Science Meets Philosophy: What Makes Science Divided but Still Significant 2022049083, 2022049084, 9781032354354, 9781032354361, 9781003326878

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Science Meets Philosophy

The book is an attempt to bring together what are often seen as incommensurable scientific and philosophical positions. Its core argument is that a main reason for the divisions about what constitutes scientific knowledge relates to disagreements on philosophical issues. The book explores what these disagreements are about, and discusses whether they can be overcome. Taking a historical perspective, the book traces the divides in science back to three main philosophical traditions: realism, idealism, and scepticism. It maps how these have inspired three main current positions in science: logical empiricism, phenomenology, and sociology of scientific knowledge. The book is intended for a general audience concerned with today’s debates on scientific knowledge and society. It will be useful for students and researchers studying philosophy of science, sociology of scientific knowledge, realism, phenomenology, positivism, logical empiricism, analytical philosophy, and sustainable scientific knowledge. Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen is Professor at the Department of Working Life and Innovation at the School of Business and Law at the University of Agder, Norway. He has been Visiting Professor at Deusto University in Spain, Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Senior Researcher at NORCE (previously Agderforskning), and Visiting Scholar at several universities including UC Berkeley and Cornell in the USA, and Kingston University in the UK. His latest books are Coping With the Future: Rethinking Assumptions for Society, Business and Work with Holtskog, Halvor; Ennals, Richard (2018); Applied Social Science Research in a Regional Knowledge System with Hauge, Elisabeth S.; Magnussen, May-Linda; Ennals, Richard (2016).

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

Anatomies of Modern Discontent Visions from the Human Sciences Thomas S. Henricks Critical Theory of Coloniality Paulo Henrique Martins Karl Polanyi and the Paradoxes of the Double Movement John Vail Nationalism and Hegemony The Consolidation of the Nation in Social and Political Life Michaelangelo Anastasiou Lockean Property Ethics and Restitution David Jarrett Making Citizenship Work Culture and Community Edited by Rodolfo Rosales Towards a Sociology of the Open Society Critical Rationalism and the Open Society Volume II Masoud Mohammadi Alamuti Radical Civility A Study in Utopia and Democracy Jason Caro Science Meets Philosophy What Makes Science Divided but Still Significant Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/RSSPT

Science Meets Philosophy

What Makes Science Divided but Still Significant

Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen The right of Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Johnsen, Hans Chr. Garmann, 1955– author. Title: Science meets philosophy : what makes science divided but still significant / Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge studies in social and political thought | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022049083 (print) | LCCN 2022049084 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032354354 (hbk) | ISBN 9781032354361 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003326878 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy and science. Classification: LCC B67 .J59 2023 (print) | LCC B67 (ebook) | DDC 501—dc23/eng/20230211 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049083 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049084 ISBN: 978-1-032-35435-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-35436-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-32687-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003326878 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Preface 1

A king’s art 1.0 The line of argument in this chapter  1 1.1 How to study science  2 1.1.1  An uneasy relationship  2 1.1.2  What is the disagreement about?  5 1.2 Science meets philosophy  9 1.2.1  Four traditions and three positions  9 1.2.2  The methodological approach in this book  13

2

Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science 2.0 The line of argument in the chapter  19 2.1 Science before science: the Plato/Aristotle controversy  20 2.1.1  The nature of knowledge  20 2.1.2  Plato on knowledge and truth  24 2.1.3  Aristotle and the order of things  27 2.2 The emergence of modern logic  31 2.2.1  Critique of Plato’s and Aristotle’s methodologies  31 2.2.2  After antiquity: science and religion  35 2.2.3  The language of science  42

3

The realist track towards logical empiricism: the problem of conceptualising reality 3.0 The line of argument in this chapter  52 3.1 Empiricism 53 3.1.1 Phenomenalism 53 3.1.2  All science is science of man  60 3.1.3 Positivism 64

viii 1

19

52

vi  Contents

3.2 Logical empiricism  69 3.2.1  The non-existent King of France  69 3.2.2  The Vienna Circle  78 3.2.3  Discovering truth by observation and logic  84 3.3 Post-positivism 90 3.3.1  The logic of scientific discovery  90 3.3.2  Towards critical rationalism  94 3.3.3  The practical turn  101 4

