Chapter 3. A Short Chapter on Epistemology (How Do We Know What We Know?)
Chapter 3. A Short Chapter on Epistemology (How Do We Know What We Know?)
What Is Epistemology? A Short Introduction
Epistemology is the name we give to the cluster of questions we have about how we (humans) know things about the world. As beings made up of matter with various sensory organs, our ability to “grasp” the world out there is constrained by those sensory organs and the matter (e.g., brain) we use to process what our senses take in. How do we know that what we see with our eyes is actually out there in the world and not an image that our brain projects or manipulates? How do we know we are not living in someone else’s imagination or having images and thoughts live-streamed into our consciousness? What, after all, is our consciousness? Those are difficult questions, impossible to answer, which is one of the main conclusions of those who ask epistemological questions. It is difficult to know what is real! On a more prosaic level, closer to home, we are asking epistemological questions when we address the shortcomings of our ability to know what someone else is thinking or what some social fact or circumstance actually means to other people.
Qualitative researchers tend to ask these kinds of questions all the time. They are at the heart of why we engage in the kinds of methods we engage in. For example, we are sometimes skeptical of large-scale surveys because we think that people’s answers are not so clearly understood as a yes-or-no response or multiple-choice answer would have us believe. Take a question that asks college students to rate their satisfaction with their university’s response to COVID, on a scale of one to ten. First of all, we don’t know how people are using the scale and what a particular number ranking means to them. Second, we don’t really know what aspects of the university response different people will be responding to. Maybe one person didn’t like the mask policy, so they scored a two, while someone else really enjoyed remote learning, so they scored a ten, and yet another person didn’t have time to complete the survey, so they quickly answered all questions with a five. How do we know that the average response of seven reflects a reality that the response was, overall, more positive than negative? What do we really know from this about the university’s response? To be fair, a skilled survey researcher will be able to write questions that reduce some of these ambiguities, but they will never be able to completely get at the reality of the situation. Nor will a qualitative researcher, although at least they will be able to sit down with a person, ask follow-up questions as needed, and urge the person to explain their answers as thoroughly as possible to get closer to the truth.
The above example also helps explain why we sometimes use quantitative and sometimes qualitative research methods. Surveys are terrible at capturing subtle and personal evaluations because they do not allow for probing questions and follow-u