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Chapter 1
Educational research and two traditions of epistemology
Helen Freeman and Alison Jones
Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
Editors’ introduction
This article serves as a precursor to discussions of gender in field practices which are the focus of the rest of the articles in this collection. In this 1980 article, Helen Freeman and Alison Jones discussed traditions of epistemology in educational philosophy and theory, which they describe as objectivist and constructivist. Their systematic analysis of the two orientations toward educational research reveals a noticeable lack of concern with subjectivity, or the notion of a non-universal subject position in theorizing, from the viewpoint of a contemporary reader. Gender is mentioned only once in passing, while the authors write one paragraph considering the way intelligence may be measured in culturally biased ways against racial and ethnic minorities. The essay is included in this collection to set the stage for the articles which follow: this stage is one of the universal subject, hardly questioned, and prized in educational philosophy and theory. That women and men might do things differently and/or experience the world differently, in educational philosophy and in fields, is not in the realm of major concerns in the philosophy of knowledge that Freeman and Jones put forward here.
In contemporary discussions on the philosophy of social science it is customary to distinguish between two dominant competing traditions. These have been categorized by Bernstein1 and Fay2 as the positivist and the interpretivist respectively, and most research within education can be seen to fit into one of these two categories. The first tradition emphasizes the search for generalizations, and, being often interventionist in intent, seeks not only explanations of social behaviour but the prediction and control which is concomitant with positivist research findings.3 The second tradition, into which e.g. much of the early work in the “new” sociology of education,4,5 can be seen to fall, emphasizes the way in which the social world is constituted by actors’ meanings and suggests that the task of the researcher is primarily to elucidate these.
Researchers of the interpretivist school generally lay great stress on the activity of human agents in constructing their meaning systems and negotiating “definitions of the situation”. In the spirit of Berger & Luckman’s “Social Construction of Reality”,6 they appear to deny the existence of an “objective reality” – or at least of an objective reality which the researcher can come to know. It is our view that there are strong arguments in favour of a constructivist/interactionist epistemology of the kind on which their work is founded. However, we see that this position has generated serious problems for itself, problems of idealism, relativism and validation. In this paper we seek to contribute to the resolution of these by stressing the need to focus greater attention on the “worldly” aspect of the interaction and to re-instate the appearance/reality distinction that phenomenology rejects.
The constructivist epistemology calls into question the claim of positivists in both the natural and social sciences to be able to conduct “neutral” research as scientific “observers”. But at the same time, questions are raised about the assumptions of interpretivist research. Are “meaning systems” not somehow “out there” in the social world, to be captured by insightful researchers in a way not significantly different from the way that structures and processes are alleged to be “out there” in the physical world to be captured by physicists and chemists (at least according to a non-idealist metaphysics). Isn’t the interpretivist account of a social situation only a good one to the extent that it faithfully represents the understanding of the actors in the social context? Schutz’s account7 of interpretivist social science seems to require the social scientist to be “neutral” and “objective” in almost the same sense as positivist understanding requires of the physical scientist. What can be represented faithfully necessarily can be misrepresented. Furthermore, the actor’s understanding is itself a representation of social reality. As Gellner8 points out, in order to make sense of many social practices involving absurdity, we must preserve the appearance/reality distinction, which is also necessary to the ideology/knowledge distinction. The actor’s understanding may mis-represent social reality.
We argue here that neither the physical nor the social scientist can be “objective” in the sense of simply “grasping” through “observation” what is “out there independently of the researcher”, whilst accepting that reality exists independently of whether it is being researched or not. We believe that claims to this sort of objectivity on the part of educational researchers are misleading and dangerous. In Section I we outline that “objectivist” position which seems to us to be assumed by much research work in educational psychology by comparing it with a constructivist/interactionist one, and argue that research which is “objective” in this sense is impossible of achievement. In Section II we discuss the way that constructivist epistemology is usually thought to lead to total relativism, considering in particular the work of M.F.D. Young and recent discussions of it.9,10,11,12 We argue against total relativism by attempting to resolve some of the epistemological difficulties associated with constructivism. The rejection of total relativism is important and necessary to our further claim that as a matter of urgency an alternative view of such research is required (particularly by “consumers” of it). In Section III, having sought to sustain a constructivist/interactionist epistemology without being forced into either idealism or total relativism, or abandoning the necessary recognition of the socio-historical situating of all knowledge, we argue that this epistemology requires a new conception of objectivity for responsible research in education. In conclusion we briefly give an account of such a concept.
