Introduction

A fundamental and rarely debated assumption guiding most scientific research is that researchers, like all human beings, do not enjoy immediate and unencumbered access to objective reality. Their perspectives into and approach to investigating specific aspects of reality are always mediated via theories, concepts, research instruments, and ultimately language. There is hence no Archimedean viewpoint from which we can perceive or construe objective truth. However, recognition of this assumption does not necessarily make judgemental relativism – the view that all scientific and lay accounts are equally valid – the only possible stance on offer. Although our means to understand the world are inherently fallible and conditioned by the knowledge that is available at certain times in history, as researchers we must assume that objective reality, both natural and social, exists independently of the mind of the observer (Bhaskar, 1979). Otherwise, science, the very possibility of scientific progress, and the capacity for scientific discovery to improve the quality of both human and non-human life, would be impossible. Scholars thus remain steadfastly invested in pursuing the improvement of theories, concepts, and methodologies, and they do so through collective, critical, and conceptually grounded adjudication between stronger and weaker, better and worse theories. To this end, they must develop, work with, and critically reflect upon their own and their discipline’s philosophical assumptions about what is (ontology), how it can be known (epistemology), and why we do research (normativity).