The idealist track towards phenomenology: the problem of objectivity of thinking 4.0 The line of argument in this chapter  115 4.1 Constructivism: thinking at the centre of everything  116 4.1.1  A mind-dependent reality  116 4.1.2  Kant’s Copernican revolution  121 4.1.3  Synthetic a priori knowledge  126 4.2 Science in the post-Kantian world  130 4.2.1 The parting of ways: rationalism versus humanism 130 4.2.2 Existentialism 133 4.2.3  Explaining and understanding  141 4.3 Phenomenology 145 4.3.1  Striving towards the infinite horizon  145 4.3.2 Fundamental ontology 152 4.3.3 Communicative rationality 159

5

The scepticism track towards the sociology of science: the problem with the concept of knowing 5.0 The line of argument in the chapter  177 5.1 The practical turn  178 5.1.1  Beyond realism and idealism  178 5.1.2  Scepticism, rationalism, and evolution  184 5.1.3  The knowledge society: who killed the parrot?  189 5.2 Inside the whale  193 5.2.1  The historical embeddedness of thought  193 5.2.2 The critical theory tradition: against epistemology 197 5.2.3 Post-structuralism: the social construction of thought  204 5.3 Sociology of science  210

115

177

Contents vii

5.3.1 Pragmatism 210 5.3.2  A naked emperor: science as a social practice  217 5.3.3 Incommensurable paradigms? 225 6

Still a role for philosophy? 6.0 The line of argument in this chapter  238 6.1 A view from the moon  239 6.1.1  Scientific pluralism  239 6.1.2  Science in a post-metaphysical society  243 6.2 Sustainable scientific knowledge  248 6.2.1  Pending questions in the philosophy of science  248 6.2.2  To reach out into the unknown  252

238

SmP References Index

257 280

Preface

This book is an attempt to reconcile what are often seen as incommensurable scientific and philosophical positions. While I am humble in my response to the argument that this attempt has not been completely successful, I would still argue that there is value in the attempt. It has been my long-term ambition to write a short book that traces some of the roots of scientific thinking and follows them through to contemporary scientific debate. My core thesis is that one of the main reasons for the divides in thinking about what constitutes scientific knowledge relates to disagreements on philosophical issues. These issues are explored in the book and I discuss whether they can be overcome. Are we living in a world where addressing fundamental philosophical questions raised by science is obsolete? Should science stop caring about philosophical issues? Is it unrealistic to rewind today’s science back to simple philosophical principles? These and similar questions have been in my mind as we have seen increased hostility between scientific and non-scientific opinions in society. If nothing else, I hope I have made a good argument for why science still needs to address philosophical issues. I have had the pleasure of discussing these issues with several scholars. In particular, I wish to thank Richard Ennals, Hans Grelland, Olav Eikeland, Fredrik Haraldsen, Dag G. Aasland, and Friedrich Stadler. Lillesand, Norway, April 2023 Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen

