Only Diverge

Abstract

The fascination of consumer research lies in its capacity to open doors on human experience, to help us understand fully its nature and ramifications. This cannot be achieved by the adoption of just one paradigm, nor by the attempted production of some vast synthesis of available viewpoints, nor yet by the accumulation of empirical research results that will eventually learn to speak for themselves. It can be more closely approached by means of methodological pluralism, the intermingling of viewpoints that are tenaciously held by individuals within the scholarly community but prevented from becoming restrictively dominant by the proliferation of alternatives. This research perspective has been forcefully described by Paul Feyerabend:

Knowledge so conceived is not a series of self-consistent theories that converge towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to truth. It is rather an ever-increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness. (Feyerabend 1975: 47)