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The Green Revolution's two ledgers

From India·An enduring case

High-yield wheat varieties helped end famine-scale scarcity in India, and decades later the same programme is cited for depleted aquifers, soil damage and farmer indebtedness in Punjab. Both accounts use solid data. They differ on what the experiment was for, and over what timescale success should be measured.

The concepts this raises

Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.

EvidenceGrounds of Knowledge
What is offered in support of a claim. Evidence is not the same as proof: it raises or lowers how likely a claim is, and its force depends on how it was gathered, what it was gathered for, and what else it is consistent with. Asking what would count as evidence against a claim is usually more revealing than listing evidence for it.
ValuesKnowledge and Society
What a knower or a community takes to be worth pursuing, protecting or preferring. Values operate inside knowledge production and not just around it: they select the problems, set the acceptable risk of error, and decide which trade-offs count as costs.

Where it sits in the knowledge framework

Perspectives
Whose viewpoints have shaped this knowledge, which viewpoints have been absent, and how the discipline handles internal disagreement. This element includes the historical dimension: how the standpoint of a field has moved over time.
Ethics
The ethical questions internal to the knowledge itself: what may be investigated and how, what obligations the knowledge places on those who hold it, and the ethical constraints the discipline imposes on its own practitioners.

Areas of knowledge

The same ideas, somewhere else

Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.