RES701- Blog 2 “Ontology & Epistemology”

Hi everyone. In the previous blog, we discussed about what research is, what plagiarism is, etc. This week we will look into Ontology and Epistemology. I have also looked into these 2 keywords to understand more about the topic. So for the purpose of this blog, I have done some research and I have included some contexts from websites like https://i2insights.org/2017/05/02/philosophy-for-interdisciplinarity/ and https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_someone_explain_the_ontology_and_epistemology_in_simple_way to answer few key questions. We will be talking about ontology, epistemology and how they are relevant to research. At the end of this blog we will be talking about connection between ontology and epistemology in a research context.

Let’s start by answering what ontology is and how can it be relevant to research?

Ontology is the “study of being”, which is mainly focused on things that actually exists in the world from which humans can acquire knowledge. Ontology allows the researchers to recognize how certain they can be about the existence of objects and it’s natures that they are researching.

The second question would be what is epistemology? How is it relevant to research?

Epistemology is the “study of knowledge” and its main focus is with all aspects of the validity, scope and methods of acquiring knowledge (such as how knowledge can be acquired, up to what extend can transferability be assessed, etc.).

It is important because it influences how researchers frame their research in their attempts to discover knowledge. The idea of epistemology can be explored by looking between the relationship of a subject and an object and we can learn how it influences the research design.

In this section, we will be looking into the connection between ontology and epistemology in a research context. We can say that ontology is about how we come to know about something, and epistemology is how we know about something. These are important in research because we then start to ask questions to know how much we know about the subject and then based on that, by knowing the answer we research suitable resources to back up our answers or in case if we have no knowledge about the subject, we start researching to learn something out of it and come to a conclusion in our research. This helps the research to be completed.