Researcher’s orientation
In the following sections, you can find my researcher’s orientation.
This is a work in progress, in two senses:
- In one sense, it is not exhaustive and I will be adding content as it occurs to me.
- In the other sense, it is an ever-changing document, since I will frequently change my mind about any part(s) of content herein.
1 Positionality
Positionality statements are about a reflexive understanding of one’s own world view and how it affects one’s own research (Darwin Holmes 2020; Goundar 2025; Jafar 2018; Lazard & McAvoy 2020; Tomlinson 2023). There isn’t a single accepted way of writing a positionality statement nor what should be covered in them. I personally take a positionality statement to be the social position of the researcher in the research landscape.
I identify as a neurodiverse male academic of Mediterranean ethnicity. I was born and raised in Northern Italy, but I have been living in the United Kingdom for a decade and I think of this country as my home. Most of my current research is about research methods and how research practices shape linguistic research. In this sense, I have an in-group point of view, being myself a researcher.
2 Philosophical stance
My philosophical stance is a syncretic integration of non-dual monism, anti-realism, holism, cosmopsychism, spiritualism, subjective Bayesian epistemology, and ecological awareness.
Ontologically, this framework entails an ultimate monistic reality that transcends Cartesian dualism (mental/physical plane), so that anti-realism is understood as rejecting the metaphysical framing of a strict mind-independent vs mind-dependent divide. Mind, consciousness, experience, and the cosmos are understood as manifestations of a single non-dual ultimate reality. Furthermore, cosmopsychism entails that the entire cosmos has a fundamental experiential aspect and that all entities have experience deriving from the cosmic experience. Holism, the idea of a unified whole which is more than the sum of its parts, is another central aspect of Stefano’s philosophical stance, and it is intended as applied to ontology (reality is whole), epistemology (knowledge is relational) and methodological (description and explanation requires whole-level analyses).
Bayesian epistemology, which I use in my research and teach in my courses, is grounded on belief updating under uncertainty and inference given priors representing belief and evidence. Under this stance, quantitative methods are viewed and practised not in a reductionist way (explaining phenomena based entirely on lower-level terms) but simply as representing phenomena numerically as one way of operationalise entities, events and relations.
3 Methodological theory
From the point of view of methodological theory and practice, I am an active advocate of Open Research practices for a more transparent, well-grounded and reflexive scholarship. Open Research encompasses “concepts of openness, transparency, rigor, reproducibility, replicability, and accumulation of knowledge” (Crüwell et al. 2019) put to the service of “making the content and process of producing evidence and claims transparent and accessible to others” (Munafò et al. 2017).1
I am also a supporter of the Slow Science movement, part of the broader “slow” movement (as in “slow-food”), which can be summarised with this quote from the manifesto: “We do need time to think. We do need time to digest. We do need time to misunderstand each other”.
Philosophy and science might seem two very unrelated fields, but in fact philosophy of science is an extremely important intersection of the two, with broad implications for research methods, from experiment planning, through statistical modelling, to inference. I’ll expand on this some time in the future, but for now I can strongly recommend the following books:
- Philosophy of science: Very short introduction (Okasha 2016).
- Understanding psychology as a science: An introduction to scientific and statistical inference (Dienes 2008).
- The Systems View of life: A unifying vision (Capra & Luisi 2018).
References
Footnotes
Open Research is a more inclusive term than the more common Open Science term.↩︎