Obstacles to development-oriented social research

The objective of this intervention is to raise some of the most serious problems or obstacles faced by research in Social Sciences in general.

When talking about problems and obstacles, it refers to factors that to a greater or lesser extent block the development of scientific and technological solutions that satisfy the needs of social development. And, when speaking of social development, I refer to a collectivist vision of society and economic relations, that non-pyramidal, non-competitive vision that advocates the inclusion of

the great masses dispossessed in the productive dynamics and that opposes that other individualistic, exclusive vision, according to which individual effort and the retreat of others is the secret to ascend in the social pyramid where, at the top, are the few who have a lot and, at the bottom, are the many who have little (or nothing).

If these factors could be minimized, Social Science Research would constitute a powerful tool to advance towards an independent, self-sustaining, just and, finally, developed society. I firmly believe that there is no development if only a few enjoy it and that the independence and sovereignty of societies depend on their inclusion / exclusion mechanisms. Scientific and social research must take sides against both mechanisms. In this intervention, everything that bends to individualistic and competitive factors of social exclusion is assumed as an “obstacle” and formulas for overcoming it are suggested that lead to a Social Research oriented to broad, inclusive development, in the terms already outlined.

PREVIOUS CONCEPTUATIONS

There are some important points to make before addressing these inhibitory factors. In the first place, when we speak of research we are referring to Scientific Research, understood as that class of processes for the production of scientific and technological knowledge. Therefore, we are not considering within the term research those products such as literary works, for example, free reflections, philosophical speculations without argumentative or empirical basis, intimate revelations, esoteric texts, etc. In general, we start here from the idea that knowledge is a cognitive representation of reality and, although all knowledge has close and inevitable links with the affective and sensory spheres, it is not valid to confuse it with these.We cannot treat knowledge as if it were identical to feelings and perceptions. Therefore, when we speak of knowledge, we refer to those representational networks that are formed in the cognitive sphere of people and not to things like emotions and sensory impressions.

On the other hand, when we say that knowledge is scientific, we mean that it has high socialization and systematization values, as well as an explicit theoretical basis. Knowledge is highly socialized to the extent that it further escapes the limits of one-person, individual consciousness, and projects itself towards the domain of the interests of large social groups. It is thus opposed to intimate, subjective, personalized or individualized knowledge. A good example of intimate knowledge is offered by Saint Augustine in his "Confessions", when he says that he knows what time is if no one asks him, but that he stops knowing it when someone asks him. That kind of knowledge that Saint Augustine has about time lacks socialization values. Instead, knowledge about things like cancer,the solar system, etc., have high socialization values, without necessarily being scientific. For this to happen it is required that they have high levels of systematization at the same time and that they be associated with an explicit theoretical basis. Knowledge is highly systematized when the processes that generate and sustain it are standardized, canonical, repeatable, communicable, so that anyone, within the right circumstances, can replicate it whenever they want. In this, Science differs from Art, among other things. The processes that generate a work of art, especially those that define its creativity, are impossible to standardize, to organize in a series of steps and instructions, even though, socio-historically speaking,artistic production has been "institutionalized" and subjected to canons (see Araujo-Valero 2009). The same goes for Magic: the pathways of the magician's mind are impenetrable and no one knows how they work. A typical case of systematized knowledge is that of most cooking recipes, since it is enough to have the ingredients and instruments and to follow the instructions to obtain the desired dish.

Someone might suppose that the case of cooking recipes is scientific, since culinary knowledge has high levels of socialization and systematization, but that is not enough.

It also requires a theoretical component that is inextricably associated, without which it is impossible to manage the knowledge in question. It is clear that culinary knowledge has its theoretical bases in physics, chemistry and biology, but these are not essential to produce and consume that knowledge. With the latter, we also exclude from the concept of Scientific Research those elaborations that are only of a technical nature and of methodological replication, as is the case of software production based on a pre-existing protocol, curricular and instructional designs, biographies and character reviews. and historical records, among other things. The case of technological research is different, when the product obtained has high levels of socialization and systematization and, in addition,it is derived from some plausible theory, such as pioneering software production, curriculum design technologies, biographies as empirical correlates of some theories, etc.

