With recent calls for expanding the scope and rigor of engineering education research, use of qualitative methods to answer research questions that can not be answered through quantitative methods is taking on increasing significance. Well-designed qualitative studies often build on epistemological consistency across theoretical perspectives, research questions, and research methods. We examine...

Research on epistemic beliefs has been hampered by lack of validated models and measurement instruments. The most widely used instrument is the Epistemological Questionnaire, which has been criticized for validity, and it has been proposed a new instrument based in the Epistemological Questionnaire: the Epistemic Belief Inventory. The Spanish-language version of Epistemic Belief Inventory was a...

Contextualism in philosophy of language and in epistemology are two distinct but closely entangled projects. The epistemological thesis is grounded in a semantic claim concerning the context-sensitivity of the predicate “know”: we gain insight into epistemological problems by investigating our linguistic intuitions concerning knowledge attribution sentences. Our aim here is to evaluate the plau...

Identifying the developmental origins of scientific thinking, as well as its endpoint, provides an essential framework for understanding its development. The origins of scientific thinking are claimed here to lie in attainments in epistemological understanding, beginning with the understanding achieved at about 4 years of age that assertions generated by human minds are distinguishable from an ...

We show a lot of respect for science today. To back up our claims, we tend to appeal to scientific methods. It seems that we all agree that these methods are effective for gaining the truth. We can ask why science has its special status as a supplier of knowledge about our external world and our bodies. Of course, one should not always trust what scientists say. Nonetheless, epistemological jus...

This study investigated whether and how university students’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge i.e., epistemological beliefs affected L2 academic reading ability directly and/or indirectly via self-regulated learning strategies. EFL college students (n =196) answered the reading section of a TOEFL test, two parts of Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire and Epistemological Beliefs...

In recent years, Hjørland has developed a typology of basic epistemological approaches to KO that identifies four basic positions—empiricism, rationalism, historicism/hermeneutics, and pragmatism—with which to characterize the epistemological bases and methodological orientation of KOSs. Although scholars of KO have noted that the design of a single KOS may incorporate epistemological-methodolo...

Thomas E. Uebel has recently claimed that, contrary to popular opinion, none of the philosophers of the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists were proponents of epistemological foundationalism. According to the considerations of the current discussion, however, Uebel's conclusion is erroneous, especially with respect to the work of Moritz Schlick. The chief reason Uebel offers to support his con...

Over the past several decades, increasing overlap has emerged between projects in mainstream epistemology and corresponding projects in the philosophy of education. This is no doubt in part because epistemology’s focus has broadened far beyond the post-Gettier project of analysing propositional knowledge; front and centre on the contemporary epistemological agenda are philosophical problems ass...

The paper describes the relational semantics of knowledge organization system (KOS) and their dependence on a reference system –epistemological position and conception of language and semantics. It starts with characterization of the role and functions of relational semantics in information retrieval systems, with description of types of relational semantics and their understanding in different...