Post Your Answer

I will try and answer your question from the perspective of carrying out social research as this often raises a number of theoretical questions  that relate to ontology and epistemology. Ontology refers to what sorts of things exist in the social world and assumptions about the form and nature of that social reality. It is concerned with whether or not social reality exists independently of human understanding and interpretation. Broadly speaking of Ontology,  there are 3 distinct ontological positions identified are realism, idealism and materialism. 1. Realism claims that there is an external reality independent of what people may think or understand it to be. 2. Idealism maintains that reality can only be understood via the human mind and socially constructed meanings. 3. Materialism also claims that there is a real-world but it is only the material or physical world that is considered to be real. Epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge and ways of knowing and learning about social reality.  Two main perspectives for knowing are positivism and interpretivism. Constructivism and ‘naturalistic’ are terms commonly referred to in the literature.

In my opinion, Ontology deals with what kinds of things exist. Epistemology deals with what we can know and how we know it (the means and conditions for knowledge), including how we can know what exists.The two are interconnected, since how we can know depends on the nature of the objects of knowledge, and determining what exists and its nature depends on how we can know. The ontology includes physical objects, minds, events, properties, values, and abstract entities such as numbers and sets. Epistemology might attempt to define what it is to know: e.g. to improve on the traditional view of knowledge as “justified true belief”.

I thought it could have been clarified having a little fun with the definitions, and we are speaking from educational research. Ontology is the branch of metaphysics is concerned with identifying, in the most general terms, in other words, the questions like: What is existence? and What is the nature of existence? Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge itself, its possibility, scope, and general basis. More broadly: How do we go about knowing things? or How do we separate true ideas from false ideas? or How do we know what is true? or “How can we be confident when we have located ‘truth’?” So, ontology is about what is true and epistemology is about methods of figuring out those truths. Hope, you could learn from this information.