Following Schwandt's lead, we will additionally ground our study after
House (1993), Kliebard (1995) and Beyer and Liston (1996) in a survey of
the critical literature, by considering the consequences of the ascendancy
of the liberal democratic traditional beliefs in the 20th century and the
concomitant "contemporary crisis of liberal society". Grounding these philosophical
considerations will occur by nesting our specific concern within the second
of three "consequences" listed by Schwandt: "the tendency to obscure the
importance of cultural, and, more specifically, moral conceptions in maintaining
social life" and to ameliorate this by capturing "both emic and etic views"
in evaluation. (Sullivan, 1986, as cited in Schwandt, 1989, p. 14). Elucidation
of this consequential residue within the current state of the evaluative
discourse will then occur within the scope of the second (and third) of
six agenda points within Schwandt's recaptive thesis: recapturing "the
underlying civic or republican tradition in American social thought" (after
Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler & Tipton, 1985; Sullivan, 1991).
Here, some consideration will be given to possibilities and perspectives
which offer prospects for rapprochement and reconciliation between the
constructive and positive elements in the current discourse within evaluation.
The Schwandt and Halpern Model is offered here as the linchpin for completing
the Copernican Revolution in Vernunft attempted by Kant across his three
Critiques. Implications for the proper use and better utilization of evaluation
will conclude the inquiry by considering implications for evaluative use
and abuse of the positive and naturalistic paradigms.
Overview
Jeffersonian Democracy and the American Tradition:
What Does German Idealism Have to Do with the Crisis in Liberalism,
Anyway?
Aptly enough, the entryway to our present inquiry had been prepared by readings in the critical literature with respect to evaluation and social policy issues. The readings leading directly to the questions motivating this inquiry were structural and theoretical critiques offered as contextual relief for our investigations into program evaluative sciences in a New York State University setting where we have been graced with the stewards in leadership who provide room in our studies for social and policy inquiry. This has been through curriculum and evaluation studies within the overall context of education.
In relief, against the rich thematic contexts offered by such as Madaus, Scriven, and Stufflebeam, (1983), and Shadish, Cook, and Leviton, (1991) there were judiciously offered ontological studies as found in Lincoln and Guba (1985) as well as socio-historical analyses as offered by House (1993) and Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton (1992) from an evaluative sciences perspective. Structural and theoretical studies represented by Cremlin (1964), Kleibard (1995), Senese and Paige (1995), Beyer and Liston (1996), Saranson (1996), and Banks (1997) provided additional foundations for asking the questions motivating the present study--these from a curriculum studies point-of-departure. After concernful and considerate readings, there emerged, across all those socially conversant in our present evaluative science, a resonance we felt lacking in the thematic studies: various manners of dealing with or considering, to use a common articulation, the crisis in liberal democratic tradition (LDT).
Historically, the greatest impetus for these considerations in the world of letters (critical literature) came in a social response to the failures of what were promises (ontological justifications) of the merging of Pragmatic Moral Philosophy (J. S. Mills and Adam Smith) with the principles which were the rationales for the French and American (both continents) Revolutions. This is not only the point offered by House (1993) but is precisely the point made by reconstructivist Kantian inquiry, as well. We shall see this, later. It is not the intent of this inquiry to lay down in the critical literature the connections between Rousseau (Romanticism), Hume (Pragmatism), Kant (Idealism) and Jefferson (Republicanism). Suffice it to say that both literate and historical connections are present. The crisis is seen as structural, theoretical and/or cultural anomalies implicit within the attempts of Western Civilization at realizing the ultimate promises of the European Enlightenment: Freedom, Liberty, and Fraternity, just to summarize. The motives for securing the freedom and liberty of a justly and rationally consorting fraternity of autonomous and sovereign members were found in the rejection of arbitrary and sentimental use and abuse of power such as were found in Alternative Paradigm Axioms such as those founding The Divine Rights of Kings, Theocracies, Mercantilism and other morally bankrupt, irrational human social systems.
Existentialism and Phenomenology were two continental frames of inquiry which were spawned by the aggravated crisis as it manifested itself across two World Wars and their contemporary residuals. The horrors unleashed by Rational Democracies following the Positive paradigm spawned formal, structural, and theoretical attempts to refound or rebuild the fruits of the enlightenment.
The phenomenological, and for this reading, the constructivist, inquiry has offered the West the best opportunities, in our opinion, for a reconciliation of Reason's structural and functional anomalies found in its practice and doctrines (methodology). In fact, the lineage of investigation which finds a most fruitful benefit of this phenomenological method of inquiry can be traced from Merleau-Ponty (1961) and his choice of the body, the flesh as the ontological perspective through present cognitive psychological studies as in Dreyfus (1982). The existential strand of the phenomenological (constructivist) tradition departing from Heidegger through Levinas (1981, 1990), Lingis (1989, 1983 and 1995), as well as Brody (1995) is concerned with ontological foundations and implications of otherness and the emphasis upon the factical, lived body, in-the-flesh in all its worldliness as the focus of inquiry. Much moral and ethical considerations ensue from these suggested readings serving as foci for further evaluative consideration in our science.
