Postpositivism and Educational Research

Citation

Young, B. (2001), "Postpositivism and Educational Research", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 206-206. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijem.2001.15.4.206.1

The theory of knowledge, on which late twentieth‐century Western science is based, is something that we have taken in with our mother’s milk. We have been socialised into a particular view of knowledge and a set of theories about the best way of finding things out, which philosophers of science call positivism. The groundwork for this position was really laid in the late seventeenth century in Europe, especially by Hobbes in his literally reactionary response to the upheaval of values threatened by the English Revolution; in the following century in was consolidated especially by the two friends Locke and Newton. Then David Hume put in the final touches to a philosophy of science that came to be known as empiricism, the most extreme form of positivism. It is the epistemology that Western culture has inherited along with the sliced loaf, television soaps, nuclear weapons and McDonald’s. In the last 20 years, the tide of relativism has undermined this perspective which my colleague, formerly of Cambridge but now at Oxford, J.L. Doyle, has referred to as “an almost religious desire to make any judgement”.

D. Phillips and Nicholas Burbules are to be commended in that they have acutely outlined a positivist case, that reinforces the perspective that research in the social sciences and education is of value. This book rescues the positivist position from many of the justifiable criticisms that have been levelled against it. It is a book that will be of considerable value to those following research courses and practising researches.

This is an immensely readable book. Peter Medawar stated in Plato’s Republic: “In all territories of thought which science or philosophy can lay claim to, including those upon which literature also has a proper claim … no one, who has something original or important to say, will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood: people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief”. The authors of this book not only have something original to say concerning the postpositivist position, but state their case in a beautifully composed text.