Issues in collecting converging evidence

In empirical research, metaphor constitutes a showcase for the difficulties involved in handling converging evidence, which typically displays a conflation between two scientific phenomena, ‘phenomenological pluralism’ and ‘methodological pluralism’. Phenomenological pluralism is exciting but problematic, and involves the evaluation of evidence produced by different methods of data collection and analysis across distinct areas of research, pertaining to distinct phenomena of investigation. Methodological pluralism, by contrast, is widely accepted as able to produce converging evidence – it pertains to using different methods of data collection and analysis within one distinct area of research, so that evidence may be legitimately claimed to point to the same conclusion about the same phenomenon.