ABSTRACT
Naturalistic inquiry begins with a number of paradigmatic assumptions that distinguish it from traditional positivistic inquiry. The most fundamental of these rests on its conception of reality and how information about that reality can be obtained. Positivistic science assumes that reality is objective and can be ascertained by objective methods and measures. The naturalistic paradigm is agnostic about the nature of reality but assumes that human knowledge cannot completely comprehend reality, and since a human researcher is part of that reality, he cannot be truly objective about it. This assumption of naturalistic research is based upon the axiom that reality is infinite in time and space (at least as humans calculate them) and comprehension is finite. Not only is this the case, but the naturalistic researcher would maintain that reality contains major components that are outside time and space. Furthermore, the naturalistic researcher claims that objective methods are inherently flawed in that they impose classifications that are limited in what they uncover. Part of this has to do with the nature of human language as an abstracting, simplifying, stabilizing device that can never say everything about anything. Another part of it has to do with the inquiry paradigms that are imposed upon reality in trying to understand it. This latter problem is essentially the difficulty portrayed in Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970).
