METHODOLOGY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES
Year:2008 | Volume:14 | Issue:54|Papers Count:9

The viewpoint of independence of the two fields of science and religion attempts to first, end the conflict of these two fields and second, stress the role of science in managing the unspecific religious fields.Ayatullah Javadi Amoli asserts that this segregation of science and religion is the product of a wrong image of science and religion. He believes that the correct relationship between science and religion is based on the position of intellect in the geometry of religious knowledge.In this view, intellect along with Quran and Sunnat provides religious knowledge. Therefore, intellectual epistemology and scientific knowledge are not outside the jurisprudence of religious epistemology and never contrast with religion. In fact, intellect contrasts word-of-mouth not religion. In this view, science is completely religious and there is no such thing as secular science. In this article, the bases and assumptions of this theory are stated, and the theory's applicability in picturing scientific religion and Islamization of sciences are studied.

Even though the highest level of understanding human being is a philosophical understanding of him, human being as a social reality can be experimentally understood only when philosophical understanding can be reduced to the paradigm level and then the scientific understanding level. Meanwhile, paradigm is a set of logical statements that is accepted by the scientific society and answers the basic questions on the ontological, epistemological, methodological, anthropological and axiological assumptions of science. In this article, after introducing the dominant paradigms in humanities (positivism, hermeneutic, critical theory), it is attempted to analyze the responses of each of these paradigms to anthropological questions. Familiarity with dominant humanities paradigms' views of human's nature can open grounds for criticizing liberalist, critical and humanist theories and develop a common sense of human nature in divine paradigm. This serves as a preface to theorizing in religious social sciences for a better explanation of human and social events.

Social sciences are responsible for understanding human being, identifying problems and developing a plan for solving such issues. Contemporary Science studies show that science is a cultural and humane phenomenon and is value laden.After proposing the problem of crisis in contemporary social sciences, this article studies the necessity of organizing a new movement in this field and suggests critical studies as means of localization of social sciences. In this way, some critical points from different perspectives in modem science assumptions are analyzed, the necessity of theorization in local social sciences is mentioned, and the main prerequisites of such necessity are depicted. 

The prevalent conception of science and knowledge in Iran and Islamic countries is distinguished from the modern conception of science in the industrial world. Based on this, it is explained why Islamic countries still have not accepted the modern conception of science, along with common examples. This differentiation of conceptions of science helps us explain the conception of religious science or sciences clearly. With the differentiation of designated religious science and exclusive religious science it can be explained why designated religious science is desirable and exclusive religious science is undesirable.

This article includes critical notes on the prevalent perspective, which claims that by considering the deep gap between traditional and modern science one can offer an explanation of underdevelopment. These critical notes include psychologism, chronological problems, a positivist perception of science, and its obligation to a kind of technocracy. It will be shown that how a combination of such problems can provide an inappropriate explanation of the relation of science, tradition, and development.

This article has five parts. The first part will be devoted to the definition of scientific theory and its importance in science and philosophy of science. In the second part, after offering some examples from different sciences, the differences between scientific laws and scientific theories will be examined. Logical positivists believed that scientific theories are linguistic entities. In part three, a review of their opinions on the structure of scientific theories, which is called "the classical view," will be offered. After a brief review of realism and instrumentalism in the classical view in the fourth part, some of the most famous criticism of the classical view will be listed in the last part.

The paper pursues two main objectives. First, it attempts to provide a straightforward overview of those branches of science studies that enable us to investigate various aspects of the complex phenomenon of science and to manage it. Based upon the conceptual frameworks introduced, the paper then focuses on the notion of scientific originality and tries to pave the way for accounting for the nature and level of originality in a typical scientific system. All of these, in the end, lead to proposition of a package of suggestions about effective policy-making requirements for enhancing creativity and originality in scientific productions.