ABSTRACT
Throughout this book I have emphasised the irreducibility of social structures and relations to explanations or theoretical constructs. If some notion of human agency is to be preserved, it is also necessary to avoid reifying social properties. However, there is a more serious problem for educational researchers, which is that regardless of whether a theory about human relations is true or not at a particular point in time, it may become true later, because it then becomes the accepted way of proceeding in society. Its truth value is thus not a function of its original correctness as a theory to explain some aspect of human life, but a function of how particular communities of people construct and reconstruct forms of knowledge. Furthermore, it would be wrong to construe those people as living falsely or in a misguided way because the subject matter of social and educational enquiry is in part those beliefs and frameworks which constitute social life. Thus it is possible to suggest that the ‘real’, of which this book has been much concerned, is only real at particular moments of time. Giddens (1984) coins the phrase ‘virtual reality’, but this, I feel, fails to capture the essence of the matter because it seems to indicate a reversion to idealism. For Bhaskar (1989) these structures, mechanisms or entities anyway only have a relatively enduring life-span and thus his notion of ‘unchanging entities’ seems to need, as he acknowledges himself, some modification.74
