A Critique of Traditional Science in Educational Administration: Thoughts on Evers and Lakomski’s Naturalistic Coherent Epistemology

Educational administration, an area of scientific research, has evolved into a field of intellectual conflict beginning from the second half of the twentieth century. Conflicts arouse between the views belonging to traditional science that are based on positivism and those of the scientific communities against traditional science. It is witnessed that recently Evers and Lakomski have joined this scientific controversy. Evers and Lakomski argue that both logical positivism (empiricism) and paradigm approach, which acts a critic of this approach, stand on foundationalist epistemology. Evers and Lakomski are of the opinion that, through taking a critical stance on foundationalist epistemology, it would be fair to state that an appropriate epistemological framework for educational administration would be the naturalistic coherent one. To this end, Evers and Lakomski visualize the science of educational administration as an area which carries holistic aspects of values as well as human subjectivity while being in accordance with natural sciences. Taking this overall perspective as a base, this study discusses the arguments that Evers and Lakomski found on their critique of traditional science together with the ways they justify post-positivist science resting on naturalistic coherent epistemology