Publisher's Synopsis
Theories textualize our world. They are a system of ideas assembled and translated into language that mirror the world in order to construct or reconstruct reality. We build theories to reflect and interpret the world but theories shape the way we configure or make sense of it in return. This is constructed or reconstructed reality for us. We make theories but theories make our view of our social and natural world as well. This is a book about the nature of theories. It aims to introduce theory as a means to translate the world into text. It rationalizes theory as a set of statements meant to formulate concepts that attempt to mirror phenomena which besiege human beings in the natural or social order, where such statements are capable of deconstructing the phenomena into parts, reconstructing or building them back again into a relatedly functioning whole, and capable of providing foreknowledge of how such relatedly functioning whole operates. Theory has textualized our world. And it is through textualization that science has proceeded. Science is not just nature or human relations textualized, it is also the method and validation textualized. Science then is a body of rigor-achieved, rigor-differentiated and rigor-validated text that create an image of the world it attempts to explain or understand; discover its order or even re-order what it has discovered. Theory has made the world readable and it is through theory that we are able to change it. Thus science is a human invention.
