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Джозеф Марголис (США). Ответ Г. Гутнеру
Joe Margolis (USA). Reply to G. Goutner
I cannot be sure that I fully understand G. Goutner’s thesis, though I daresay I’ve caught its spirit if not its entire sense. Goutner threads through a considerable number of disparate views, which appear to converge rather nicely in favor of his central themes. He characterizes his own approach to the problem of scientific discourse as “pragmatic,” and it is certainly that. But he clarifies what he means by “pragmatic” by offering us a variety of comments on assorted figures, including Kant, Schleiermacher, Wittgenstein, and Apel. From this I infer that he is indeed a kind of pragmatist who, favoring a pragmatism, not at all unlike that of John Dewey, takes his inspiration from Hegelian sources, though in a way that, with some ingenuity, incorporates certain attractive themes developed by the figures mentioned. For instance, he draws in Wittgenstein’s account of following a rule, the hermeneutic account of the dialectical relation between part and whole in expanding interpretive space, and (as it seems to me) an account meant to capture the Hegelian critique of Kant by way of K.-O. Apel’s semiotic and pragmatized reading of Kantian universality. I find this quite interesting and instructive.
Goutner begins with what appears to be a disjunctive opposition between what he calls a “syntactic-semantic” analysis of science and a “pragmatic” analysis of communication. The first is meant to provide an objectivist account of the structure of scientific discourse, presumably directed to something that would take a correspondentist reading of truth and evidence. The second means to capture the general form of communicating to others a conception of a rational understanding of what scientific knowledge fully comes to.
The argument leads us to see that the abstract formulation of the first conception neglects the essential role of the cognitive subject, who is explicitly central to the articulation of the second model. Except that Goutner substitutes a human subject for Kant’s transcendental ego and reads the result in terms of a historicized and consensually oriented society. The upshot, for Goutner, is that the logics of the two processes are, finally, one and the same and implicate one another. So that the encompassing framework of the first proves to be provisional and consensual in terms of the contingent communicative success of the second process. Goutner favors a Kantian-like reading of the universalized agreement of an entire enquiring society; but, as it appears, any seeming universality is itself an artifact of the prior observations and theorizing of the community n question. It’s just this way at looking at the matter of scientific inquiry that I find at once Hegelian and pragmatist.
On Goutner’s view, the rational structure of inquiry is manifested in a dialectical way. We seek a conceptual totality that can accommodate the whole of the changing data of experience and the provisionally competing conceptions offered to explain the data given and to adjudicate our claims of adequacy. We seek both the right covering laws of the first process (explaining the data) and the rules of rational consensus are regarding what to agree to regarding what a scientific explanation is (understanding).
If I understand Goutner’s account correctly, then I support it as a reasonable policy. But I offer several considerations for Goutner to reflect on. First of all, I don’t believe this sort of procedure can assure us that it is approaching universality asymptotically: there is no progress possible on this basis, though relative to our prevailing interests we can indeed speak of progress. If I’m not mistaken, this would be very close to Kuhn’s view. Secondly, what we may achieve here is, on the grounds advanced, never more than a reflexive construction of what seems most reasonable. But that means that reason itself, contrary to Kant’s view, is an artifact of an evolving consensus, which is rational only in terms of consistency with its prevailing beliefs and weighted experience. Thirdly, the entire conjecture rests on the assumption that the experienced world constitutes a flux, so that succeeding in the way of rational explanations must be relativized (Goutner sees this) to the interests and contingently weighted beliefs on the strength of which our consensual judgment wins out; so it betrays certain circularity. Finally, the only sense in which the entire process is not trivially question-begging rests with our intuitions of what, in the entire process, counts as our having been in touch with the real world itself. This, too, is an interesting intuition, not any sort of contact with noumena, but it catches up, if I understand it rightly, the profound importance of Peirce’s notion of Secondness, which Peirce felt Hegel had slighted. I think Peirce was probably mistaken; but in any case, Secondness is an intuition, not an independent criterion of reality of any kind.
Goutner has touched here on one of the essential problems of objectivity in a post-Hegelian account of the sciences.
Никос Псаррос (Германия). É pluribus unum – Логика наук (и)
Nikos Psarros (Germany). É pluribus unum – The Logics of the Science(s)
What is Science?
