Throughout history, we see that many very important people come from various backgrounds, and these many backgrounds inform their world view and how they think that things will operate. For example, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought that people were inherently evil, needing a government over them to keep them in line. John Locke (also an English philosopher) came from a different point of view, and thought that people were inherently good, or at least neutral, and that governments were a necessary fact of life, but needed to be kept on a short leash. It all depends on the perspective. And this concept, paired with the term “ontology” is what we discussed in class a while ago (along with some other things that I’ll get to eventually).

If you get my example above, that’s basically how I understand ontology. It’s the summation of all of someone’s background experiences combined into one central philosophy that forms the basis for how they view the world. I like to think that ontology happens whether one likes it or not; it’s as if Schrödinger’s cat only had one result, but each person also gets a result that explicitly unique. Well couldn’t someone’s ontology change, you ask? Sure! But the person would have to go through some serious experiences to change their entire world view.

Moving to a smaller scale, (though not much smaller) is the concept of a methodology. This would be the guiding principles for how one conducts themselves in a certain setting. Let’s look at a mundane example. Different athletes have to train for different types of goals: sprinters for speed, weightlifters for strength, swimmers for endurance, gymnasts for technique. Now there is some crossover in all of these categories, and that’s fine, but each group concentrates on different types of exercises so that they can create their desired goals. This can be applied to other things as well; namely research. Different groups of tools make up a methodology that can be utilized to achieve a goal.

Now I’m going to switch to talking about myself and my self–diagnosed experiences with these two concepts. If you had asked me what I thought my ontology was with respect to whether or not we can observe something without it changing, I would first ask you what the heck an ontology was, but then I would give you an answer that is something along the lines of “of course we can observe things without imparting variance on the data”–and that would come from my parents trying to raise a good little physicist! A couple of years ago, right after taking chemistry, I would have told you that it is impossible to be absolutely impartial (I would also 100% try to relate this to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle). At this moment, I can feel the pull of both, but I would say that I lean more towards the concept that we can be impartial observers in our research.

To cap it all off, I would also like to posit the belief that I think that literally anything that we, as humans, can be known can be researched. Life at the bottom of the ocean? For sure! Shifts in language? You’re darn tootin’! Even uncertainty principles can be researched! Having limitations to what we can know only proves that there is a reason to be researching everything–knowing that we cannot go beyond a certain point of knowledge is possibly the most intriguing research ever thought of!

But that’s just my opinion.

Until next time!

Nathan