What do we mean by ontological and epistemological questions?

Prof Derik Gelderblom

Ontological questions have to do with the things we study in the social sciences, and epistemological
questions have to do with our knowledge. In order to clarify this, we first need to ask ourselves what
kinds of things we study in our disciplines. In Psychology, for example, we study the human personality;
in Sociology, we study society and social groups. However, if we start thinking about each of these
things, we realize that they are not straightforward objects. Unlike people who study, for example,
motor car designs in the 1930s, where it is easy to figure out the nature of the object we are studying,
the objects studied by social scientists are far more fuzzy, and difficult to define. A personality can be
defined as a combination of character traits that define an individual and that show a degree of internal
coherence. A society can be defined as a combination of people engaged in structured social interaction.
As you can see from these definitions, we are talking here about relatively complex objects. It is easy to
know if we are dealing with a car made in the 1930s or not. However, nobody has ever seen a
personality, or a society, as such, so our objects of study are not so easy to define. We can infer the
existence of these things, but they are not themselves easily observable. In physics, the equivalent
would be something like a magnetic field. We can see that it has effects, because it attracts metal filings,
so it must be real. However, we cannot easily observe the field as such. In the social sciences, we are
dealing with similar, abstract things. In my view, both the personality and society exist out there in the
real world. However, it is possible to formulate a position that none of these exist in a coherent and
stable form. Postmodernists, for example, may deny the existence of a coherent personality ready for
study, and point to its transient, ever-changing nature. And some economists will deny that societies
exist as things different from the people that make them up. Because of these difficulties, and unlike the
people who study car designs in the 1930s, social scientist also have to consider a large number of
questions about the nature of our objects of study that we call ontological questions. We have to ask of
our objects of study whether they really exist, and if they do exist, what their essential characteristics
are.

Partly because of the difficulty of defining our objects of study, social scientists also have to worry far
more about the best ways to get knowledge about our objects of study. It is not likely, once again, that
people who study car designs in the 1930s will have to worry that much about how they are going to get
valid and reliable knowledge about their study objects. In our case, unfortunately, we do need to worry
about that. Should we focus, for example, only on externally observable characteristics of people and
ignore their own perceptions about their world? In other words, how much weight should be give to the
feelings and perceptions of people in gaining knowledge about them? Because people can be so easily
mistaken about their own motivations (and because they may sometimes try to deliberately deceive us)
it is easy to argue that one should ignore those. One can argue that the rule should be ’Look at what
people do, not what they tell you’, because it is so easy to be misled about people’s real motivations and
beliefs. As a result, it can be argued that feelings and perceptions are not sources of valid and reliable
knowledge. This is not the last word on this, however. Another course of thinking claims that we must
focus precisely on people’s own understanding of their world, and not on their external behavior. The
argument here is that the human world is unlike the natural world, because it is a world of meanings.
This means that it cannot be studied in the same objective and external way as the natural sciences
study the natural world. These issues define the field of epistemology.