ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses traditions of epistemology in educational philosophy and theory, which they as objectivist and constructivist. The emphasis is on the impossibility of an epistemological separation between the enquirer and the object of enquiry. On the early constructivist views of knowledge, there can be a very large number of alternative constructions of reality. If people create their own “realities”, then within the limits imposed by their own physiology and the world, they can re-create them differently through the use of alternative conceptual schemes. We live in a society in which science has high status as knowledge, on a positivist conception of science which prevails amongst the community as a whole. The claims of empirical science to be the only non-tautological knowledge possible and thus of special status rests on the radical separation of fact from value and the possibility of both neutrality and the elimination of “subjectivity” from scientific enquiry.
