It is all too easy to group approaches to inclusive education and research into one of two polarised camps.  Where one camp proclaims the necessity of an objective comprehension of disability and effective educational practices (see here Anastasiou & Kauffman, 2010; Kauffman, Bantz, & McCullough, 2002; Kauffman, & Sasso, 2006; Kauffman, & Landrum, 2009; Mock & Kauffman, 2002; Sasso, 2001), the other insists that all knowledge is itself the produced in accordance with a researcher’s cultural and social experiences, expectations, codes and intentions (see here Gallagher, 2001; 2004; 2006; Gallagher, Connor, Ferri, 2014).   The former makes the case for research into inclusive education that utilises scientific methods to discover effective educational practices, while the latter takes this to be a fruitless undertaking and turns our attention to the manifold ways in which knowledge of the world is constructed.  Gallagher, Connor and Ferri (2014, p. 19) discuss ‘the far too incessant schism’ that divides these two camps andthus excludes them from engaging in ‘respectful debate’. And yet, their work reproduces and reinforces the same binary between research that seeks objectivity and research that constructs reality as they attempt to refute the former and defend the latter. This paper argues that both seeking to discover knowledge about others in their totality, as they 'really are', and the reduction of reality to a construction, excludes us from forming relations with others in which we might learn with and from them.  In so doing this paper attempts to bypass both the claim that knowledge is discovered by way of following prescribed methods assumed to meet scientific standards of research and the insistence that all meaning is constructed.  Making use of Buber’s (1965; 1997; 2002; 2004; 2006) concepts of  ‘dialogue’ and ‘confirmation’, the paper advances the view that total reliance upon method and procedure excludes us from turning to the other and thus from our own capability to respond to, to learn from and to give to the other.  Drawing on Levinas’s (1969; 1995; 1999; 2006; 2011) ethical philosophy, the paper argues that meaning cannot be constructed, since the possibility of meaning begins precisely at that point at which the other teaches us what is other than, and cannot be reduced to, any of our categories, interpretations and constructions.

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