It is a widespread opinion among scientists and philosophers of science that all sciences share the same object of study, namely an ontologically uniform natural and social world, and the same way of reasoning, the same “logical methodology”. This idea of the Einheitswissenschaft survives since the early 20ies of the last century, when it was coined as the ideological core of the Vienna Circle, despite many challenges from the ranks of deconstructivists, social constructivists, and of historians of science in the tradition of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend.
The fact that this debate has not come to a satisfactory end, despite of convincing arguments regarding singular points, suggests that it is perhaps the concept of science itself that needs further clarification. The disagreement between the adherents of the Einheitswissenschaft and their opponents may rely on their focussing on different aspects of science, resulting in an exchange of incommensurable arguments. The main question that needs to be answered first is therefore: “What is science after all?”
In answering this question we need not beginning with scrap. We find a still useful explication of the concept of science in the distinction between epistéme and dóxa, which goes back as far as to the ancient Greek philosophers, especially Plato. The common opinion nowadays is that those terms refer to the difference between “true” knowledge and mere belief that is only apparently valid. A closer look at the relevant texts, however, reveals that both terms refer to true or valid knowledge. The difference between epistéme and dóxa is a difference in the “quality” of the validity of knowledge. Dóxa refers to a knowledge that is only valid from a certain point of view, or under certain circumstances – i.e. to knowledge that is valid locally. Dóxa is knowledge about tokens, knowledge that is acquired by “doing”. The form this knowledge is presented are sentences of factual character containing quantifiers or qualifiers: All shoes this shoemaker produces are comfortable; My cat is lazy; The ore of this mine is very rich in copper; Copper from Cyprus is of profound quality.
In contrast to dóxa refers epistéme to knowledge that is universally valid. For fulfilling this purpose epistéme knowledge has to be theoretical knowledge. Its objects are types and it is presented in form of generic sentences that do not contain any quantifiers or qualifiers: Shoes protect feet from injuries; Cats hunt mice; Cuprite is a particularly copper-rich ore; Copper melts at 1083°C.
An additional and very important difference between dóxa and epistéme knowledge is that the latter is of normative character. The validity of dóxa knowledge has to be “compatible” with the validity of epistéme knowledge. If a certain piece of dóxa knowledge contradicts for example epistéme knowledge of the same field, then we have to present evidence that justifies why the dóxa knowledge should be nevertheless accepted. In other words, dóxa can always be confirmed by epistéme knowledge, and epistéme knowledge is in case of contradiction entitled to “cancel” the validity of dóxa knowledge.
To use an allegory, dóxa knowledge can be compared with the knowledge of people who live in a carpet. These people experience the carpet always from their local point of view, but have no idea about its overall form, about the arrangement of the patterns etc. A carpet denizen could explore the jungle of the carpet fibres and from the distribution of colours he could draw some conclusions about the patterns they form. Every such conclusion would remain, however, conjectural. In our carpet example epistéme knowledge can be compared with the knowledge about pattern and colours that would be obtained if one of the carpet people succeeded in flying over the carpet and having a general view on it from above. Now, after having obtained this knowledge from “above”, any local knowledge about the arrangement and the colour of the fibres obtained from living inside the carpet can be seen under a new light. Conjectures about the patterns can be now accepted as true, or rejected if they do not comply with the new knowledge.
The epistéme concept of science that was prevalent among the philosophers of the Antiquity and has been refined by Plato has, however, neglected an important aspect of science, namely the fact that scientific enterprise is not just a leisure activity of wealthy people, but that it has also an institutional form that makes possible the transfer of scientific knowledge from generation to generation. This aspect of science was captured by the medieval distinction between scientia and disciplina. Scientia referred here to the scientific (in terms of epistéme) knowledge of an individual and disciplina to the knowledge that is transferred from teacher to pupil by means of teaching. In order to establish something like a scientific practice both aspects, the epistéme providing universally valid knowledge, and the disciplina, rendering this knowledge common property of humanity by institutionalized teaching, are equally important.
