فصلنامه روش شناسی علوم انسانی
پیاپی 60 (پاییز 1388)

One of the basic and fundamental questions that certificate every paradigm is “what are social things?” In the other words, what is epistemology and ontology of social things? Indeed, every paradigm of social science and humanities was determined by explaining essence of social things as one of the basic prepositions of social science and humanities.In this paper, we try to express and analyze the viewpoints of three important paradigms of social science and humanities. Next, we will refer to and analyze the viewpoints of paradigm of ejtehadi religious science (PADD). This paper attempts show preference of this viewpoint to other alternatives.

The idea of an Irano-Islamic model of development has been in vogue in Iran in the past few years. A number of writers have written in support of this notion or have tried to produce actual plans to show how it works in practice. In the present paper, I shall argue that all models of development are regarded as technologies and as such are context sensitive and bearers of the values invested in them by either their inventors or their end-users. From here it follows that producing an Irano-Islamic model of development should be, in principle, feasible. Nevertheless, I shall further argue that such a model (assuming that it is efficient and designed rationally), would not differ radically (save minor details) from other efficient and rationally designed models of development used in other countries. The upshot of the argument of the paper is that to call an efficient and rationally designed model of development, which is devised in Iran, an ‘Irano-Islamic Model of Development’ would largely amount to an exercise in semantics rather than a substantive activity.

It seems that if determinism holds, in other words, if every event has been caused by some previous events, then what an agent does at this moment has been caused by some events prior to the agent's birth. This means that no agent is morally responsible for what he does. On the other hand, if non-determinism holds, i.e. if some events occur randomly without having a cause, then the agents are not morally responsible as well. By introducing the notion of agent causation, Roderick Chisholm tries to escape this dilemma. According to his view, every event has a cause but some events are not caused by other events but by agents which do not themselves have a cause. In this paper, I review Chisholm's theory and his responses to some of the alleged objections. I argue why some of these objections, along with some new objections, undermine the adequacy of Chisholm's position.

Tacit knowledge is increasingly becoming important in public organizationsand it is important to document the experiences in order to produce bestpractices. In this article, a methodology to prepare “best practice” isproposed. To do this, the following process is followed:At the first step:(i) the exploration and collection of information from experiences;(ii) the modification of the information; and,(iii) the abstraction of the results from case study’s information;are proposed.At the second step, consequential model of public policy is used for theconversion of information into institutional knowledge.At the final step, to be concrete, a public decision-making based on thatknowledge is discussed in the article: the case of Radio Shahar, a localradio station in Tehran municipality.

Within social science, there are large numbers of causal hypotheses in format of necessary and/or sufficient condition. With respect to the importance of these hypotheses, it is required to pay attention to how we can empirically evaluate and test them. Scholars that proposed necessary and/or sufficient condition and tested them quantitatively, usually, did not consider whether their statistical techniques were appropriate or not for testing this sort of hypotheses. Since, it is impossible to find a statistical methods textbook that even mentions necessary and/or sufficient condition hypotheses and how to test them, quantitative researchers inevitably apply standard statistical procedures allocated to non-necessary and/or sufficient condition hypotheses for assessment necessary and/or sufficient condition hypotheses.This article demonstrates, with respect to special properties of necessary and/or sufficient condition hypotheses, that standard statistical procedures can not provide valid answers for research questions. Hence, in empirical research it is quite possible to get statistically significant results with data that simple visual inspection indicates in no way support a necessary and/or sufficient condition hypothesis.

The main object of this writing is a survey of concept and role of thought experiment in science. Thought experiment is an innovative instrument that plays an important role in different areas of science such as physics. The most important feature of these experiments is that in absence of any new empirical data, they lead us to new knowledge or to change our opinion about a theory. There are different views about the function of thought experiment. At the beginning of this writing, some examples of thought experiments and their features have been presented. Then, some of the most famous views on thought experiment have been examined. According to Norton's argument, thought experiment is merely an argument which has a form of narrative. Brown's view has a priori and Platonic view on thought experiment and claims that a correct thought experiment can grasp laws of Platonic world. Although the mentioned views criticize Norton's view from different perspectives, all of them have a common point: thought experiment plays an important role in science and is able to provide us new information about the world.