Friendship as a scientific method

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meritxell Ramírez-i-Ollé
Keyword(s):  
Research Ethics ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Research Subjects ◽  
Sociology Of Scientific Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
Knowledge Formation ◽  
The Ideal

Friendships formed in the course of scientific research are common and should be foregrounded in discussions of how the sciences are done. Inspired by the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, I propose a ‘symmetrical’ analysis of friendships in both the social and natural sciences as a way of comparing knowledge-making practices. The research question that derives from this approach is: How are friendships with and between subjects generative of new forms of scientific knowledge and new types of relating? I provide an answer based on my experience of befriending a group of dendroclimatologists to whom I referred metaphorically as ‘my chimps’ in an analogy with the primatologist Jane Goodall’s affectionate relation with her research subjects. In my case, befriending dendroclimatologists involved cultivating a curiosity about each other’s research and worlds through different means. As a result, my work also came to matter to them and we produced it collaboratively. The instrumentalisation of friendships for the purpose of achieving a certain control and agreement with subjects and beings is, I argue, a normal aspect of knowledge formation, and should not be seen as unethical. If anything, befriending subjects promotes better research ethics as it generates a form of mutuality based on partial relatedness, constructive dissent and playfulness, rather than hybridity, totalising consensus and domination. Overall, my argument about friendship as a method in science seeks to criticise the ideal that isolation and indifference are at the heart of the way scientific knowledge, both social and natural, is and should be made.

scholarly journals Astrobioethics

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Octavio A. Chon-Torres
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Ethical Aspects ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Planetary Protection ◽  
Protection Policy ◽  
The Social

AbstractAstrobiology is a discipline that is expanding its field of investigation not only in the natural sciences, but also in the social sciences. It is for this reason that the ethical aspects are progressively emphasized leading to a point where the whole field requires a specific handling. The appellation ‘astrobioethics’ is now considered as not only relevant, but also a true issue for the future of Astrobiology. Astrobioethics is the subsection within astrobiology that is accountable for studying the moral implications of, for example, bringing humans to Mars, the Planetary Protection Policy, the social responsibility of the astrobiologist to society, etc. It is in this way that the present article outlines a path for astrobioethics, as being a fertile field of study and an opportunity to trade scientific knowledge in a transdisciplinary way.

Development Of Reality System Theory

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lloyd H. Stebbins
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
System Theory ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Management Theory ◽  
Font Size ◽  
The Social ◽  
Globalized Economy ◽  
Management Literature ◽  
Human Reality

<p class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt; mso-pagination: none;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 10pt; mso-themecolor: text1;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">The emergence of the scientific method evoked many successes in the natural sciences, which inspired a migration of the method to the social sciences. </span><a name="OLE_LINK5"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">As widely applied, the scientific method is analytical (rather than synthetic), positivist, and reductionist. The management literature is replete with the successes of reductionist research. However, it is incomplete because it does not recognize the holistic nature of human systems. </span></a><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">It is timely and largely inescapable in a globalized economy to consider the synergistic and emergent potential of organizations guided by a new management theory that touches all three influences of the human reality (intellectual, emotional, and spiritual).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></p>

scholarly journals Scientific Communication and Codification

2021 ◽  
pp. 51-65
Author(s):  
Loet Leydesdorff
Keyword(s):  
Heterogeneous Networks ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Communication ◽  
Cognitive Structures ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Sociology Of Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Research Programs ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sociology Of Translation ◽  
Actor Networks

Abstract In the sociology of scientific knowledge and the sociology of translation, heterogeneous networks have been studied in terms of practices and so-called actor-networks. However, scientific practices are intellectually structured by codes. Cognitive structures interact and co-construct the organization of scholars and discourses into research programs, specialties, and disciplines. The intellectual organization of the sciences adds to and feeds back on the configurations of authors and texts. The social, textual, and cognitive sub-dynamics select upon each other asymmetrically. Selections can further be selected for stabilization along trajectories and then also be globalized—symbolically generalized—into regimes of expectations.

scholarly journals Scientific Discoveries and the Cognitive Progress of Philosophy

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-39
Author(s):  
Nikolai S. Rozov
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Theoretical Knowledge ◽  
Analytical Philosophy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Reliable Knowledge ◽  
Positive Knowledge

For a long time discoveries were recognized only in natural sciences. We can talk about “discoveries” in the social sciences only in some other sense. At the same time the accumulation of general theoretical knowledge in economics and sociology is not in doubt. Eleven criteria of “positive knowledge” (respectively, “discoveries” when such knowledge is first acquired) are formulated. Three groups of scientific and philosophical disciplines with similar indicators according to these criteria are distinguished. In philosophy (with the exception of logic and analytical philosophy) it is difficultto talk about discoveries and knowledge due to the lack of agreement regarding any non-trivial judgments with a philosophical level of generality and abstractness. At the same time the development of philosophy is more than the accumulation of ideas as optional opinions. To solve this difficulty the metaphor of “a lock” (obstacles to cognition), “a key” (intellectual means selected and created to obtain reliable knowledge) and “a view” (holistic meaningful image on “opening different doors”) was used. Even if philosophy does not produce full-fledged discoveries and generally accepted knowledge it progressively develops its ideas as heuristic “keys” for scientific research and as “views” that generalize heterogeneous, accumulated scientific knowledge connecting them with changing self-consciousness and values in human generations.

