Academic approach and the philosophy of science
In order to understand the attitude required for academic researches, I read an introductory book about the philosophy of science. One of the main purposes of academic researches is to gain new knowledge about the world, and a procedure to find out the truth, which many people think is the most reliable, is scientific approaches. However, what are the scientific approaches? Why is it so reliable or is it just illusion? Maybe there are a lot of ways to explain the role of the philosophy of science, but it must be one of them.
In academic researches, how to verify your idea is important and the process should be rigorous enough. My research will mainly use qualitative methodologies, so it seems to be different, but I thought it would be worth understanding the scientific attitude briefly as an extreme example of revealing the truth in the world. The book chiefly introduces the philosophy of science through the argument between scientific realism and anti-realism. The main conflict point is whether things we cannot observe can be verified or not. Well, this book is for introduction and some people criticises it online, so I’m not sure his claim is valid or not, but what was interesting for me was his (or someone’s) idea that science at least provides us with approximate models of the world if not perfect. Why it was interesting is that recently I have been feeling the role of the academic research would be making models for understanding the world. Obviously this perspective is influenced by the idea of paradigm shift of Thomas Kohn, and postmodernism by Lyotard since this perspective presumes that we cannot perceive the world entirely and objectively. However, somehow we can understand the world better with some model and the models can be multiple. Of course some people believe it can be synthesised into one single theory, or making new models is not the only purpose of academic research, but it seems to be one of the important aspects at least.
In academic researches, how to verify your idea is important and the process should be rigorous enough. My research will mainly use qualitative methodologies, so it seems to be different, but I thought it would be worth understanding the scientific attitude briefly as an extreme example of revealing the truth in the world. The book chiefly introduces the philosophy of science through the argument between scientific realism and anti-realism. The main conflict point is whether things we cannot observe can be verified or not. Well, this book is for introduction and some people criticises it online, so I’m not sure his claim is valid or not, but what was interesting for me was his (or someone’s) idea that science at least provides us with approximate models of the world if not perfect. Why it was interesting is that recently I have been feeling the role of the academic research would be making models for understanding the world. Obviously this perspective is influenced by the idea of paradigm shift of Thomas Kohn, and postmodernism by Lyotard since this perspective presumes that we cannot perceive the world entirely and objectively. However, somehow we can understand the world better with some model and the models can be multiple. Of course some people believe it can be synthesised into one single theory, or making new models is not the only purpose of academic research, but it seems to be one of the important aspects at least.
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