It is no mere coincidence, either, that Heidegger (1928) and Vygotsky (Wertsch, 1985; Ratner, 1991) were investigating--one ontologically, the other, psychologically--a socio-cultural object as their unit of investigation and point-of-departure. Both these teachers were fascinated with the results and potential for such alternative analytic frames and studied ontological, cultural, technological and educational spaces in their work in which cultural objects are primary facilitators of psycho-social processes. In fact, Heidegger was criticized by his contemporaries in the departments of philosophy because, in their opinion, he was studying cultural anthropology and not philosophy--due just to his choice of ontological perspective.
All of this half-century and more of anxiety in the literature is centered upon what we see as the necessary reduction implicit in the liberal democratic tradition of the human subject from its factical and historical foundations and the concomitant treatment of these subjects as principles and sovereign seats of power exercised in a rational field of consideration apart from the vagaries ever present in sentiment. It is, in fact, the purpose of this inquiry (i. e. Schwandt's, 1989; second and third agenda items) to show that this ethical and moral reduction of rationalism is necessarily the case, ontologically, and to offer ways out of the crisis through an ontological reconstruction of German Idealism.
We offer presently, as an advance organizer for this reading, an illustrative analogy as taken from German Idealism (GI) and the liberal democratic tradition (LDT), respectively (See Figure 1., Appendix). The Kantian System represents GI--the United States Federal Constitution, the instantiation of Jeffersonian Democracy, represents LDT. We have, in this scheme: the ontological mapping: [Kantian System] <-> [Jeffersonian Republic] :::: ontological forms: [Pure Reason/Practical Reason/Judgment :: Executive/Legislative/Judicial]; and ontological methods: [hermeneutic sublimation :: separation of powers]. We have done this to illustrate the intimate connectivity of each frame in paradigmatic symmetry--each with the other. Others could have been used including theocratic (Christian Trinity: Father/Son/HolySpirit :::: Executive/Legislative/Judicial: LTD; or In-itself/For-itself/For-others: existential and/or Freudian psychological frames; Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis: GI [Hegelian alternative] and so forth... depending upon our point-of-departure) ours being the LTD (See Figure 2., Appendix).
Our overview ends with yet another advance organizer for a delicate theme broached early on in our inquiry. I now relate the story of my Aunt Mary wringing the necks of chickens for dinner. As I was a boy, I eventually became old enough to ask my aunts and uncles questions apart from the presence of my parents. This occurred when I was around ten years old. We used to visit her farm on Sundays and stay for dinner. She would walk about the yard for a few seconds, select a chicken and, in one quick movement, whip the doomed bird up and over her shoulder in a great, swooshing arc, thereby, wringing the chicken's neck. It was limp before she set it down on the porch. Aunt Mary was a plump, kind, and generous woman who walked the earth in humbleness, never averse to generously helping all the needy who came her way without a thought. This behavior of hers was anomalous to what else I knew of her. Once, when I finally asked her why she didn't cut off their heads, she chopped one off for me and I watched the chicken run around without its head. In what is to come, Kurt Godel is Aunt Mary with Ax.
The moral question motivating our inquiry will now be restated: "Should we, in our zeal for trustworthiness and purity of a stream of data representing the human subject, ontologically dissociate man in himself, in his Being of being?" An ethical question to positivism, in its incomplete search for its foundations is: "Should we cut off the chicken's head? or wring it's neck?" We feel the answers are "No!" and "We can reach a rapprochement with the chicken!" We offer the bird a "third way." Let's see.
Among the things we are about to say is that deliberation in evaluation "is both a procedure by which we reach a decision and an outcome in and of itself" (Mathison, in press after Gutman & Thompson, 1996). The Being of being (read Ontology) is ever present (evermoreso recently, we note) in any thorough discussion of foundations for our work these days in the critical literature (Guba & Lincoln, 1985; Shadish, Cook, & Leviton, 1991; Schwandt, 1996, 1997). De(con)struction is become familiar to all who work in hermeneutic studies. So, after closer examination, Heidegger's formula for answering (corresponding with) the question "What is Philosophy" is not so very strange to us, after all. In fact, it has opened the way for our further considerations. Underneath this first question is implicit our prior task: What is evaluation?
So we consider philosophical reflection in order to liberate us from the "merely historical assertions about the history of philosophy". Provisionally, we shall understand this rationale as justifying our stepping back into the history of philosophy first in our consideration in order to better see the present context of the discourse as it appears in evaluative science--and to, thereby, liberate us from the very much skewed separation of positive social science research (and its preoccupation with theory and method) from philosophy. As Schwandt reminds us, "The modern separation of 'philosophical critique from methodical inquiry'...is one of positivism's most enduring ideological achievements." (after Carr, 1995 as cited in Schwandt, 1996). And, we might add: totally unfounded achievements, at that!
