Abstract
In this chapter the basic position of the book will be delineated. This is very much about the crisis of our social sciences and about a concomitant distorted worldview. Actually it is about the wrong foundation of our social sciences. History has shown how these sciences have evolved as a wrong kind of copy of the natural sciences, with a concomitant degeneration of the social sciences; a degeneration which has ultimately led to a contemporary crisis of our sciences and humanities and in society at large (cf. Sandywell 1996, p. xv). So, the topic of concern to be dealt with will be nothing less than The Future of the Sciences and Humanities (cf. Tindemans et al. 2002). The basic problem of the contemporary crisis seems to be that the system we are in as participating scientists is not able to reflect on itself (Sandywell 1996, p. xv). The functioning of us as scientists doing our science is comparable with the metaphor of the functioning of the eye which Giambattista Vico (1744/1984) used, in his book about The New Science: of the eye which is not able to see the eye itself (proposition 331). In direct relation to that inability, he described the need for the use of a mirror to see itself. This is also what we, as social scientists, need today for reflection on our doing science (Sandywell 1996, p. xv). As was the case for Vico, this reflection on the man-made construction of our world may be regarded as a turning point for our ‘wo/man-made’ view of the world. We may become aware that reality, as we perceive it, is not a given reality but an invented, ‘man-made’ reality (see e.g. Watzlawick 1984, p. 9; and Sandywell 1999, p. x). Just because it is a kind of invented reality, this reality cannot be the true reality (Watzlawick 1984, p. 9). This moment of reflection, of looking in the mirror, may make us aware that science itself, like reality, is not an independent variable! Both kinds of invention may be considered to be a kind of choice made in our history of science: a choice which could have been a different choice, made by men (see e.g. Vico 1744/1968; Whitehead 1925/1967, p. 200).
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- 1.
In the journal Nexus, nr. 48, pp. 191–192.
- 2.
See Tristan Fecit (2000): available online at: http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/norton.html
- 3.
T.S. Eliot (1922). “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In: The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.
- 4.
See Vygotsky (1926/1997) for his contribution on the crisis in psychology, which was not published until after his death.
- 5.
This kind of immaturity may be linked with the state of immaturity, described by Kant, in his famous text on Enlightenment, in which he connects this state of self-incurred immaturity with the courage to think: Sapere aude!
- 6.
Maybe his very first work was about educational psychology around the same age or before (Vygotsky 1926/1997).
- 7.
cf. the role of agency in the recent book of Margaret Archer 2003.
- 8.
To master, here, is to be taken as very much different from the notion of control, of the calculable, of the predictable.
- 9.
See Dewey, in Freedom and Culture, about the greatest danger of becoming blind to the shortcomings of our own “working theories” (in Clark 2002, p. 388).
- 10.
See Margaret Archer 2000, p. 306.
- 11.
This seems to be the usual misunderstanding in viewing the role of theory, and that of practice.
- 12.
See Dewey, in Freedom and Culture, about the greatest danger of becoming blind to the shortcomings of our own “working theories” (in Clark 2002, p. 388); cf. situation of deadlock, in Archer (1995), p. 26, about programs of Methodological Collectivism and Individualism.
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Jörg, T. (2011). The Crisis in the Social Sciences. In: New Thinking in Complexity for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1303-1_3
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