I. General conception. The author contends that the constitution of science requires the completion of two different tasks: a) a negative-critical one, i.e. the clearing of the theoretical field through expurgating all pre-scientific ideologies jeopardizing the growth of scientific concepts; and b) a positive-constructive one, or the actual building up of a science through the production of the formal-abstract object, using ontically indeterminate raw material. Those tasks have characteristics that differ from the formal and factic-natural sciences to the social sciences. The reasons for the differences are: a) the former two have established objects, whereas the latter ones have their objects in the process of undergoing constitution, and thus possessing and oscillating ambiguity; b) the former two sciences have specific methods related to their specific objects, whereas the latter ones have a host of methods, all of them advocating scientific status; c) the former two sciences integrate their concepts into systems so as to constitute the unity of their meaning, whereas the latter ones lack a systematic integration. The consequence is that sciences already constituted (formal and factic-natural sciences) have, by the same token, established the co-implication of both moments (negative-critical and positive-constructive), to the extent that they are in the midst of universes admitting some law-system. Social sciences, on the contrary, set a double register of problems: a) in-themselves, as they suppose the opening of a new way to approach the object; and b) for-themselves, as long as that opening is performed at the expense of pre-scientific ideologies that bar the developments to be done in-themselves. Furthermore, the double task is not accomplished in the same fashion in logic-formal sciences and factic-natural ones, both groups having an apodictic adequation (absolute in the first group, relative in the second one) between the context of discovery and the context of justification, be it formal or experimental, whereas in social sciences there is no such adequation, as they are still searching and trying to establish the mutually foundating relationship between both contexts. II. The epistemological obstacle in Psychology. Psychology, belonging to the general class of social sciences, is subject to two kinds of epistemological obstacles: a) those stemming from common sense, born and nourished in the naive, day-to-day experience, and being used as a general canon for usual as well as entirely new situations; they reach the status of a pre-critical knowing, based solely on beliefs, and advocating to provide the grounds for our opinion on singular and general subjects; and b) those stemming from the speculative discourse, understood as a system of notions encircling themselves and pretending to have an analogical reference to real objects, when analogy only actualizes objects that are absent...

The epistemological obstacle in the constitution of social sciences

ivySCI AI Smartly Parses PDF, Answers Researchers' Questions, and Helps You Understand Papers in Seconds

Journal Info