An Analysis of the Concept of Method and its Redefinition

Muhammad Sadeq Ali-pur / PhD in Comparative Philosophy, IKI      msalipoor@yahoo.com

Received: 2019/01/02 - Accepted: 2019/07/17

ABSTRACT

Putting forward methodological discussions requires a vivid and common comprehension of the conception and reality of ‘method’. This is while scholars in various scientific fields have offered a variety of definitions for that conception, in a way that it seems difficult to find a common aspect among them. Thus, the precise analysis of that conception and recognition of its fundamental parameters is an inevitable necessity. Accordingly, it is first clarified that the conception of ‘method’ is a philosophical one whose most important accessories are the agent, orientation, the existing and favorable situations, the model and the territory. In view of these points, a descriptive-analytical investigation of definitions of this conception and paying attention to their weak and strong points made it clear that those definitions are not complete. Thus, defining ‘method’ as ‘the quality of human’s transfer from unfavorable situation to favorable situation’ is a definition without the aforementioned defects and committed to the type of that conception and its accessories.

KEY WORDS: method, philosophical conception, orientation, territory of method, methodic model.