New Directions for Inquiry and Education: Empirical Non-Foundationalism

Stop trying to get it right, enjoy instead the creative freedom of aspiring instead to get it less wrong, of continually creating new generative stories using all three loops

Empirical non-foundationalism:

• Recognize the inadequacy of purely empirical approaches, embrace the additional two productive loops ... the unconscious/story teller and the interpersonal
  • seeking objectivity is just a matter of getting as much intersubjective agreement as you can manage
• Accept/value the role of stories in inquiry, and of diversity of stories
  • If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.
• Commit to helping students acquire not only critical but creative skills, using all three loops
  • The logic of aspiring to, and teaching, "objectivity" thus derives not only from our individual needs to make our individual ways in a mysterious world but equally from a recognition that we can better do so in state of the most effective exchange with people whose experiences/understandings are different from our own.
• Stop worrying about the uncertainty of the known. Enjoy/share enjoyment of the certainty of the unknown and our collective participation in creating what might yet be
• Commit to sharing that understanding/enjoyment with students ... and with the world at large