Chapter 1

A king’s art

1.0  The line of argument in this chapter When I asked a group of students the question ‘What you would do if you wanted to know something?’, almost unanimously they replied ‘We would Google it’. When I then asked ‘What does it mean to know something?’, their answers were less clear and more diverse, ranging from ‘solving problems’ to ‘verify and prove’. When I asked ‘Do you believe that scientific knowledge is true’, the students’ responses varied greatly. In this chapter, I present attempts to answer questions about thinking and knowing that have led to dilemmas, and I use some of those dilemmas as a door to the field of philosophy of science. I argue not only that dilemmas are an inherent part of the discourse of science but also that they represent a challenge when science generates knowledge. I argue that there are competing positions in science that can be explained by disagreements about fundamental philosophical issues related to epistemology and ontology. The answers to the questions of what scientific knowledge is, what makes it different from other kinds of knowledge, and how we know that it is good all depend on the answers to more fundamental questions: What is knowledge? How do we come to know things? How do we verify that our knowledge is true? What is truth? Furthermore, the question of what knowledge is relates to questions about how we perceive the world and what the world is. Knowledge presupposes that we can identify it in relation to other concepts and phenomena, such as facts, truth, meaning, and certainty. This chapter presents the three main philosophy and sociology of science positions that I discuss in this book – logical empiricism, phenomenology, and sociology of science – and how they relate to three different philosophical traditions – realism, idealism, and scepticism. Together, they represent what is broadly defined as the discourse on philosophy and sociology of science. In this respect, science is used as a general term to identify what is generally regarded as scientific activity in society. As a general term, ‘science’ is at the same level as when we talk about politics, art, or business. We can use these terms without referring to any specific political regime, art form, or form of trade. Thus, when we use the term science

DOI: 10.4324/9781003326878-1

2  A king’s art

in such a way, it does not refer to natural science versus social science, or to any specific scientific practice. I aim to identify areas where science and philosophy have met, and to demonstrate how the relation between science and philosophy has been a complex encounter over time. This is what not only this chapter but also the book as a whole is about. It is a discussion about fundamental issues in science: what are they, what are they about, what are the main positions in the scientific debate, why do these positions disagree, how important are these disagreements, and whether we can learn from these fundamental discussions something that is relevant for science today. My intention is to show that science is diverse and that its pluralism is a strength that contributes to its significance, and in this first chapter, I present my approach.

1.1  How to study science 1.1.1  An uneasy relationship If one is presented with some scientific knowledge, one should naturally question whether it is true. Furthermore, one might ask whether it is useful, relevant, and good. These common sense questions are not far removed from the issues that have occupied the discussions between philosophers and scientists over the years. The question of whether something is true leads naturally to a philosophical discussion about what truth is. Furthermore, if we ask whether something is relevant or useful, we are indirectly dealing with the meaning of things. Likewise, a discussion about whether something is good will rest on our ability to define goodness.1 Related to all these questions is the question of what knowledge is and whether or not scientific knowledge is a certain kind of knowledge. Hence, as science is a social activity, these questions also have a social dimension. In this sense, the scientist can be regarded as a ‘king’, in the way described by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (424–347 BC) (Plato 1996, p. 1022): STRANGER:  

Now comes another point that can hardly be controversial. What a king can do to maintain his rule by using his hands or his bodily faculties as a whole is very slight in comparison with what he can do by mental power and force of personality. YOUNG SOCRATES:   Magnificently. STRANGER:   So a king’s art is closer to theoretical knowledge than to manual work or indeed to practical work in general? SOCRATES:   Yes. Scientists use theory to address problems. In addition to what a king does, they also develop theories, often from other theories. Still, the scientist provides