In Schwandt's "Farewell to Criteriology" (1996), we find an invigorating assault on the methodological vestiges of Logical Positivism which historically far outlast its own inner foundational critique. This death knell of the search for logical foundations of positive science was offered by Kurt Godel (1932 & 1933) within David Hilbert's project which sought, among other goals, to lay bare the foundations of Positivism from within its own meta-logical investigations. Incidentally, we date what has been popularly coined the period of postmodernism (read: postfoundationalism, after Schwandt, 1996, para #6) precisely from the publications by K. Godel of his (In)completeness and (In)consistency Proofs within the Hilbert Project-- this as much as to avoid the almost indiscriminate and, therefore, unintelligible use of the catchall moniker, postmodernism, as to mark a theoretical a-trophe.
It is an important motivation for this current study to query how, after Godel's critique, the impetus within this node (the positive) of our evaluative discourse has managed to continue its current sway within the dialoque--unabated. We muse here to say we are as astounded by this continuance as we are in observing a chicken with its head cut off... It surely must be as Saville Kushner reminded me in his recent post to EVALTALK: "...a powerful hypothesis will always dominate weak results in the reality stakes." Evenmoreso, it is in the theoretical stakes, we rejoin.
We begin now a sketch of the philosophical terrain which held our discourse in evaluation within the tradition of German Idealism in the last century. This is not intended to be an exhaustive outline, nor a complete vessel for our stand. Schwandt has done an excellent job in offering the contemporary leg of this discovery process. A structural (theoretical) critique is offered by Schwandt in his "Farewell" (1996); a phenomenological (hermeneutic) critique is offered by the same author in his "Reading the 'problem of evaluation' in social inquiry" (1997). Lincoln and Guba (1985) preceded this effort and serve presently (in the current leg of our mission) as our trophe within the critical theory.
No--rather, this sketch is offered in order to supplement the effort of Schwandt and to do so within the corpus of the critical literature which witnessed the most thorough and absolute critique of the positive stand and the residue of The Enlightenment in recent history. Additionally, we require a more thorough critique of the philosophical foundations of our Discourse than that offered recently by Madaus, et al (1983) in their chapter, Program Evaluation: A Historical Overview. Besides, I follow Lewis White Beck's admonition:
We start with several contextual readings in the secondary literature as well as from the Critique of Pure Reason in order to situate our study and illustrate Kant's project intentions, goals, and its general deficiencies. We then consider Rockmore's (1991) reading and see several tie points into our present deliberations, chief among them his insight that ontology (speculative metaphysics) has become functionally reduced to epistemology (positive inquiry) since Kant. The paucity of Kant's treatment of his fundamental construct--the transcendental unity of apperception and its correlative transcendental subject--is shown and the need for the historical liberation of the Moral Discourse is indicated. How this obtains to our own concerns is illustrated by identifying the relevance of validity and reliability constructs within the Kantian epistemology. They are seen to be residues from the correspondence theory of truth necessitated by the collapse and consequent reduction of the Kantian edifice into its dualist ontological reconstruction. Lincoln & Guba's constructs of trustworthiness and authenticity are offered as the ontological vehicles of liberation of Moral Discourse from the shackles of the dualist paradigm. After Lincoln and Guba, they will be seen to contain the former positive constructs as limiting cases. Therefore, the way for the subsumption of the positive inquiry will be indicated within a unified whole, completed ontology--offered in a holist Critique embracing the Critiques of Pure and Practical Reason [together considered as Inquiry] as well as that of Judgment. As is known to practitioners of evaluation presently in the field, models underwritten by Lincoln and Guba contain both judgment as well as inquiry in their proper exercise. The Schwandt and Halpern Model of an audited evaluation is offered, finally, as an exemplary study of a practical instantiation of this ontology's doctrine (method) and how it is that the liberation occurs in a transcendent unity of apperception and historical presence of a human subject, as well. As this holist ontology anticipates (and as the Schwandt and Halpern model demonstrates), holist methodology implies that the evaluative process is (and captures) a reflexive encounter in reality. The implicit product of this methodology is a more improved and self conscious human being--in the flesh. It is thus that this moral and ethical discourse liberated by a new ontology seeks to "make good a great loss" and finally have things as Kant wished: knowledge (rational, ethical or moral) is possible "only on the assumption that the subject produces its object according to its own (plan)."
In this section we read the significance of Kant's epistemology insofar
as the captivity of Moral Discourse occurred within the liberal
tradition. The banishment of Moral Discourse from the realm of pure and
practical reason into that of "sensitivities and mere opinion" occurred
even as the ontological grounds for this epistemology quickly became obscured
from the dialectic within the liberal tradition, itself. The impetus for
this reading has been provided by Tom Rockmore in his most thorough treatment
of these foundations, Subjectivity and the Ontology of History (Rockmore,
T., 1991) as offered in Monist of the Hegeler Institute. We humbly
offer here that, though Schwandt has suggested a recapturing of
the moral discourse in evaluative science as the motif for this study,
we will entitle the last section of this study: Liberating Moral Discourse
in Evaluative Science.
