Epistemology means ‘study of knowledge.’ It is concerned with the mind’s relation to reality. What is it for this relation to be one of knowledge? Do we know things? And if we do, how and when do we know things?
When solving some Attitude problem or reading something then there we require knowledge to understand the world, which is known as Epistemology.
As a branch of research philosophy epistemology deals with the following questions:
- What is knowledge?
- Do we have knowledge?
- How we can gain knowledge?
Also Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that studies knowledge or knowing. They ask questions like: How do we know what we claim to know? That’s the classic epistemological question. That we can see in a lot of theory and research textbooks. A researcher might assume for example, that knowledge is already out there, just waiting to be discovered. And so, it’s our job as researchers to uncover this universal, unchanging and absolute truth.
In contrast, other researchers believe that people develop knowledge based upon how they perceive the world and through their experiences. That’s how we create knowledge. Still further along this spectrum is the relativistic view, that believes that knowledge is a social construction. In essence, whatever we treat as knowledge, is knowledge. There is no universal or absolute truth. These are epistemological positions that are getting at this notion of knowledge. Like I said, most researchers don’t spend many paragraphs in each given journal article spelling all of this out. They normally just get on with their work. But their research will leave clues, and I see that epistemology is most evident in the methods that they use to conduct their research. In other words, if they assume an objective reality, objective knowledge, exists out there, then they will approach it that way. For instance, some organizational researchers do climate surveys. These are quantitative surveys driven by statistical analysis, and the idea here is if you ask the right questions, you’ll get reliable and valid answers, and the results are meant to give you a snapshot of how things really are. In other words, there’s an objective reality out there, and our survey is trying to show it. In contrast, there are other ways to get at knowledge, other beliefs about the best way to know something. For example, the ethnographic method believes that to really understand, to really know, you have to experience something for yourself. You can’t study culture, from the ethnographic standpoint, for example, from a distance. Firsthand knowledge gained through experience is the best way to know. These are epistemological kinds of issues. Also as we know that we still not know the whole things about world and that’s where Epistemology comes into play.
In summary, there are three main examples or conditions of epistemology: truth, belief and justification.
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