On the background of this double explication of science as an enterprise aiming at the acquisition of universally valid and normative knowledge about the world in an institutionalized form, we could try to formulate some criteria for the distinction of the main scientific “parts” or disciplines, namely the delimitation between the main natural sciences on the one hand – physics, chemistry and biology – and the delimitation between the natural and the social sciences on the other. At this point the controversy about the unity of the sciences pops up again, since the proponents of the Einheitswissenschaft claim that such delimitations are only conventional. The reason is – so the unionist credo – that scientific research itself has revealed that the world is made up by a single kind of entities, namely material corpuscles. Every phenomenon of the natural world can be explained as a different arrangement of these corpuscles at a different level of organisation and complexity. Thus the differences between the natural sciences rely on the fact that each one of them examines the uniform physical world at a certain level of complexity: Physics is concerned with the behaviour of the corpuscles themselves, chemistry with the behaviour of certain systems of interconnected corpuscles (atoms, molecules), and biology (perhaps also geology and geography) with very complex systems of systems of corpuscles (organisms, geological formations, continents and oceans etc.). Regarding the relationship between the natural and the social sciences, unionists agree that there is at least uniformity in their methodology, namely that both forms of science acquire true knowledge by observation and that scientific knowledge enables the forecast of future events by means of the same type of logical inferring. The idea that there is one uniform logical methodology is even shared by the opponents of the Einheitswissenschaft. Here it should be noticed that the main point of dissent between the unionists and their opponents is not the idea of an ontologically uniform physical world, but the idea that there is a uniform human enterprise called science that remained historically continuous since its coming into being in Greek antiquity, and that scientific knowledge is accumulated linearly over the ages converging to the true depiction of the structure of the world.
This very idea of a uniform scientific logic and methodology that regards the delimitations between the sciences as a matter of mere convention – even if this convention arose in a historically contingent process – is at the focus of my criticism. I think that there are several reasons against this unionist view. First of all the world as we experience it is a thoroughly non-uniform affair: It contains various realms of objects and processes, which are phenomenally, ontologically and logically completely independent from each other. Obviously, in order to keep the world running, all these phenomena, objects and processes have to be somehow interconnected, but this interconnection is not just the sum of their existences and effects. Moreover, it is not only so that we divide the world into mutually independent realms, we also use specific methods for dealing with the phenomena, objects and processes that comprise each of them. In dealing with animals and crops farmers use methods that have nothing to do with the methods, with which a smith or a carpenter belabour their objects, and those methods are again completely different from the methods we use in cooking food, or extracting metals from ores. On the other hand, such producing (poietical) activities have nothing to do with methods we employ for resolving social matters (practical methods and activities).
Another argument against the ontological uniformity of the world can be derived from the fact that science, epistéme, is always interconnected with local practice, with practice at the level of dóxa. As our carpet example showed, the need of having a view at the carpet from above arises from the fact that our carpet people need arguments sustaining a certain hypothesis made by knowledge acquired from a local, carpet-internal, point of view. The epistéme knowledge is not an end in itself, but it is used to sustain or to refute an item of dóxa knowledge. Thus the issues and the objects science deals with are not created by science itself, but are taken up from everyday life. Science gives theoretical explanations using epistéme knowledge for phenomena that cannot be explained and for problems that cannot be resolved by applying mere dóxa knowledge. In this context the knowledge that the world consist of a uniform type of corpuscles fulfils a specific purpose, namely to explain why changes in a given realm of the phenomenal world are accompanied by coincident changes in other realms. Why. For example, are many stuff changes (i.e. chemical changes) are accompanied by changes of the volume or of temperature that are regarded as mere physical changes? Or why does some stuff have effects on organisms, despite of the fact that it is not food?
Further, the circumstance that scientific knowledge has the character of a tool means also that this tool can fail – scientific knowledge can be falsified and that it should be falsifiable in order to remain useful. But the main instance that decides about the falsification of scientific knowledge is its applicability on problems of everyday life. If there are no problems then it does not make much sense to seek and acquire scientific knowledge, i.e. if the non-uniformity of the everyday world is not problematical it cannot be refuted by the scientific idea of an ontologically uniform world, because in that case there is no conflict between dóxa and epistéme knowledge.
From the above mentioned, a third explication of the concept of science emerges. A given science is an epistéme-practice that sustains theoretically a number of aspect-related everyday practices at the dóxa-level by providing them with universally valid, relevant and teachable knowledge. The borders between the various kinds of science can be drawn across the relevant common aspects that everyday life practices and their sustaining sciences have in common.
The Delimitations of the Sciences
The Realms of the Natural Sciences
According to the general explication of science given above a natural science can be defined as an epistéme-practice, the aim of which is to sustain aspect related poietical practices of the everyday life by providing them with universally valid, relevant and teachable knowledge about the common objects of interest. Thus the delimitations among the natural sciences should be sought – and can be found – already in the natural phenomena of our everyday world. Natural means here, following a definition already given by Aristotle, that only such phenomena and objects are of interest to the natural sciences that carry their “principle of change in themselves”, i.e. that are not changed by sheer outer force. Examples for such “changes by virtue of an inner principle” are the conversion of wine to vinegar, or the free fall of a stone, or the life processes and the movements of animals. This “inner principle” includes also the intrinsic properties of natural objects and processes. In this sense the sweetness of a sugar cube is a natural property of this object, while the sweetness of a cake is not its natural property because it is dependent from the amount of sugar or other sweeteners that have been added by the pastry cook.
