Research On Several Scientific Epistemological Issues Caused By Big Data

The emergence of Big Data has brought a new scientific and technological revolution to human history,which has not only profoundly changed the living conditions,learning styles,and working methods of modern human society,but has also invisibly influenced modern people's cognitive mode and ways of thinking.More importantly,Big Data has influenced traditional scientific research from the perspectives of methodology,epistemology,scientific value theory,and so on,and has enhanced the transformation of traditional science in the aspects of research objects,research methods,research levels,and research types.It also led to a series of new changes and challenges in study of contemporary philosophy of science.These changes will trigger changes from the perspectives of ontology,axiology,methodology and epistemology philosophically,and become one of the frontier issues in the field of philosophy of science.This thesis will conduct a discussion on changes of scientific research generated by Big Data,as well as some scientific philosophical thinking caused by big data.Through review,investigation and analysis,this thesis divides the influence of Big Data on scientific research into two major issues:whether Big Data develops new epistemology;whether Big Data leads to a new scientific paradigm.The specific research approaches in the thesis are respectively carried out around the above two main issues.Firstly,by analyzing the definition,connotation and characteristics of big data,the thesis lays a foundation for the following discussions.As to whether big data uses new epistemology,the paper analyzes the relationships between scientific progress and the development of epistemology by investigating the development of traditional epistemology.Meanwhile,it specially discusses the subject and object as well as the process and results of big data epistemology.With regard to whether big data brings paradigm shifts,the paper compares the old and new paradigms from the perspective of Kuhn's paradigm theory,and discusses separately about the paradigm shifts of big data in different disciplines such as natural science,humanities and social sciences.Finally,the paper analyzes some specific philosophical Big Data-related issues,and gives additional argumentation for the two main issues mentioned above.For example,it discusses whether the correlativity replaces the causality,whether the paradigm theory is the terminated,the relationship between the small data and big data in the Age of Big Data,and so on.Through the above systematic investigation and analysis,the opinion held by this thesis is as below:Big data has brought epistemological changes to scientific research.There are four specific performances:1.The change of research object;2.The change of research subject;3.The change of research method;4.The change of research type;5.The change of research thinking.Due to the limitation of different subject attributes and the level of big data technology,big data has brought different paradigm shifts in the field of Natural Science and Humanities and Social Sciences.In the field of Natural Science,a breakthrough in data-intensive scientific research has produced a "fourth scientific paradigm".In the field of natural sciences,the data-intensive scientific research has made great breakthroughs,giving rise to the "fourth paradigm".In the sector of social sciences,the paradigm shift brought by Big Data is the occurrence of computational social science.Whereas the change in the humanities is more about the way of research and the combination with other disciplines to engage in interdisciplinary research.Concerning text recognition and semantic understanding,since Big Data technology is still in its infancy,comparatively the application of Big Data in their paradigm reconstruction is still at a slow pace.