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Reflections on the Philosophy of Science: The Demise of Justificationism
| Article
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19715 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
5,797 Words |
| Author
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Lloyd Eby
Lloyd Eby has worked in film and video since 1970 and has
published articles on the interaction of film and religion.
With René Berger, he coedited the book Art
and Technology (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1986).
He is assistant senior editor in the Currents in Modern
Thought
section of The World & I. |
For people who are uninterested in philosophical questions, the status of philosophy of science may seem unimportant or even worthless. This attitude is understandable but mistaken. The importance of the philosophy of science can hardly be overestimated for philosophers and those with philosophical concerns and interests. Western philosophy and science were born among the pre-Socratic Greeks, who began their investigations and speculations with questions that were primarily about the nature of the world--questions that nowadays would be considered to be scientific questions. Aristotle developed the first great philosophy of science, and he did this in addition to presenting comprehensive philosophical accounts of ethics, politics, aesthetics, metaphysics, logic, and psychology. His theory of science, moreover, is tied to his theories in each of those areas.
Theory of science became central in Western thought and culture after the ascendancy of the scientific work of such figures as Copernicus, Kepler, and especially Sir Isaac Newton. Newton's work presented a clear, mechanical, mathematically precise, comprehensive, simple and elegant account of the natural world. In addition, Newtonian mechanics tied together the heavens and the earth, the motions of the most distant and massive objects with the most close and minute, presenting a world which was, in principle at least, totally knowable, totally predictable, and totally controlled. Newton's achievement was so great that it seemed to raise the sciences--especially the physical sciences--to a godlike status. That attitude persists in some circles and among some people to this day.
From the time of Newton on, the question "What do humans know?" has been answered best in Western thought by: "They know the sciences." According to this view, if there is any genuine knowledge in such fields as ethics, politics, theology and religion, and the arts, then that knowledge is less certainly known and more open to controversy than the sciences. Moreover, the sciences themselves have often been ranked in a hierarchy according to the certainty and comprehensiveness of their knowledge, with physics (plus chemistry, later on) taking the top position, and knowledge in such fields as astronomy, geology, the biological sciences, geography, genetics, paleontology, and so on, falling somewhere lower on the hierarchy. When we get to psychology, sociology, economics, history, and politics, although these are often called sciences, there is an ongoing argument whether and to what extent they deserve that name and the status that (supposedly, anyway) accompanies it.
The growth and ascendancy
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