Methodological Pluralism and Epistemology between and Beyond Relational Methods

The years of epistemological – and a fortiori, methodological – Manicheism waded: since the seventies, excepted for the supporters of positivism, as an epistemological position, and mathematical analytical approach, as a methodological position, methodological pluralism and non-positivist epistemologies widely diffused and consolidated. On the methodological side, qualitative studies, laboratory case studies, statistical analysis, case-based reasoning, network-based methodologies and computational modeling have been accepted and practiced. What we want to underlie here is that, in search of better explanations of a given phenomenon, all these methodologies can be viewed not necessarily as competing, but rather feeding each other. As for most human behaviors, besides competition there is also collaboration as a possible approach. Contextualized on methodological pluralism, it means that, for instance, a qualitative study could provide salient data to better calibrate an agent-based model, whose findings in turn could lead to better empirical or statistical studies. The scarce practice of these methodological cross-fertilizations derive much more on the tendency of scientific communities to close into a self-referential world rather than to the undeniable methodological difficulties in combining different methodologies. On the other hand, some recent studies seem to demonstrate that mixed methods research has a major impact on scientific growth, thus, witnessing a certain demand for richer and more articulated approaches. Likely, most researchers perceive, more or less knowingly, that socio-economic phenomena are complex and that such a complexity require finer and deeper and multiple methodological perspectives