For a compact summary of Kant's project, I defer to Wolff's (1973) account in Autonomy of Reason:
Ironically the First Critique, that of Pure Reason (containing immature concepts) came first in the plan. However, Kant's more mature thought (Ethical and Moral Critiques) was arrested from development by his dependence upon this systematic investigation. More recent attempts at this project (after Heidegger and Dilthy) attempt to overcome this deficiency by a nonsystematic investigation relying not upon a "hermeneutics of sublimation" (after Caputo, 1984), but on a hermeneutic methodology of de(con)struction, instruction, and construction: that is, phenomenology. Our plan is one such attempt.
A summary of Kant's motives for his systematic philosophy is fortunately not hard to find in his own words, either. In the investigation of Pure Reason, he wishes to avoid considering metaphysics and morals which have as their own and separate provinces: the speculations upon "God, freedom and immortality" (Kant, I., 1949, p.46.). The "separateness" (the "hermeneutics of sublimation", see below) of these metaphysical and moral concerns from those of reason is needed in Kant's project since these fields of knowledge "leave the field of all possible experiences and have the appearance of extending the scope of our judgments beyond all limits of experience, and this by means of concepts to which no corresponding object can ever be given in experience." (Kant, I., 1949, p. 45, emph. added). Kant boldly and simply states the precept of his rational epistemology, as well: "Any knowledge is pure, if it be not mixed with anything extraneous. But knowledge is more particularly called absolutely pure, if no experience or sensation whatsoever be mingled with it, and if it be therefore possible completely a priori." (Kant, I., 1949: A, p.58). Accordingly, the activity which supplies the principles of a priori knowledge is called Pure Reason. Therefore, "We can regard a science of the mere examination of pure reason, of its sources and limits, as the propaedeutic to the system of pure reason. As such, it should be called a critique, not a doctrine, of pure reason. Its utility, in speculation, ought properly to be only negative, not to extend, but only to clarify our reason, and to keep it free from errors--which is already a very great gain." (Kant, I., 1949, pp. 58-59)
Ironically, this "very great gain" becomes the West's "very great loss" and is the very indictment of Moral Judgment which begets the captivity of Moral Discourse into the realms of mere speculation. We come to this later. As a point of clarity, the knowledge of such a priori "sources and limits" Kant entitles transcendental. "I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects insofar as this knowledge is to be possible a priori." Therefore, it is obviated that Kant construct a transcendental subject which will seat the knowledge. The process of this ontological subject which would unite all elements of the subject (Pure and Practical Reason and Judgment and their issues: Knowledge, Ethics and Morals) is the transcendental unity of apperception. Additionally, it is helpful to keep in mind for the purposes of our further reading and the context of our evaluative science one structural feature of Kant's edifice. The Critique (limiting effect) of Pure Reason is the ontological foundation for his Doctrine (expansive effect) of Reason which is contained in Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science with its methodology (doctrine) and is where we will find the ultimate references to validity and reliability.
We agree with Caputo (1984) in his Kant's Ethics when he reinforces Kant's intent to derive reason's "sources and limits" as a conservative concern in the face of his concomitant zeal for the revolution in metaphysics and morals which the enlightenment sought to bring to the West:
Natural scientists, Galileo, Torricelli and Stahl, for example according to Kant "learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining." (Kant, I., 1949, p. 20). Caputo's point is that, having made this holistic observation of the interactivity between the senses and reason, his hermeneutics of sublimation threw him back into the older metaphysics (scholastic) which he had sought to extinguish in his section entitled Transcendental Dialectic, where reason winnows itself from the grips of speculation, thereby structurally separating and, consequently, captivating Moral Discourse in the greatly emasculated Practical Critique (Ethics) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Judgment)._
Let's see now how this failure to secure the foundations of the transcendental unity of apperception and its underlying transcendental subject structurally collapsed the Moral realm and captivated its discourse in realms ontologically separate from Reason. This is, after all, the crisis in liberal traditions.
Rockmore then commences a detailed exposition of "Kant's residual conservatism, his failure to draw the consequences of the Copernican turn." Kant's successors in the German Idealist tradition have, from various points of departure, made these same observations as does Rockmore. These Copernican Consequences, analogous to Guba and Lincoln's (1985) five axioms for the positive paradigm explicated below, are cited by Rockmore to be: "(a) the relativism of the subject-object distinction; (b) the decline of the epistemological subject, which becomes transformed into a social being; (c) the contextualization of the theory of knowledge, which violates the criterion of psychologism in order to become social theory; (d) the abandonment of the absolute standard of knowledge, or apodicity, in favor or relativism; and (e) the shift from an a temporal conception of knowledge as in, but not of, time to a temporalized notion, in sum to a historical view of the epistemological process." (para 18-22). I add here that these successors to Kant include (mostly the ideal tradition): Hegel, Marx. Dilthy, Husserl, Heidegger and other phenomenologists (departed from German Idealism)--but, certainly exclude the successors to DeCartes: the positivist tradition! This tradition is diametrically in opposition to this agenda.