scholarly journals Interests, Folk Psychology and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petri Ylikoski
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Folk Psychology ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Social Studies Of Science ◽  
Sociology Of Scientific Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Way

This paper provides a conceptual analysis of the notion of interests as it is used in the social studies of science. After describing the theoretical background behind the Strong Program’s adoption of the concept of interest, the paper outlines a reconstruction of the everyday notion of interest and argues that the same notion is used also by the sociologists of scientific knowledge. However, there are a couple of important differences between the everyday use of this notion and the way in which it used by the sociologists. The sociologists do not use the term in evaluative context and they do not regard interests as purely non-epistemic factors. Finally it is argued that most of the usual critiques of interest explanations, by both philosophers and fellow sociologists, are misguided.

scholarly journals A reflection on modeling and the nature of knowledge

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Zazueta
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Knowledge Generation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Right

We reflect on the criticism that the methods in the natural sciences have been an object of and argue that these very methods, seen from the right perspective, are crucial to the progress of social science. We propose a knowledge generation framework that sets the minimum requirementsfor a claim to be considered scientific knowledge and sketchan ontology of the objects of study. We present science as an accumulating yet self-revising process and present examples in the social sciences.

A Mannheim for All Seasons: Bloor, Merton, and the Roots of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

1998 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Experimental Psychology ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Karl Mannheim ◽  
Sociology Of Scientific Knowledge

The ArgumentDavid Bloor often wrote that Karl Mannheim had “stopped short” in his sociology of knowledge, lacking the nerve to consider the natural sciences sociologically. While this assessment runs counter to Mannheim's own work, which responded in quite specific ways both to an encroaching “modernity” and a looming fascism, Bloor's depiction becomes clearer when considered in the light of his principal introduction to Mannheim's work — a series of essays by Robert Merton. Bloor's reading and appropriation of Mannheim emerged from his background in experimental psychology and his attempts to supercede Merton's own structural-functionalist program for the sociology of knowledge. By retracing this extended trail of readings and re-readings, we may begin to understand the roots of Bloor's curious interpretation of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, and inquire in a reflexive way about the present and future directions of science studies.

PENERAPAN PENDEKATAN CONTEXTUAL TEACHING AND LEARNING (CTL) BERBANTU MDIA GAMBAR UNTUK MENINGKATKAN HASIL BELAJAR IPA SISWA KELAS VI SD NEGERI 007 KAMPUNG BARU KECAMATAN GUNUNG TOAR KABUPATEN KUANTAN SINGINGI

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamnidar Hamnidar
Keyword(s):  
Primary School ◽  
Learning Outcomes ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Learning Approach ◽  
Research Subjects ◽  
Average Value ◽  
Average Grade ◽  
Complete Category ◽  
Contextual Teaching

This research was motivated by the learning outcomes of students' natural sciences that were still low. The purpose of this study was to improve student learning outcomes with the application of the Contextual Teaching And Learning approach. This research is a classroom action research consisting of II cycles with research subjects in class VI of 007 Kampung Baru State Primary School Gunung Toar District, Kuantan Singingi Regency. The results showed that, judging from the basic score, the lowest value of students was 50 while the highest score of students was 85 with an average grade of 62.78 with an incomplete category. in the first cycle the lowest value of students was 65 while the highest value of students was 90 with an average grade of 74 with a complete category. For learning outcomes in cycle II, the lowest value of students is 75 while the highest value of students is 100 with the average value of class 84.47 with complete categories. Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that the application of the Contextual Teaching And Learning learning approach assisted by media images can improve the learning outcomes of Natural Sciences students of class VI 007 Public Primary School Kampung Baru, Gunung Toar District, Kuantan Singingi Regency.

Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary J. Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Health Research ◽  
Western Medicine ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Right To Health ◽  
The Body ◽  
Health And Wellness ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
The Social

The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be

The critical theory of democracy in Western political thought

2020 ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Ruqaya Saeed Khalkhal
Keyword(s):  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Process ◽  
The Social ◽  
Science And Politics ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
The Church ◽  
Theory Of Democracy ◽  
Or Applications ◽  
The Ideal

The darkness that Europe lived in the shadow of the Church obscured the light that was radiating in other parts, and even put forward the idea of democracy by birth, especially that it emerged from the tent of Greek civilization did not mature in later centuries, especially after the clergy and ideological orientation for Protestants and Catholics at the crossroads Political life, but when the Renaissance emerged and the intellectual movement began to interact both at the level of science and politics, the Europeans in democracy found refuge to get rid of the tyranny of the church, and the fruits of the application of democracy began to appear on the surface of most Western societies, which were at the forefront to be doubtful forms of governece.        Democracy, both in theory and in practice, did not always reflect Western political realities, and even since the Greek proposition, it has not lived up to the idealism that was expected to ensure continuity. Even if there is a perception of the success of the democratic process in Western societies, but it was repulsed unable to apply in Islamic societies, because of the social contradiction added to the nature of the ruling regimes, and it is neither scientific nor realistic to convey perceptions or applications that do not conflict only with our civilized reality The political realization created by certain historical circumstances, and then disguises the different reality that produced them for the purpose of resonance in the ideal application.

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