EPISTEMOLOGICAL BASES OF RESEARCH

BY ROBERT MUDIDA, LECTURER INSTITUTE OF DIPLOMACY AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI

THE DEFINITION AND IMPORTANCE OF EPISTEMOLOGY

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that
studies the nature of knowledge, its presuppositions and foundations and its extent and validity. It is derived from the Greek world episteme which means knowledge. All methods of investigation depend on a certain epistemological basis. Epistemology is important because all research is based on a certain vision of human beings and society. Scholars operate on certain paradigms or perceptual lens about the world.

IMPORTANCE OF EPISTEMOLOGY
Thus in this sense, methodology has two
meanings: Firstly, the mechanical aspect of research methods dealing with statistical methods. Secondly, the fundamental assumptions of knowledge which deals with conceptual questions and is often ignored.

IMPORTANCE OF EPISTEMOLOGY (CONT)

A theory or hypothesis should not be accepted

or rejected on superficial grounds. Theories need rigorous tests. A theory should not be accepted because someone has said so. People can have conflicting theories and we could all be wrong. Thus a fundamental problem is to decide between different versions of the truth. In strategic and international studies we need to know the basis of our prepositions. It is therefore important to give evidence to support the prepositions we make.

IMPORTANCE OF EPISTEMOLOGY (CONT)

A fundamental problem is that the methods of the
natural sciences may sometimes not be adequate to solve the problems of the social sciences. Natural sciences thrive on experiment and prediction, unlike the social sciences which are less experimentally based. Thus the means of validating knowledge in the natural sciences may sometimes not be the same as in the social sciences. Epistemology therefore helps us to engage in competent research and to develop critical awareness in terms of determining which scholarly publications are useful. We therefore read texts more critically.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Thus an epistemological issue concerns
the question of what is or should be acceptable knowledge in a discipline. A central question in this context is whether the social world can and should be studied according to the same principles, procedures and ethos as the natural sciences.

POSITIVISM IN EPISTEMOLOGY
Positivism is an epistemological position that advocates the application of the methods of the natural sciences to the study of social reality and beyond. Positivism entails the following: Only phenomena and hence knowledge confirmed by the senses can be genuinly warranted as knowledge(this is known as the principle of phenomenalism). The purpose of theory is to generate hypotheses that can be tested and that thereby allow explanations of laws to be assessed (this is known as the principle of deductivism).

TENETS OF POSITIVISM (CONT)

Knowledge is arrived at though the gathering of facts

that provide the basis for laws (the principle of inductivism). Science must, and presumably can, be conducted in a way that is value free (that is, objective). There is a clear distinction between scientific(positive) statements and normative statements and a belief that the former are the true domain of the scientist. This is because the truth or otherwise of normative statements cannot be confirmed by the senses.

INTERPRETIVISM
This is a term given to a contrasting epistemology to
positivism. It is predicated upon the view that a strategy is required that respects the differences between the people and objects of the natural sciences and therefore requires the social scientist to grasp the subjective meaning of social action. The term interpretivism subsumes the views of writers who have been critical of the application of the scientific model to the study of the social world. They share a view that the subject matter of the social sciences is fundamentally different from that of the natural sciences.

INTERPRETIVISM (CONT)
The study of the social world therefore requires a
different logic in its research procedures which reflects the distinctiveness of human beings in relation to the natural order. Von Wright (1971) depicted the epistemological clash between positivism and hermeneutics which is concerned with the interpretation of human action. This clash reflects a division between an emphasis on the explanation of human behaviour which is a fundamental ingredient of the positivist approach to the social sciences and the understanding of human behaviour.

INTERPRETIVISM (CONT)
Hermeneutics is concerned with an empathetic
understanding of human action rather than with the forces that are deemed to act on it. Causal explanation, according to Weber, is undertaken with reference to the interpretive understanding of social action rather than to the external forces that have no meaning for those involved in social action.

