ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Alternative Sociology: Probing into the Sociological Thought of Allama M. T. Jafari Chapter 1: Relocating Scientific Rationality in Humanities Science in Retrospection Once upon a time the term science was associated with prestige, status, kudos, power, superiority, and truth.

However today it is very difficult to associate all these wonderful aspects with scientific enterprise due to intellectual turns which have brought havoc upon the pantheon of science. In particular, the truth-claim of science is not shared by all members of scientific community today.

In other words, issues of truth and feasibility in both ontological and epistemological fashions have separated their paths and each has become the sources of many controversies and conflicts as well as ideological battles and methodenstreit . This is not to argue that the scientific enterprise is passé but nobody can deny the crisis of western scientific enterprise in 21st century.

Of course, by western we don’t refer to an ethnic group, ideological camp or geographical location but to a mode of doing science and conceptualizing reality in all its multifaceted dimensions which is built upon the Cartesian philosophy.

Another way of talking about the crisis of modern science is to talk about the end of hegemony of logical empiricism which resulted in the births of various post-positivistic philosophies in science and social sciences as well as diversified discourses of postmodernisms along with hermeneutic approaches as well as phenomenological philosophies.

Looking retrospectively one could easily discern that there was a great time when science was considered as the cream of human intellectual achievement and science was equivalent to natural science and among them the physics was the towering model in rationalistic approach to reality.

In other words, to approach the gamut of reality in any dimension, one was inescapably dependent upon the natural scientific models which provided the best mathematical pattern in conceptualizing as well as quantifying the complexities of realities in any field. To put it differently, the authenticity of an intellectual activity was appraised in reference to its propinquity to available models and patterns in the discipline of physics.