Again, Rockmore repeats the assertion made by Wolff and Caputo that Kant's historical and Moral/Ethical writings were his more mature thoughts composed of considerations which actually appreciate and incorporate these five Copernican declivities much better than was done in the First Critique. They occurred toward the end of his career, primarily in scattered non-systematized writings. All suffered from the absolute weight of the systematic philosophy which spawned them. This system, as previously mentioned, collapsed under its own weight, preventing Kant from utilizing the Copernican Consequences, instead, to found his ontology and Moral philosophy. These allusions by Kant to the historical aspects of the transcendent subject are liberally cited in the secondary literature with many subsequent authors (Heidegger predictably excluded) agreeing with the analysis offered by Rockmore, Wolff and Caputo.
Rockmore, next, serially accounts for Kant's failure to synthesize the five Copernican consequences listed above. The most telling and relevant point, directly analogous to Schwandt's second and third agenda points--to whit, our current motivation for our present inquiry--which ontologically prevented Kant's recapitulation of this historical aspect according to Rockmore is the fifth: "the maintenance of the ahistorical, atemporal view of knowledge. The critical philosophy sketches the outlines of history, but lacks a historical view of knowledge. The ahistorical character of Kant's epistemology is visible in the Copernican Revolution itself. Kant's hypothesis is that knowledge is possible only on the assumption that the subject produces its object according to its own (plan). But in virtue of his antipsychologism, the subject is an epistemological principle, but not a human being. And the act of production is not itself a historical event, since time, the condition of history, is a mere subject condition of experience (schemata of experience), a way in which an object appears to us." According to Rockmore, "(b)oth Kant and Husserl insisted on the distinction between real and fictitious forms of epistemological subjectivity necessary in order to maintain traditional claims for knowledge. It is, hence, not by chance that Fichte and Heidegger, their successors, abandon both the traditional, or strong, view of knowledge in the absolute sense, as well as the antipsychologistic insistence on purely epistemological conception of subjectivity. Unlike Kant and Husserl, who think subjectivity from the vantage point of epistemology, Fichte and Heidegger invert this relation in order to think knowledge from the angle of vision of human being." (para 26/27, emph. added)
In fact, Rockmore closes his succinct critique of the Kantian notion of the historical with a most cogent and relevant observation for this current study:
According to the exposition offered so far, we have revealed enough of the plan and substance of Kant's system to locate wholly within the realm of pure reason the five axioms which, after Guba & Lincoln (1985) define positive inquiry. This is important to our thesis since we are attempting to show that it is the result of (a) Kant's "hermeneutics of sublimation"; and (b) the concomitant collapse of his system away from a holist ontology (Critiques of Reason, Ethics and Morals united under the transcendental unity of apperception) effecting reduction into the dualist ontology. This reduced ontology constructs an object external to subjective reality As the hermeneutics of sublimation are still the method driving Kant's transcendental inquiry in his Critique, the resulting ascendency of pure reason and the subsequent reduction of ontology to epistemology now lays open the potential liberation of moral discourse form the shackles of speculation. The five transcendental axioms founding positive inquiry (after Guba & Lincoln, 1985) are: (1) Reality is single, tangible, and fragmentable; (2) Knower and known are independent, a dualism; (3) Time- and context-free generalizations are possible; (4) There are real causes, temporally precedent to or simultaneous with their effects; and (5) Inquiry is value free. We shall label these: [L & G Axioms (1) - (5)]. The reader is here asked to take note of the symmetry between this set and that which are the Copernican Consequences [Vito & Rockmore Axioms (a) - (e)]--in fact, they are in one-to-one opposition.
L & G Axiom (2) has been extensively discussed in the preceding sections and has been shown to be, in fact, consequential to his failure at adequately grounding his transcendental subject reducing this "third way" to the Cartesian dualist paradigm. Similarly, L & G Axiom (5) was the motivation for Kant's overarching "hermeneutics of sublimation" requiring just this purity from sentiment or opinion in each of his three critiques, one from the other respectively. The remaining three are evidenced by a deconstruction of Kant's Principles of Pure Understanding (Kant, I., 1949, I. Transcendental Doctrine of Elements, First Division, Book II, Chapter II, Section 3).
James Ellington recapitulates our discussion so far in the best way we've seen. In the essay which closes his translation of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (i.e. the Doctrine of Pure Reason) entitled The Unity of Kant's Thought in His Philosophy of Corporeal Nature, Ellington helps to locate the remaining correlative expressions of these five axioms as follows:
It is within his Doctrine of Pure Reason, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, that we find Kant's schemata for directing natural inquiry: validity and reliability constructs. It was previously illustrated that the Kantian motif collapses in a reduction to a dualist, positive ontology by its hermeneutic sublimation of the various ontological aspects of the transcendental subject. The subject of knowledge is dehumanized to the status of a formal placeholder, an abstraction in order that the efforts of the positive doctrine of natural inquiry will yield "truth" in its survey of its object of inquiry. But, we have already seen as well that this subject is prevented from "producing its object" due to the declination implicit in Kant's turn away from the Copernican Consequences of his attempted rapprochement between idealism and reductionism (skepticism, after Hume). Therefore, the object is left, presumably to produce its subject; this being accomplished by methodological inquiry into the nature of the object (natural science). We see the ultimate consequence, here, of positive inquiry. Separated, sublimated from its object, the subject can be objectified by natural inquiry in the same fashion as any other natural object (physical, chemical, biological, etc.)--without the fear that there is something, somewhere, transcendentally beyond its ken unobservable and undemonstrable.
