[Critical-Realism] mediating convergences

[<gdemetrion@xxxxxxx>]

Without getting into personal arguments my emphasis on the search mediating convergences does not presuppose that differences are unimportant; in fact, far from that.  Both differences and similarities are important, including the relationship to them.  The context in which I have done my work (amateurish, I hope in the better sense of the term) is within the framework of research design in adult literacy education, my professional field in which I have written a book, Conflicting Paradigms in Adult Literacy Education, and about a dozen published articles.  In this field, positivism is alive and well especially on research designs stemming out of the Bush White House in their interpretation of science. I deal with this topic in two chapters (9 & 10) of my book and the follow-up on-line essay, Postpositvist Scientific Philosophy:  Mediating Convergences, where in part, I look at certain aspects of adult literacy education through the prisms of Dewey's theory of inquiry, Popper's critical rationalism, and the more recent work of contemporary pragmatic philosopher Nichoals Rescher.  There I did not concentrate on differences, though they are noted, yet neither did I try to see anything like they are all saying the same thing; the commonality being a postpositivist mediation between positivism and constructivism.  Here's the link if anyone is so inclined http://www.the-rathouse.com/Postpositivism.htm.

It seems to me that critical realism (the little, rather than the nothing I know of this) also fits within this broad postpositivist framework even as in certain key ways Bhasker is making some very different claims than Dewey, Popper and Rescher, particularly his emphasis on ontology, though, as at least as I intuit it, from the limited basis of what I have read the epistemological/ontological gap remains far from resolved.

Gradually, I have two objectives; one is a greater understanding of critical realism particularly in relationship to critical pragmatism and critical rationalism, and an attainment of a reasonably solid understanding of what a critical realist approach would add toward a research design that in some way builds, strengthens, improves upon what I sought to lay out in Postpositivist Scientific Philosophy.  I'm assuming a great deal, though at this point I am far from the point where I could substantially appropriate such knowledge in any potential revision of this essay.  At this point I'm taking baby steps on the side as I am at this point working on a book on contemporary theology.

One can do what one can do.

George Demetrion
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