ARAŞTIRMA YÖNTEMLERİ

Ontology is a concept that means the study of being/existence and the nature of reality. Ontology asks questions such as “What is the essential substance of (or the underlying foundation of) existence?”, “What is the nature of reality?” and “Is it possible for us to perceive reality as is?”

Epistemology is a concept about how we come to know about these existing things (that ontology is interested in) and their reality. So, epistemology is interested in investigating the sources of our knowledge of reality. And, epistemology is also interested in investigating whether we are in a state to know reality as it exits independent of us (reality as is); and whether what we are able to know corresponds to a reality that exists independent of us (independent of us knowing it).

Ontology is a particular focus area within metaphysics, which focuses particularly on the study of “being” or “existence.” The term ontology also comes from the ancient Greek roots, from “ontos” which means “being”, “to be” or “to exist” and from “logos” which means “the study of.” Thus, ontology can be defined as the philosophy or the study of being or existence. Thus, ontology focuses on questions related to abstract concepts such as “what is it mean to exist?”, “What is the unchanging substance of the existing things?”, “Is there an objective, unchanging reality beyond human perception and conception?” and so on. These two areas of philosophy (epistemology and ontology) are not clearly separate fields, they overlap most of the time; that is, these are deeply interrelated areas of philosophical considerations

Rationalism is most often associated with Rene Descartes (1596-1690) in modern philosophy. However, the ancient philosopher Plato is also known as a radical rationalist. Rationalism defends the idea that knowledge that is obtained through the senses lack certainty, because senses often deceive us; for example, a stick put in water seems to us as if it is bend, even though in reality it is not bend.

A priori proposition/knowledge is a concept that refers to propositions or knowledge gained through rational means like thinking and reasoning. In other words, they don’t come from sense experience, or they are prior to the experience.

Empiricism argues that the only source of all human knowledge is the sense experience (observations and experiments).

A posteriori proposition/knowledge is a concept that refers to propositions or knowledge that comes from sense experience, or they are available after the experience.

In inductivism, the starting point is observations of singular facts, events, or happenings, then expressing them as singular observation statements. An important condition is that the observations must be theoryfree in order to prevent contamination of pure facts with a previously accepted theory.

According to Kuhn, paradigm comes prior to any set of activities or procedures and provides the practitioners with the current state of knowledge and practices of a field. A paradigm is defined as a worldview, or an intellectual or theoretical framework that provides guidance for the engagement of the community of scientists with their phenomena of interest.

Idealism argues that there is no material, or no physical external world that is the basis of our reality. Thus, our reality does not correspond to a reality existing independent of our minds. Further, what we perceive are just ideas in our minds.

Ontology is a particular focus area within metaphysics, which focuses particularly on the study of “being” or “existence.” The term ontology also comes from the ancient Greek roots, from “ontos” which means “being”, “to be” or “to exist” and from “logos” which means “the study of.” Thus, ontology can be defined as the philosophy or the study of being or existence. Thus, ontology focuses on questions related to abstract concepts such as “what is it mean to exist?”, “What is the unchanging substance of the existing things?”, “Is there an objective, unchanging reality beyond humanperception and conception?” and so on.

The term “epistemology” comes from the ancient Greek roots, from “episteme” meaning “knowledge” and from “logos” meaning “the study of.” Thus, epistemology can be defined as the philosophy of knowledge, or the study of knowledge. Epistemology, thus, is also referred to as the theory of knowledge. Epistemology focuses on answering such questions as “what is the nature of coming to know?”, “what are the foundations or sources of knowledge?” and “what are the limits of human knowledge?”

The scientific study of social life began in the early 19th century, with Auguste Comte’s proposal of positivism as the model for studying society (in 1830s). The discipline of sociology was thereby established; thus, Comte is often referred to as the founding father of sociology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018).

Rationalism is most often associated with Rene Descartes (1596-1690) in modern philosophy. Rationalism defends the idea that knowledge that is obtained through the senses lack certainty, because senses often deceive us. However, the knowledge we gain through rational thinking and reason gives us certain knowledge.

A priori proposition/knowledge is a concept that refers to propositions or knowledge gained through rational means like thinking and reasoning. In other words, they don’t come from sense experience, or they are prior to the experience.

Plato defended the idea that the sense experience of our everyday lives was just a reflection of the actual reality of forms (an ideal world), which was innate to us but accessible only through careful reasoning. And, our sense experiences in this world is only a venue towards the real world of forms, however only if we can reason effectively (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2018).

Scientific anti-realism is the view which defends that we are not in a position to know or claim that our theories correspond to an external reality. We cannot know if there is a reality existing independent of our perceptions. Thus, anti-realism defends the idea that we are engaged in science and we develop scientific theories only because we are interested in what can science offer to us, for its practical, instrumental benefits for our life conditions. Science simply gives us useful tools to deal with the natural world for our own purposes, thus we cannot have claims about its ability to represent an external, mind-independent reality.

The idea of systematic method of science was developed in the 17th century, by Francis Bacon (1561-1626). It is systematic in the sense that it is based on certain rules that could be followed by any practitioner who is interested in replicating a study. Bacon argued that science should be based on carefully conducted observations and measurements of a phenomenon. The method proposed by Bacon is based on inductive reasoning, thus known as inductivism.

Inductivism poses further a problem known as the problem of theory-ladennes, which states that inductivism assumes that theory-free observations are possible, however neither theory-free observations nor statements are possible. Because, without a framework for what to observe, that provides guidance for what features to pay attention to, or what to focus on, there are too many things to observe. Any observation statement presumes a theory behind it. In other words, theory-free observations are impossible simply because there are no pure facts to observe; what we call facts are interpreted by us as relevant to our purposes at hand. Thus, any observation statement is necessarily theory-laden, regardless of how purely-factual it appears to be.

An anomaly is defined by Kuhn as a deviation of the “paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science” (Kuhn, 1962, pp. 52-53).