ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Three Views of Science in the Islamic World The Epistemic View of Science: For and Against the Method An important channel through which the contemporary Islamic world, especially in the last three decades of the 20th century, has come to terms with modern science is philosophy science as developed in the West.

The impact of the deconstruction of the epistemological hegemony of 19th century positivism together with the critique of Newtonian physics and scientific objectivism and realism on the Islamic world has been stupendous and caused a torrential release of intellectual energy among students and intellectuals.

Needless to say, the influx of ideas associated with such names as Kuhn, Feyerabend and Popper and their current students continues almost unabated in spite of the fact that the post-antirealist thinking on science seems to have come to a serious stalemate. Being on the receiving end of this debate, many Muslim students and intellectuals are still experimenting with these ideas with little effort, as we shall see shortly, to extrapolate their full implications.

Before doing that, however, a few words of clarification on the scope of contemporary philosophy of science are in order. The primary concern of the contemporary philosophy of science is to establish the validity, or lack thereof, of the truth claims of modern natural sciences.

The theory-observation dichotomy, fact-value distinction, experimentation, objectivity, scientific community, history and sociology of science, and a host of other problems stand out, inter alia , as the most important issues of the field, which leaves no aspect of the scientific enterprise untouched. What concerns us here, however, is the emphasis of the philosophy of science on epistemology to the point of excluding any ontological or metaphysical arguments.

The majority of contemporary philosophers of science, including such celebrated vanguards as Kuhn, Popper and Feyerabend, construe science primarily as an epistemic structure that claims to explain the order of physical reality within the exclusive framework of scientific methods. Scientific realism, anti-realism, instrumentalism, empiricism are all, needles to say, anchored in different notions of knowledge with profound implications for the natural as well as the human sciences.

Given its exclusive concern with epistemic claims involved, contemporary philosophy of science can be stated as the epistemology of science.