Methodological themes Empirical research in accounting:alternative approaches and a case for“middle-range” thinking [7]
论文作者:PAT SUCHER论文属性:短文 essay登出时间:2008-06-10编辑:点击率:29930
论文字数:3600论文编号:org200806101038079925语种:英语 English地区:英国价格:免费论文
关键词:Methodological themesEmpirical researchaccountingalternative approaches
d actual gaps in the genealogy) to the contemporary schools of thought highlighted in Figure 2. Figure 3 depicts in broad terms what is, in effect, a claim that there are three major streams of empirical investigative endeavour which are traceable to respectively Auguste Comte, Immanuel Kant/Georg Hegel and Immanuel Kant/Johann Fichte. Each of these streams of thought are, in turn, traceable to the endeavours of early scientists such as Bacon (1561-1626), with his dominant Christian underpinning of God’s ordering of a rational world waiting to be discovered through rational processes, to the more agnostic position and division between the European “rationalists” (for example, Descartes (1596-1650), Spinoza (1632-1677), Leibniz (1646-1716)) and the English “empiricists” (for example, Locke (1632-1704), Berkeley (1685-1753), Hume (1711-1776)). The “rationalists” maintained that it was possible through reason to obtain an “…absolute description of the world uncontaminated by the experience of any observer” (Scruton, 1982, p. 14). “Empiricists”, on the other hand, “…argued that we have no ideas at all other than those whichcome to us via our senses” (Brown, 1969, pp. 60-1). As a result, to the “empiricists”, any statements, apart from those of pure logic, can be known to be “…true or false only by testing them in experience” (Brown, 1969, pp. 60- 1). The claims and counter-claims between these major streams of thought in the seventeenth century were remarkable: both claimed absolute truth for their chosen approach and each was dismissive of the other’s perspective on understanding. This battle, which seemed to have no solution, was finally resolved by Kant’s amalgamation and critique of both schools of thought followed by Comte’s somewhat unquestioning binding together of these different traditions. To Kant neither experience nor reason alone can generate understanding and, of arguably more importance, all discovery is mediated through human beings making the insights generated always conditional and inevitably subjective. His critique of the “rationalists” and “empiricists” is a tortuous journey, but in essence his criticism against the former is that it generates form without content and for the latter that it derives content without form. More fundamental though is the very fact that, to Kant, all insights are inevitably subjective because no knowledge is generated distinct from the observer whose reasoning and experiential powers are not uniform or determined. Scruton (1982, p. 18) puts the issues succinctly in the following way: Objects do not depend for their existence on my knowing them; but their nature is determined by the fact that they can be perceived. Objects are not Leibnizian monads, knowable only to the perspectiveless stance of “pure reason”; nor are they Humean “impressions”, features of my own experience. They are objective, but their character is given by the point of view through which they can be known.While this logic may seem obvious and unsurprising to our twentieth-century minds it was revolutionary in eighteenth-century thought. It was also far from fully worked through by Kant. It was this latter aspect which was key in understanding the diversity of perspectives which followed Kant’s “enlightenment”. Two areas of ambivalence in Kantian thought are significant. The first is related to the ontological question concerning a material existence. If all insights are mediated through experience then to what degree is r
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