What is ontology?
Ontology is the study and thought concepts based around what is real, truth or an illusion. The human race has had an incremental rise in the understanding and explanation of the world around them to an ever increasing degree of certainty and scope through science. This was the end game of an evolutionary process over thousands of years through research and experimentation. Religion has held back this process through a manipulative control mechanism that tends to lean peoples thought process into a “head in the sand” scenario where its just that way because (insert god) designed it that way. This of course was dominant in the early years of civilizations natural mind state where knowledge had not progressed past “the sun rises because we sacrificed a goat yesterday to the gods” in a meaningful way yet. Through that long process (that I will not detail here) we have gone from cavemen making fire, through to the internet and instant communications with a process that has developed to the point where information is not just believed, but vetted by the greater hive mind to be of an legitimate source with proof and process of claims. The power of information being freely available in this way in the past 30 years has skyrocketed the ability to quickly and efficiently find truth from the reality around us.
This how ever does not account for the concepts that cannot be explained or the answer is likely to never be solved because of the nature of the question moving into questioning existence itself. These are the fascinating questions that drive modern science through research. The two slit experiment is a perfect example of a question that cannot be answered… currently, but questions reality itself in its outcomes. Just the literal process of observing a particle in transit changes the outcome of how the particle reacts in the future AND the past! This is seen through the way the particle reacts as a wave or individual particle. How can the past be affected by the future? or is this an illusion! and we are yet to understand a hidden secret about the fundamental laws of nature?
How is it relevant to research?
The ideas above are the fundamental ways in which we discover new and interesting technologies. This advances our knowledge to improve mostly our comfort and ability to control and decipher our reality and at its core gain wealth and knowledge to reproduce optimally with a brutal vetting process!… :D. To have this base knowledge in the process of learning and vetting information in a verified way gives us better results and increases the efficiency and quality of the ideas we create and problems we solve. Understanding previous mistakes or discoveries and changing the process to get better results is at its core how the human mind works and relates to all fields.
What is the connection between ontology and epistemology in a research context?
Ontology and epistemology are so closely related as they overlap in many ways. Epistemology is the study of knowledge where as ontology is the study of existence and meaning. Through knowledge you understand more about the unanswerable questions which drive the question to be divided up into smaller solvable sections. And whether that understanding is wrong or not is irrelevant, as the process loops continuously refining the results till a more accurate outcome is acquired. Do you exist? Is freewill an illusion?
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