Another important precision before entering into the subject is that there is no single way of investigating nor can we, in principle and in absolute terms, believe that a certain way of investigating is better than the others. This is opposed to what we could call investigative proselytism, that nefarious tendency to convince everyone that a certain research pattern is the best of all, while all the others are rejected. This is how many of our universities often impose a single work pattern from above and try to force everyone to follow it:

But it is not only the secretaries or traffic prosecutors or, in general, low-level employees, but many rectors, vice-rectors, deans, members of academic committees, juries, etc., tend to be the most evolved and sophisticated representation of that complex over the counter. They are even worse than humble traffic officers. This complex of the counter is actually the basis of the perversion of the Bureaucracy, something like its genesis: when the bureaucrat realizes certain opportunities for power, then he not only exercises it, but refines, consolidates and converts it. in a whole system of domination that tends to grow and swallow more and more, with an insatiable hunger.

One way to overcome this is to require research evaluators to have a deep command of the investigative processes and, especially, a total management of epistemological approaches. Those who are not active researchers and who have not carried out at least five or eight published and recognized investigations should not be allowed to be members of jury or of academic or selection or decision committees. Unfortunately, it is only required that they have the same level of the author who is being evaluated and that is why we see teachers who in their entire lives have hardly done any promotion work or some degree work, but who in reality have not They are researchers and do not have any epistemological knowledge. Thus, to compensate for their academic ignorance, they resort to bureaucratic blackmail,with which the production of development-oriented social research is notably deteriorated. It is quite a spectacle to review many of the observations that bureaucratic evaluators make to jobs: strikeouts with the annotation “this is poorly formulated” or question marks that say nothing or underlined with exclamation marks that do not say anything either. I know of the case of an evaluator who on all the pages of a teacher's work wrote the following: "who said this?" As this legend appeared absolutely on every page of the paper (in the middle of it, he only wrote the initials: “yqde?”), It is to be assumed that this evaluator was convinced that nothing original can be said in an investigation, but everything must be taken from someone who has already said it before, that is,To investigate is to repeat things already said. It seems that the elimination of bureaucracy and bureaucrats in our institutions is something that must be done urgently.

Many other organizational obstacles remain to be mentioned, such as the lack of definition of research preferences at the institutional level, the disarticulation of individual efforts, the absence of a research culture, the conception of research only as a procedure. so and not as a product, etc. A detailed exposition of these factors that are only mentioned here can be seen in Padrón (2001, 2004b and 2006).

EPISTEMOLOGICAL OBSTACLES

Here are grouped those factors whose inhibitory power depends on prejudices, distortions and epistemological errors. As mentioned above, the curricular conception eclipses epistemological visions, those that are rooted in a research theory, to impose a methodological vision per se, not theoretically supported and of a prescriptive nature (something like cooking recipes). This methodological vision has been built from fees originally imposed by some author of methodology manuals and then those fees are repeated and disseminated among professors, advisers, tutors and jurors, who in turn impose them on researchers social and thesis students. Nobody disputes them and nobody knows what foundation they have or why they are applied.It is something similar to the case of a lady who always cut one end when she prepared pork leg before putting it in the oven. When asked why she cut that piece, she replied that she did not know, that her mother did the same. When he asked the mother, she said the same thing: she did not know and that she had seen her mother prepare the leg.

And when she went to her grandmother to find out why, she explained that in her time the oven she had was very small and, as the whole leg did not fit, she had to cut a piece of it. Instead, the daughter and granddaughter had a large oven, but by sheer repetition they continued to do the same without wondering why and believing that it was part of the recipe. Let's look at some of the factors of this type.

