DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

testing and theory-exemplification (at which point deduction is emphasised), but at all
points both are employed in differing balance.
3.3 Reconciling Realism and Constructionism
One of the key dimensions that qualitative researchers disagree on is whether
our interpretations are based on an observer-independent real world, or whether the
world is subjectively constructed in the act of thought, language and interpretation.
The first of these is the position of realism; that things do in some sense exist, and that
things exist independent of any observer. The second is the postmodern or
constructionist position, which states that there is no given state of affairs and no
absolute, only personal or group interpretations.
There are of course many variants within this polarity. There are many
different forms of realism, all of which consider that reality is to be found somewhere,
but disagree on where to find it. Naïve realism is a term that is often used to describe
an unquestioned “common sense” philosophy that both the material world of
particulars and theoretical abstractions are real in an unmediated and external sense.
The philosophies of Plato and Aristotle represent distinct, more nuanced, forms of
realism. Both believed in a real world, made of real entities, but for Plato, it was
abstract ideas such as love, force, harmony, goodness, beauty, truth, that are the
ultimately real things, given an ontological status above and beyond any individual
instance. The world of particularity for Plato is imperfect and dreamlike. His brand
of realism is therefore ‘transcendental realism’ – reality is not the concrete everyday
here-and-now, it is the realm of nature’s laws and ideas. For Plato it was reason,
mathematics and logic that would take you to this transcendent reality, therefore
Platonic scholarship is what we now call philosophy.
Aristotle suggested conversely that reality is not in the realm of abstract form,
but in the here-and-now world of direct experience. He said it is the world of
particular entities that is real, while ideas and concepts are mental extrapolations from
these real things (Armstrong, 2001). His doctrine was reformulated as ‘entity realism’
by Hacking (1983). The Aristotelian realist is an empiricist – the way to reality is
through observation of particulars. Aristotle was in this sense the first scientist, for he
paved the way for the notion of knowledge gained by sensory interaction with the real
world. He was also arguable the first constructionist, for he introduced the idea that
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