The crisis of professional knowledge and the pursuit of an epistemology of practice

Abstract

This paper was first delivered at the Harvard Business School 75th Anniversary Colloquium on Teaching by the Case Method. It analyses the contemporary loss of confidence in professional knowledge. The paper argues that professional education is based on a positivist philosophy which privileges the technical, the testable and the objective and separates ends from means yet fails to train for the real problems of practice. Schon suggests a model of an epistemology of practice based on reflection in and on practice.