3.1. Universalization and particularization

("This topic is very broad, it delimits")

This is one of the most widespread factors, not only in our country but in many other parts. In fact, it is one of the remnants of the Empiricist-Inductivist (IR, observable object) approach that dominated until not long ago and that used to be based on inferences from representative samples of a universe. Then, when working with samples, they particularized the design and reduced it to the sample (the students of a school, for example), but kept their vision in the universe (the set of all the students, continuing with the example), towards which they projected their generalizations. This was very misunderstood by many methodology teachers, who believed that the problem and the research objective should also be particularized.Take the case of a thesis that formulates a problem such as what factors intervene in performance. Then some teachers would tell you that the topic is very broad, that it delimits, what specifies which students and in which performance area you are going to investigate. The thesis concludes by reformulating his problem in a way like this: what factors intervene in the mathematics performance of the students of the W school. With this, the research lowered their levels of socialization tremendously, since their results can only be applied to the students of the W school, exclusively in the area of ​​mathematics and not to any other student in any other area. If for any reason that school should disappear or be closed, the object of study would also disappear and the research would lose all meaning. That is to say,If the thesis student had wanted to formulate a theory of performance, he would never have been able to achieve it because he is not considering the object of study in a universal, abstract sense, but only in the case of those from the W school. And we already know that a theory of performance in mathematics at the W School it would never be a scientific theory, precisely because of its low socialization value.

But that is not all. Then there is the problem of relevance and universal classes: are there any properties that make the students at school W particularly different from other students? It is as if we wonder why the inhabitants of Margarita have two legs. It is not only the inhabitants of Margarita who have two legs. All normal people have them, so this is an irrelevant question. They say that Newton made his observations and experiments in the backyard of his house, but when he formulated his three laws he spoke of “laws of motion of bodies” and not of the laws of motion of the pebbles in the backyard of my house. Of course, if Newton had fallen into the hands of one of these professors, he would have said: which bodies? where? Define the problem. AND,Thanks to this imaginary teacher, Newton's laws would never have been produced and physics would have slowed down their development. One of the highest aspirations of Science is the formulation of theories that explain universal classes of facts and not particular classes. Einstein, for example, set out to design a Theory of the Universe; Chomsky set out to formulate a Universal Theory of Languages ​​(all); Darwin, a Theory of the variations of the alive beings (all); Luhmann, a Theory of Social Systems (all); Mendel, a theory of heredity (not just of the peas in his garden) and, thus, many other cases. Some advisers and tutors would have told them that each of those topics was very broad, that they delimited the topic. Fortunately, that did not happen in those famous cases,But it is easy to imagine how many research works in our institutions, which could have been excellent, were inhibited by those who confuse delimitation with particularization and by those who do not understand theoretical research.

Someone could say that there are case studies, which point to particular kinds of facts. It is true, the case studies constitute an extremely useful work pattern and in addition there are the focal investigations, widely used in medicine, zoology and botany, such as, for example, a study of the insects of the dry forests of Guatemala or a study of ocular surface cells in patients with aniridia, etc. But there is something important: focal works, case studies and, in general, all empirical investigations, oriented to particular classes of facts, are always conceived, understood and justified in relation to a broad research program that gives them general coverage of all cases and foci studied by the members of the program, so that,adding all these studies, it is intended to arrive at a universal class of facts, that is, a broad theory. And this occurs due to scientific uncertainty about the specificity of each case and, consequently, due to the risk of assuming all of them beforehand in a single universal class. But a study on a reduced set of facts is absurd when it is known in advance that they belong to another larger set and when there are adequate investigative mechanisms to treat them universally (for example, establishing conditions of geographical or historical or social variation, etc..). In any case, we must differentiate between empirical and theoretical investigations.The former are a function of the latter and make sense within large Research Programs in which many researchers participate and in which it is sought to successively reach a theoretical phase, while the latter always seek to cover large classes of facts and make use of of the results of the former (hence the need to avoid superficialities when analyzing the concept of "Line of Research"). We already know that Research Programs are born with a descriptive phase, go to an explanatory phase, then move towards a contrastive phase and close in an applicative or technological phase. What is criticized here is that many times, when a student aspires to a theoretical investigation, some professors try to turn it into an empirical one, without further analysis,only based on the prejudice of the delimitation of the subject.

3.2. Hypotheses, variables and operationalization

Although this prejudice has given way a lot with the recent boom in research based on the Experiential-Interpretative approach (VI, above), it still continues to cause discomfort in many places. It consists in assuming that all research must have hypotheses, variables, indicators and operationalization of the problem, just to mention four debatable elements. The underlying problem is to ignore the methodological variations originating from epistemological approaches and from the diachronic structure of research processes (the development phases of Research Programs).

