The first part of this book is of an epistemological nature and develops an original theory of scientific objectivity, understood in a weak sense (as intersubjective agreement among the specialists) and a strong sense (as having precise concrete referents). In both cases it relies upon the adoption of operational criteria designed within the particular perspective under which any single science considers reality. The "object" so attained has a proper ontological status, dependent on the specific character of the criteria of reference (...) (regional ontologies). This justifies a form of scientific realism. Such perspectives are also the result of a complex cultural-historical situation. The awareness of such a "historical determinacy" of science justifies including in the philosophy of science the problems of ethics of science, relations of science with metaphysics, and social dimensions of science that overstep the traditional restriction of the philosophy of science to an epistemology of science. It is to this "context" that the second part of the book is devoted. (shrink)

Regroupement d'articles et d'essais sous deux grands titres : le monde de la science et de la technique; la rencontre avec la dimension éthique. [SDM].

The essays presented in this volume offer a valuable contribution to this interdisciplinary study.

[First paragraph] According to a widely accepted opinion, the most typical characteristic and even the constitutive element of science is measurement, i.e., those processes of measuring upon which science is based. For a long time this has caused a general orientation of disciplines seeking to call themselves "science"; toward a certain form of quantification; in order to achieve the prestigious title of "science"; some form of measurement, of whatever kind, had to be introduced into the area of study.

When we think about our way of seeing, appreciating and understanding the different forms and manifestations of the life of the mind in human civilization, we become aware of a rather surprising fact. We are ready and spontaneously inclined to place them in a historical perspective and consequently to judge them according to a “historical consciousness”, with practically only one exception, that of science. No one finds it difficult to admit that the poetry of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Goethe or Baudelaire (...) has always been an authentic poetry, attaining the heights of absolute value and even at times being incomparable, all the while recognizing that to understand this poetry, to appreciate its nobility and penetrate its meaning the effort must be made to put it within its historical context (and ideally to put oneself within that context) rather than to judge it according to the modes and forms of the poetry of our own day. What we have just said regarding poetry also applies to music, the fine arts, philosophy, law, social and political institutions, ethical concepts, religions and customs. In the case of science, on the other hand, such a historical consciousness is almost entirely lacking, even among cultivated people: the history of the sciences is not normally a part of the store of knowledge of these people, but this situation, far from being the cause of such a lack of historical consciousness, is rather the consequence. This is because we are unconsciously persuaded that science is not properly speaking a historical phenomenon; we have the impression that it has not had a real history. (shrink)

Modern natural science followed Galileo’s proposals regarding ontology, epistemology and methodology, limiting investigation to a few measurable properties of bodies by the adoption of the experimental method. Force appeared as a specialization of the traditional concept of efficient cause within the new science of Mechanics, which was soon able to incorporate practically all branches of physics. The concept of system had been introduced into scientific vocabulary in the seventeenth century and the limitations of the mechanistic approach in physics emerging by (...) the end of the nineteenth century prompted Bertalannfy to deeply re-elaborate it as System Theory. This permitted him to complement the analytic outlook with a rigorous characterization of the notion of organized totalities. This could be applied to life sciences and several other scientific domains, allowing rigorous treatment of traditional concepts such as finality, and new concepts like complexity and interdisciplinarity. (shrink)

Perspectivism is often understood as a conception according to which subjective conditions inevitably affect our knowledge and, therefore, we are never confronted with reality and facts but only with interpretations. Hence, subjectivism and anti-realism are usually associated with perspectivism. The thesis of this paper is that, especially in the case of the sciences, perspectivism can be better understood as an appreciation of the cognitive attitude that consists in considering reality only from a certain ‘point of view’, in a way that (...) can avoid subjectivism. Whereas the way of conceiving a notion is strictly subjective, the way of using it is open to intersubjective agreement, based on the practice of operations whose nature is neither mental nor linguistic. Therefore, intersubjectivity is possible within perspectivism. Perspectivism can also help understand the notion of ‘scientific objects’ in a referential sense: they are those ‘things’ that become ‘objects’ of a certain science by being investigated from the ‘point of view’ of that science. They are ‘clipped out’ of things by means of standardized operations which turn out to be the same as those granting intersubjectivity. Therefore this ‘strong’ sense of objectivity, which is clearly realist, coincides with the ‘weak’ one. The notion of truth appears fully legitimate in the case of the sciences, being clearly defined for the regional ontology of each one of them and, since this truth can be extended in an analogical sense to the theories elaborated in each science, it follows that are real also the unobservable entities postulated by those theories. (shrink)

