Conventionally, methodology is considered to be about the identification of “correct" answers to important questions. With Gramsci and Foucault as our guides we should ask: “Who decides the questions?” Indeed, whenever someone claims their answer is correct, the question methodologists might ask is, “How do you know your answer is correct?” Still within the orbit of Cartesian thought, today “science" is widely regarded as the embodiment of “correct answers" and the “scientific method"—deductive, hypothetical, selective by way of falsification—is conjectured to be the only certain way to demonstrate that one's answer is “correct.” In contrast to this success-oriented approach, it was long held, but nonetheless disputed, that the unifying and indeed essential presumption is that: “Knowing is knowing the truth.”(5) Here the word “scientific" has an aura of revealed truth, an uncovering of the covered.
It is a common, though lamentable, fallacy to think of science as being characterized by a particular methodology, or prescribed way of acquiring knowledge. However, a moment's reflection on the diverse methodologies employed by scientists, ranging from the highly abstract mathematical models of the theoretical physicists to the controlled laboratory experiments of biologists and the painstaking field work of the geologists should suffice to disabuse anyone of that notion. Instead, what characterizes a scientific approach is its ontology, or the study of what we can possibly know,(6) and its epistemology, or the study of what we can possibly know. In this regard the modern world is qualitatively different from all previous civilizations not because a certain group of savants identified as scientists have invented a way of adding another brick to the wall of knowledge, but rather because the members of that fraternity have invented a set of rules for “discovering" (deciding) what is false. The set of rules for eschewing what is false is the epistemology of science...