On the one hand, we have that only within the Inductivist-Realist approach (measured, probabilistic) do we speak of variables and indicators and the problem is usually operationalized, but never in the Experientialist-Interpretative approach and not always in the Rationalist approach. -Deductivist. In the first of these two categories of analysis are used rather, and in the second the properties or predicates of an argument. Regarding hypotheses, it is very rare to see them in Experiential-Interpretative research (where neither the operationalization of the problem nor the indicators are used) and in the Rationalist-Deductivist approach they have a totally different nature and function. The hypotheses of Inductivist-Empiricism are usually experimental,divided into null hypothesis (no dependency is found between variables or no significant difference between the population means) and alternate (this dependency is found, there is a significant difference in means). But in Rationalism-Deductivist hypotheses have a high theoretical and abstract range and serve to derive progressively more specific statements from them, until reaching observational statements that can be compared with the facts. Note this concept of Hypothesis in the following quote from Einstein (1989):But in Rationalism-Deductivist hypotheses have a high theoretical and abstract range and serve to derive progressively more specific statements from them, until reaching observational statements that can be compared with the facts. Note this concept of Hypothesis in the following quote from Einstein (1989):But in Rationalism-Deductivist hypotheses have a high theoretical and abstract range and serve to derive progressively more specific statements from them, until reaching observational statements that can be compared with the facts. Note this concept of Hypothesis in the following quote from Einstein (1989):

We should start with some classification criterion, even if it is different from the one just proposed, but it is a fine, disaggregating and powerful criterion, not one of a simplistic type (such as qualitative / quantitative) or too complex (as the of multiple intelligences). It is not that the typologies in the previous table are the most relevant or the most appropriate, but they are the best supported by interteoretical (interdisciplinary) arguments.

Given this, one cannot help but be amazed at such confusing classifications as those offered, among others, by the famous UPEL Manual, which has been copied by most of our universities, especially private ones. Personally, I have the conviction that this Manual is one of the most important confounding factors in terms of the training of researchers and guidance for thesis students. I quote it here because it is one of the most representative examples of the mix of qualifying criteria mentioned above. Part of considering four types or classes: Field Research, Documentary Research, Feasible Projects and Special Projects. Apart from the irrelevance of this classification, the mixture of criteria is notorious (as in the case reported by Borges: animals with hair,hairless animals and emperor animals). Indeed, Field Research and Documentary Research obey the criterion of the data source, while Feasible Projects and Special Projects obey the usefulness of investigative productions. Internationally, it is known that Feasible Projects are Applied or Applicative Research (material or human technologies) and Special Projects are Technical Elaboration.Internationally, it is known that Feasible Projects are Applied or Applicative Research (material or human technologies) and Special Projects are Technical Elaboration.Internationally, it is known that Feasible Projects are Applied or Applicative Research (material or human technologies) and Special Projects are Technical Elaboration.

3.4. The objectives of the investigation

This is another of the key points that contains different obstacles for a social research oriented to mass development. The obstacles can be seen from two angles: the problem of the type of objectives that define scientific research as rational human action and the problem of the design of a system of objectives in particular research works.

	DESCRIPTIVE	EXPLANATORY	CONTRASTIVE	APPLICATION
EMPIRIST	Frequency pattern method. Information processing into observable data, grouped into variables. Use of descriptive statistics for the management and presentation of data.	Inductive method. Verification of observational hypotheses by means of an experimental design, based on inferential statistics.	Experimental method. Hypothesis testing replicas using inferential statistical-based designs, varying the test conditions.	Technologies of action are derived from empiricist theories. The technology obtained is experimentally validated.
RATIONALIST	Structural configuration method. Information processing into observable data, grouped in an empirical structure. Use of class logic and relationship calculation for the handling and presentation of data.	Deductive method. Formulation of non-observational hypotheses that explain the facts and from which progressively more specific explanations are derived, which can be contrasted.	Logical-formal method and experimental method. The logical validity of the work results is first tested and then empirical tests are carried out.	Technologies of action are derived from rationalist theories. The technology obtained is validated by logical and experimental tests.
INTROSPECTIVIST	Coexistence method. Information processing in categories of analysis, grouped in hermeneutical constructs. Use of verbal language for the management and presentation of information.	Experiential-Introspective Method (hermeneutical and / or ethnographic applications). The analysis categories of the previous phase is resolved in an interpretation that allows understanding the facts implicit in the research problem.	Consensual method. The participants of research evaluate the results of the research.	Intervention proposals are derived from introspectivist theories. The proposal obtained is validated consensually.