The issue whether science can be correctly submitted to ethical judgment has been widely debated especially in the 1960s. Those who denied the legitimacy of such a judgment stressed that this would entail an undue limitation of the freedom of science; those who defended such a limitation laid stress on the great dangers that an uncontrolled growth of scientific knowledge has already produced and would continue to produce against humankind. This sterile debate can be settled by recognizing that scientific knowledge (...) can and must be evaluated, as far as its validity is concerned, exclusively through the methodological criteria admitted by the professionals of the single scientific disciplines concerned, and no ethical judgment is pertinent from this point of view. Nevertheless, if we consider science as a particular system of social activities, entailing concrete procedures, conditions and applications, the ethical evaluation of these actions is pertinent and correct. A second question is whether or not the inclusion of these ethical investigations in the specific domain of philosophy of science is correct. If one conceives philosophy of science simply as an epistemology of science consisting in a logical-methodological investigation about the language of scientific theories, this broadening would appear spurious. This view, however, is too narrow and dated: a fully fledged philosophical investigation on the complex phenomenon of science cannot prevent important outlooks and instruments of the philosophical inqujiry from legitimately pertaining to the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Philosophy of Science, understood as a special philosophical discipline, was born only at the beginning of the twentieth century as part of the effort for overcoming the “foundational crisis” that had affected especially mathematics and physics. Therefore, it was conceived as an investigation about the features and reliability of scientific knowledge and for a few decades was deeply marked by the philosophical approach of logical empiricism. This cognitive point of view persisted also when, after Kuhn’s work, the attention focused on (...) the scientific activity in order to understand scientific change and a sociological model replaced the view that empirical adequacy and logical consistency are the factors that determine the change of scientific theories. Ethical, social and political considerations regarding science ware considered inappropriate and potentially dangerous since they violate the alleged “neutrality of science” with respect to values. Nevertheless, the strict intertwining of science and technology in contemporary “technoscience” has produced a wide debate regarding the practical aspect of technoscientific activity that has the intrinsic features of a philosophical debate. Therefore, it is natural and advisable that the entire wealth of the philosophical disciplines be called to contribute to the specific complex discourse of the Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

Until the middle of the present century it was a commonly accepted opinion that theory change in science was the expression of cumulative progress consisting in the acquisition of new truths and the elimination of old errors. Logical empiricists developed this idea through a deductive model, saying that a theory T superseding a theory T must be able logically to explain whatever T explained and something more as well. Popper too shared this model, but stressed that T explains the old (...) known facts in its own new way. The further pursual of this line quickly led to the thesis of the non-comparability or incommensurability of theories: if T and T are different, then the very concepts which have the same denomination in both actually have different meanings; in such a way any sentence whatever has different meanings in T and in T and cannot serve to compare them. owing to this, the deductive model was abandoned as a tool for understanding theory change and scientific progress, and other models were proposed by people such as Lakatos, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Sneed and Stegmüller. The common feature of all these new positions may be seen in the claim that no possibility exists of interpreting theory change in terms of the cumulative acquisition of truth. It seems to us that the older and the newer positions are one-sided, and, in order to eliminate their respective shortcomings, we propose to interpret theory change in a new way.The starting point consists in recognizing that every scientific discipline singles out its specific domain of objects by selecting a few specific predicates for its discourse. Some of these predicates must be operational and they determine the objects of the theory concerned. In the case of a transition from T to T, we must consider whether or not the operational predicates remain unchanged, in the sense of being still related to the same operations. If they do not change in their relation to operations, then T and T are comparable. If the operational predicates are not all identical in T and T, the two theories show a rather high degree of incommensurability, and this happens because they do not refer to the same objects. Theory change means in this case change of objects. But now we can see that even incommensurability is compatible with progress conceived as the accumulation of truth. Indeed, T and T remain true about their respective objects, and the global amount of truth acquired is increased. (shrink)

When it is spoken of scientific representations it is often understood that science can offer "only" representations but does not enable us to know reality. This tenet is the inheritance of a gratuitous and inconsistent presupposition that affected modern philosophy during almost two centuries, according to which we know our representations and not things, and we have to find warranties in order to believe that such representations correspond to reality. The present paper analyzes this presupposition, shows its inconsistency and, through (...) a discourse regarding the relations between thought and ontology, between sense and reference of the intellectual constructions, between abstract encoding of properties and concrete exemplification of the same by means of operational criteria of reference, justifies the cognitive purport of scientific representations, including the mathematical representations of physical phenomena. (shrink)

RésuméCe travail est consacréà l'examen critique de l'itinéraire qui conduit Maxwell, à partir de l'intuition des lignes de forces de Faraday, à sa conception du champ électromagnétique, à ses célèbres équations et enfin à la théorie électromagnétique de la lumière. L'auteur montre et discute la manière dont Maxwell, qui avait fondé sa théorie sur un modèle élastique, l'a convertie en une pure théorie du champ sans pour autant renier une philosophie naturelle de caractère mécaniste.

