[See also: How to write the background, theory, methods, analysis and discussion sections. How to write the introduction and conclusion. How to review the literature and how to structure a research paper. How to finish on time and how to reference properly. Part of the Craft of Research series. Full program here.]
In what sense is your research project “scientific”? It is the purpose of your “philosophy of science” section to answer this question. It may not be a formally identified section of your paper, integrated instead into your theory or methods sections, but wherever you are reflecting on the quality or value of your research as “science”, your are doing philosophy in some sense.
I say “reflecting” advisedly. Very few social scientists (or students of the social sciences) actually let philosophy guide their theoretical or methodological choices. They simply see the world as their peers do and do what their peers would do to study it. But sometimes they ask themselves (and each other) what is so special about their work. How are their results more than merely personal opinions drawn from subjective experience? On what basis can they claim to have “empirical knowledge” of their subject?
In this talk, I speak very loosely about ontology and epistemology; positivism, constructivism, and realism; hermeneutics and phenomenology; qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods; and, finally, deductive, inductive, and abductive methods. I hope it’s clear that mine is not the final word or “right answer” on any of these questions. In your philosophy of science section you will need to be much more precise than I was in the talk. You will need to think carefully, both about what these words mean and what they can be used to say about your research. At the end of the day, however, please remember that your philosophy of science is not about what some philosophers have said; it’s about what you think you were doing when you were doing the science you did.
To focus your reflections I suggest you begin, not with your theories or your methods, but with your analysis. Most of the paragraphs in your analysis will be supporting claims about the world on the basis of your data. They will offer interpretations of your observations. (My go-to example is that you might claim that the employees in a company are unhappy with their leaders and quote what they told in your interviews as evidence.) Well, what is the difference between an observation and an interpretation? Here you might invoke hermeneutics to explain how it is possible to go from what people to say (or write) to what they mean (or think). If we have recorded and transcribed an interview, it is perhaps easy to see how we can take their words for granted. But how can we speak truthfully about their state of mind? How can we know what they intended by their words? That’s a good, philosophical question.
Likewise, we might distinguish between our experience of things and the “reality” we “construct” to explain them. Do we in some sense experience things as they “really” are? Are we “realists” about the things we encounter and do more abstract objects like “organizations” and “strategies” and “agents” really exist “out there” and “in themselves” or are they merely fictions that serve an “instrumental” purpose in our thinking about the world. We may proceed phenomenologically, “bracketing” the question of whether anything “exists” behind our experiences and focusing our attention on the “condition of the possibility of our experience of objects”. What, within our experience, can we use to tell us how experience is ever possible. What is given “immediately” to us know? Again, these are, perhaps obviously, philosophical questions.
Thinking in this way about what your analysis means is a good way to begin thinking about your ontology (what there is) and epistemology (how we know). I’ve always found it useful to think of ontologies and epistemologies as belonging to the theories and methods of particular disciplines (or, to use Kuhnian language, paradigms). That is, since we’re doing philosophy of science, not, say, metaphysics (philosophy of everything) we don’t have to have a position on what the universe is made of and how it is knowable at all. We just have to be able to make explicit what things we, and our peers in the discipline, know something about and how those things are known to us.
I began the talk with a call back to something I was thinking about at the beginning of the semester, namely, the identity of Venus and the difference between the Morning Star and the Evening Star. Let me conclude here simply by copying the relevant paragraphs (lightly edited) from the page to the first talk:
Already five-thousand years ago, the early Summerians knew that the Morning Star and the Evening Star are the same celestial object, namely, Venus. Some people even today may be underwhelmed by this insight; to them, Venus looks about the same when it appears in the morning and when it appears in the evening. The identity of Venus is “intuitive” to them; the Morning Star and the Evening Star look immediately like the same thing. But this is not science. At some point, ancient astronomers began to keep careful records, noticing that you could never see the Evening Star at the end of the day that you saw the Morning Star. (They were never in the “same room together,” we might say.) In fact, you could observe the Morning Star for 263 days, then nothing for 50 days, then the Evening Star for 263 days, and then nothing for 8 days. Then the Morning Star was back. While their identity was established by the Babylonians, and then re-established by the Greeks, the exact nature of Venus, as a planet orbiting the sun more closely than the Earth, was only determined in the seventeenth century, in Shakespeare’s time, by Galileo. And even to him its motion was a mystery governed by an essentially “occult” force, namely, gravity. It would take Einstein to finally figure out that it was following a straight path through curved spacetime. That explained (almost) everything.
This tells us something important about what science is, and this may help you understand how to write your philosophy of science section. You don’t just need to understand the concepts of your theories, nor the objects of your analyses, you need to understand how your observations constitute your knowledge. In what sense are you doing empirical science? You are not just making intuitive sense of what people are doing. Indeed, your results may be outright counter-intuitive and still be true. What do you mean by “true”?
This page is a work in progress. Here are some more posts about the subject:
“Observation and Construction”
“The Conditions Under Which the Objects of Human Knowledge Are Given”