Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Postformalism and Critical Ontology—Part 1 891
they identify the methodologies, epistemologies, ontologies, cultural systems, social theories, ad
infinitum that they employ in their multilogical understanding of the research act. Those who
research the social, psychological, and educational worlds hold a special responsibility to those
concepts and the people they research to select critical and life affirming logics of inquiry. A
critical hermeneutics demands that relationships at all levels be respected and engaged in ways
that produce justice and new levels of understanding—in ways that regenerate life and, central to
our ontological concerns, new ways of being.
Thus, postformalists as critical ontologists are able to make use of the power of difference
in the context of subjugated/indigenous knowledges. The power of difference or “ontological
mutualism” transcends Cartesianism’s emphasis on the thing-in-itself. The tendency in Cartesian-
Newtonian thinking is to erase mutualism’s bonus of insight in the abstraction of the object
of inquiry from the processes and contexts of which it is a part. In this activity it subverts
difference. The power of these synergies exists not only in the cognitive, social, pedagogical, and
epistemological domains but in the physical world as well. Natural phenomena, as Albert Einstein
illustrated in physics and Humberto Mataurana and Francisco Varela laid out in biology and
cognition, operate in states of interdependence. These ways of seeing have produced perspectives
on the workings of the planet that profoundly differ from the views produced by Western science.
What has been fascinating to many is that these post-Einsteinian perspectives have in so many
ways reflected the epistemologies and ontologies of ancient non-Western peoples in India, China,
and Africa and indigenous peoples around the world. Thus, critical ontology’s use of indigenous
knowledge is not offered as some new form of postcolonial exploitation—as in pharmaceutical
companies’ rush into indigenous locales to harvest plants that indigenous peoples have known for
millennia possess medicinal qualities. In this context such products are then marketed as culturally
sensitive postcolonial forms of exotica. The hipness of such entrepreneurial diversity provides
little benefits for the indigenous people watching the process—they are not the beneficiaries of
the big profits. Instead, postformalism vis-à-vis critical ontology employs indigeneous peoples as
teachers, as providers of wisdom. In their respect for such indigenous knowledges and indigenous
peoples, critical ontologists use such indigenous teachings to create a world more respectful and
hospitable to indigenous peoples’ needs and ways of being.
REFERENCE
Apffel-Marglin, F. (1995). Development or decolonization in the Andes? Interculture: International Journal
of Intercultural and Transdisciplinary Research, 28(1), 3–17.