Dilemmas the Researchers Face

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- It is the third development that concerns us here.

- The ideas that have emerged in postmodern philosophy are a reaction against the views of science and knowledge that originated from Europe during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries and reached their culmination in the eighteenth century in what is known as "the age of Enlightenment".

- The central idea of modernity was a belief in rationality and progress, a radical break with history and tradition that was intended to liberate human beings from irrationality, ignorance and superstition.

- This rationality is most clearly evident in the precision and certainty of science in its attempt to understand, control and manipulate nature.

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CHARACTERISTICS OF POSTMODERNISM

- Grand narratives are rejected: Postmodernism denies that grand theories9 provide universal explanations, and accords them no privileged status; they are regarded as stories, grand tales about social life, told from the point of view and interests of the story-teller, and are designed to maintain established power bases. Instead, mini-narratives10 are preferred.

- Rejection of absolute truth: Absolute truths are rejected because postmodernism regards social realities as multiple social constructions, subject to re-formation and reconstruction, notions of objective reality and absolute truth are rejected. Truth and reality are embedded in the meanings that are intersubjectively negotiated between social actors from their shared, subjective life experiences. Knowledge itself is regarded as a social construction that is negotiated through dialogue. The result is that there can be many truths. Neither everyday nor scientific truths can be regarded as absolute, because they are based on local, negotiated knowledge.

- Critique of Representation: One of the dominant characteristics of postmodernism is a rejection of the idea that language mirrors or maps reality. In empiricism, language was used to describe facts about the world that emerged from disciplined observation. Postmodernists are more concerned with how images of reality are produced instead of what they are meant to represent.

- Centrality of Discourse: Postmodern theorizing involves close-up interpretive analysis of texts, written or visual accounts of both social participants and researchers. Text become synonymous with empirical data, but data that have no relationship with a reality beyond with text.

- Fragmented Identities: The humanist idea of the individual as unique - with intentions, motives and meanings, and possessing a dynamic, integrated consciousness - is regarded as a Western ethnocentricity. The person is now seen as a collection of separate identities, rather than as an individual. These identities may form and re-form, may change and disappear, in unpredictable ways. This is the death of the individual, autonomous, meaning-giving subject.

- Adoption of Cultural Relativism: Relativism is a reaction against objectivism. Post modernists endorse all forms of relativism. Relativism denies the right of members of one culture to make judgements about the values or practices of another culture, on the grounds that there is no culturally neutral position from which any human being can make objective judgements about anything, let alone about another culture.

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METHODS OF NATURAL SCIENCES

- In order to answer this question, 'Can the social sciences use the same methods and procedures as the natural sciences?', another question must be answered: 'What are the methods of the natural sciences?'

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- Theories like Marxism can be considered as grand theories

- Mini-narratives are those that provide explanations for small-scale situations located within a particular context and where no pretentions of universality or generalizability are made

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- For the past fifty years or more, there has been as much if not more controversy over this second question than over the first one.

- Many philosophies of science have been proposed and debated, centering on issues such as (1) the nature and importance of observation, (2) when observation should occur in the process of developing scientific knowledge, (3) the appropriate from of logic to be used in constructing theories, (4) the role of theories themselves in this process, (5) the structure of theories, and (6) the extent to which scientists work with open minds or as constrained by the beliefs, values and orthodox practices of the community of scientists to which they belong.

- Behind the question about the methods of the natural sciences lurks a common assumption that there is something called the scientific method.

- Some philosophers now tell us that the common-sense view of the scientific method, of scientists making careful observations and conducting experiments that lead to scientific 'discoveries', is not only logically unsatisfactory, but also does not reflect good scientific practice.

- Therefore, it is no longer possible to provide one prescription for such a method.

- What has been regarded as the scientific method has been changing, at least over past fifty years.

- Please recall that Inductive strategy proposes that scientific research begins with pure observations, and that generalizations or theories are produced from them.

- Deductive strategy argues that scientific research begins with a tentative theory that is expected to explain some observed phenomenon and observations are then made to test whether this theory can be accepted.

- Retroductive strategy proposes that, as observed regularities are produced by hidden structures and/or mechanisms, it is necessary to build models of these structures and mechanisms and then to look for evidence of their existence.