A Search in Metatheories of Humanities and Social Sciences; Necessities of Proceeding towards Islamic Metatheorizing
Document Type : Scientific-Research Article
Authors
1 Assistant Professor , Faculty of Social Studies, Tehran University
2 M.A. Student of Islamic Studies, Culture and Communication, ISU.
Abstract
There is no such thing as impartiality in the theories of social sciences and humanities. We can recognize their metatheories by studying various pretheoretical bases they are founded on. By metatheory we mean a corpus that consists of metatheoretical constituents, or pretheoretical presuppositions. Metatheoretical presuppositions are often hidden and become manifest through metathorizing and studying theories that in turn will lead to a second – hand knowledge. According to metatheoreticians, metatheoretical presuppositions are of different kinds: metaphysical, cosmological, logical, ontological, epistemological, methodological, axiological, praxiological, aetiological, ethical, and aesthetic. Metatheoricians also mention some principal metatheories due to the existing differences among theorists in regard to the above-mentioned presuppositions or the prominent philosophical schools. These are: positivistic, postmodernist, critical realist, and hermeneutic presuppositions; and critical presuppositions.
Each metatheory has its own method of metatheorization; i.e its own stance towards how to discover or formulate metatheories. In this article, metatheorization is discussed as a path towards religious theories in social sciences and humanities through discovering Islamic metatheories.
Keywords
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