We see more closely in this level of our inquiry that this is no mere academic, internecine dispute about methods. Methods, themselves, implicate fundamental determinations about the very nature of the 'object' of social and human sciences, once they fix their gaze. If we are forced to utilize 'objective' criteria for the determination of our 'subjects', we ontologically at that moment in historical time reduce the 'object' of inquiry and, instantly, its true nature escapes the inquiry. What the positive inquiry does produce is a topic for an extension of this present consideration. Inescapably, though, we must use a correspondence theory of truth judgment since not only has the subject withdrawn from its object--correlatively, of course, the object has withdrawn from the subject intended but prevented from producing this, its object.
The only place for trust in this paradigm, it may be noticed, is in the Paradigm Axioms. Etymologically, Axioms are the holders of trust. Trustworthiness has already been secured, so long as the doctrine (methodology) underneath the paradigm (ontology) is able to correspond its sensible input with the formal schemata which represent for the inquiry the thing (object) in-itself. Indeed, so long as the methodology is rigorously implemented, error will not enter the scheme of the inquiry. This is, once again, due to the hermeneutics of sublimation which banished the sentiments (opinions) from the scope of Pure Reasons ontological construction.
These positive Paradigm Axioms were chosen precisely to isolate the inquiry from the prospects of unfounded truth (hence, the ultimate justification for a hermeneutic sublimation of the faculties of Judgment, one from the other). These are the ontological implications of the positive paradigm, prefiguring as they do by their ontological nature, an entire and all embracing world view and the very ontic possibilities and the nature of the things discovered within it.
The obvious question, in our modern terms is this: is the subject of human and behavioral sciences (including, therefore, evaluation science) intrinsically the very same or fundamentally (ontologically) different form any of the other objects of natural inquiry. Lincoln and Guba (1985) were correct in their careful choosing of their name for the new paradigm: Naturalistic Inquiry--implying as they do a metaphoric connection only to that other, Natural Inquiry, the Doctrine of Pure Reason.
Echoing the concerns of Vico and Kant in their search for a transcendental subject able to "produce its own object", Patti Lather (1981) strikes at the heart of the issue:
Having cited (Fay, 1975; Bernstein, 1976; Mishler, 1979; Nowotny & Rose, 1979; Hesse, 1980), Patti Lather (1986), in her structural critique of positivist ontology and methods (doctrine), Issues of Validity in Openly Ideological Research: Between a Rock and a Soft Space, helps more clearly set the focus for this present stage of our inquiry by explaining:
Excellent inquiry has been initiated into structural and practical manifestations of the utilization of the instruments of positive inquiry in the field of human and social sciences and research. We are wont to make the strong assertion that the improper application and misappropriation of instruments of inquiry with respect to human subjects is intrinsically both immoral and unethical. This should especially be the case if, by the use of such instruments, it can be demonstrated that a reduction at any ontological or substantial level whatsoever will be effected upon that subject. We have shown, in this present inquiry, how this is necessarily the case in the positive inquiry. Therefore, the use of positive instruments in assessment or evaluative acts occurring across methodological implementation of inquiry with respect to human subjects must be justified within a naturalistic paradigm which constrains and suborns the measurements and analysis within the audit trail and process method. We feel this is the sense behind studies such as those conducted by House and Mathison (1989) in their investigations of the "traditional notions of validity as presented by Cronbach and Cook and Campbell" finding, as they did, these notions to be inadequate due to the necessary dependence of such notions upon the regularity theory of causation (founded in the Axiology of the Positive Paradigm, i.e. [L & G Axiom (4a)]). As was seen, Patti Lather (1986) found, in her reconstructions of real political discourse, ethical and moral issues articulating themselves across structuralist, gender and alternative cultural attempts at entering into the discourse of the inquiry process in lived, situated time; that is to say, historical and real time. Such entry and voice development being facilitated by a paradigm shift away from objective and criteriological inquiry toward one based upon constructs as articulated in the Lincoln and Guba Naturalistic Inquiry, by her investigations.
Fortunately, there are models in the field currently, more than a decade after calls for direct inquiry along the naturalistic paradigm as voiced most coherently by Lincoln and Guba (1985). The Schwandt and Halpern model is emulated across a dual installation by Rodwell and Byers (1997). Not only are the two case studies dynamically telling of the evaluation processes, but a very succinct summary and justification is offered in the first section preceding the case studies. Here, the constructs of trustworthiness and authenticity are justified and explicated from their bases in the model suggested by Schwandt and Halpern. The methods description and audit trail is tidily illustrated, as well.
