#epistemology

#epistemology

The other researcher suggested that the methodology we use should, to a large extent, be dictated by our epistemological philosophy. For example, are you a positivist, interpretivist, a hypothetico-deductivist, a post-positivist or some other stance appearing on the list of epistemological perspectives? I imagine many readers of this blog, like myself, will be surprised by this stance. Since day one of my research methods training, I've been taught that it's the research question that should dictate your methodology...

Consider what happens when you observe anything external to yourself. Light reflects off an object, travels through space, enters your eye, and triggers photoreceptor cells. These generate neural signals that journey through multiple processing stages in your visual cortex, integrate with other sensory information and memory, and finally produce the conscious experience of "seeing." That's extraordinary mediation. Multiple transformation layers where information gets filtered, compressed, interpreted, and reconstructed. By the time you "see" something, you're experiencing a highly processed representation, not the thing itself.

This way, Latour thought he could analyse the behaviour of scientists and verify how discussions, negotiations, and rivalries shape what becomes "knowledge." After his inquiries, Latour concluded that scientists apply an awful lot of personal biases and human behaviours to so-called factually correct scientific research. For Latour, "facts" gain authority through social processes, institutional validation, and consensus-building. Not just through "objective" discovery.

The traditional epistemological categories - truth, belief, inference, and justification - are ill-suited to describe ChatGPT, which does not possess beliefs or human grounding.