A short guide to ontology and epistemology: Why everyone should be a realist

Every PhD student, and a few (un)lucky Master’s students will get asked:

‘What philosophical paradigm are you going to use?’

‘What’s your ontological and epistemological position?’

Now it’s completely fair to panic and have no idea where to begin. You might have heard a ridiculous number of terms used to describe different philosophical positions like subjectivism, constructivism, interpretivism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, positivism, objectivism, post-positivism, post-modernism, critical realism, critical theory, post-colonialism, pragmatism, structuralism… The list could go on and on. But which one are you going to pick?

Let me let you into a secret. The person asking you these questions probably also hasn’t got the foggiest what a philosophical paradigm is. Like you, they keep getting all these terms mixed up. Like you, they think that ontology and epistemology sounds like a hospital department focussing on bones and stem cells. Like you, they’ve probably been put off from looking into philosophy because too much of it seems dense for the sake of being dense, complex for the sake of being complex, discombobulated for the sake of being discombobulated.

That’s where this guide hopes to help out.

It starts off by explaining the concepts of ontology and epistemology.

It then defines what a philosophical paradigm is, before giving you a general framework to understand all the different positions.

It ends with a short pitch on why everyone should be a realist.