According to Mertens all of these perspectives have opened up important arenas of investigation and all have legitimacy in their respective spheres. The project I took on in that chapter was to problematize Scientific Methods in Educational Research by juxtaposing four of Shavelson & Towne's six principles of educational research in terms of the paradigmatic framework of Mertens' typology in which I sought to describe how they could be differently perceived from the divergent research traditions. Beyond the specifics, the nonfoundational paradigmatic model proposed by Mertens' was intrinsically deconstructive of both the USDOE's vision of educational research as well as the more tempered perspective of Shavelson & Towne. Although I only briefly discussed it in Conflicting Paradigms, I called for a postpositivist mediating convergence. This third way is not an integration of three schools, as the tensions among them are important to keep intact for the sake of vigorous research. However, postpositivism would provide for a mediating perspective between positivism and constructivism in a problem-centered focus based on a definition of truth as a regulative ideal, in which problem resolution can only be (but also must be) as exacting as the nature of the problem allows. I argue for the importance of this perspective in the essay to be distributed, Postpositivist Scientific Philosophy: Mediating Convergences. (http://www.the-rathouse.com/Postpositivism.htm).

In addition to the problems referred to above, I would point to the pragmatic (small "p") ethos of a getting things done culture of the United States, as well as to a pervasive anti-intellectual bias even among many who are quite brilliant. These cultural trends, which have very much to do with the ethos of democracy in America, are reinforced in such an applied field as adult literacy where a "what works" philosophy plays a critical role in defining the realm of legitimate research.

In terms of perpetual pragmatism, one thinks of the WIA/NRS, which was designed to resolve a variety of political/policy-based problems in the late 1990s, through what I would like to refer to as the illusion of science, yet which had the result also of exacerbating as many problems, if not more, than it set to resolve. The irony has now come full circle when the results of NRS measurements are used by the Bush administration as evidence that the federally supported adult education program has not been effective in delivering the measurable goods. By its very design, the NRS serves at best as a gross measure of adult student literacy levels. However, it lent an impression of exactitude, stemming from an impetus based on the pragmatic pressure to come up with a viable format for a standardized measure at the national level, which its goods (the NRS levels) could not deliver.