In Defense of Realism: It Really Is Commonsense

“What is truth? ” Pilot asked Jesus of Nazareth. For many in academe today this question seems quaintly passe. Rejection of “truth” goes hand-in-hand with the rejection of epistemological realism. Educational thought over the last decade has instead been dominated by antirealist, instrumentalist ideas of two types: first by psychological constructivism and later by social constructivism. Social constructivism subsequently has been pressed to its logical conclusion in the form of relativistic multiculturalism. Proponents of both psychological constructivism and social constructivism value knowledge for its utility and eschew as irrelevant speculation any notion that knowledge is actually about reality. The arguments are largely grounded in the discourse of science and science education where science is “western” science; neither universal nor about what is really real. The authors defended the notion of science as universal in a previous article. The present purpose is to offer a commonsense argument in defense of critical realism and the epistemically and ontologically distinguished position of science (rather than privileged) within a framework of epistemological pluralism. The paper begins with a brief cultural survey of events during the thirty-year period from 1960-1990 that brought many educators to break with realism and concludes with comments on the pedagogical importance of realism. Understanding the cultural milieu of the past forty years is critical to understanding why traditional philosophical attacks on social constructivist ideas have proved impotent defenders of scientific realism. The good Dr. Johnson and James Boswell were walking down a London street one day discussing George Berkeley's philosophy of immaterialism. Dr. Johnson, unconvinced by Berkeley's logic, said to Boswell, "I refute it thus! " Upon which he turned and soundly kicked the street curb with his big toe – much to Boswell's amusement! Along with Boswell, one is amused. Of course, Samuel Johnson's refutation of immaterialism was no philosophical threat to Berkeley. What Johnson did was to present dramatically the wisdom of common folk and everyday, ordinary life. For most people philosophy is an esoteric, arcane discipline with little apparent practical value. Unfortunately, that is not always a wise view. For example, Duschl (1985) argued that for 25 years science curriculum developers ignored concurrent development in the philosophy of science, resulting in impoverished curricula. In the years since Duschl’s article there has been much more interest in both the history and philosophy of science as these fields pertain to education. Indeed, educational thought over the last decade has been dominated by instrumentalist philosophy of two types: first by psychological constructivism and later by social constructivism. Social constructivism has been pressed to its logical conclusion in the form of relativistic (i.e., philosophical) multiculturalism. Proponents of both psychological constructivism and social constructivism value knowledge for its utility and eschew any notion that knowledge is actually about reality as irrelevant speculation, thus the label instrumentalism. The arguments are largely grounded in the discourse of science and science education where science is “western” science; neither universal nor about what is really real. We have defended the notion of science as universal in a previous article (Cobern & Loving, 2001). In this paper, our purpose is to offer a commonsense argument in defense of critical realism. The paper begins with a brief cultural survey of events during the thirty-year period from 1960-1990 that brought many educators to break with realism and concludes with comments on the pedagogical