Section I: The two epistemological positions
Although it is clearly possible to formulate a variety of positions which might ‘be termed “objectivist” and “constructivist”, we have no space in this paper to discuss them all. We therefore address ourselves to that objectivist position which seems to us to be assumed by most writings of that type in educational research, and develop a constructivist position which does not fall back into idealism.
Many current textbooks available to introduce students to the field of educational research have passages comparable to this one, taken from a text which, though not very recent, is widely prescribed:
Research may be defined as the application of the scientific method to the study of a problem … research is universally a systematic and objective search for reliable knowledge … when the scientific method is applied to educational problems, educational research is the result.13
We are not in this paper considering the issues in the continuing debate about the nature, or in fact the existence, of “the scientific method”. Rather we wish to consider the notion of objectivity which is widely claimed to be the fundamental and essential component of the activity of the researcher within this model, and which is referred to by writers such as Monod and Scheffler as the “cornerstone” and a “fundamental feature” of science. This seems to be assumed by the educational research texts in this tradition, which typically refer to objectivity in terms such as the following:
Educational research is … objective in its collection, analysis and evaluation of data.14
Educational research involves objective measurement.15
… the objectivity of observations, that is, the independence of the observer …16
… the scientist is objective and impartial.17
“Objective evidence” is here clearly opposed to “personal experience” – the subjective response of the enquirer to its phenomenon.18 That is, this notion of objective evidence rests on the assumption of a clear separation and distinction between the researcher and that which is being researched. It is assumed that it is “possible for the descriptions and explanations of a subject matter to reveal the actual nature of that subject matter … as they exist independently of an enquirer’s thoughts and desires regarding them.”19
It is not necessary for a constructivist to deny the possibility of an ontological separation between the researcher and that phenomenon in the world, which s/he is researching, in that the phenomenon does not require the researcher for its existence. What the constructivist denies is the significance of this for epistemology. The emphasis is on the impossibility of an epistemological separation between the enquirer and the object of enquiry. It is not only that constructivists deny the possibility of sustaining a clear and accurate distinction between the knowing subject and the object known.20 They argue more positively for a dynamic and mutually determining relationship between them.
Piaget’s research into the ontogenetic development of knowledge has led him to the claim that:
“… it is in fact possible to affirm, and to our way of thinking this is where all modern criticism is tending – that the object of an act of knowing is never completely independent of the subject.”21
Indeed,
“… it is impossible to talk about objectivity or object without referring back to the previous condition of cognitive organization.”22
Piaget’s proposal (which has some similarities with Kant) is that knowledge is an operation that constructs its objects. This does not mean, however, that our understanding of reality belongs merely to an individualistic fancy. Rather our understanding of the world is both social and constitutive. We have knowledge of an environment whose character arises partially from its own structure and partially from the structure of the minds of knowing subjects situated in a social world of other knowers. In a radical sense, one constitutes the other.
Hanson23 argues that perception is simultaneously a visual and a conceptual experience. One does not first see an object and then see it as something. The interpretation is simultaneous with and inseparable from the seeing, which is therefore best regarded as a phenomenological encounter between the individual and his/her environment. Seeing is an interpretive activity, involving an interaction between the observers’ physiological structures, their mental or conceptual structures, and the ontologically existent object. The mind creates its own perceptual paradigms from prior experience with the world, including ontologically existent other knowers, and these paradigms are invoked in subsequent perception Similarly, for Piaget, knowledge is an interpretive activity, in which the object of knowledge and the knowing subject are locked together. An understanding of one pre-supposes an understanding of the other. We cannot know an independent reality but only a constructed reality, and a relation of inter-dependence to be recognised.
The intellectual apparatus an individual brings to a cognitive encounter is not something that has been imposed upon people by the world, but rather a body of humanly produced instruments, which we have constructed in collective endeavours under the pressure of our own needs and purposes. Different needs and purposes generate different cognitive schemes, and thus different perceptions of the “same” phenomenon are possible. At any time conceptual, physiological and other material constraints limit the interaction possible between the ontologically existent phenomenon and the enquirer. Since the epistemological object (i.e. what can be known) can only be the product of an interaction, what is believed or known cannot be that ontologically independent reality, but is rather a constructed “theoretical object” partly constituted by the conceptual schemes (theories) that researchers bring to their enquiries. But what we can believe is also limited by the nature of reality and our int...
