An engagement with different ideas of knowledge or knowing is inherent to postgraduate research. This does not mean that it is necessary to adopt a specific philosophical or epistemological position to 'use' in your research. However, it does mean that you should explore different way in which knowledge, knowing and claims to know may be problematic; and ways in which philosophers, social theorists and empirical researchers have engaged with and written about the problems of knowledge. Precisely because knowledge is so problematic, you should not expect to come to any definitive conclusions in exploring these questions. However, reading across a range of approaches can help you to engage more critically within you own research practice.
While the term ‘epistemology’ is often associated with philosophical and theoretical explorations of questions of knowledge, it is important, in my view, to recognize that epistemologies—ideas and ways of understanding what counts or doesn’t count as knowledge—are present in professional and everyday practices. These epistemological ideas, while not necessarily formally articulated as such, are just as valuable, both in professional practice and in the context of doctoral research, as the philosophical and theoretical canon.
In this session we will discuss a possible way of categorizing some key strands of philosophical and methodological ideas about knowledge: e.g. positivism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction. We will discuss these terms because they appear frequently in texts about research, and it can be useful to have an initial sense of some possible distinctions between these approaches. However, none of these terms has a simple definition or is understood in just one way. More importantly, I would suggest, these terms do not mean the same thing when it is developed in a purely philosophical context as they do when developed in the context of empirical social research, and in either context the meaning of terms is not fixed.LAPPING, C. (2011). ‘Introduction: Reframing psychoanalytic concepts, or bricolage decomposed.’ in Psychoanalysis in Social Research: Shifting theories and reframing concepts, London. Routledge.
ANDERSEN, N. (2003). Discursive Analytical Strategies. Cambridge. The Policy Press.
DELANTY, G. (2005). Social Science. Maidenhead. Open University Press.