Essay --

Knowledge and philosophy are one of the key components for studying accounting. Knowledge is created when you have gathered facts and information. As suggested by Arrington & Schweiker (1992) ‘nothing counts as knowledge until it is argued before and assented by a research community’. This means that when new knowledge is created, it is always undergoes an enormous scrutiny by peers, so that it is nearly perfect. Kuhn (1970), Davis (1971) and Collins (1985) also suggest that any knowledge should be easily accessible by the public e.g. the users of accounting or accountants themselves. To obtain knowledge we have to make some observations. These observations are then transformed by the process of induction into laws and theories. Therefore knowledge is seen as creating a reality. As mentioned before knowledge is especially important in the construction of realities. This is because accountants in general created these economic realities, this leads to an expectations gap between the accountants and the users, hence accountants are also seen as communicators for these realities. However because accountant construct these realities it can become biased and objective (Morgan 1988). Accountants also persuade users to accept the realities that they have created. On the other hand philosophy helps us to better understand and access to knowledge. This type of study is known as epistemology. Epistemology creates a foundation of the basis of knowledge. One of the bases of knowledge is truth and fact. However this can be a very problematic area because if a statement is deemed to be true then it is automatically a factual statement. This causes problems because the words true and fact are interchangeable i.e. if a statement is a fact... ...tely it may change our knowledge. This leads on to my point that knowledge and philosophy is always changing, this then changes the world we live in. This is because eventually we change our concepts and theories. For example if a theory is changed, that is related to the conceptual framework and social construction, and then this too is changed. I have seen that in the creation of knowledge and philosophy, the process of induction is vital because it allows us to build theories and more importantly economic realities. When studying or researching accounting we sometimes come across a few paradigms such as the All Ravens are Black paradigm and the inductivist turkey. These paradigms helps to better understand knowledge and also it can separate true from false and fact. It can help us to refine our knowledge so that the end result is almost prefect e.g. neutrality.