A Critical Assessment of the Issues of Objectivity and Subjectivity in Contemporary Western Socio-Behavioral Thought and its Muslim Khaldunian Counterpart

Abstract

The issues of objectivity and subjectivity in the contemporary knowledge of the behavioral and the social sciences repment a highly contmemial debate whose solution has defied all attempts by those who have tackled it with analysis and discussion. There are presently four causes of bias which afflict the modern behavioral and social sciences. 1) Numerous studies in this field have explained the social scientist’s inevitable bias as emanating from personality subjective factors. The sociologist or the psychologist, accordmg to this view, can’t entirely liberate himself or herself from individual inclinations, values, and interests in going about studying the phenomena which belong to each field. Total objectivity in the sciences of man and society is beyond human reach according to the German sociologist, Max Weber. 2) In spite of the impartant role played by the social scientist’s personality subjective factors in the making of his or her scientific bias, these factors are not, nonetheless, the only forces which determine the phenomenon of bias in contemporary behavioral and social sciences. Scientific bias could be the outcome as well of a collective or an institutioml ...