Humans have used arguments for defending or refuting statements long before the creation of logic as a specialized discipline. This can be interpreted as the fact that an intuitive notion of “logical consequence” or a psychic disposition to articulate reasoning according to this pattern is present in common sense, and logic simply aims at describing and codifying the features of this spontaneous capacity of human reason. It is well known, however, that several arguments easily accepted by common sense are actually (...) “logical fallacies”, and this indicates that logic is not just a descriptive, but also a prescriptive or normative enterprise, in which the notion of logical consequence is defined in a precise way and then certain rules are established in order to maintain the discourse in keeping with this notion. Yet in the justification of the correctness and adequacy of these rules commonsense reasoning must necessarily be used, and in such a way its foundational role is recognized. Moreover, it remains also true that several branches and forms of logic have been elaborated precisely in order to reflect the structural features of correct argument used in different fields of human reasoning and yet insufficiently mirrored by the most familiar logical formalisms. (shrink)

Summary Philosophy of science is, in Italy, a relatively young field of research. The foreword of the paper gives some explanation of this fact, which is the consequence of a particular situation of Italian culture between the two world wars. When problems in this field began to be studied after the war, they were practically imported matter, and a rather long time was necessary before an original research started in this country. The beginning of it was marked by a profound (...) interest in mathematical logic and in the foundations of mathematics. More recently, also other topics in the philosophy of science (which is frequently called epistemology in Italy) have began to be studied, such as philosophy of physics, foundations of probability and inductive logic, philosophical problems of cybernetics, etc. The article gives a survey of these developments and offers an outline of the positions upheld by some more significant representatives of present philosophy of science in Italy, in the last section. (shrink)

Controversies have always characterized philosophy as expression of its typical critical attitude that depends on the complexity of the fundamental philosophical issues. Traditionally these discrepancies regarded the answers given to certain questions and, therefore, the content of the opposite doctrines, as all legitimately belonging to philosophy. With modernity the determination of the correct method of thinking becomes the necessary precondition for philosophizing and represents the core of the philosophical activity itself. As a consequence people adopting a certain method of thinking (...) often qualify as non-philosophical the discourse of those who do not belong to their methodological school, independently of the content of the doctrine they defend. This dominance of the methodological concern, on the contrary, has produced the discovery and deepening of several “thinking methods,” whose plurality must be considered a wealth and not a reason for skepticism, since it can offer to philosophy the tools for better coping with the increasing complexity of its fundamental issues. (shrink)

Man kann die wissenschaftliche Tätigkeit so betrachten, daß sie von einem "wissenschaftlichen System" ausgeführt wird, welches zugleich offen und adaptiv ist und dessen allgemeines Ziel darin besteht, objektives Wissen zu produzieren und zu verbreiten. WS nimmt aus seiner Umgebung Eingaben von "Nachfrage", "Unterstützung", "Ablehnung" entgegen und reagiert auf kreative Art und Weise darauf. Sein Funktionieren ist bedingt durch die Verträglichkeit seines Ziels mit denjenigen aller andern sozialen Subsysteme, die eine Maximierung der internen Variablen von WS ausschließen mögen, um das gesamte (...) soziale System zu optimieren. Dies ist nichts anderes als ein systemtheoretischer Ausdruck für den Begriff der Verantwortung der Wissenschaft: er ist nicht streng ethisch, aber schließt die Erwägung ethischer Normen des ganzen sozialen Systems mit ein. (shrink)

RESUMENLa idea del progreso de la humanidad se ha basado, en los últimos dos siglos, en el progreso científico-técnico. Por otra parte, se ha considerado a la ciencia como el paradigma de la racionalidad. Las consecuencias negativas producidas por el progreso científico-técnico están provocando un rechazo radical, en diversas capas sociales, de la ciencia y de la racionalidad; y la idea de progreso se ha invertido en la añoranza del pasado. Superando esta imagen neopositivista de la ciencia, el trabajo intenta (...) recuperar para el futuro del ser humano tanto la racionalidad, como la ciencia y la posibilidad del progreso. La racionalidad debe fundarse en valores positivos para el futuro de la humanidad. Por su parte, el progreso debe ser entendido como una tarea por hacer en cada momento, como el compromiso en la realización de aquellos ideales, utilizando la ciencia y la técnica como sus instrumentos más valiosos. PALABRAS CLAVEPROGRESO-CIENCIA-TECNICA-VALORESABSTRACTOver the last two centuries, the idea of human progress has relied upon scientific-technological progress. Meanwhile, science has been considered the paradigm of rationality. however, the negative consequences of scientific-technological progres are causing a radical rejection, at differents social levels, of science and racionality; and the idea of prgress has become a longing for the past. Going beyond this neopositivist image of science, the paper tries to recover rationality, science and the possibility of progress for the future of humanity. Rationality should be based on positive values evisaged to advace it. Progress should be conceived as an open, permanent task using science and technology as its most valued instruments. KEYWORDSPROGRESS- SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGY-VALUES. (shrink)

Modern philosophy of science was, initially, an epistemology of science based on the logical analysis of the language of science. It was superseded by a “sociological epistemology,” according to which the acceptance of scientific statements and theories depends on conditioningscoming from the social context and powers, and this view has fueled anti-scientific attitudes.This happened because the sociological turn still expressed an epistemology of science. Science, however, is not only a system of knowledge, but also a complex human activity. Hence, ethical, (...) political, social, religious issues appear legitimate if they concern “doing science.”Therefore, we must “rethink” philosophy of science, accepting in it also an axiology of science that could enable us to retain the cognitive value of science and at the same time to make techno-scientific activity compatible with the satisfaction of a great variety of values that inspire our societies. (shrink)