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powerful theoretical knowledge, and thereby faces the same dilemma and responsibility as a king when he or she manages that knowledge. Hence, I argue that science is a king’s art! Why is it interesting to know what scientific knowledge is? One answer is to point to the fact that, in recent years, we have started questioning scientific knowledge: Can we trust it? Is it true? Does it help us to make society better? Is the fact that scientists disagree a sign of weakness in science? If we now live in what some have called the post-truth society,2 can science be the one area in society where knowledge is undisputed? The latter question is raised at the same time when the world is currently concerned with an environmental crisis and political instability. Sustainability has become a keyword in the social and political dialogue and a new ideal. What role does science play in this regard? From a historical view, we might ask whether it is the case that scientific knowledge is always for the better. Furthermore, we might ask whether society should relate to science as much as it has done in recent centuries, not least during the last two generations. I argue that philosophy and sociology of science are more relevant for the practice of science today than it seems to have been only a few years ago, as post-truth challenges the foundation of scientific thinking. Thus, philosophy and sociology of science deal with fundamental issues that arise when one is developing scientific knowledge. Just as there are many different ways of doing science, there is no coherent agreement on how to study science. Consequently, the study of science is a large academic field with many approaches: theory of science, philosophy of science, sociology of science, history of science, anthropology of science, science and society studies, philosophy of social science, epistemology, and continental philosophy of science, to mention some. The terms philosophy and sociology of science are collectively used in this book as a single general term to address fundamental issues that can be found in some or all of the aforementioned approaches. Furthermore, these issues can be reduced to the following three questions: What is the nature of ‘reality’ (ontology)? How do we come to know this ‘reality’ (epistemology), if at all? Under what social conditions do we form knowledge in science (sociology)? In the first question, the term ‘reality’ is emphasised because there are different opinions on what it is. We might refer to science as immanent critique, when it is self-reflecting and discusses its own premises.3 Such immanent critique, if directed towards the foundation of science itself, is part of what we define as philosophy and sociology of science. Since science by nature is concerned with addressing fundamental issues, it could be argued that philosophy and sociology of science is a kind of dual reflection, as it is concerned with fundamental issues that arise when we investigate fundamental issues. We may start with a simple, thoughtprovoking question: Do scientists need to address philosophy in order to do science? In other words, is it necessary to reflect on what science is in order to do science? Such questions were asked by the founder of the Vienna Circle, Moritz

4  A king’s art

Schlick (1882–1936), in his book Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre.4 His answer was an emphatic ‘No’: [J]ust as behavior does not require a familiarity with psychology, so scientific knowledge does not in principle depend for its existence on the theory of knowledge. (Schlick 1985, p. 2) The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) used the term underlabourer or handmaid for philosophers who, he argued, had the role of ‘cleaning up’ after scientists had made their big discoveries (Locke 1977). Locke was thinking of the scientist Isaac Newton (1642–1727) and how he had forced scientists to rethink what is science. The role of the philosopher was to clarify the conceptual foundation of the new scientific paradigm, not to invent it. Still, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), in The Human Condition, wrote about how philosophy had become redundant in relation to science: As such, however, philosophy was not needed by the scientists, who – up to our time, at least – believed that they had no use for a handmaid, let alone one who would ‘carry the torch in front of her gracious lady’ (Kant). The philosophers became either epistemologists, worrying about an overall theory of science which the scientist did not need, or they became, indeed, what Hegel wanted them to be, the organs of the Zeitgeist, the mouthpiece in which the general mood of the time was expressed with conceptual clarity. (Arendt 1998, p. 294) Evidently, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) saw the role of the philosophers as deciding where to carry the torch, while the younger but still contemporary philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) primarily wanted philosophy to capture the Zeitgeist. According to Arendt, Locke, Kant, and Hegel were not particularly welcomed by scientists. In addition to this, the American social philosopher Steve Fuller (b. 1959) has remarked that great scientists are rarely seen as important philosophers of science and vice versa (Fuller 2003). Another example of drawing the line between science and philosophy was presented in the book Der Logische Aufbau der Welt5 by the German-Austrian logical empiricist Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970). In his example, two geographers, one realist and one idealist, were asked to identify a mountain. Carnap assumed that they would agree on the physical description of the mountain, even if they interpreted the descriptions differently: The realist says: ‘this mountain, which the two of us have found’, not only has the ascertained geographical properties, but is, in addition, also real’. . . . The

