academic cycle of autumn. 1 April 2011
I will start as a way to go approaching the issue, calling the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
"So, modern rely on natural laws as something inviolable, just as the old in God and destiny. And both are right and not have it, but the former were even more clear, recognized as a precise limit, while the modern system is to pretend that everything is explained "
remember some years ago at its first reading and then I moved after mature reflection brought me doubts and uncertainties, even today, I think fortunately, I carry with me each time I undertake the investigation of a new object of study.
then fall back to the days of the Industrial Revolution, time fascination with the newcomer technology of electricity, and came to the Gothic novel by Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, the modern promise, work poorly understood and considered in the best as science fiction or horror.
really is a deep epistemological and ethical message when it comes to the dangers of all pride, and warns us of danger increases as the passage through the scientific world.
Dr. Victor Frankenstein in rough dialogue and heavy exchange of accusations with the creature by which he created says
" abominable monster! Evil evil! The tortures of hell would be too sweet to punish your crimes. Diablo wicked! Reproach me with your creation. Come, then, come for you to extinguish the spark that lit so casually. "
Is this an invitation, motivate us to examine the epistemology of science through all time. Ours of course. Hence, it starred in the role of Mary Shelley and Dr. Victor Frankenstein, and the grief turned into uncontrollable violence of the creature by the created and quickly turned-monster. The clarity of the image at odds with many contemporary events so I feel less disturbing. The gentle world
de las humanidades, en contraste con las llamadas ciencias duras de la física, química y otras, siempre ha estado atento y pre- ocupándose cuanta vez a podido de estos aspectos, muchas veces, quizá demasiadas dejados de lado . La ciencia no debe desarrollarse y estar oculta en gabinetes y ser de exclusivo discurso entre pares. La ciencia, ya se ha mencionado, es parte de la cultura. Y en ella y sus consecuencias nos debemos involucrar todos.
En lo personal también rescato, entre muchos otros de igual valor , a intelectuales humanistas tan preocupados como Shelley y que llegaron después ya en el s.XX enviando from their work, strong messages from different spaces.
Aldous Huxley and his novel Brave New World, the world of fiction, imagined and feared, in which humans act and live within a society totally controlled by science, or the immeasurable Chaplin from the screen of the old biographers dumb in his film Modern Times, and in full time Great Depression, with a strong social critique of the wonders promised only had managed to turn humans, mired in poverty and distress, in a limited part of the gears of industrialism and Taylorism. are mere invitations. These works carry the advantage of being there, available to all and not on the shelves of distant libraries often grim and unintelligible to us, lay in the management of issues that remain of life, have become in distant and complex.
not lose them. Baghlan
these references to set the tone of this presentation, in which if something deliberately intend to include, is a deep respect for science and all knowledge, when this is developed and is managed from the rigorous method and the research effort, with clear social commitment and strong epistemological control. The world has suffered enough doctors and Frankenstein, and we all know that the creatures, which sometimes wake up the men of science are not easily controlled once lighted. Methodus that old concept, from and with which the Greeks in antiquity understood "a way by which to approach what should be known" and which ran and met her anxiety to know. Today, within this meaning, the concept is treated as modern. In this simple design, fits the idea of \u200b\u200bmethod.
words, repeating those Greek sages, is a valid tool to use against whatever design research and / or the science involved. That no one can circumvent it, nor any can be considered to monopolize the use of the tool. That
calls or "hard" sciences by addressing issues of nature or the so-called "soft" by addressing issues of man may believe, but sometimes if they do, they are the method, something like PROSPECTIVE PURCHASER. The method is related and necessary to any investigation into the matter and discipline and is concerned. Is the only solid bet to reliable results with critical mass and status of scientific knowledge acquired. Science The term can include several senses. We turn now in this cycle, two, subject to time constraints, which we believe are most important to this meeting.
One, the largest, made to consider Science all that each historical period considered as such and that is legitimized by institutions and from the culture.
The other, which could qualify as more accurate over time, refers to knowledge that getting away with religion, the divine and revealed truth, arises from the XVI, XVII and XVIII is consolidated in the and adopted as main characters visible faces of the level of
Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton. Next came
others but these were in many ways the teachers.
