An EPISTEMOLOGICAL APPROACH TO RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE POSTGRADUATE FORMATION

Abstract

Radically study the research methodology in the context of stricto sensu postgraduate is a necessity, as well as a broad-spectrum challenge for the formation and production of knowledge in this context. This premise implies to recognize the importance of understand, over the time, the epistemological roots that support the methodological ways of research, with decisive impacts on the subject-object relationship, the results, but especially in the formation of the students. Based on this, the objective of this text is to deepen the relationships between specific questions of research methodology and broad questions of method, based on an epistemological approach. To this, I realize a theoretical deepening based on my experiences in the context of postgraduate (master's and doctoral courses), highlighting the importance of the producing an epistemological approach to research methodology, considering implications for the formation and for the knowledge production. Otherwise, we run the risk of fostering a process of “epistemological alienation”. Think/propose an epistemological approach to the research methodology allows us to qualify the understanding of science, its internal processes and the production of knowledge in the scope of different areas of knowledge, an important and necessary effort for the formation in the postgraduate. In this case, epistemology stands as a possibility of questioning and radical methodological critical, in a movement that implies articulations between broad knowledge (the research as a teleological, axiological and epistemological process) and specific knowledge (the research as a rational, rigorous and systematized production of knowledge, with the method as a theoretical-practical battering ram).