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Some reflections on the epistemological fundaments of an Italian action-research experience

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Abstract

In this paper the authors, starting from the experience described and commented on in earlier work by Mancini and Sbordone, deal with the three main epistemological problems that the research group they participated in had to face:

  • The conflicting and ambiguous relationship between psychoanalysis and social research

  • The classical epistemological problem of the relationship between the subject and object of research within the perspective of action research

  • The problem arising from their experience, i.e., the risk of manipulation, and the way to deal with it from an epistemic perspective

The three problems are dealt with one at a time, but from a common perspective, i.e., the attempt to integrate the richness and variety of human subjectivity in social research. As to the relationship between psychoanalysis and social research, a special section is devoted to the implications of an integrated or convergent methodology on team-working in organisations.

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Notes

  1. Praetermittendae autem defensionis deserendique officii plures solent esse causae; nam aut inimicitias aut laborem aut sumptus suscipere nolunt aut etiam neglegentia, pigritia, inertia aut suis studiis quibusdam occupationibusue sic impediuntur, ut eos, quos tutari debeant, desertos esse patiantur. Itaque videndum est, ne non satis sit id, quod apud Platonem est in philosophos dictum, quod in veri investigatione versentur quodque ea, quae plerique vehementer expetant, de quibus inter se digladiari soleant, contemnant et pro nihilo putent, propterea iustos esse. Nam alterum [iustitiae genus] assequuntur, in inferenda ne cui noceant iniuria, in alterum incidunt; discendi enim studio impediti, quos tueri debent, deserunt. Itaque eos ne ad rem publicam quidem accessuros puta[n]t nisi coactos. Aequius autem erat id voluntate fieri; nam hoc ipsum ita iustum est, quod recte fit, si est voluntarium.

  2. The redundancy of the parts and that of the functions are differentiated (Emery 1967)

  3. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book II, part III

  4. A cela nous réponrons tranquillement qu’il y a deux manière de considérer une conaissance quelconque, une manière superficielle qui lasse hors de cause le sujet connaissant, et une manière approfondie qui l’inclut.

  5. Aristotle, Etica Nicomachea, 3.6.1113a32

  6. On the philosophical principle of cause, see: Aristotle, Metafisica, 5.2.1013 35-b3; Aquinas, Sententia Super Physycam, II.5 n. 6[181]

  7. From a different cultural slant, see the same notation in Dumont (1991, p 77)

  8. Dumont (1991, p 81) makes clear how the rule and the measure are different even culturally speaking in different societies, and that the distinction between the individual as empirical agent, present in all the societies and the individual as value-bearer—whom in modern Western society is connoted as rational being, normative subject, independent, autonomous and asocial—is “indispensable to sociology”

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    F. Garibaldo & E. Rebecchi

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  1. F. Garibaldo
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Correspondence to F. Garibaldo.

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Garibaldo, F., Rebecchi, E. Some reflections on the epistemological fundaments of an Italian action-research experience. AI & Soc 18, 44–67 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-003-0273-y

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