ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Alternative Sociology: Probing into the Sociological Thought of Allama M. T. Jafari Chapter 2: Human Sciences and Being Normativity versus Descriptivity Allama Jafari is one of the contemporary Iranian thinkers who have looked at the nature of scientific inquiry in a very systematic fashion.

Very little is known by the scientific community around the globe about his metatheoretical engagements on the nature of science and the relation of scientific rationality in natural sciences and the distinction of the former from humanities and all branches of knowledge that touch upon the question of human existence. What is science? This has been one of the most perplexing questions in contemporary era as the building-blocks of rationality have undergone serious metamorphoses.

For instance, Chalmers argues that science is not equivalent solely with empiricism. In What Is This Thing Called Science? (1976) he outlines the shortcomings of naive empiricist accounts of science, and describes and assesses post-positivist attempts to replace them. Allama Jafari in Iran during 70s in a series of lectures on Sociology and Human Being approaches the questions of science, human sciences and the most crucial of all concepts within humanities, i.e.

‘human being’ in a very novel fashion, which will be unfolded along the course of this research. Allama Jafari talks about ‘scientific inquiry’ in the context of his sociological debates. One may pause and ask what does it mean and how did Allama Jafari define the inquiry in a scientific framework?

In the philosophy of science, models of scientific inquiry have two functions: first, to provide a descriptive account of how scientific inquiry is carried out in practice, and second, to provide an explanatory account of why scientific inquiry succeeds as well as it appears to do in arriving at genuine knowledge of its objects. Such accounts tend to reflect different philosophical positions in epistemology. In other words, the search for scientific knowledge extends far back into antiquity.

At some point in the past, at least by the time of Aristotle, philosophers recognized that a fundamental distinction should be drawn between two kinds of scientific knowledge — roughly, knowledge that and knowledge why . It is one thing to know that each planet periodically reverses the direction of its motion with respect to the background of fixed stars; it is quite a different matter to know why .