Then we believe that to talk about research methods, imperative we talk about your product, scientific knowledge. All knowledge is a way of relating to reality, or interpreting its phenomena.
I have also to broad and complex topic, my own option, specify the content of this my conversation with you. Speak from methods used by social sciences in general.
can start from two points, from common knowledge or common sense empirical events, or product methodological research carried out by scientists or scientific.
not all knowledge is scientific. This depend on certain conditions. One of them, the critical, for example, that is, the need to rationally justify and provide evidence of truth, have generally been ever present, both in ancient and in modern. Basically, in summary, we can speak of two bodies or paradigms which has been contained the idea of \u200b\u200bScience. The pre-modern, from ancient reaching the Middle Ages, being fundamental to this stage Aristotelian thought, in its idea of \u200b\u200bseeking the causes of phenomena, at which time the science did not occupy the place of prestige and status that then gives modernity. Above it at the time, was that knowledge was able to give us the ultimate causes of things. The Greeks called it "metaphysical." That is beyond the physical.
Then come the times of this notion of science that one way or another and we understand we have today.
And it's integrated into our thinking that it, in Science, is all knowledge and knowledge itself. And this is a fundamental change: The power of reason firmly supported in the method to control and transform nature.
This happens in the XVIth and XVII centuries and moved to today. I can not omit to say that all this about what we believe or not, scientific knowledge is a matter of intense debate and tense theoretical controversies.
which forms of knowledge linked with reality, and this in basic form, must adhere to enforced stages in which:
describe, explain and predict.
By way of exemplifying.
We understand that a person carrying on their daily lives, lives and works in the field, as described las tormentas que le ha tocado vivir, hace relaciones con la temperatura, los vientos, las formas y colores de las nubes, el comportamiento de los animales de su entorno en la oportunidad y en base a ello puede llegar a predecir una tormenta con razonables índices de aciertos.
Ha descripto, explicado y predijo. Este es conocimiento de sentido común.
El metereólogo profesional, puede llegar a conclusiones similares, siguiendo razonamientos que de fondo son también iguales: describe las tormentas que ha presenciado, desde su saber y sus apoyos técnicos, explica las causas que provocan las mismas y luego can be predicted in light of its analysis.
Where lies the difference, beyond the results? Radica
the credibility and legitimacy. In the field, their peers, culturally bound peasant people from the countryside, listen carefully to the forecast of its neighbor. What justifies their rural culture. Meanwhile
non-rural society to a much lesser proximity to the events of nature and its variables, look with suspicion that forecast, but listens and accepts the prediction of the weatherman, and legitimize it in their eyes , their studies, office titles and whether in public or private sphere and the location from where his speech, the press, oral, written and televised.
From anthropology, it is my professional field in the world of science, the focus has been placed in villages, with or without recorded history, today the phenomenon is more complex, as subject and object, ie research and under study, may be living the same cultural reality or sharing the same space.
This also leads us to place the weight of our opinion as close as possible, methodological and theoretical fields, with the empirical. Especially because we think the conception of such a concept and its implementation has always been the reality of our discipline of anthropology, built from the knowledge and knowing of the pioneers of it, from
Malinowsky and loneliness of his distressing tent in the Trobriand, in Levi-Strauss
in contact with the Amazon and the Nambikwara, and not make this list endless, all anthropologists today somewhere in the world perform their field work. Observing and participating.
Levi-Strauss
, stamped in his book The Savage Mind, which in his view of scientific explanation, is not like you can believe in reducing the complexity to the simple, rather, is to substitute a comprehensive complexity complexity that was not.
In a process spanning the last 3 or 4 decades, social scientists have been forming a kind of break unruly anti-positivist clear idea, intended to see the social from the same tools of natural science like physics or chemistry. And of course, make laws that establish the positivist dream that could be ordered from the social laws and regulations as it as it happens with those. Worry
measure and generalize results to which all social production of knowledge, collided in the past, at one time or another.
This type of approach to social theory, causes immediate consequence rather minor. Quickly dismisses any analogy to the conception of social life with a body of immutable mechanical performance.
