A Leading Paradigm of Modern Russian Philosophy of Science

The book under consideration is written by the leading Russian philosopher of science. It summarizes the results of the most productive stage of the leading trend in modern Russian philosophy. Moreover, it is even more interesting as a reflection of certain tendencies some of which will inevitably become influential in future.

But let me start with the results. Up to the end of 60th Russian philosophy of science was dominated by the ontological bias with its adherents dealing mainly with the problems of development, causality, space and time formulated in the quasi-optimistic context of advances in hard sciences. Yet the next stage was marked by the logico-methodological research devoted to structure and dynamics of scientific knowledge. At the ontological stage the main problem consisted in reducing the disciplinary ontologies of the natural sciences such as relativity, relativistic cosmology, quantum mechanics, quantum chemistry and genetics to dialectical materialism (a cornerstone of the official culture), saving the bodies and souls of the partisans both in sciences and scientific philosophies. Yet at the next stage they had to deal with the problems that appeared to be more complicated now. Now one had to deal not with (usually illiterate) “apparatchics” but with real Russian scientists as well and to reveal and to demonsrate the heuristic potential of Russian philosophy of science. Moreover, one had to meet the challenge of western post-positivism too.

The efforts to scrutiny the history of science and to revalue (critically) western achievements finally resulted in the image of science as a comlicated system of knowledge subject to slow historical evolution. The system appeared to be a self-regulated one, with the dynamics consisting in passing from one type of self-regulation to another and forming the level hierarchy of the elements involved. When the new levels of organization occur they influence the old ones and transform them.

Putting it in more clear-cut terms, all the main results obtained belong to one of the following three parts. The first part (i) reveals the genesis of scientific knowledge, the second one (ii) structure and functioning of the most developed forms of it, while the third one (iii) describes the dynamics of knowledge (and especially the scientific revolutions).

(i) During the prescientific stage the models describing the transformations of objects involved in practical activity were created due to schematization of practice. In cognition the objects involved in practical actions were replaced by ideal objects (abstractions) involved in mental processes now. The relations of abstract objects (and the operations involving them) were also abstracted from practice; they appeared to be a kind of scheme of practical actions.

(ii) However in mature science a different way of knowledge construction comes to the fore—one in which models of the object relations are first created as if from above with respect to practice. Ideal objects of these models are not abstracted from practice. On the contrary, they are constructed from already existing ideal objects obtained earlier. Neither is the structure (network of relations) into which they submerge extracted directly from practice but is instead borrowed from earlier formed domains of knowledge. Models created in this way serve as hypotheses initially. But later, after proper justification, they are turned into theoretical schemes of the domain under consideration.

Scientific knowledge is a complex historically developing system which gives rise to new levels of organization. In turn, they influence the levels of knowledge created earlier and transform them. The process is accompanied by occurence of new ways, methods and strategies of research.

The primary unit of a methodological analysis of the structure of knowledge should be associated not with a separate theory taken in its relation to practice (as was argued by the so-called “standard model”), but with a scientific discipline. The structure of a scientific discipline is determined by the levels of different theories of a varying degree of generality, both basic and partial, by their relations to each other as well as to level of empirical research, and, last but not least, by their links with “foundations of science”. The foundations of science serve as a system-building factor for a scientific discipline. They consist of:

• (a) a particular scientific picture of the world (a disciplinary ontology, a Weltanschauung) introducing a generalized image of disciplinary subject;

• (b) ideals and norms of research describing a generalized scheme of methods involved in doing research;

• (c) philosophical foundations of science that justify the particular scientific picture accepted.

(iii) Theoretical schemes play an important role in the theory deployment that is carried out not only by means of deductive inference accompanied by formal operations, yet also in a genetically constructive way by means of thought experiments with abstract objects. Theory deployment takes place in the course of puzzle-solving activity when some of the problems are included into the theory in the form of “paradigmatic examples “ or patterns (Thomas Samuel Kuhn). The conception of the structure of theoretical schemes as well as of the genetically constructive ways of building theories allows to considerably specify T. Kuhn’s problematic of models as an obligatory element in the structure of a theory of experimental sciences.

Mature theory elaboration is carried out through a successive synthesis of partial theoretical schemes. At each new stage of the generalization the conservation of the previous constructive content is verified, which automatically introduces the patterns of reduction of theoretical scheme generalized to partial ones. At the final stage of the theoretical synthesis a Fundamental Theoretical Scheme is created and the basic laws of the theory are proclaimed. The verification of their constructive meaning is performed as elaboration, on the basis of newly born Fundamental Theoretical Scheme, of all the partial theoretical schemes it encompasses. All these results in the emergence of paradigmatic patterns for theoretical problem- solving activity. The further theory expansion and the corresponding extension of its application domain introduces new models into its core. Yet only those that were constructed while a theory was still in the making remain basic with respect to it. A theory preserves the traces of its past reproducing the main steps of its evolution in the forms of paradigmatic problem-solving.

