[quoting Reeves, 23 Oct 96.b]
1. What is the relationship between scientific theory and objective reality?
2. Does science possess special methods for evaluating competing theories?
Basically, I answered these questions before, but here goes.
1. Science is an attempt to explain and predict based upon the results of observations and measurements. It is not true, in the sense that the Pythagorean Theorem is true. I act as if science is talking about objective reality, but I know that cannot be demonstrated.
2. Theories can be compared for simplicity and power. If you have two theories and I have one theory which explains what your two theories explain, then mine is simpler, so I choose mine. (There is no guarantee that nature does the same.) I discussed the notion of power in the context of the Chomsky Hierarchy before. You can compare theories for where they fall on the Chomsky Hierarchy and choose the weaker one. Problem is, all educational theories I know of fall at the lowest level so there is no basis for comparison. Incidentally, I believe educational theories at the lowest level are not consistent with the data, so they must all be inadequate. Chomsky famously provided two criteria for evaluating grammars (theories of language). First they must be descriptively adequate. They must correctly describe the language. Second they must be explanatorily adequate. It must provide descriptively adequate grammar under boundary conditions. Since a grammar is simply a set of rules which underlies the behavior of a device or organism, we could write a grammar of learning or a grammar of instruction. Such grammars (theories) could be evaluated by the above criteria.
Chomsky, incidentally, the most cited scholar of the 20th Century, is a realist. He believes his grammars correspond to something that is happening in the brain.
I believe relativism, constructivism, and post-modernism are hopeless, because they ignore human nature. Humans are a kind of animal whose thoughts/behavior are bounded in certain ways. They cannot vary infinitely. They are structured in subtle and abstract ways which are not malleable. For example, there are certain grammatical transformations which are illegal in English. These same transformations are also illegal in Japanese, and every other language, so far as we know. No matter how much the upper class may want to oppress me they cannot make me form sentences like that. In fact they cannot imagine sentences like that (without training in linguistics).