Status of Method in Science, A Reflection on the Nature of Science in Modern Culture

From renaissance till date, science and knowledge have found a new position to the extent that today science and experience have become intertwined. A philosophical approach to the nature of developments, which led to this intertwinement, shows that this kind of approach to science is harmful. It has not had any precedence in the history of thought and its spread – particularly in our society – has added to the problems in the process of promotion of science. The problem is that due to the weakness of philosophy in the middle ages and the problems that surfaced in the field of philosophical thought about the nature of science and knowledge from Descartes to Kant, gradually the normative issues were taken out of the fieldof science and knowledge and in the theoretical field experiment became the only means for understanding of the outside reality. The positivists fixed the problem and Popper who was determined to defend the logical and epistemological identity of science, maintained that only the knowledge, which is open to experiment, is science and classified episteme into scientific and unscientific ones. Hence he unconsciously paved the way for the replacement of sociology of knowledge with the issues related to epistemology of knowledge to the extent that the ensuing philosophers of science – who play the role of metaphysical philosophers of modern world – openly submitted scientology to sociology, falling into the bosom of relativism, while neither experiment is the determinant of experimental sciences nor method can be basically a proper criterion for classification of sciences. The outlet is first of all return to classification ofsciences on the basis of subjects not method; secondly subjecting the methodology of every science to the proper understanding of its subject matter; and thirdly retuning the normative issues to the field of science and giving the theoretical and practical subjects their due role.