This approach is most evident in documents, such as Science for All Americans (AAAS 1990 ) , where, for example, the aforemen- tioned debates between realists and empiricists were completely disregarded. In other instances, contentious issues were addressed by adopting compromise posi- tions, such as affirming that scientific knowledge is tentative but durable (AAAS 1990 , pp. 2–3), which seemingly is an attempt to veer away from realist perspec- tives on the status of scientific knowledge while simultaneously acknowledging that successes in science cannot simply be explained by social constructivist con- ceptions of NOS (Brown 1998 ) .