Title: Philosophical outlooks
Course: EDPS0009: Researching Education and Society: Qualitative Methods 2020/2021 > Section: 1. Research community

Ontology

Here is a very short video explaining what ontology is and how the philosophical outlook is related to the foundations of research. For more details, use these links to the Wikipedia definition of ontology and the Britannica definition of ontology .

Epistemology

Here is a link to a distilled, simplified explanation of epistemology.

For more details, please use the detailed definitions from Britannica and Wikipedia, which also provide critiques and examples:

Britannica definition of Epistemology

Wikipedia definition of Epistemology

Logics

Here is a detailed introduction to logics as a philosophical branch of study from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

In simplified terms, logics is the study of reasoning, and in research we may be able to use different kinds or ways of reasoning: deduction, induction, and abduction. Here is a link to the online dictionary Merriam-Webster where the relationship and differences between the three forms of reasoning are presented.

Deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning are three forms of thinking relating to the relationship between rules, causes and effects. This is very well explained in the following video, which refers to a health research context, but you will see how it is relevant in educational contexts and indeed any social science disciplines and contexts, too.

Ethics

As a field of study, ethics explores what is right and what is wrong. And it tries to do that by systematically reviewing the relationship between how we behave and which values we have that lead us to particular behaviours.

The role of ethics in research is the topic of the next component part of the module, but for now, here is a detailed introduction to ethics from Wikipedia.

For now, consider the ethical dilemma of the trolley problem, and decide on how you would deal with this situation.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is somehow not quite in the same league as the other four domains of philosophical outlooks. This is in parts due to the fact that it is somewhat younger as a discipline or school of thought. In parts, this is due because phenomenology as a discipline sits alongside and across the other philosophical branches and cannot be entirely separated from them.

Basically, phenomenology is the study of consciousness and experience, and how people make sense of their experiences by interpreting them. For an introduction to phenomenology see this page from Warwick. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on phenomenology for a very detailed definition and historical overview.

Here is a light-hearted, yet still very accurate take on defining phenomenology: