Action research is basically a self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants (e.g., clinicians, researchers in hospital settings) in order to improve the rationality and justification of their own practices, their understanding of those practices, and the situations in which the practices are performed [ 42].
Many researchers in this tradition simply ignore traditional epistemological concerns with truth, justification and rationality.
Pursuing an evolutionary approach to epistemology raises fundamental questions about the concepts of knowledge, truth, realism, justification and rationality.
First, researchers in the social studies of science tend to embrace a form of relativism about the traditional concepts of epistemic justification and rationality, by rejecting the idea of universal and objective epistemic norms.
Such epistemology can survive, and even thrive, with an expanded conception of how the truth-goal (and the justification and rationality goals) can be served, namely, with the help of well-designed social and interpersonal practices and institutions.
There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims, whether truth (or knowledge understood in the "weak" sense of true belief) (Goldman 1999), critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the "strong" sense that includes justification) (Scheffler 1973/1989, Siegel 1988 , 1997 2005), or understanding (Elgin 1999, 1999a).
Notturno went on to write his Ph.D. dissertation: "Objectivity, Rationality and the Third Realm: Justification and the Grounds of Psychologism".
This philosophical tradition focused on themes such as meaning change and incommensurability of terms across world views (e.g., paradigms), scientific change (e.g., revolutionary: Kuhn 1970; evolutionary: Toulmin 1972), the interweaving of context of discovery and context of justification, and scientific rationality (Preston 2012; Bird 2013; Swoyer 2014).
Those two features are: (1) the introduction of a formal apparatus for inductive logic; (2) the introduction of a pragmatic self-defeat test (as illustrated by Dutch Book Arguments) for epistemic rationality as a way of extending the justification of the laws of deductive logic to include a justification for the laws of inductive logic.
(iv) Justifications via Principles of Rationality Another approach is to try to show how simplicity principles follow from other better established or better understood principles of rationality.[12] For example, some philosophers just stipulate that they will take 'simplicity' as shorthand for whatever package of theoretical virtues is (or ought to be) characteristic of rational inquiry.
