Scientific Though Forming Essays - Philosophy, Epistemology

Scientific Though Forming The arguments about these rival ontological and epistemological views cannot be safely left or judged without first looking more closely at the complex relationship between the general analytical interests of philosophers and the more specific intellectual concerns of working scientists themselves. For the degree to which each view about the reality of scientific entities and facts can carry conviction depends substantially on what branches of science are at issue. As the focus of philosophical attention has shifted historically from one scientific terrain to another, so, too, have the relative degrees of plausibility of these rival positions varied. The formal structures of science: Scientific enterprise will be considered that which has dominated recent debate in the philosophy of science, viz., the formal structures of scientific theory and the processes of conceptual change. It will soon be clear that the philosophical problems to which these two aspects, respectively, give rise are correlative and complementary--the one being static, the other being dynamic. Since 1920, most analytical philosophers of science have explicitly based their program on a presupposition inherited from Descartes and Plato, viz., that the intellectual content of any natural science can be expressed in a formal propositional system, having a definite, essential logical structure--what a leading American philosopher of science, Ernest Nagel, concisely called "the structure of science" in his book of that title (1961). One immediate inspiration of this program was the work of David Hilbert, a late 19th-century mathematician. To make the methods of mathematical proof more explicit and more perspicuous and thus more rigorous, Hilbert employed the techniques of formalization, a reduction to relations while disregarding the nature of the relata, and axiomatization, a tracing of entailments back to accepted axioms. The same techniques were taken over into the philosophy of mathematics by a pioneer German logician, Gottlob Frege, and into symbolic logic by Bertrand Russell and his collaborator Alfred North Whitehead; and, from 1920 on, the Viennese Positivists and their successors attempted to employ them in the philosophy of science also, hoping to demonstrate the validity of formal patterns of scientific inference by the straightforward extension of methods already familiar in deductive logic. According to the resulting program, the primary task for the philosophy of science was to repeat in quite general terms the kind of analysis by which, in the science of mechanics, Heinrich Hertz, the formulator of electromagnetic wave theory, had already sorted out the formal aspects of science from its empirical aspects. The program was founded on the expectation that it would be possible, first, to demonstrate the existence of formal structures that were essential to any science, properly so-called, and second, to identify the nature of scientific laws, principles, hypotheses, and observations by their characteristic logical functions. Once this had been done, rigorous formal definitions could then be given of validity, probability, degree of confirmation, and all of the other evidential relations involved in the judgment of scientific arguments. Looking beyond the internal structure of inductive logic, the dubious equation of scientific laws with empirical generalizations has also been criticized on the ground that it treats the content of those laws as matters of happenstance, far more accidental or contingent than those expressed in any genuine law of nature. In the opposing view, the explanatory force of, say, the physicist's law of inertia is totally different from that of such a generalizing statement as "All swans are white"; and one can learn nothing about the validity of actual physical arguments unless his philosophical analysis respects that crucial difference. It has not proved easy, however, to analyze the formal structure of the sciences in any less abstract manner than that of the Viennese Positivists or to give a true representation of the working language and arguments of science. In his Essay on Metaphysics (1940), R.G. Collingwood, a British philosopher and historian, made one striking attempt, in which the formal structure of intellectual systems was explained in terms not of direct entailments between more or less universal propositions but rather of mutual presuppositions between more or less general concepts. In this account, the principle of inertia was not the most universally true assertion in dynamics but was, rather, the most generally applicable presupposition, or principle of interpretation. Such an account has the merit of explaining why, within a particular science, certain formal patterns of argument carry the apparent necessity that they do; but at the same time it lays itself open to the charge of yielding too much to relativism and so of destroying the objectivity of scientific knowledge by giving the impression that the conceptual structures of science are