‘Epistemology’ refers to what we believe about how we come to know and understand the world.

Social researchers have invariably presented a dichotomy of positivist and interpretive / anti positivist epistemologies. Positivism suggest that social scientists should come to know the world by following the procedures established in natural science while interpretivism sees social research as having a special concern for uncovering the meaning associated with social activity.

Epistemology is closely entwined with ontology - the claims about the nature of being and existence – in that it is difficult to imagine the world without imagining our claims to knowledge about the world. Hence epistemology and ontology take, or should take, a place together at the top of a hierarchy when it comes to shaping a research project. In other words, our understanding of what knowledge is and how we acquire it defines the nature of the questions we might ask when carrying out research as well as the methodology and methods which we think will help us address these questions. For example, by taking a positivist stance the researcher is led towards asking questions which seek out ‘cause and effect’ and to look for external factors to explain behaviour. The methodology followed in this kind of research is more likely to cover large scale casing; deductive and experimental hypothesis testing. Positivists are more likely to adopt a quasi-scientific language, for example they will find terms such as reliability, validity and bias meaningful.

The researcher taking an interpretivist approach, in contrast, is more likely to look at internal motivation and the human agency which constitutes social activity and to look for internal factors in assessing cause and effect. Indeed the interpretivist is more likely to ask why others see an association between different variables, rather than take evidence of cause and effect as a realisable goal. Interpretivists may be as interested, or more interested, in the consequences of phenomena rather than accounting for the phenomena in the first place. Interpretivists are more likely to adopt ethnographic or small scale case studies and will talk of trustworthiness and other quality criteria rather than validity and reliability.

Epistemological considerations provide the logic of an enquiry and without understanding that logic the research will be incoherent. For example many researchers take an instinctive interpretivist or anti-positivist position but end up looking for causal explanations of events in tension with that position. The dichotomy between positivism and interpretivism is very important (Cohen et al. 2007 are particularly clear here) but in practice the distinction between the two blurs around the edges. Much research within a positivist tradition is ‘fuzzy’ about interpreting cause and effect (see generalisation) and much interpretive research follows positivism in treating some concepts as objective categories in order to focus on other categories which are more problematic. Even within interpretivism the process of deconstruction of concepts has to stop somewhere. As an example we once supervised a student looking at the learner experience of using technology in education. After letting go of an initially essentialist or ‘objective’ view of learning as a concept, he began to put learning in italics to show that it was capable of multiple interpretation. The following week he came to the same conclusion as to the word technology and that too appeared in italics. The week after the same occurred for the word experience. After a few months most of the key terms in this thesis, if not the whole thesis, would have been italicised. This is not to criticise the student as he was simply following through a logic expressed most clearly in post modernist approaches which sees language as nested within a maze of conflicting meaning and interpretation. However if he wanted to report his work coherently (and he did) he had to start taking some concepts for granted.

Much interpretive work is similarly compromised in its anti-positivist stance and de facto follows Searle (1995) in a belief that there are ‘hard material facts’ (the physical nature of the world we live in) as well as social facts (agreements about the objective nature of reality). This suggests that the positivist / anti positivist dichotomy is not as deep as imagined and that it is not ‘the only show in town’. Post modernism, for example, critiques the assumption that agreement can be reached as to the nature of physical and social reality and stands apart from positivism and mainstream interpretivism. Meanwhile pragmatist epistemology sees knowledge as generated by reflection on action: in order to understand the world it is necessary to make an active attempt to change it –a lynchpin of action research as well as of marxism and of ‘emancipatory’ research. This commitment to action is not simply an ethical issue but an epistemological one and sets it apart from both mainstream positivist and interpretive social science.

Epistemological considerations need to be included not only in the conduct of the research but also the conduct of the researcher. Many researchers take an espoused stance that knowledge is gained through collaborative social participation. However in practice these researchers follow their own highly individual and independent learning strategies when the logic of their epistemological positions should lead them to seek out feedback, to offer a voice within a community of scholars, to propose collaboration and peer review.

References

Cohen, L., Manion, L. and K. Morrison (2007) Research methods in education, Oxon: Routledge.

Searle, J.R. (1995) The construction of social reality, New York: The Free Press.