Epistemological approaches and the ontological resolution in educational policy

Abstract

The article proposes a way to address epistemological issues in education policy research through an epistemological script that describes the conditions under which epistemic questions in the context of educational policy make sense. A historical reconstruction of the philosophical context of the emergence of the question about the scientific nature of knowledge is exposed, describing the sociological turn on the epistemic justification of knowledge, in favor of a perspective that privileges the context of discovery (socio-cultural) over the context of justification (logic). We focus on the scientificity of educational policy knowledge, aiming at re-discovering the fundamental epistemic demands in ontological terms, which allows to make explicit the basic thesis of work: the nature of the epistemological problems in education policy depends on specifying the object of its study. We finally refer to the convergence between theoretical issues and their practical implications.

Keywords

• Educational Policy.
• Epistemic dilemmas.
• Science and Society.