Philosophy and ways of knowing · Lesson 2 of 3

Positivism, interpretivism, critical realism, pragmatism

Paradigms decide what counts as evidence. Know which one your design assumes, and say so.

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A paradigm is a set of assumptions about what exists and what counts as evidence. It sits underneath a methodology and usually goes unstated, which is why method disputes get heated: people argue about techniques when they disagree about something deeper.

Positivism holds that there is an objective reality, observable and measurable, and that research should look for regularities and ideally laws. It underwrites experiments, surveys and most quantitative work. Its strength is discipline about measurement; its limit is that much of what matters about human life is not straightforwardly observable.

Interpretivism holds that social reality is constructed through meaning, so the job is to understand how people interpret their world rather than to measure behaviour from outside. It underwrites ethnography, phenomenology and most qualitative work. Its strength is access to meaning; its limit is that it does not generalise in the way policy often wants.

Critical realism holds that a real world exists independently of us, and that our access to it is always partial and theory-laden. It looks for underlying mechanisms rather than surface regularities, and it sits comfortably with mixed methods.

Pragmatism declines the argument: choose whatever produces useful, defensible answers to the question at hand. Most applied research operates this way, and it is a legitimate position rather than an evasion — though it needs the honesty to say what "useful" means and to whom.

You do not have to pick a camp for life. You do have to know which assumptions your design is making, because that is what a methods chapter is actually defending.

See it happen

A reviewer says your study of teacher experience "lacks objectivity" because you interpreted the interviews yourself.

The read that arrives on its own

That is a fair criticism of qualitative work — you should have had a second coder to make it objective.

The same situation, with this idea

You notice the disagreement is about paradigms. The reviewer is applying a positivist standard where interpretation is contamination. Your study is interpretivist, where the researcher's engagement is the instrument and the standard is not objectivity but transparency: documented process, traceable findings, stated positionality. A second coder may still help dependability — but answering the criticism on its own terms would concede a standard your design never adopted.

After this, you can

recognise when a criticism is about assumptions rather than about execution.

The takeaway

Paradigms decide what counts as evidence. Know which one your design assumes, and say so.

Easy to take the wrong way

That one paradigm is correct and the others are soft or naive. Each is strongest on the questions it was built for and weak elsewhere.

Try this

Write the paradigm your current design assumes and the standard it should therefore be judged by.