that action research in OD seeks to generate practical knowing. There are different forms
of knowing, what Reason and Torbert (2001) refer to as an extended epistemology, which
includes propositional or scientific knowing and practical knowing. Toulmin (1990) has
pointed out that as the rational became the focus of modernity to the exclusion of the
humanistic, practical knowing became excluded from scholarship as after the seventeenth
century as philosophers turned to problems of the objectivity of knowing. This was a shift
from knowing in a descriptive mode to knowing in explanatory mode where things were no
longer presented in relation to the knowing subject but were related to one another in
recurring patterns.