The Full Circle Transmission of Ideas & the Muslim Social Scientist

Abstract

Science Without Philosophy?
Many of our readers and contributors have raised questions regarding the
various definitions of social science and their relation to the scope of MISS.
Definitions of social science have changed with time and place, and one of the
reasons for that is not what is “social,” but what is “science”? “Science” in
French, or “wissenschaft” in German, do not translate exactly the same as
“science” in English. In English speaking world, “science” has an association
with hard sciences while social sciences have been tacitly considered to be soft
sciences, or not sciences at all. Such a distinction does not exist in other
languages.
It is not our intent here to provide a mere taxonomy of the meanings of
science, but to develop an understanding as well as a consensus that social
sciences and their sub-disciplines are, without exception, based on certain
paradigms that are philosophical in nature. Being a social scientist without the
knowledge of these philosophical assumptions, upon which the paradigms of
the socia1 sciences rest, is to willingly escape the full picture. Proper
philosophical training, therefore, has a deep nexus with the methods of social
science, and constitutes a necessary pre-requisite of understanding the
paradigms. Paradigms establish the agenda and the agenda dictates the policy.
social sciences therefore become a vehicle of understanding the society in
consonance with the accepted philosophical truths.
Philosophical exposition of concepts and ideas in turn necessitates a
definition of philosophy itself. All definitions of philosophy will point to
certain “givens” or a priori assumptions that precede all scientific inquiry. If
social sciences stay within the realm of the positivist paradigm, the problem
may seemingly be solved, but reducing inquiry to empiricism has its own pitfalls
and the atomistic division in today’s academia is a direct result of that.
Further, it restricts the scope of those social scientists who also happen to be
believers in transcendental Truth. Conversely, to the degree that philosophy is ...