Books-In-Brief : Epistemological Bias in the Physical and Social Sciences,
- سنة النشر: 01 Jan 1970.
- عدد مرات التحميل: 502882 مرّة / مرات.
- تم نشره في: الإثنين , 14 ديسمبر 2015م.
وصف الكتاب:
Epistemological Bias in the Physical and Social Sciences, of which Elmessiri is the editor and author of the first paper, is an anthology of writings on the subject of Bias originally published in Arabic by IIIT and subsequently translated into English. This Books-in-Brief version is an abridged edition of the English translation. The collection of papers making up the anthology, explore and critique an issue widely accepted in the Muslim academic world as an essential and defining aspect of academic knowledge despite being a western philosophy of science and thought. This is the dominance of philosophical positivism, and a near total adoption as well as unquestioned acceptance of paradigms, terminologies, and research models that are in fact alien to the socio-economic-religio realities of the Muslim world. So how credible is their application and viability? For Elmessiri, the question of bias in methodology and terminology is a problem that faces researchers east, west, north and south; however, it faces Third World intellectuals with special keeness, because although they write in a cultural environment that has its own specific conceptual and cultural paradigms, they nevertheless encounter a foreign paradigm which attempts to impose itself upon their society and upon their very imagination and thoughts. Why not establish a new science, ideally suited for the purpose, with its own mechanisms, methodologies and points of reference to deal with epistemological biases and open up the gate of ijtihad with respect to them? The papers aim to discover some of the biases latent in our terminology, methodologies, research tools, and conceptual principles, and to propose alternative ones marked by a greater degree of independence and neutrality. This is not to belittle the human value of the West’s creative contributions but to emphasise the danger of making it the ultimate point of reference and then trying to continously play ‘catch up’ with it.