In the realm of the natural objects and processes we find three forms of change that are correlated with three relationships between processes and objects60: The first form of change is what Aristotle calls “locomotion and superficial change”. It encompasses all sorts of movements of bodies from one place to another, including the circular movements of stellar bodies, and changes of temperature or pressure. The common trait of such changes is – according to Hegel – that the object that is subjected to the changing process and the process itself exist independent from each other. A body can for example be affected by a gravitational field, but if we remove it from the influence of that particular field, neither the body nor the gravitational field ceases to exist. The same holds for processes that cause a change of the temperature, of the form or of the volume of a body. For our purposes we can identify such changes with the processes and objects that belong to the realm of the objects studied by Physics. The second form of change is in Aristotelian terms the “coming into being and decaying”, like the transformation of wine into vinegar or the burning of a piece of wood. We can identify such changes with chemical transformations in a broader sense. The common trait of such transformations is in Hegel’s terms that the objects of such transformations are produced or destroyed by the transforming processes, but they can remain existent after the forming process has stopped. This is true for chemical substances that are produced by chemical reactions, but do not require them for their mere existence. The third realm of the natural is distinguished by a form of change that Aristotle calls “growing and dwindling”, and that we can identify with our notion of life phenomena. Common trait of such phenomena is that process and object are interrelated. Living organisms are sustained by life processes and life processes are triggered by living organisms in order to sustain them. 61
Form of change and relationship between process and object are the sufficient and necessary criteria for the delimitation of the three main natural sciences, namely Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. The nature of these criteria is such that each realm of the natural cannot be reduced to any other, despite the fact that there is a “hierarchy” between biological, chemical and physical objects. Namely, biological objects utilize chemical processes and objects and act also as physical objects, but not the other way round. A solely chemical object is not affected by life processes and a solely physical one is not affected both by chemical and life processes.
The Difference between Natural and Social Sciences
The second border line separates the natural from the social sciences. The criterion of this distinction is not a phenomenological one, but is grounded in the way scientists treat their objects. Natural scientists operate from a purely observational point of view, in the sense that they neither use an evaluative vocabulary in their descriptions nor are affected as persons from the results of their research: A biologist observing a female spider eating her male mate during sexual intercourse does not evaluate this phenomenon as a morally detestable or even as a criminal act. Such evaluations of animal behaviour do not make biological knowledge more valid or more valuable. Commenting morally a biological phenomenon is regarded rather as not scientific. Chemical and physical processes are similarly described using a morally neutral vocabulary. Nuclear fission and fusion are as natural processes morally neutral, even if they could cause illnesses and death in humans. Both proponents and opponents of nuclear power plants share the same vocabulary in describing nuclear processes, as well as chemists involved in the production of chemical weapons for a fierce dictator and controllers of the United Nations use the same morally neutral chemical vocabulary when discussing technical matters. And finally, the discovery of an “aggression gene” in the human genome would not render manslaughters and murderer irresponsible for their deeds.
Social scientists on the other hand, are always committed to a participant’s point of view: An ethnologist studying a foreign culture is not released from his moral responsibilities towards the people he is studying. If he is in position to save a human life, he is obliged to intervene if he observes that the members of the culture he studies practice ritual homicide or ritual rape or similar criminal practices, even against the opinion of the members of the local culture who do not think that such practices are bad. A sociologist studying his own social environment cannot exclude himself from the social structure he uncovers. In other words, the crucial difference between natural and social scientists consists in the fact that natural scientists have to refrain from any morally evaluative vocabulary in their statements while social scientists cannot avoid it. This peculiarity of the social sciences means that in a strict sense the distinction between epistéme and dóxa knowledge does not apply to the social sciences. This does not mean that social scientific knowledge is bound to individual cultural environments and that social epistéme knowledge is not possible or even not desirable. The peculiarity of social scientific knowledge means that its epistéme quality is achieved and maintained by other means.
On the background of the fundamental attitudinal difference between natural and social sciences the difference between natural and social epistéme knowledge can be summarized as follows.
