We aspire to omnipotence. We imagine we have the capacity to know, without limits, doubt, reservation. We hope to create boundaries around knowing and to breed from that truths, altogether universal and timeless. And so we do research, so that we may discover, uncover and recover what has eluded, but so much escapes us still. We see shadows of truths and hear echoes of history and it baits us into the pursuit of the absolute: the perfectly symmetrical ordered reality we see glimpses of. This pursuit constitutes us, whether we look for answers in our God, our Science, our Nature or our History. We hope to buttress our mortality with knowing. If we can somehow light the shadows and lay bare what lives there, we may very well be able to
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Instead, we bind ourselves with verification and falsification principles, and try to order knowing in such a way that we may make it static because we aspire to omnipotence, and limiting how to know and what can be known is akin to holding a torch in the vast darkness of it all. The light aids but it should never leave us ill-equipped to traverse the dark spaces. The debate between constructivists and naturalists, need not undermine one position or the other. The fact that naturalism has claimed a more prominent position in social science research simply means that what we need to know now, is best served through this methodology. And one day this will change, because knowing is constantly evolving and reshaping itself, in much the same way that we are. As much as the ontological and epistemological leanings of each is distinct, we have already begun to see shifts in the way that both constructivism and naturalism are utilized, especially as it relates to the expansion of the feminist approach, indigenous methodologies and even participatory action research. What is required of us now, as researchers, is being humble enough to recognize the limits of our capacity to know, explain, predict and encourage a plurality of …show more content…
A monster here fails to prompt our expecting monsters everywhere, after all, we can never be sure if this monster or any monster exists at all. The constructivist is perpetually uncertain but where this uncertainty and unknowing might be a source of anxiety for the naturalist, the constructivist is very much at home here. Moses and Knutsen say, “constructivists embrace the particular and use their knowledge to expand our moral sympathies and political understanding. For the constructivist, truth lies in the eyes of the observer, and in the constellation of power and force that supports that truth” (11). Constructivism, however, cannot be fully captured by this or any definition; because it espouses multiple ways of knowing, researching and analyzing, this methodology is riddled with contradictions and dissention within its ranks. But dissention does not necessarily translate to cacophony, it also means plurality, and this is the essence
Instead, we bind ourselves with verification and falsification principles, and try to order knowing in such a way that we may make it static because we aspire to omnipotence, and limiting how to know and what can be known is akin to holding a torch in the vast darkness of it all. The light aids but it should never leave us ill-equipped to traverse the dark spaces. The debate between constructivists and naturalists, need not undermine one position or the other. The fact that naturalism has claimed a more prominent position in social science research simply means that what we need to know now, is best served through this methodology. And one day this will change, because knowing is constantly evolving and reshaping itself, in much the same way that we are. As much as the ontological and epistemological leanings of each is distinct, we have already begun to see shifts in the way that both constructivism and naturalism are utilized, especially as it relates to the expansion of the feminist approach, indigenous methodologies and even participatory action research. What is required of us now, as researchers, is being humble enough to recognize the limits of our capacity to know, explain, predict and encourage a plurality of …show more content…
A monster here fails to prompt our expecting monsters everywhere, after all, we can never be sure if this monster or any monster exists at all. The constructivist is perpetually uncertain but where this uncertainty and unknowing might be a source of anxiety for the naturalist, the constructivist is very much at home here. Moses and Knutsen say, “constructivists embrace the particular and use their knowledge to expand our moral sympathies and political understanding. For the constructivist, truth lies in the eyes of the observer, and in the constellation of power and force that supports that truth” (11). Constructivism, however, cannot be fully captured by this or any definition; because it espouses multiple ways of knowing, researching and analyzing, this methodology is riddled with contradictions and dissention within its ranks. But dissention does not necessarily translate to cacophony, it also means plurality, and this is the essence