The Philosophy of Research

Jeremy Horne

At either extreme, “research” ostensibly is finding new information just to know it or for some purpose. Indeed, schools are established for people to learn what already has been discovered or how to discover. Usually, matters end here. Left out of conversations about research are deeper meanings of words like “knowledge”, “education”, “bias”, and “objective”. Students rarely encounter the more sophisticated “epistemology”, “second order critique”, and “ethos”. Above all, the foundation of learning, the love of truth, rarely is touched, “educators” freely floating in the air just as confused as their students. This essay sets forth orderly thinking and development of research, starting with definitions, continuing with knowledge acquisition – context and problems, and ending with applying the lessons learned. Phenomena as data get transformed into information, information through epistemology (justified belief) becomes knowledge, and knowledge through ethos yields wisdom. Overcoming the bias problem is done through bootstrapping, identifying a reference frame. Against the background of knowledge types, epistemic (theory) and technic (praxis), emerge inductive (synthetic) and deductive (analytic) methods of establishing quality reference frames. Bringing it all together, we have a philosophy of research. We all as students with the core ethos of loving truth are ourselves processes embedded in dialectics, or unity of opposites that describes knowledge space, from the infinitesimal to infinity. As the etymology of “research” says, humanity is wandering in search of itself.

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