PHENOMENOLOGY
Phenomenology is one of the main intellectual traditions that has
been responsible for the anti-positivist position. This philosophy is concerned with the question of how individuals make sense of the world around them and especially how the philosopher should bracket out preconceptions in his or her grasp of that world. The initial application of phenomenological ideas to the social sciences has been attributed to the work of Alfred Schutz. He argued that a fundamental difference between the natural and social sciences is that social reality has a meaning for human beings and therefore that human action is meaningful. Human beings act on the basis of the meaning that human action has for them and they act on the basis of meanings they can attribute to their acts and to the acts of others.

PHENOMENOLOGY
The job of the social scientist therefore is to gain access to peoples
common sense thinking and hence to interpret their actions and their social world from their point of view. The phenomenologist therefore views human behaviour as a product of how people interpret the world. Therefore, in order to grasp the meanings of a persons behaviour, the phenomenologist attempts to see things from that persons point of view. However, taking an interpretative stance suggests that the social scientist is not simply laying bare how members of a social group interpret the world around them. The social scientist will be aiming to place the interpretations into a social scientific frame. Thus the researcher is providing an interpretation of others interpretations. The researchers interpretations further have to be interpreted in terms of the concepts, theories and literature of a discipline.

CRITERIA OF VALIDITY
This section deals with some insights from the

philosophy of science regarding what constitutes valid knowledge. Karl Popper argued that hypothesis testing serves the purpose of ruling out theories even though it cannot demonstrate that a theory is true. Popper urged scientists to test the implications of their theories by comparing the implications with relevant evidence. Popper argued that the method of the social sciences like that of the natural sciences consists in trying out tentative solutions to those problems from which our investigations start.

CRITERIA OF VALIDITY
According to Karl Popper, solutions are proposed
and criticised. If a proposed solution is not open to objective criticism then it is excluded as scientific, although perhaps only temporarily. Thus according to Popper his demarcation of what was scientific and what was not depended on the notion of falsifiability. Falsifiability is an important concept in the philosophy of science that amounts to the idea that a proposition cannot be scientific if it does not admit consideration of its being false.

CRITERIA OF VALIDITY
Poppers theory implied that scientists should give up
theory as soon as they encounter falsifying evidence, replacing it with increasing bold and powerful new hypotheses. Thomas Kuhn, on the other hand, in his seminal work the Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that science consisted of periods of normal science in which scientists continue to hold to their theories in the face of anomalies, interspersed with periods of great conceptual change. Kuhn argued that the aim of science is to find a model which will account for as much of the observations as possible within a coherent framework.

CRITERIA OF VALIDITY
As a paradigm is explored to the limits of its scope,
anomalies or failures of the current paradigm to take into account observed phenomena accumulate. Their significance is judged by the practitioners of the discipline. But no matter how large the anomalies that persist, Kuhn observes, the practising scientists will not lose faith in the established paradigm as long as no credible alternative is available. In time challenging paradigms emerge which may eventually replace the old ones in which case a paradigm shift has occurred.

CRITERIA OF VALIDITY
Lakatos a Hungarian philosopher tried to resolve the perceived
conflict between Poppers falsfication and Kuhns paradigms. For Lakatos what we think of as theories are actually groups of slightly different theories that share some common idea which he calls the hard core. These are known as research programmes. The scientists involved in the program will shield it from falsification attempts behind a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses. Instead of asking whether a hypothesis is true or false, Lakatos encourages us to ask if a research programme is progressive or degenerative. A progressive research programme is marked by its growth along a discovery of stunning novel facts. A degenerative research programme is marked by a lack of growth, or growth of a protective belt that does not lead to novel facts.

CRITERIA OF VALIDITY
In his books Against Method and Science in A
Free Society, Feyerabend developed the idea that there are no methodological rules which are always used by scientists. He objected to any single prescriptive method on the grounds that such a method would limit the activities of scientists, and hence retard scientific progress. In his view science would benefit most from an attitude of theoretical anarchism.

THE END

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