In the first place, one of the greatest difficulties for research aimed at broad collective development lies in what is conceived as the typical achievement associated with the action of research. Of course, that necessarily leads to what is conceived as the logical structure of such action in general. There is a tendency to think of the typical goal of research as creating a valuable document, an elegant speech, a rhetorical piece, or an emotionally powerful work. This trend has been generated from those postmodernist, enlightenment and esoteric visions that, as in other historical eras (more details in Padrón, 1996), have taken off after the famous “death of logical positivism” 8. For these visions, investigating is an action included in "chatting",“Write beautiful” or in which it seeks, in short, to make an impact on ignorant or uncritical readers. From these visions, it would be desired that investigating was the same as impressing, something similar to what artists do, with the difference that they usually produce valuable works, appreciable for their technique and / or creativity, while what is done in these visions he lacks any technique, all originality and, above all, any meaning. It is, as Popper (1996: 88) said:while what is done in these visions lacks any technique, any originality and, above all, any sense. It is, as Popper (1996: 88) said:while what is done in these visions lacks any technique, any originality and, above all, any sense. It is, as Popper (1996: 88) said:

throwing words into the air professing a wisdom you don't have. The recipe consists of tautologies and trivia peppered with paradoxical nonsense. Another recipe is: write down some barely comprehensible pomposity and add trivia from time to time. This will be enjoyed by the reader, who will be flattered to find in such a 'deep' book thoughts that he already had once (anyone can see these days that the new clothes of the emperor are in fashion) They have not learned how difficult which is solving problems and getting closer to the truth. They have only learned to drown other human beings in a sea of ​​words.

Second, there is the problem of how the design of the objective system is conceived in an investigation. Many of our Methodology teachers still do not understand that an objective supposes an action and an achievement associated with that action, that an objective supposes a disaggregation of actions and minor achievements, that the objectives of an action constitute a system and that the Design of a system of objectives implies a planning vision, rather than an investigative vision. Many are unaware, for example, that the semantic sum of the specific objectives must equal the general objective. Many are also unaware that the formulation of a general objective obeys the overall intention of the researcher and reflects the final product of their action. They do not know that the important thing is the semantics of the action achievements before the syntax,for which they tend to believe that every objective is necessarily headed by a verb and not also by a noun (the product of the action). Some even have a 'list of allowed and forbidden verbs' in mind when writing objectives. Some, for example, have gone so far as to say that the word “explain” is not a research objective, when precisely the great goal of Science is “explanation”. And, in general, many of our Methodology teachers are unaware that there is a Theory of Action and a Logic of Goals, which are the most systematic reference we have to decide whether or not a system of goals is right. formulated.And the worst of the case is that it is precisely that section of the "Research Objectives" on which most of the attacks by our evaluators are focused and that is where comments such as "that objective does not work", "that objective is poorly formulated ”, etc., without them proposing correction options and without knowing absolutely anything about Theory of Action or Objective Logic.

The design of a research objectives system is one of the most systematic and systematically evaluable aspects, but in general our evaluators judge it according to their personal opinions, according to their individual criteria and even according to their particular tastes. The thesis student is the great victim of all this: in fact, I am convinced that, if a thesis student submits their work objectives to 100 evaluators, they will get 100 different answers.