Natural scientific knowledge is:
aiming at the elimination of technical obstacles,
universal, in the sense that it is applicable to every aspect related poietical practice that experiences the same kind of technical obstacles,
transculturally valid, since aspect related poietical practices can be found or introduced in every culture,
subject to revision (or falsification) in case that new unanticipated technical obstacles appear.
Social scientific knowledge is:
aiming at the resolution of social conflicts and at providing orientation in life,
relational, in the sense that the starting point of social scientific enterprise is always the local social and cultural environment of the involved social scientists,
integrative, because it is oriented towards the conditio humana,
extensible in case that new cultures or social practices have to be integrated into the existing explanations and theories.
United States of Science?
The result of our analysis is that on the material level there is nothing like a unified science or Einheitswissenschaft, because not only the world is phenomenally and ontologically inhomogeneous, but also the methods of each science and our attitudes against the objects of natural and social sciences are so. On the other hand there must be a common trait that all sciences share if the notion of science shall have any meaning. The concepts of science discussed above suggest that this unity is only formal, i.e. that the only thing sciences have in common is now the way their concepts are ordered and the “sort” of the validity of the scientific knowledge. The formal unity of the sciences means that:
Every scientific concept can be positioned in a three dimensional reference system that makes up the conceptual space.
The validity of scientific statements relies on their practical applicability.
Scientific inferences have to be conservative with respect to their validity.
Ad 1: Concepts can be ordered in a space created by three pairs of opposites, namely normative-factual, descriptive-prescriptive, and local-universal/integrative (figure 1). These opposites regard the referential and ontological status and the validity of concepts. Normative concepts explicate an “ought”, an attitude, the notion that something shall be used in a certain manner. Their opposites are factual concepts that refer to something that has to be accepted as “given”, as an occurrence. Descriptive concepts just state what the case is, be it something normative or factual, prescriptive ones tell us what to do and how to do it. Finally, local concepts are valid on the dóxa level, while universal/integrative ones are valid on the epistéme level as delineated previously. In the plane defined by the pairs normative-factual and prescriptive-descriptive, concepts that are located between the normative and the prescriptive I call norms, such located between the prescriptive and the factual I call prescriptions, those located between the factual and the descriptive I call descriptions and finally those located between the descriptive and the normative I call ideas. Additionally a concept can be also located somewhere between dóxa and epistéme according to the degree of its universality or, in case of social concepts, according to the degree of its integrative power. Scientific concepts are also ordered in this space, where one should take into account that some scientific concepts are by their very nature placed at the zero-point of the co-ordinate system defined by the pairs normative-factual and prescriptive-descriptive, e.g. the concept of natural law or the concept of a scientific theory. Such concepts are made up by “equal parts” of normative, prescriptive, factual and descriptive aspects.
Figure 1: The structure of the conceptual space
Ad 2: As mentioned previously, epistéme and dóxa knowledge are interrelated in the sense that the dóxa level provides the epistéme level with the topics, the objects and the primary problems that have to be resolved scientifically. The epistéme level on the other hand, provides the dóxa level with universal knowledge that is of a normative character since it can refute local knowledge even if the latter appears to be valid. As we have seen however, the normative authority of epistéme knowledge is not dogmatic, but it has to prove itself in everyday life, by helping removing technical obstacles, by resolving social conflicts, or by providing a meaningful orientation in life. The latter is the task of historical sciences and of natural histories, e.g. cosmology, evolution theory or geography, because they show us our limits as biological beings and our place in the natural world.
Ad 3: New scientific knowledge is obtained not only by direct observation but also by inference from valid scientific knowledge. Examples of such valid inferences are theoretical predictions that enable the construction of new technical devices (including new methods of medical treatment) or open new fields of scientific research, the various kinds of mathematical calculus, or the conclusions that are drawn from social scientific analyses. It is of crucial importance, however, that the various techniques of inferring ensure the validity their results.
On the background of these formal elements that make up the unity of science, scientific method can also be formulated in a formal sense that is outlined in following methodological rules:
Science has to be oriented towards its everyday life basis!
The dimensionality of scientific concepts has to be determined in every theoretical setup!
The level of validity of scientific concepts has also to be determined in every theoretical setup!
Inferences have to start with valid concepts as premises!
Inferences have to be conservative regarding validity!
Inferences should not be derived from a single premise!
The validity of scientific inferences has to be proven by their applicability in everyday life!