The foundations of science rebuilding (during the scientific revolutions) is carried out, on the one hand, under the pressure of new empirical and theoretical data emerging within scientific disciplines, and, on the other, under the influence of socio-cultural factors. Scientific revolution is a kind of “bifurcation point” in the evolution of knowledge when different possible scenarios of scientific growth become apparent. Of all these competing research programmes only those survive that not only provide empirically-progressive problemshifts (I. Lakatos) but also fit into the “spirit of the epoch”. In times of scientific revolutions, out of the multiplicity of scenarios, culture sorts out those that best of all correspond to the basic values.

During global scientific revolutions when all the parts of the foundations of science are being rebuilt drastic changes in scientific rationality take place. One can single out three main historical ideal types of rationality, i.e. classical, non-classical and post-non-classical ones.

• (a) Classical science (newtonian mechanics and maxwellian electrodynamics, for instance) assumes that true knowledge of an object is conditioned by the elimination, in the true course of theoretical explanation and description, of anything that has to do with the subject, its aims and values.

• (b) Non-classical science (relativity and quantum theories, for example) takes into account the links between the knowledge of an object and the nature of the means of activities in which the object is discovered and investigated.

• (c) Post-non-classical type of scientific rationality (non-equilibrium thermodynamics) is aware of the relations not only between the knowledge of an object and the nature of the means of activity, but between the knowledge and the structure of goals and values of activity as well.

To evaluate the importance of the results obtained one has to stress once more that they are extracted not from the metaphysical speculations of any school of thought. The main role in their elaboration was played by scrupulous rational reconstructions of the histories of newtonian mechanics, classical electrodynamics, special relativity and quantum theories (including quantum electrodynamics), of revolutionary changes in biology, chemistry, geology, sociology and language studies.

The second important trait consists in the following. The “hard core” of Russian philosophy of science (emerging from genuine Marxist tradition, of course) includes at least three main principles: realism, practical and socio-cultural determinations of scientific cognition. However, preoccupation with real scientific texts and history-of-science data had to soften significantly the metaphysical rigour of primary philosophical claims and to introduce some auxiliary hypotheses into the protective belt of the philosophical programme. For instance, it appeared that in the structure of a scientific theory there exist such elements that can not be related to corresponding counterparts of the empirical scheme (or “reality”), four-potential of maxwellian electrodynamics being a most vivid example. Further, the demand of operational content of theoretical terms has to be softened while passing from empirical schemes up to partial theoretical schemes. Alas, at the level of Fundamental Theoretical Scheme it takes the form of paper-and-pencil operations. And, at last, the demand of socio-cultural determination can not be reduced to content of scientific theories. It can influence the choice between competing scientific research programmes only.

One has to look at the tendencies now.

(1) One has to indicate the trend to re-evaluate the main results obtained by analytic (or positivist) philosophy. Disappointment in postmodernism with its unlimited relativism and sterile scepticism according to “Grand Narratives” leads to re-evaluation of the positivist heritage beginning from Comte and Spencer. V.S. Stepin’s book stresses the positivist impact for the advancement of scientific knowledge. Moreover, the positivist critique of the natural philosophy helped to develop philosophy of science that was devoted to solving the real methodological problems posed by the evolution of science. Hence, intention to demarcate science and metaphysics played positive role in justifying the new disciplines such as sociology.

So, in Russian philosophy of science positivism is criticized not for it was based on some idealisations of scientific practices since every brand of philosophy of science is engaged in such an activity. The main merit of positivism consisted in that it proposed and struggled for a certain Scientific Ideal. Hence the critical arguments against positivism consist in that its programme provided the picture of science that appeared to be too narrow. But it was the logical rigour of Russell’s, Wittgenstein’s and Carnap’s basic studies that made it possible to disclose the limitations of positivism consisting in inevitable theoretical laidedness of the “protokollsätze” of the observation, of accessive theoretic content that can not be reduced to the observations and in “theoretician’s dilemma”.

(2) One of the book’s main merits consists in detailed careful comparison of the results obtained by Russian and Western researchers in philosophy of science. The author thinks that the comparison leads to a conclusion that Russian philosophers of science could not only criticize their Western positivist and postpositivist counterparts, not only successfully assimilate their fruitful achievements but also were capable to produce some important new results as well. The latter include the problems of interaction of science and philosophy, of structure of scientific knowledge, of logical analysis of theory deployment, “logic of discovery” and insufficiently scrutinized by the Westerner’s type of scientific revolutions connected with interdisciplinary paradigmatic “inoculations” without previous anomalies and crises.

Thus, V.S. Stepin’s book represents an outstanding achievement of Russian philosophy, sociology and history of science. In conclusion I want to make a critical remark. The book contains rational reconstruction of special relativity genesis. The reconstruction stresses an important role played in the theory creation by the so-called “principle of invariance” (Felix Klein, the “Erlangen programme”, etc.). On Stepin’s view, Einstein had accepted the principle due to his personal contacts with Dr. Joseph Winteller while he was attending a secondary school in Switzerland. It was Winteller who employed Saussur’s image of language as a wholeness, a safe and variative system and concentrated on the search of invariant entities in language.

When Einstein became engaged in the search of electrodynamics of moving bodies he had successfully applied Winteller’s ideas as a kind of basic principle, “the invariance principle” of special relativity.

One has to remember Einstein’s own dictum that “Dostojewski gives me more than Gauss”. However it seems to me that to make the reconstruction more reliable the author should find direct Einstein’s quotations of Winteller’s works.