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This thesis has been an overview of the state and direction of contemporary philosophy. Specifically, it has examined the methodology of contemporary philosophy and has presented specific alternatives to academic specialization. Furthermore, it has explicated the notions of "systems philosophy" and "systems theory", which according to this writer are extremely relevant and useful alternatives to the problems of contemporary philosophy.This thesis has also examined the isolated nature of in holistic approach to world problems.Within the framework philosophy, and has endeavored to "publicize" philosophy order to make philosophical inquiry more "practical". The methodology of systems philosophy has been presented as a of systems philosophy the notions of "order" and "integration" are examined.

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This thesis makes a contribution to the debate about the status of the social sciences. Many philosophers have argued that the social sciences are unlike the natural sciences because they involve a kind of interpretative inquiry which has no parallel in the natural sciences. Stronger versions of this argument suggest that the social sciences are dominated or exhausted by interpretation. In many cases, this stronger claim is supported by an appeal to an analogy between interpretation in the social sciences and interpretation in the arts. The claim of this thesis is that the analogy between interpretation in the arts and the social sciences is not as strong as it is often thought to be. Works of art can be subjected to several distinct kinds of interpretation. Not all of these different kinds have analogues in the social sciences. In particular, conceptions of interpretation which allow for multiple incompatible interpretations of a single artwork have no corollary in the social sciences. By questioning the analogy between interpretation in the two fields, I seek to develop a limited version of naturalism in the philosophy of social science. That is, I argue that there are similarities and points of contact between the social sciences and the natural sciences. This position is strengthened by a further argument: that those who have opposed naturalism have tended to rely on an outdated and overly-rigid view of the what the natural sciences are like. The naturalism I defend is limited because it accepts that there are differences between the natural and social sciences, including the fact that there is a role (but not a dominating role) for interpretation in the social sciences.

In this thesis I give an account of Marx's methodology in his critique of political economy. By methodology I mean methods of investigation and presentation (a distinction made by Marx himself), and ideas on method andndash; the methods of other writers, his own, and scientific method in general. I have tried to explain why Marx devoted so much of his time to this critique, what methods he employed in criticizing political economy, how he was able to make the Grundrisse a significant advance over his previous efforts, and where, in the 'final' version of this critique, some of his fundamental arguments can be refuted. The ideal commentary on Marx's social and political thought (and here I part company with many commentators) presupposes athorough understanding of the economic work on which, according to Marx, it rests. In these economic studies, the commentator is confronted with Marx at work on the theory of political economy, using methods drawn from the philosophy, logic, historical research, and political economy of his time. His methods and ideas on method are of paramount importance in grasping the nature and content of his critique, since the material to which he addressed himself, and the substance of his work, differ very greatly from what we recognize today as economics. The originality of my thesis lies in the distinction drawn between political economy and modern economics with reference to the elucidation of Marx's work, the detailed consideration of his use of terms from nineteenth-century logical science of both the Hegelian and traditional pre-Hegelian types, the claim that important methodological innovations were recorded in the Introduction (1857) to the Grundrisse, and the specific criticisms offered of the fundamental arguments of Capital. Since Marx's critique of political economy, begun in 1844, was never finished, and since its scope and form were altered many times, I discuss his numerous plans for this work in chronological order, in conjunction with an account of his economic studies, in so far as they have been preserved in published form. I also consider his methods and ideas on method in selected works written between 1842 and mid-1857. This material supports my contention that three methodological innovations are recorded in the Introduction (1857) to the Grundrisse andndash; innovations in his method of investigation, in his ideas on a scientific method for presenting his critique, and in his plan for the critique as a whole. The first innovation is that he undertook a thorough investigation of the meanings and logical interrelations of the fundamental concepts of political economy; the second, that he identified a version of logical synthesis as the 'scientifically correct method' to be followed in his presentation; the third, that he decided to open the substantial part of his critique with a discussion of the economic category 'capital'. These innovations are elucidated, in the central chapter of my thesis, by examining their place in Marx's arguments in this text. In considering the remainder of the Grundrisse notebooks, I contend that in his methods and studies Marx did not reject the content of the Introduction, but developed his ideas further in the same direction. I also argue that his use of certain logical methods of investigation and his reasoning behind certain conclusions about the nature and future of capitalist society can be seen with exceptional clarity in the Grundrisse. These methods include his efforts to formulate correct questions and clear distinctions, to analyse the conceptual counterparts of economic phenomena as they appear, to produce conceptual counterparts of economic phenomena as they really are, and to use 'idealist' expressions and 'ideal' formulations without introducing errors. I consider his work in the Grundrisse on value, capital, labour, and profit, and the relationship of these investigations to his critique of political economy the published volumes, and the finished product, in so far as its outlines can be discerned. I discuss the plans and publications which followed the writing of the Introduction to the Grundrisse in August/September 1857, so as to establish the context of volume one of Capital, the only volume of the critique which Marx himself prepared for the publishers and corrected for further editions and translations. In my consideration of Marx's fundamental contentions in this work andndash; contentions about the commodity, labour, and value andndash; I criticize his version of an objective view of value, his claim that labour is the sole 'property' (apart from the property of being material things) common to the 'material bodies of commodities', and his acceptance of the view held by Adam Smith and David Ricardo (among others) that skilled labour is an arithmetic multiple of something called 'simple labour'. I consider a criticism previously made of Marx's work in Capital andndash; the criticism that his propositions are unfalsifiable andndash; and conclude that it is mistaken, since his claims can be refuted, though not with statistical data. Marx's last recorded comments on methodology in connection with the critique of political economy appear in his Notes (1879-80) on Adolph Wagner. My consideration of this little-used text reveals that there is a striking continuity in the problems considered and methods employed between the Notes of 1879-80 and the Manuscripts of 1844. In a final chapter I discuss the scientific status of some of Marx's claims about capitalist society, and the general relation of his economic critique to his political thought. I conclude that attempts to deduce a Marxian view of reality, from which his theories are thought logically to follow, are at best misleading, and that his methodology was a highly eclectic mixture of procedures, rather than something distinct and abstractable from his writings, as certain commentators have claimed.

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The objective of this research is to provide an account of literary expertise by examining literary experts and students in English Literature as they describe a fictional narrative. The experimental text is a complex narrative conveyed by means of character dialogue. / To investigate expert performance this study developed a model of text description that identified semantic units in the description protocols as a set of possible "discursive patterns." A discursive pattern identifies the text unit being described along with the point of reference of the description, that is, from the point of view of the reader, the author, or simply the text. / The results indicate that students' descriptions closely paraphrased the text, repeating either the narrative events or the characters' speech, while experts' descriptions reflected higher-level references to narrative structure or the function of the dialogue which were derived either from the text or from prior knowledge. Experts relied on specific information in the text as a support for more inferential statements. In addition, experts commented more extensively on the language of the text. Experts also included references to the author, the reader and the relationship between the two. It seems that experts view the text as the result of deliberate linguistic and conceptual choices made by an author and awareness of these choices appears to guide their descriptions.

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