METHODOLOGY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES
Year:2008 | Volume:14 | Issue:56|Papers Count:11

Molla Sadra's Transcendental Philosophy still has opposers who view it as a mixed school that has compiled ontological teachings of different epistemological fields - peripatetic philosophy, illuminationist philosophy, theosophy, theology and Islamic texts - in an unharmonious structure and regardless of a philosophical method. In this article, based on the statements of Molla Sadra, the unique methodological attributes of transcendental philosophy are shown using the descriptive analysis method. Additionally, it is shown that transcendental philosophy, while using contents of various ontological fields in Islamic civilization, uses only philosophical method in proving or rejecting statements.This article also includes methodological review of theoretical theosophy in view of transcendental philosophy, methodological distinction of transcendental and illuminationist philosophy, the position of intuition and Islamic teachings in transcendental philosophy, comparison of the traditional method with rational and intuitive methods in understanding the ontological truths, terminology of illuminated intellect in transcendental philosophy and manifestation of multi-disciplinary studies in transcendental philosophy.

Grounded theory is one of the methods used in qualitative research. This is based on inductive approach. This methodology is an independent methodology that is used for immeasurable phenomena and is supposed as a context for analyzing data. In this method, after theoretical sampling, gathering and coding and analyzing the data are performed simultaneously. Data analysis is done by open coding, axial coding and selective coding. Theoretical sampling continues on to theoretical saturation. In theoretical saturation, theory will be extracted from the saturated data. This article aims to introduce this methodology which can be used in social psychology, management, health and sociology. Introducing its potentials and research steps are the main goals of this paper.

For qualitative research, judgment about integrity of research process and quality of final product requires different evaluative criteria from quantitative research. Qualitative researchers object to and reject the criteria used by quantitative researchers when evaluating their work. Instead, qualitative researchers have developed alternative criteria in response to their specific research ideals.This article includes a consideration of the notion of approach and its impact on the subject matter of science; a criterion besides quantification that implicitly underpin all conceptions of science, and entails reframing the notions of internal and external validity and reliability within qualitative research.The article attempts to show how researchers choose from these alternatives and that the selected criteria should be compatible with the nature of the research in question (its methodology, aims and assumptions).

The article first studies the basic discussions on science and technology. Then, using a philosophical-analytic approach it is shown that the model of science and technology development can be described as Islamic-Iranian for two main reasons. Based on this introduction, it is argued that the national system of innovation is not sufficient to cover the concept of Islamic-Iranian model of science and technology development and that applying the concept of context system can provide a more comprehensive analysis in this case. In the second part of the article, the importance of scientific policy versus research method and the motivation for concentration on Islamic-Iranian model are studied. Then, strategies for realizing the Islamic-Iranian model of science and technology development are offered. The ideas of these strategies come from discussions with scholars of this field. Then, these ideas have been incorporated III brainstorm meetings of experts of science and technology policy.

This article reviews the major teachings of policy formation in modernism paradigm by deconstruction method to reconstruct the discipline in the context of postmodernism. Based on this, the first section studies the key modernism teachings such as objectivism, rationality, development, unitarianism and their impact on the modernism policy formation theory. The second section introduces postmodern teachings and reforms the policy formation theories in postmodern paradigm. Thus, postmodern criticism of modernism bases of policy formation in denying objectivism, development and improvement, irrationality and pluralism is discussed. The article does not claim that contrary to postmodern thinkers' approach, there is postmodern policy formation discipline in a metanarrative frame. Hence, the paper explains and criticizes modem policy formation theories in the new context.

The functionalist theory is one of the several classic theories in sociology, whose methodological framework was established by Emile Durkheim and was expanded from France to all of Europe and US. This article briefly reviews the social and scientific environment of Durkheim's era, and then analyzes the logical construct of functional explanation and describes the difference of this theory from teleological, utilitarianism and pragmatism. Obscurity of the key terms of this theory, namely normal situation, function and social system, unfalsifiability, unhistorical nature of this theory and its inability in explaining some of the social phenomena are being studied in this article. Finally, it is suggested that in applying functional explanation, special attention must be paid to its methodological problems and the impact of such problems on social studies.

The purpose of sociology of law is sociological and scientific study of the social being of law. Sociology of knowledge is a field of sociology that studies social determination of knowledge to show which part of human knowledge (shape, content, or both) has been caused by social factors. In this article, sociological concepts and views are used to study and categorize legal knowledge, four types of which have been introduced (legislative, judgmental, intellectual, and instructional). In this study, the necessity of basing legislative legal knowledge on religion, the rapid evolution of legal knowledge and the key role of judgmental legal knowledge have been analyzed in a sociological framework.