest, namely illumination, introspection, intermediation, and interrogation . These practices, we suggest, are sophisticated yet often under-appreciated. Across a very broad range of domains they enable us to form the kind of evaluative judgements that constitute wise and evidentially defensible bridges between evidence and practice , between what is and what ought to be .