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)
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)
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)
A sociological study of science is not very recent and has never been seen as particularly problematic since science, and especially modern science, constitutes an impressive and extremely ramified "social system" of activities, institutions, relations and interferences with other social systems. Less favourable, however, has been the consideration of a more recent trend in the philosophy of science known as the "sociological" philosophy of science, whose most debatable point consists in directly challenging the traditional epistemology of science and, in particular, (...) in stripping scientific knowledge of its most appreciated characteristics of objectivity and rigour . A vicious circle seems to lie at the root of this sociological epistemology because, on the one hand, criticism of the traditional concept of scientific knowledge is developed by relying upon sociology, but this, on the other hand is reasonable only if sociology is credited with the status of a reliable instrument, that is, because it has been recognized as a science through an epistemological debate . In this paper it is shown that not all circles are vicious: in particular, feedback loops, positive and negative, are normally considered in cybernetic models of various processes. Negative feedback loops are fundamental in self-regulating processes and have already occurred from time to time in readjusting the concept of science itself. Therefore, a sociological epistemology of science can contribute to a more careful analysis of the real meaning and purport of the cognitive aspect of science, provided that it is not pushed to the self-defeating extreme of challenging the legitimacy of considering objectivity and rigour as the characteristic features of scientific knowledge. (shrink)
SummaryScientific realism is here made equivalent to the referentiality of scientific language. A clear distinction of meaning and reference is advocated and certain ‘symptoms' of referentiality in scientific language are stressed. It is then shown that contemporary scholars stressing the contextual determination of meaning, the meaning variance and theory‐ladenness of all terms in scientific theories, often fail to recognize that an independent ‘stable’ core of the meaning still exists. This allows for theory comparison and is witness that science investigates reality, (...) provided one is aware that different kinds of reality are investigated by different sciences. Naive realism amounts to disregarding that no access to reality is given outside meaning and language, naive antirealism amounts to overlooking that language refers to something different from language itself. (shrink)
The paideia of modernity is now in crisis. What is needed is a deeper, global understanding of the human being, and a broader determination of its ends and needs. Such a picture of the human being, its life, its real problems and expectations, can be called a paideia, in a sense that is the hard core of the different modulations this concept has received during its long history. It is suggested that this new paideia will be of service to humanity (...) only insofar as it bridges the gap between the sciences and the humanities, between facts and values. (shrink)
A lógica, considerada como uma disciplina técnica iniciada por Aristóteles e tipicamente representada pela variedade de cálculos lógicos modernos, constitui um esclarecimento e refinamento de uma convicção e prática presentes no senso comum, ou seja, o fato de que os seres humanos crêem que a verdade pode ser adquirida não apenas por evidência imediata, mas também por meio de argumentos. Como uma primeira aproximação, a lógica pode ser vista como um registro “descritivo” das principais formas de argumento presentes no senso (...) comum, mas o fato de que alguns desses padrões possam realmente permitir a derivação de consequências falsas a partir de premissas verdadeiras impõe a tarefa de tornar explícitos que padrões correspondem a um “raciocínio correto” e quais não. Nesse ponto, a lógica (que contém a apresentação de tais padrões) parece ser dotada de uma característica “normativa”. Isso equivale a dizer se pretende que os cálculos lógicos espelhem adequadamente a noção intuitiva de “consequência lógica” e que nesse sentido eles não podem ser totalmente arbitrários ou convencionais, mas devem satisfazer certos requisitos básicos tais como as condições de correção e (tanto quanto possível) de completude semântica. Em tal forma eles são “julgados” de acordo com os requisitos fundamentais presentes no nível do senso comum e aparecem como “idealizações” das espécies de raciocínio praticadas no senso comum. Por essa razão também vários tipos de cálculos lógicos são inteiramente justificados uma vez que tornam explícitos, de uma forma idealizada, os modos concretos de raciocinar que são impostos pelo particular domínio de referência da disciplina na qual são usados e que são basicamente reconhecidos no senso comum. DOI: 10.5007/1808-1711.2011v15n1p15. (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)
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)
After a brief survey of the different meanings of consistency, the study is restricted to consistency understood as non-contradiction of sets of sentences. The philosophical reasons for this requirement are discussed, both in relation to the problem of sense and the problem of truth. The issue of mathematical truth is then addressed, and the different conceptions of it are put in relation with consistency. The formal treatment of consistency and truth in mathematical logic is then considered, with particular attention paid (...) to the relation between syntactic and semantic properties of sets and calculi. After the crisis of mathematical intuition and the dominance of the formalistic view, it seemed that consistency could totally replace the requirement of truth in mathematics, also in the sense that the existence of "objects" of axiomatic systems could be granted by their consistency. A rejection of this claim is presented, whose central point is a detailed analysis of the theorem that any consistent set S of sentences of first order logic has a model. A critical scrutiny shows that this model is very peculiar, being offered by the elements of the same language that is being interpreted, and the satisfiability conditions for any sentence being constituted by the mere fact of belonging to S. Though not being insignificant from a metatheoretical point of view, this theorem fails to endow consistency with an "ontological creativity", that is, with the capability of providing a model ontologically distinct from the language itself. A final discussion regarding the different "ontological regions" and the referential nature of truth clarifies the different aspects of the whole issue discussed. (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)
