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One of the criticisms of much ‘qualitative’ educational research is that it adopts ontologically and epistemologically relativistic stands, maintaining that there are multiple realities which researchers need to take account of and that truths about one ‘reality’ do not necessarily apply to another and that each perspective is equally valid from the point of view of the researcher (an idea that seems to have been originally derived from the work of Schutz (1932, 1976) and which has been further developed and cast into more overt versions (Guba and Lincoln 1989; Schoonenboom 2018)).¹⁰ The reality of multiple, often contested, perspectives makes relativism a tempting option for the educational researcher struggling for a framework to take account of this very pervasive feature of education. However, it is a temptation which should be resisted as the price to be paid is too high to be acceptable.

The first reason is that it seems to commit the researcher to a form of idealist ontology, where reality is perspective-dependent. This in itself threatens to compromise the possibility of providing an objective view of an educational practice, although it does seem to allow for disagreement and the making of mistakes within a perspective (von Wright 1971; Kölbel 2005). The second is that it threatens the possibility of applying the concepts of truth and falsity to beliefs about educational practices to any form of cross-perspectival judgement. The third is that it drastically limits the extent to which research can have practical implications for teachers and policymakers. One might, perhaps, be prepared to live with these consequences of relativism if there were no alternative. But there is a much less drastic alternative way of making sense of multiple perspectives.

Even were we to adopt Mulhall’s (1990) Wittgenstein-derived account of permanent aspect perception as a way of thinking about multiple perspectives, it would not follow that each perceived aspect implied a distinct reality. What would follow is that reports of such intentional perception (McGinn 2015) could only be subjected to assessments of their sincerity rather than their truth. In fact, there are good grounds for thinking that what Wittgenstein termed ‘permanent’ aspect perception does not correspond to the phenomenon described by Mulhall, which as Arahata (2015) has argued, could be better described as ‘chronic’ aspect perception or the sense of knowing one’s way about in the world, of features of the world assuming a salience corresponding not only to biological needs and capacities, but also to particular cultural preoccupations and interests. Chronic aspect perception carries no implication of multiple realities.

Ironically, the idealism of the phenomenological approach is ultimately based on a kind of realism. It is assumed that true judgements correspond to reality and since such judgements are perspectival and there are potentially multiple perspectives, we have to assume that there are multiple realities which correspond to these perspectives. But, as we shall see in Chapter 2 we do not need to subscribe to a dogmatic form of realism in order to hold on to a secure concept of objective truth. There also appears to be a view implicit in the phenomenological approach that there are multiple incompatible perspectives on the same educational practices and because each perspective requires a reality to validate its statements, there must also be multiple realities corresponding to each incompatible perspective. But the assumption remains implicit that all the perspectives are about the same reality; otherwise there would be little sense in calling them alternative perspectives – they would merely be perspectives unrelated to each other, rather than a parent’s, a child’s or a teacher’s perspective on a particular educational practice. The phenomenological approach, in formulating its claims, arguably makes the very assumption that it seeks to reject. In other words, by assuming that there is a linkage between perspectives, it assumes tacitly that there is something which the different perspectives are perspectives on. Different individuals may look at a landscape from radically different perspectives with radically different results, but it is still the same landscape that they are all contemplating. It may be that we need to locate the problems that phenomenology encounters when seeking to deal with perspectivalism in both its hidden and its more overt realist assumptions. In Chapter 2 we will examine more closely how it is possible both to do justice to the reality of multiple educational perspectives and to work with a robust account of objective truth in EER.