Pluralism Done Right: Locating an Eisnerian Response to D. C. Phillips

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: New Visions for Qualitative Educational Research

Abstract

This paper proposes an Eisnerian solution to the problem of relativism that D.C. Phillips has raised against Eisner’s ideas from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. Importantly, my Eisnerian solution is not Eisner’s solution. Once committed to Eisner’s Deweyan account of experience and knowledge, admitting plurality or multiplicity into the machinery really does raise the specter of relativism in a way that the account itself can neither prevent or ignore. Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor (2015) offer an alternative ontological and epistemological framework that better suits the multiplicity that Eisner correctly takes to be an essential and self-evident feature of human experience.

Author

• Derek Gottlieb, University of Northern Colorado