Reductionism as the Most Important Methodological Error in Scientific Investigation

The conflicts resulting from exclucivism and reductionism in the various domains of cognition has been an important obstacle in scientists access to extended and all-embracing cognition. Then bearing in mind that one of the main obstacles in the process of investigation is reductionism, the pathology of multiple phases of investigation will be studied. Essentialism and the concept of teleology in Aristotelian thought and paying no attention to situations and mutual relations of phenomena along with dogmatism was among the causes of insufficiency of this kind of investigation which led to various reductions such as reduction of philosophy to kalam or logic and finally to linguistics and psychology. Modern objectivist method with positivism for resolving the obstacles of thought replaced it. Mere attention to theory, inductive method, observation and description of phenomena rather than interpreting them are the most important features of positivism which was the reason that all human knowledge or part of it, that is natural sciences, be identified as one and the whole knowledge be reduced to a part of it.
Such an error led the postmodern thinkers to question the positivist ideas. Postmodern era is accompanied with the era of verification and falsification of theories, special attention to method and research programs, reduction of science to sociological factors in scientists, anarchism, relativism and finally unbridled pluralism. In each of these tendencies in fact the process of investigation is reduced to a part of it. The period after postmodernism by investigating in these cognitive gaps is seeking to find a standpoint in scientific research that takes into account all viewpoints and avoiding one-sidedness in research and its methods. Such a viewpoint does not recognize the research a mere mental process, but it considers various factors such as sociological, psychological and even biological and other factors as influential in it.