This text names, and gives the logical relations to, fundamental categories of theoretical, methodological and empirical problems. They are based on naive realism, and a correspondence theory of truth- type thinking.
The first and innermost intuitive notion is the idea. This is an illogical stream of images and sensations. Then these images get a structure of a sort - which one can follow through ones own mind. This is called a conception. Formalized conceptions are named concepts. Concepts formed together become a theory. The knowledge of how to apply a the theory to a research situation is called a methodology. The operationalized form of the theory for research purposes, after it’s transformed by your methodology, is called your method. If it is for engineering purposes it is called technique.
The researcher in the field is ontologically speaking a subject, and epistemically speaking subjective. The image created in the researchers brain, that which bear the subjective characteristics, is called his phenomenal experience. What is perceived is called reality - or, if one wants to add emphasis, ontic reality. What we perceive in reality are objects and subjects. These categories are ontological, naming respectively inorganic matter, and organic life. The unprocessed information streaming from objects and subjects onto us, either in the form of sound waves, light rays, pressure or anything else we can sense - is called presentation. The form this information takes in our phenomenal experience is called the representation. Though these representations bear the characteristics of our subjective interpretation, they may contain information with the same logical pattern as the causal pattern of reality. The technical term for this will be presentation/representation- isomorphy; but we will more generally speak of this as objective or factual knowledge. Entities of factual knowledge are called facts.The degree to which single concepts or logical connections are in an isomorphic relation to ontic causality, is called the degree of correspondence. The degree to which a theory corresponds to reality is called it’s coherence.
Theory has a descriptive relationship to reality, and their descriptions are often either anachronistic (structural) or diachronic (functional). In ontology we discriminate between constitutive causality, and temporal causality. The researchers relation to reality, both in this constituted subjectivity and in his subject- relation, is called his perspective. The phenomenal experience resulting from the researchers method and perspective will take the form of ideas and conceptions.
There are two processes of abstraction. One is the abstraction of fact from reality, the other is the abstraction of concepts from ideas. Abstractions appear in our mind as mental objects available for scrutiny. Fact and concept have a complicated relationship in our phenomenal experience - where they will remain as almost overlapping categories of thought. We may be successful in holding facts as ideas in our mind, in which many conceptions may be tried to find the one form at the same time most corresponding to the fact and to our coherent theoretical structure. Any extant concept or fact is positively stated. The logical processing of factual and conceptual information is called deduction. The addition of more facts of varying degrees of isomorphy (but always some) is called induction. Non- corresponding, or dysmorphic, facts bear upon conceptions and facts negatively - changing them by subtraction. The belief in epistemic progression through discovery of positive inductive facts is called positivism. The danger of positivism is to bloat your theory to encompass every fact. The belief in epistemic progression through the discovery of negative facts is called falsificationism. Statements can only be negative in relation to another fact. This is because negative statements also are statements - that is; they must be positively stated. These statements can result from a dysmorphic presentation/representation relationship (or error), leading you to make a false negative statement bearing on the original theory.
Inductive facts that bear upon a theory in such a way that their existence is incommensurable to other concepts in the theory create the situation of a paradox, oxymoron or aporia. The resolvement of these may sometimes lead to paradigm shifts.
While we call our coherent collection of concepts “theory”, we call our collection of facts either “empirical” or “scientific”- knowledge.
One of the main problems of knowledge in the social sciences is separating fact from concept.
