In recent decades, proponents of naturalistic and/or critical modes of inquiry advocating the use of ethnographic techniques for the narrative-based study of phenomena within pedagogical contexts have challenged the central methodological paradigm of educational research: that is, the tendency among its practitioners to adhere to quantitative forms of analysis. The innovativeness of "qualitative methodologies" has succeeded in calling for a reevaluation of traditional solutions to educational research problems within the dominant paradigm. The concept of paradigm was introduced as a gesture to illuminate the historicity of science as loosely configured sets of ever changing assumptions with respect to our understandings of the world. What it did was to account for the proliferation of emergent patterns of knowledge production and disciplinary agendas that serve to convene actual research praxis in the sciences. But it also entrenched a certain incommensurability of intents and purposes, not to mention epistemological and methodological constraints that created disciplinary divisions. The engendering logic of such a paradigmatic conception of research sets up divisions according to a methodological basis for confirming knowledge claims as the products of a science. Post-structuralism, as a theoretical movement framed after the work of Jacques Derrida, transformed the discourse of the debate over the paradigmatic nature of educational research science. It enabled a displacement of the almost undisputed primacy of quantitative methodologies by qualitative forms of analysis. The implications of arguments for and against qualitative inquiry as a valid and reliable means for conducting pedagogical research will be addressed in relation to the work of Derrida through a discussion of: (1) epistemological questions about the nature of ontology; (2) theoretical questions concerning the knowledge of sense perception; and (3) methodological questions regarding the scientific truth-effect of procedure.