Teaching on the philosophies of evaluation as part of a pilot introductory course of a new diploma programme jointly sponsored by the United Nations (UN) Evaluation Group and the United Nations Staff College, the author compared and contrasted the "rationalistic" paradigm with the "naturalistic" paradigm on the basis of ontology, epistemology, and methodology and suggested an alternative "non-Western" paradigm. Course evaluations criticized this concept as insufficiently developed; this article challenges those criticisms. Using the five basic axioms cited by Guba and Lincoln in "Epistemological and Methodological Bases of Naturalistic Inquiry," the author compares and contrasts an Eastern paradigm of evaluation to the rationalistic and naturalistic paradigms, and offers suggestions for methodological practices that one who subscribes to such a paradigm might follow. (Contains 1 table.)