After Lincoln and Guba (1985), the construct, Trustworthiness, the first construct of our new paradigm's rigor, has four elements: credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability. Credibility is maximized by "(p)rolonged engagement, persistent observation, triangulation, peer debriefings, and member checks to increase the likelihood of congruence between the participant constructions and the reconstructions presented in the final case study...To be transferable, the case study must contain careful and extensive description of the time, the place, the context, and the culture in which the hypotheses were found to be salient...Dependability is achieved by accounting for the instability and emergent design-induced changes in the process...document(ed) in a methodological log... and... an audit trail...Finally, confirmability...is documented through an audit trail that traces findings through raw data, documentary evidence, interview summaries, data analysis, and methodological and reflexive journals." (Rodwell and Byers, 1997, paragraphs 4-7, emph. added)
Considering, now, the enhancements to the original paradigm of Lincoln and Guba as designated by the Schwandt and Halpern model which are brought together in the second mode of establishing constructivistic (soft, after Lather, 1986) rigor, authenticity (Eigentlichheit, after Heidegger, 1928), we have five methods of documentation: fairness, ontological, educative, catalytic and tactical authenticity. "Fairness...is demonstrated in stakeholder identification, in the solicitation of group constructions, through open negotiation of findings, through the establishment of appellate mechanisms when there is lack of agreement, and finally through the constant use of member checking processes...(O)ntological authenticity...is demonstrated through testimony of respondents in the audit trail, where there should be evidence of the growth of perceptions...Educative authenticity...is demonstrated through testimony of respondents and through the data in the audit trail showing participants' greater understanding and appreciation of alternative views...Catalytic authenticity...is demonstrated in testimony establishing the willingness among participants to be involved in change...Finally, Tactical authenticity...is demonstrated through participant testimony through follow-up after the process has been terminated, and based on a judgment about the quality of the change that occurs." (Rodwell and Byers, 1997, emph. added)
It can be seen by inspection of the Rodwell and Byers design that the vehicle for generating the "data" are all, in one format or another, dialogical devices and merely utilize propositional forms occasionally as dictated by the semiology of the differing audit articulations. The new language is dialogical inquiry with the subject as correspondent with the inquirer. Of course, as an added feature ensuring methodological (doctrinaire) rigor, we have the inquiry and audit performed by separate individuals, the auditor, necessarily external to the process investigated. Therefore, our closing remarks have to do with the nature of the language which speaks the truths discovered in naturalistic inquiry: dialogical ameliorative deliberation. It will then be that the liberation of Moral Discourse, the ultimate mission of our present inquiry will have been effected.
By offering Reason a seat with us and the presence of a deliberated format of evaluation, we offer the chicken a "third way", putting down the ax and relaxing our fists. This is our rapprochement: positive inquiry, when deliberated according to the above outlined critical dialogical methodology in the naturalistic paradigm in active process with the subject of inquiry will have a place in judgment of worthiness. When needed and authentically determined in a trustworthy manner, positive inquiry may use its instruments and propositional forms to assist in developing the data and audit trails. Therefore, the analyses of these issues as offered by Thomas Murphy III (1994) in his explication of Habermas' Diskursethik; Mathison (1997; and in press, after Gutman and Thompson, 1996) in her insights concerning the need for ameliorative considerations and how they are accommodated in deliberation and discourse, and Lawson (1992) in his constructive analysis of language and its influence as a socio-cultural form upon our ontological awareness all have the perspectives and concerns accommodated by the Schwandt and Halpern model of evaluation as articulated by Rodwell and Byers.
We take exception to what we will call the accomodationalist model as suggested by C. Weiss. Weiss advocates accommodating and adjusting evaluative reports and analyses for appropriate consumption by governmental and other institutional agencies in order to increase use and utility. The reason for our exception is simple: by consorting merely with the interface between inquirer and consumer of evaluations, she allows her inquiries to be reduced to the same positive ontological dimension as those suffered (and previously explicated, herein) in the Kantian edifice. This hermeneutic sublimation of the subjective powers of judgment are all the more reduced in what has been come to be known as a "strict interpretationalist" Supreme Court setting. As was alluded to by our choice of the Jeffersonian Model, the Federal (and, sui generis, the State) Constitutional Republics are similarly reduced by the separation of powers to a positive model. The subject is dissociated in its liberty and freedom by the dualist calls for sovereign subjects and absolute freedom to choose as ontological axioms. It was only abstractions of "the guiding hand of providence", and other such surrogates for justification in the emasculation of the moral realm, judgment teleologically concatenated on top of this experimental design which allowed the sovereigns to act "as if" all things were assured of acting toward the common good, thereby, able to rationalize and justify moral and ethical adherence and compliance to this transcendent guiding hand. In our opinion, constructing an abstraction (the guiding hand) in order to deal with an abstraction (the sovereign individual) is the long way around the devil's barn at establishing political trust. Oh! why can't we trust in the integrity of data from the hand of historically engaged evaluators just as much as we have been asked to trust in this other hand?