The process has not been easy or quick. The path is long and much effort from positivism Comtean until the present moment where the emphasis is methodologically and effort to let the natural sciences and sink into the spirit.
social life, for thinkers like the American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz
,
culture that surrounds y sostiene, pasa a ser :
"Un tejido de significantes y significados, plena de símbolos, lejos de tener carácter de ciencia experimental en busca de leyes, la entiende como una ciencia interpretativa en busca siempre de significaciones."
Busca sin descanso la Antropología las explicaciones que surgen de interpretar formas de expresión social que parecen a la primera mirada, herméticas en su sentido, opacas a la comprensión, mudas al diálogo.
He ahí donde se introduce el pensar y ejecutar de métodos y técnicas de la disciplina antropólogica.
La revalorización subject status, anthropologist and researcher, is in a constant state of research in itself. The old conception of passivity of the observer in the results and the actual object of study, not only today has been reconsidered, but has been shattered all naive account of objectivity and lack of bias, let's be clear, the contact is always a dialogue of cultures, and in that dialectic, both put their own settings. This is a detail no less, that should not be overlooked in the analysis. It is true
turn, that has not been easy, leave the safe home of the "quantitative" to sink into the risks of 'investigations qualitative. " Old
controversy that is still valid, which can be traced back to Aristotle's conception of understanding of the causes of the phenomena under study at the post position of Galileo in putting emphasis on the search for explanations.
Within these guidelines are certain dangers:
• One of them is to forget the effort involved in the methodological process. • That same dynamic has its own unchanging in its rhythms, Soper of contaminating the entire result from the emergency. • Que debe ser necesariamente el producto de un trabajo en profundidad, de análisis en profundidad y contrastado en un seguimiento que en términos de tiempo no permiten ni aceptan economías que no se manifiesten luego en la calidad de los logros.
Por tanto, el conocimiento científico, o sea Ciencia aplicada, implica para su logro entre otras muchas, dos facultades o elementos que surgen como muy importantes: 1. Ser el fruto de una construcción metódica, que como ya lo hemos dejado entrever, supone recorrer un camino respetando reglas, sin descuidar, y aquí tomo conceptos de ese filósofo y epistemólogo contemporáneo Theodor Adorno, for whom the method is dependent on what is studied and not a methodological ideal in itself.
2. The attempt to grasp the concept of scientific knowledge and methodology through which to obtain the same, implies a thorough understanding of how we think qualify as scientific knowledge. From a constructivist point of view, we understand that knowledge is truly a process, a movement, that it is modified and becomes a constant, these issues must not be forgotten, which is good and intellectual honesty to bear in mind the quality of all provisional and incomplete knowing or knowledge, even if in a given historical moment can be considered the maximum possible knowledge.
In this era of globalization is important to bear this in mind as to which cultural knowledge, and even appearing to be elementary common sense reasoning and elementary, will not always be taken into account, this condition and as such we borrowed a lot of knowledge that we do not need and / or appropriate to our cultural strategies of survival.
Science, is part of the human project from its beginnings as a genus and species, with privilege of monopoly in the possession of symbolic thought, and therefore the ability to manufacture tools with which to transform and adapt nature to our needs. Conceived as a tool of production and domination of nature, but not minor or insignificant, is also latent, which are tools that lead to misuse the domain of men.
As a final result on the idea and noted the concerns that I think we have permanently installed in us, scientists and citizens and the world belongs to us all, I leave, imagining the voice of Lord
Byron
with his poem: Darkness
"I had a dream that was not a dream.
The sun had been extinguished and the stars
wandered in the dark in the eternal space,
No light and no direction, and the icy earth
Swung blind and black in the moonless air.
Monument in personal Grande.Visita Salsipuedes coast. 
Zorrilla and Tabaré to understand and understand them because we think what we think and feel what we do not always express with honesty. We are not a society that identifies with their Indian ancestry. 
These lands and their native inhabitants seen by travelers who walked around entertaining tasks and multiple missteps during times of conquest. 
Law No. 18,589 
not formal. 
Pierre Thuiller, author of the books: Knowing ventriloquist 
