ABSTRACT
‘Critical realism’, due very much to the work of the late Roy Bhaskar, has provoked interest internationally. That interest (this paper argues) lies in the ‘middle way’ which it presents between one of the many ‘dualisms’, which distorts so much educational thinking – for example, in the frequent categorisation in doctoral theses between quantitative and qualitative research, the former too often equated with the errors or virtues of ‘positivism’, the latter too often equated with the errors or virtues of what is referred to as the social construction of reality. Such a ‘false dualism’ is supported in the influential book on educational research by Guba and Lincoln, Fourth Generation Evaluation. Each side of this dualism affects differently what one means by ‘truth’, ‘reality’, ‘evidence’, ‘facts’ and ‘enquiry’. It is surely necessary, therefore, for the purpose of evidence-based policy and practice, to find a reconciliation between such significant disagreements – between what are referred to in the paper as two apparently irreconcilable paradigms. But the importance of doing so is not simply a matter of sorting out a philosophical problem affecting educational research. Also is it the case that the different philosophical languages enshrined in each provide different instruments of political control?
