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147 8 Deaf Worldviews, Views of the Deaf World, and the Role of Deaf Children of Hearing Parents in Creating a Deaf Epistemology Margery Miller Epistemology is part of the field of philosophy, which examines what is considered to be knowledge: what we know about something or someone (see also Paul & Moores, Chapter 1). Epistemological studies attempt to determine what is “true” knowledge, which can be verified, what is unknown, and what can be verified as a so-called fact but in actuality has no basis in truth whatsoever. Some scholars try to combine these parts, which are viewed as being based in truth from someone’s perspective (because rarely is there absolute truth), to produce a coherent, holistic, and defensible theory (Bradie, 1994; Raskin, 2002). This theory includes the pieces of knowledge but is actually greater than the sum of the truths, and it can be thought of as a stronger theory or view than one based on the component “weaker” truths. An interesting element of one view of epistemology is that “truth” is viewed as being relative, fluid, interactive, and context dependent. In the past, truth was viewed as more fixed, stagnant, rigid, and absolute. Many people have come to see truth, perspectives, worldviews, views of the world, and facts as changing and interacting with the environment—or multiple environments. Thus, epistemology, the field of discovering what we know, must be fluid itself and analytically reactive to multiple environments (Kukla, 2000; Sexton, 1997). CONSTRUCTIVISM There are many different types of epistemological approaches, but the two that form the basis for this essay are individual constructivism and group constructivism. Individual constructivism views knowledge as coming from a person, who has come to “know” something. It is created through the eyes and existing constructs of a 148 Margery Miller person, which influence interpretations (Sexton, 1997). With this model, nothing is assumed to be a universal truth and information is neither objective nor factual (Raskin, 2002). Your view or your reality may or may not have anything to do with an external reality, but it still exists and is your personal, constructivist view of the world—your own epistemology. This constructivist view has strong reflections of relativism: It is futile to search for universal truths and any model or epistemological construct is as worthy and accurate as any other. Thus, it would be impossible to search for what is true and what is falsely claimed as true, because all truth would be individually constructed and relative to the perspectives, interpretations, and views relative to that one person. Lest we be led to believe that there is no pattern to constructing a personal notion of truth, we are only referring to individual truths and theories that have come about as the person becomes aware of important inconsistencies a notion or fact may have relative to other knowledge or facts that the individual has come to believe. If a notion is too different from previously held strong notions of truth, the new information will be rejected as false. If, however, a new construction can adjust enough to integrate prior notions of truth or theories viewed as facts and knowledge, then both the new piece of information and older notions can exist and form a larger epistemological truth. This is similar in many ways to the Piagetian principles within cognitive development where our concepts change and evolve as we accommodate and assimilate our conceptualizations to new incoming facts and experiences (Duncan, 1995; Smith, 1993). Social constructivism, on the other hand, only recognizes the worth of an individual ’s view of a “truth” or way of knowing if many other people agree with it (Kukla, 2000; Searle, 1995). Thus if there is an agreement among people about knowledge constructions, then it becomes a truth or a reality merely because most of the individuals who make up a social group view it that way. Social constructivism is one possible explanation of why strongly held beliefs about the “truths” of educating d/Deaf or hard of hearing children1 appear in radically different forms, each one pushing in a drastically different direction. No new facts or supportive evidence will alter these ways of knowing or views of the language and life issues of people who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing, because there are sufficient numbers of people who hold the same beliefs, thus perpetuating the existence of parallel but incompatible deaf epistemologies. Examples abound, but the classic ones are the strongly held beliefs about the best...

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