Deconstructing research: paradigms lost

Abstract

In recent decades, proponents of naturalistic and/or critical modes of inquiry advocating the use of ethnographic techniques for the narrative‐based study of phenomena within pedagogical contexts have challenged the central methodological paradigm of educational research: that is, the tendency among its practitioners to adhere to quantitative forms of analysis. The innovativeness of ‘qualitative methodologies’ has succeeded in calling for a reevaluation of traditional solutions to educational research problems within the dominant paradigm. The concept of paradigm was introduced as a gesture to illuminate the historicity of science as loosely configured sets of ever changing assumptions with respect to our understandings of the world. What it did was to account for the proliferation of emergent patterns of knowledge production and disciplinary agendas that serve to convene actual research praxis in the sciences. But it also entrenched a certain incommensurability of intents and purposes, not to mention epistemological and methodological constraints that created disciplinary divisions. The engendering logic of such a paradigmatic conception of research sets up divisions according to a methodological basis for confirming knowledge claims as the products of a science. Post‐structuralism, as a theoretical movement framed after the work of Jacques Derrida, transformed the discourse of the debate over the paradigmatic nature of educational research science. It enabled a displacement of the almost undisputed primacy of quantitative methodologies by qualitative forms of analysis. The implications of arguments for and against qualitative inquiry as a valid and reliable means for conducting pedagogical research will be addressed in relation to the work of Derrida through a discussion of: (1) epistemological questions about the nature of ontology; (2) theoretical questions concerning the knowledge of sense perception; and (3) methodological questions regarding the scientific truth‐effect of procedure.

Keywords:

• empiricism
• research method
• epistemology
• poststructualism
• educational research

Notes

1. John Locke (1632–1704) is credited with setting the epistemological bedrock for empiricism by endeavouring to follow the progression of all knowledge claims and subsequent pronouncements of the truthfulness of sensory perception to degrees of certainty actualizable from conscious reflexion upon experience. To show how sense experience stimulates the generation of ideas from the nominal classifiability of objects in reality, Locke’s theory manifests the fundamental elements of a Newtonian viewpoint by exemplifying a mechanistic, or ‘clockwork‐like’, retypification of a universe that could then ultimately branch out from sensory experience(s) through language, vis‐à‐vis associational or causal relationships, to encompass the totality of other forms of knowledge (intuitive, demonstrative and sensitive). George Berkeley (1685–1753), in reaction to Locke’s conceptualization of a universe, that essentially excluded probabilities for any form of divine intervention in it, denied the existence of the physical world as a concrete and objectifiable entity outside the subjective being of consciousness. Maintaining the corporeality of objects external to the cognitive processes inculcating subjectivity was nothing but the inducement of untenable conjecture, since our thoughts could never inform us about anything but our ideas. Berkeley called unto the unified perception of an omniscient God to explicate the epiphenomenal continuity of disclosed reality. A faithful appeal to the power of providence, that is the preternatural guidance of God as an ordering influence upon the chaos of the cosmos, is to give a rationale for the regularities and coherence among the ideas we acquire from sensory experience. The onto‐theological verifiability of the truthfulness of science, for Berkeley, did not transpire as the feigning of a contiguous attachment of mind to the autonomy of a physical world detached from the realms of consciousness – regardless of Locke’s theory of the priority of non‐empirical universals that had intimated the contrary for the eradication of epistemological or theological skepticism; it was the projection of a belief in the feasibility of recreations of subjective worlds from the ideas of minds that perceived the structures of reality as corollary to non‐absolute inceptions of sense experience. One could never ascertain the truth about the consistency of perceptions of the materiality of objects exterior to the self‐insulating devices of subjectivity, but only as the fragmentary reserves of sensory relations rendered oblique from a multiplicity of factors informing the circumstances consolidating the veracity of the moment of apperception during the act of interiorizing the experience of phenomena within the self.

David Hume (1711–1776) also departed from a Newtonianist schematic of the cosmos by posing a skeptical challenge to a melange of, as then, uncontested claims to knowledge. Arguing against the potentially non‐empirical effects of a theory of causality, Hume insisted that experience could never reveal to the sensory capacities of human perception – the metaphysical field of forces structuring the system of relations holding together cause and effect; for example, the innate connectability inspiring a series of two or more events, one following another in sequence. This endeavour to undermine the epistemological‐theoretical assumptions of the fundamental principle of Newtonian science by offering philosophical explanations for the lack of empirical evidence to sustain a belief in causality, the absence of the certitude of sense experience not withstanding, allowed Hume to assert the opinion that it is a natural disposition of human beings to form associations between events that are regularly conjoined in experience. Berkeley and Hume reached similar philosophical resolutions by way of drastically divergent epistemological formulations. Yet, as empiricists, both held that greater restrictions could and should be placed upon what can be perceived and is knowable about a world beyond subjective realms of consciousness through the tracing of truth claims back to the sometime extralogical circularity of empirical sources of evidence, simply because, not all phenomena can be grasped from recourse to sensory experience (e.g. cognition and other neuropsychological‐based performances).

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the main figure of nineteenth century empiricism, gave a chiefly phenomenalist account of the knowledge gained from experiential contact with the outer world of reality by persisting in the opinion that objects are merely the permanent displays of eidetic sensation(s) (e.g. imagistic projections of figure, form, shape, contour and line stored in the enduring gestalt of long‐term memory). The psychologistic concentration of Mill’s theorizing followed closely in convention to Hume’s, but for the exemption of one important and characterizing feature: it elaborated what proved to be an extreme dispersion of the case for the applicability of induction, specifically to scientific problems. Impressed by the prospects for knowledge expansion through the implication of inductive inference to circumstances considered outside of its domain. Mill proposed, for example, that the veridicality of certain mathematical expressions demonstrating the unequivocality of equations was the effect of very highly confirmed generalizations affirmable from the determinative sense of sensory experience(s), rather than from the syllogistic movements of pure reason. There was certainly no space in the philosophy of Mill for knowledge abstractions linking truth to a capricious coupling of ideas other than the psychological exigencies for conceding to the obviousness of a proposition from the prospect of its intrinsic logicality or its common sensicalness.