Again, I don't understand, I simply don't understand:
[quoting Duchastel, 17 Sep 98.f] No ID can be conducted without goals. But whose goals, the designer's own or the client's? The architecture analogy is revealing in this matter.
A client chooses an architect because of a synergy of aesthetics: the look, the economy, the fit of design to the user's goal are all critical criteria in such choices. Even then, there are enough times when clients choose other architects when they discover that the fit is inadequate to meet the goals of the construction. So, does this imply in any way that the architect has no goals? Quite the opposite: the clearer the architect's goals, the more easily the client can find a match. That is all I'm suggesting. It seems that you are suggesting that the architect has no goals and that the best architect can design drek if the client's goal is drek. Not true, either aesthetically, intellectually, morally, or professionally. Did I misunderstand your reference to architects or have I worked with too many in building too many places?
As for conducting science, who suggests doing it without passion? But what passion? A passion for discovery and understanding, or a passion for one's pet educational philosophy of the day?
I think this is a sophistic exercise. A passion for discovery and understanding is the criteria for academic enterprise; for pet educational philosophy is a marketing technique. Arguments against such straw men are beneath your capabilities. You advocate a scientific method independent of a body of knowledge, which I understand to be a neologism. You ignore "pet educational philosophies" from Plato to Dewey to support a mechanical view of instructional design which pretends to be without values but is infused with western didacticism. I understand you disavow positivism, but even a modestly dispassionate view of Osborne's meritocracy, for one example, reveals an incredibly mechanical, western, industrial drive to measure "progress" against "standards," which is in many ways the "general model" you seem to propose. The same for Senge or Blanchard, among the self-help management types, or Mager, or even Tyler, among the old curriculum guys. Nobody is advocating a philosophy of the day, but only advocating that the inherent bias in any general theory be exposed and up front, revealed rather than disguised by a kind of "scientism" which sounds more like Mary Baker Eddy and Herbert Spencer than any of our own contemporaries.
Finally, I don't get the point of this exercise for a general theory. It's not relativity or the atom we're dealing with, it's the design of an instructional activity. There doesn't have to be an ideal model to have a model work perfectly fine in less than ideal settings. Surely it is a goal, for example, of the designer to get the client to identify the client's goal. Once identified, I at least, have dropped plenty of clients whose goals seemed naive, ridiculous, or educationally inappropriate. I dropped 'em because of my "passion for discovery and understanding" which wasn't shared by the client. Was this bad ID or was this good?