In this line, many other particular obstacles remain to be described, but the ones just mentioned give an idea of ​​this kind of epistemological brakes. For example, it would be necessary to analyze irrationalities such as that the bibliographic references cannot be more than five years old. Incredibly, many reviewers reject papers whose bibliography contains documents older than five or ten years of publication. That is, according to them, Einstein's works are useless, because he quotes Newton, three hundred years before. Chomsky's works are of no use either, because he quotes Descartes, three hundred years earlier. And, in general, the best scientists in history would have been postponed by these Methodology professors, considering that all knowledge has a fixed and precise limit of obsolescence: five years.In other words, there is no knowledge that is worth anything if it passes five years after being published.

Minor things could also be analyzed such as, for example, that investigations must obey a certain number of pages or that projects must be divided into “chapters”, forgetting that the division into chapters is only for books. In short, however insignificant these details may seem, the fact is that they manage to make life miserable for any thesis student and that they are often used maliciously. And, as a jewel in the crown, it turns out to be our poor students who suffer from "TMT Syndrome" and who need proper therapy. In truth, on the contrary, what we need is gigantic hospitals for our experts in Methodology and for our distinguished university authorities.

THE AXIOLOGICAL OBSTACLES

Finally, the third sphere from which numerous obstacles are generated for a social research oriented to mass development (the most important and influential) is that of values, that of preferential systems that are internalized in the individual and group minds of both academics as administrators of academic institutions. These values ​​or preferential systems are so powerful that they create attitudes and dispositions for action that are stable and that, in the end, are the ones that generate the organizational obstacles outlined above.

I am not going to describe cases or examples, but only to point out that the conception or ideal of a society influences here. And in this regard I am going to distinguish, as I said at the beginning and as I have already done in several works, between an Individualist conception of society and a Collectivist conception. I do not use the same Popper sense for these two terms: in this case, Individualism supposes a pyramidal vision of society, a space in which people struggle to be at the top, where fewer and fewer people fit, but where there are more privileges, based on the mechanism of Competitiveness, that mechanism according to which one's own progress depends not only on conquering ascending spaces but also on other competitors stagnating or descending. That is to say,competitiveness supposes the value of cheating, deception, appearances and tricks, more than of the true merits. Collectivism, on the opposite side, supposes a rectangular vision of society, a space in which everyone has the same opportunities and in which there is no need to compete, but rather one's own progress depends on the progress of others.

The mechanism that intervenes in this is Cooperation, collaboration, the shared effort to reach a goal all. A suitable example that I have already cited before to illustrate this difference is the historical, recent, documented case of that race of children with Down syndrome, in which one of them falls and all the others, instead of taking advantage of that fall To overtake, they stop, help him to get up and, all holding hands, arrive together at the finish line, to the astonishment of an entire competitive audience. This great lesson of disabled children, totally unforeseen and spontaneous, becomes evidence that Collectivism is less utopian than has been commonly said. The difference between the two views can be explained by the phrase: “there are two kinds of people:those that fight to reduce the gap between rich and poor and those that fight to belong to the class of the rich ”.

This has a perfect application to Social Research: Individualism leads to competitions such as the PPI (Researcher Promotion Program), the Conaba (National Commission for Academic Benefit to University Professors) and other official incentives, all which do nothing but generate miserable attitudes in our researchers, attitudes dependent on the petty need for a little more money, correlatively associated with the fictitious needs of consumer societies (beautiful cars, beautiful houses, children in private schools, etc.). Aside from that is the obvious, commonly overlooked fact that in these awards "neither are all who are nor are there all who are." Thus, in the face of an acute and critical analysis,There is no merit in itself to belong to the highest level of the PPI system, but rather the suspicion of how much bureaucratic ruse could underlie that position.

Let's not talk about the paid Tutors, the hired Advisors, the private organizations (made up of anonymous academics) that write theses, promotion work and commissioned research under forms of payment, or let's talk about the mercenaries of the Academy: the There are many types, from some of the private universities to others of the doctoral and post-doctoral programs, to our “full-time” professors who have the gift of ubiquity. In all this the molds of this Individualistic vision are imposed, in which Social Research, basically and primitively, serves to ascend, gain scores and obtain more income, in perfect correspondence with fatuous, vain (and, therefore, false expectations).) of a notion of quality of life under consumerist schemes.

