The Ottoman History and Paradigmatic Principles of the History -xv- (*) (Mustafa Özcan, 18.01.2016)

The Ottoman History and Paradigmatic Principles of the History -xv-

When researching Paradigmatic Principles of the History, I would like to discuss through this article my view on the issue that the three main intellectual areas - the narrative, philosophy, and science of the history - that are especially likely to be popular need to be considered. In fact, the necessity of such an approach in terms of completing the totality of the flow of subject in such treatments in the form of series of articles have probably been noticed by the valued readers that have been following up the series since the beginning.

Narrative or, in other words, a form that could be designated as the descriptive story-telling represents as a literary genre an informative flow of words that develops mostly by proceeding in the direction of underlying network of events. 

On the other hand, the questioning in the philosophical treatment of what the causes of historical events could be forms the basis of the framework of idea in this category. The framework applied here reveals the structure that creates the methodological approach. When viewed from a practical point, the method represents here, as always was the case, the functionality that is essentially the foremost at all times that reveals the  method in discovering “how” of the subject. 

However, the grounds reached when paradigmatic principles are discussed to be researched not in practical terms but rather on a theoretical or, in other words, abstract scientific basis reflects a level that has been quite complicated.

For instance, as a perspective that will be applied in the scientific treatment that is in question in such a situation, while the issue is to be viewed on the one hand from a micro-sociological plane based on interpretation,  a factual (factuality verifiable with statistical data) framework of causality on the other hand needs to be created in the flow of macro-sociological perspective and the narrative. 

In the narrative of Big History, an approach with a dichotomous structure that is socially in the form of micro/macro as indicated is required due to the inevitable existence of a factuality with maximum breadth because of the time being the widest and the space being the greatest.

In other words, we can say that the style in handling the issue, in line with micro-sociological interpretational and macro-sociological statistical approaches that will be taken simultaneously and in parallel, and these two sociological elements being integral polar supplements to each other reflect a situation that is both necessary and mandatory.

While macro-sociological treatment takes us to the Cliodynamical model that approaches history from a mathematical foundation, the micro view leads to referring to biographies, oral history, and local history (*).

Mustafa Özcan (18.01.2016)

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(*) To be continued.