Reductionism in Humanities (essay extract)

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 Excerpt from "Way Forward: Operationalising a Higher Education Model Based on Islam". 

"Believing that only positivist convention which accepts only observed knowledge as the truth, hence, can attain the status of natural sciences, non-scientists adopted blindly these tenets as the scientific method for research and teaching practices in non-science and humanities. Quantity has now masqueraded as quality to the extent that only what can be measured, counts, as in the case of performance indicators for instance. It seems incongruous that a Muslim scholar would consciously reject revealed knowledge as a method of knowing when Islam is a religion founded upon faith of the unseen and that the Quran was revealed to the Prophet PBUH through revelation mode. Muslims too, know the importance of intention or niyyah and its qualitative nature which cannot be substituted with quantitative measure. Ignorance of Comte's motivation for social science appears highly likely a plausible reason for a continued acceptance of the legacy.Bellah. Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton (2007) in inviting a look at history of social science and its professionalisation noticed that in the 19th century, the social world changed from being a community into an industrial-corporate society organised around competing professional careers. Educational institutions were transformed from an educational system that produced 'man of learning to serve society into research university model that prepared vastly larger numbers of people or scientists for employment in an industrial society. The new ethos of research university gave rise to the impoverishment of the public sphere. "Today's specialised academics, with notable exceptions, write with aset of intellectual assumptions and vocabulary shared only by their colleagues" (Bellah et al., 2007,p.299), forgetting their role as a 'general citizen of society'


The narrowly framed specialised social science into silos disavows knowledge of the whole or any part of the whole that lies beyond its strictly defined domain following the reductionism tenet perceived as scientific. The Parts, then are put together to resemble the whole like an assemblage of cogs in machines. This reductionist and syncretism approach dominates social science till the present day.


P117-118


ARFAH SALLEH AND AZIUDDIN AHMAD

Way Forward: Operationalising a Higher Education Model Based on Islam


In


Charting New Directions

for Muslim Universities

Editors

Hafiz Zakariya

Fauziah Md. Taib


Penerbit USM, Pulau Pinang, 2013

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