So, in conclusion, we can now finally see how it is that the human in its Being of being, in its socio-cultural self, as it lives and grows in its flesh and cultural world comes back into historical (real) from transcendent (ontological) time simply by the instantiation of the naturalist inquiry in the soft rigor of the corresponding living context which is naturalistic inquiry. This dialogue between the inquirer and corresponding subject is the very civic and social object which this correspondence produces in its own real being. Here, in this way we might celebrate the "subject producing its object after its own plan" now made ontologically holistic in naturalistic evaluative inquiry. Active and concernful communion in stewardship and fellowship being not only the subject, but additionally, now, the process and object, as well. If we have been successful, we have come close to satisfying the second and third agenda concerns of Schwandt, our adopted part in this liberal project. We ultimately, do not need to await a paradigm shift in the ontological frame of the nation state. Perhaps, this is best done, instead, at the ontic level, in practice--despite and even in the face of positive exercise of reason outside the scope of inquiry conditions in which the correspondent is naturalistically nested and socially engaged. Additionally, we find no better vehicle than the naturalist inquiry which will do a better or more thorough job at increasing use and utility of evaluations. This, of course, due to the eminently digestible and historically relevant subjectively defined worldly product: the results of our inquiry.
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Richard A. Parkany, MS; resident graduate student - Ph.D.
The University at Albany, SUNY; School of Education, Department of Educational Theory and Practice
Reconciling Discourse in Evaluation
Overview
A listing of the headings and major themes in this section is now offered:
I. A preliminary contextualization will investigate foundations of use and utility as moral and ethical phenomena.
A. Historical frame: Moral Discourse - the liberal democratic tradition;
B. Epistemological presuppositions: - the nature of self-evident truths and veracity;
C. Ontological considerations: the prior question of method - dualist and phenomenal perspectives;
D. Empirical reality: the facticity of Need and the fact of neediness - the foundation for both a moral (values) and ethical (factual) dimension in evaluation;
E. Moral question: caring and utility - is justification or (cor)rection the primary issue of the evaluative act?
II. Phenomenal map: intersubjectivity - the truth beyond the facts of first-order logic.
A. Kant, Husserl & Kurt Godel: critique of pure reason revisited phenomenally and positivistically - a frame for understanding post-Kantian rational limitations of complex axiomatic systems (Completeness/Consistency), recapturing the agenda of Vernunft and implications for social science;
B. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, & Vygotsky: constructivist attempts to recapture the "human" in "being" and the intersubjective component in social sciences (esp. semiotic meaning);
C. Constructivism and Positivism: the role of artifacts and utility.
III. Prospects for rapprochement within the constructivist/positive dialogue and implications for proper use and better use of evaluation.
This proposal fields the challenge offered by Dr. Thomas A. Schwandt (1989) to "recapture moral discourse" and to do so while "restoring these issues to a place of prominence in evaluation" (p. 11). It will work within the scope of a thesis outlined therein (pp. 14 - 15). Of particular interest to our inquiry serving as our point-of-departure will be the philosophical foundations which frame the current debate within evaluative science between its descriptive and positive discourses. Following Schwandt's lead, we will ground our study after Sullivan (1986) and House (1993), also, by considering the consequences of the ascendancy of the liberal democratic traditional beliefs in the 20th century and the concomitant "contemporary crisis of liberal society". Grounding these philosophical considerations will occur by nesting our specific concern within the second of three "consequences" listed by Schwandt: "the tendency to obscure the importance of cultural, and, more specifically, moral conceptions in maintaining social life" and to ameliorate this by capturing "both emic and etic views" in evaluation. (Sullivan, 1986, as cited in Schwandt, 1989, p. 14). Elucidation of this consequential residue within the current state of the evaluative discourse will then occur within the scope of the second (and third) of six agenda points within Schwandt's recaptive thesis: recapturing "the underlying civic or republican tradition in American social thought" (after Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler & Tipton, 1985; Sullivan, 1986). Finally, some consideration will be given to possibilities and perspectives which offer prospects for rapprochement and reconciliation between the descriptive and positive elements in the current discourse within evaluation. Implications for the proper use and better utilization of evaluation will conclude the inquiry by considering implications for evaluative use and abuse in Dornbusch & Scott (1975), Alkin (1979), Guba & Lincoln, (1989), Kreigle and Brandt (1996), and others.
A listing of the headings and major themes in this section is now offered:
I. A preliminary contextualization will investigate foundations of use and utility as moral and ethical phenomena.
A. Historical frame: Moral Discourse - the liberal democratic tradition;
B. Epistemological presuppositions: - the nature of self-evident truths and veracity;
C. Ontological considerations: the prior question of method - dualist and phenomenal perspectives;
D. Empirical reality: the facticity of Need and the fact of neediness - the foundation for both a moral (values) and ethical (factual) dimension in evaluation;
E. Moral question: caring and utility - is justification or (cor)rection the primary issue of the evaluative act?
II. Phenomenal map: intersubjectivity - the truth beyond the facts of first-order logic.
A. Kant, Husserl & Kurt Godel: critique of pure reason revisited phenomenally and positivistically - a frame for understanding post-Kantian rational limitations of complex axiomatic systems (Completeness/Consistency), recapturing the agenda of Vernunft and implications for social science;
B. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, & Vygotsky: constructivist attempts to recapture the "human" in "being" and the intersubjective component in social sciences (esp. semiotic meaning);
C. Constructivism and Positivism: the role of artifacts and utility.
III. Prospects for rapprochement within the constructivist/positive dialogue and implications for proper use and better use of evaluation.
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