A Pragmatist Defence of Classical Financial Accounting Research

One reason for the disdain in which classical financial accounting research

has come to held by many in the scholarly community is its allegedly

insufficiently scientific nature. While many have defended classical research

or provided critiques of post-classical paradigms, the motivation for this

paper is different. It offers an epistemologically robust underpinning for the

approaches and methods of classical financial accounting research that

restores its claim to legitimacy as a rigorous, systematic and empirically

grounded means of acquiring knowledge. This underpinning is derived

from classical philosophical pragmatism and, principally, from the writings

of John Dewey. The objective is to show that classical approaches are

capable of yielding serviceable, theoretically based solutions to problems in

accounting practice.