The study of problems concerning method has almost always been conditioned by metaphysical concerns.
In general, methodology was studied on two levels: the philosophical level, with the consequent metaphysical foundation, and the specialized level, insofar as the method was a technique to simplify and make more effective the control of a sector of nature.
The connection between the two levels is a constant problem, since the treatment of a sector of nature in order to control it better does not require metaphysical foundations. However, the general methodology is based on this assumption.
The method, therefore, is either a metaphysical question, or a technical question or instrument of control.
The fundamental idea in the first case is in the admission of two distinct but connected realities, in such a way that the process of one is reflected in the process of the other. Admitting this duality and connection, it follows that rectitude in the order of thought expresses rectitude in the order of extramental reality.
This criterion is fundamentally an Aristotelian criterion that implies, a) a duality without which knowledge is not possible, and b) a synchronization between both elements of duality.
The mind follows a process whose intrinsic order coincides with the order of extramental reality. Logical investigations, therefore, are ontological investigations, and the order of thought and the order of the world coincide.
The reaction against this criterion has been very late. There is hostility, which comes from the fallacy of internal experience and cultural heritage, to admitting that harmony in the duality of its epistemological elements has no more value than that of an increasingly unuseful hypothesis.
It is not a question of admitting the opposite, a perfectly acceptable hypothesis, but of avoiding the dogmatic and limiting drawbacks of the metaphysical conception of the method.
Logic, including mathematical logic, has had to admit that the harmony between the structure of logical discourse and the structure of the facts of the world and its process is not a pre-established harmony, nor determined by another third reality, nor continually composed of a transcendental principle.
It is not necessary, if not even convenient, to start from the hypothesis of harmony. It is better to start from the harmonizable hypothesis. The structure of the logical process and the order of its elements is harmonizable with the facts of the world.
The prejudice “harmony” produces errors as gross as that of that sage who, seeing the light of Mr. Pickwik’s lantern and receiving the punch of Sam Sawyer in inadequate conditions of observation, induced a complex theory about new luminous phenomena.
The prejudice of harmony led him to suppose that the logical process of analytic derivation demanded the corresponding facts. There are so many intellectuals who fall into this deception. There is a certain class of facts, historical facts, which admit this fallacy, without the results disturbing the order of the cumulative process of new knowledge.
… The book that follows, well thought out and constructed, expresses with probity the rudimentary level of scientific methods in sociology, politics and related disciplines. After reading it, the reader is in a position to ask himself whether or not the disciplines that investigate political and social phenomena can follow the safe path of science.
In any case, although the answer is a very high percentage negative, the student of sociology should not be discouraged. Empirical methods are the basis for a future preliminary codification of what is useful and what is useless, and the sum of the experiences of the results obtained by the empirically based approaches can coincide in a critical methodology.
This is a considerable step forward and the beginning of a path that has not been followed so far.
Precisely what is lacking in the social sciences at their present level is a critique of the methods that have hitherto been followed. It is urgent, more and more every day, that we have a safe balance of what is methodologically usable and what is not. Perhaps it is not accurate to speak of methods, but of procedures, and a large part of the procedures that have been used so far are rigorously ineffective. The critical methodology that we all expect must begin with books that offer an overall vision such as this one, which I am honored to present, whose author offers, due to his great knowledge and well-deserved prestige, the maximum guarantees.
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