This is the greatest obstacle to development-oriented social research for all. From this obstacle all those previously mentioned are derived. Even all these obstacles mentioned above are miniscule given the magnitude of these others. Consequently, only if we face this axiological obstacle, of values, only in this way will we be able to progressively fight against the other obstacles and only in this way will we have a true Social Research oriented to a true 'development'.

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• (2008): "Styles of Thought and Social Exclusion", in EntreCiencias, Multidisciplinary Scientific Journal of the CDCHT-UNESR. July, 2008, Vol. 1 No. 1. Pp. 117-148. Available: http://padron.entretemas.com/EPyES.pdfPopper. K. (1992): In Search of a Better World. Lectures and Essays from Thirty years. London / NY: Routledge. (1977): Search without Term. Madrid: Tecnos.Rivero, N. (2000): Epistemological Approaches and Styles of Thought. Doctoral Thesis. Caracas: UNESR / LINEA-i.Salinas, PJ (1998): «The TMT Syndrome and the TMA Syndrome. Symptoms, Effects, Epidemiology, Etiology, Therapy and Contraindications ”, in MedULA, Journal of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Los Andes. Vol. 7 No. 1-4. Merida Venezuela. Editorial. Pp. 1-3 Valarino, E. (1991). TMT syndrome. Everything except Thesis. Postgraduate, 1, (1), 63-78

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1 On Styles of Thought, see Padrón (2008). On Epistemological Approaches, see Padrón, Hernández and Di Gravia, A. (2005). For both, see Rivero (2000).

2 LINEA-i, Research Line in Teaching / Learning Research, at www.lineai.org

3 This is even more alarming when admissions committees for graduate courses are made up of recent graduates: they almost invariably behave according to the Counter Complex (see below) and tend to take special pleasure when they humiliate participants. It's quite a case for a possible Academy Psychology.

4 I recently ran into a former student of mine, and when I asked him if he had finished his PhD, he replied that not only had he finished it, but that he was a “Postdoctor”. I also heard of a professor who, when signing documents, precedes his name by the acronym "PostDr." It follows that our postdocs are useless if they are not even capable of putting people in their right place or instructing them about what an academic degree is.

5 W e shall therefore assume the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and the corresponding acceleration of the reference frame. This assumption extends the principle of relativity to the case of uniformly accelerated motion of the reference frame. The heuristic value of this assumption rests on the fact that it permits the replacement of a homogeneous gravitational field by a uniformly accelerated reference system, the latter case being to some extent accessible to theoretical treatment.

6 This quote from Einstein appears a lot on the Internet in Spanish: “When I examine my methods of thinking, I come to the conclusion that my gift for fantasy has meant more to me than my ability to absorb positive knowledge”. By "fantasy" he means "capacity for imagination", which is essential in the RD approach (it is Peirce's famous abduction, which is not introspection, as many believe, but Rationalism or RD approach). By "positive knowledge" he refers to observational data. Another confirming quote is this: "Reality is nothing other than the ability of our senses to deceive ourselves." One of those sources is

7 Children, from birth, begin with a descriptive phase in which they seek to organize the strange world that surrounds them (the question “what is this?” Is typical). Once that phase is saturated, they go on to an explanatory phase, seeking to find out why things happen the way they are seen to happen, with which they elaborate their first everyday theories (the question “why?” Is typical). From there they go on to a phase of knowledge testing, when they seek to find out if everyday theories are correct (the phase in which they stop believing in the Stork and the Child Jesus, whose typical question is "how do I know?" Who said it?"). They finish their cognitive maturation with the application phase, the consolidation of skills and abilities (“How do I do it?”, “How do I solve it?”),which definitely seems to anchor the dominance of a certain Style of Thought in the individual.

8 Popper (1977) has a chapter entitled "Who killed Logical Positivism" (p. 117) in which partial authorship of this epistemological 'murder' is attributed. At the beginning of the chapter he quotes John Passmore: "Logical Positivism, then, is dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement has ever been." Later he comments: “The philosophers of England and America seem to have taken me for a logical positivist or, at most, a dissident logical positivist, who replaced verifiability with falsifiability (…). But by then logical positivism had really died for some years. "

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