A king’s art  5

idealist on the other hand says: ‘on the contrary, the mountain itself is not real, only our . . . perceptions and conscious processes are real’. (Carnap 2003, p. 333) Thus, the geographers’ philosophical or metaphysical beliefs were independent of their scientific task of physically describing the mountain.6 Furthermore, some philosophers have argued that there is a deep conflict between philosophy and science, claiming that science is a threat to philosophy. For example, the late writings of both the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)7 and the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)8 point to this argument, as does the writing of the German philosopher and sociologist Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002).9 It could be added that the attempt to separate science as an activity in its own right, unaffected by society and unconstrained by ethics of metaphysical reflections, was severely reversed after World War II.10 The relation between science and philosophy is therefore undoubtedly complex. The American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926–2016) stated the following in his book Philosophy in an Age of Science: That philosophy is not to be identified with science is not to deny the intimate relation between science and philosophy. (Putnam 2012, p. 45) This ‘intimate relation’ refers to fundamental issues about the scientific validity of a philosophical kind that should concern scientists. The question is whether they can be addressed within science or whether one needs philosophy or philosophical approaches to help to address them. It has been assumed that scientific knowledge refers to a restricted subset of knowledge in general. The epistemological question of what knowledge is is one of the fundamental questions in philosophy. Philosophy and sociology of science share with philosophy the need to address such fundamental issues. However, the question of what scientific knowledge is involves a narrower discussion than the discussion of what knowledge is in general. What I present here is not only ‘a view from the moon’, even though I respect many of the competing positions in the scientific discourse. I argue that in a liberal, democratic society, and in building on some of the main ideas of the Enlightenment in which we can celebrate differences and discourses in a respectful way, disagreement can be constructive, given acceptance of the rules of just conduct that make the democratic discourse possible, even if those rules are also subject to debate. When seen in a pluralistic perspective, science increases its potential for making relevant, valid, and sustainable knowledge. 1.1.2  What is the disagreement about? Science grew out of philosophy, but attempts have been made to rid science of philosophical issues. The American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty

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(1931–2007) argued in his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979) that there were no discussions about science in relation to philosophy before the work of René Descartes (1596–1650) was published. In the history of science (and philosophy), Descartes’ work represented a turning point. I discuss his thinking in more depth later in this book,11 and I subscribe to the notion of before and after Descartes. The point is that, before Descartes, all of the activities that were later referred to as science were part of philosophy. After Descartes, the term ‘natural philosophy’ started to be used to mean ‘natural science’.12 One reason for identifying natural science as natural philosophy was to distinguish it from another branch of philosophy that Descartes called ‘first philosophy’.13 While, in Descartes’ understanding, philosophy reflected the foundation of knowledge, meaning reflection on issues such as ‘how do I know that I know’, and was thereby aimed at understanding our inner mental world, natural philosophy was about understanding the external world, meaning the world external to the human mind. The British Empiricists, inspired by British scholar Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and his book Novum Organum Scientiarum published in 1620 (Bacon 2017),14 increasingly used the term inductive science with reference to the study of nature. In the 19th century, the split between philosophy and science became more apparent. The first professor of philosophy of science at Cambridge, William Whewell (1794–1866), whose book History of the Inductive Sciences was published in 1837, established the concept of a scientist (not a philosopher) (Whewell 1837). Some main positions on the relation between philosophy and science are listed in Table 1.1. In Table 1.1, I identify those who argue for an integrated approach to philosophy and science, seen from both perspectives. In the same way, I  also identify those who argue that science and philosophy should be regarded as separate discourses or domains. Again, the argument differs between those who see this from the perspective of science, and those who see it from the perspective of philosophy. This gives us the following four positions, Positions a–d, all of which have their champions or supporters.

Table 1.1  The uneasy philosophy–science relation Perspective

Integrated

Separated

Philosophy

a) Philosoph y is about the foundation knowledge that is central to science, whereas science is a branch of philosophy. c) Philosoph y is a science and operates with the same criteria as other sciences.

b) Philosoph y deals with issues outside science, including metaphysics.

Science

d) Science does not ha ve to refer to philosophical issues. It has its own methodology.

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Position (a) lives on within phenomenology. I  present this position in more detail later in this book,15 but the main argument is that behind all our immediate knowledge about the world, there is a reflective practice that tries to understand the truth of the world, while at the same time acknowledging that it is a minddependent world. This reflective practice is philosophical, and it should be an integrated part of science. Position (b) is championed particularly by those who argue for the need to have a space for speculation and metaphysics, and to be able to speculate without being accountable to scientific standards, especially the standards of empirical natural science. Such philosophers argue that they do something that is not science, and thereby see science as a different kind of activity compared with philosophy.16 In a critical comment on how modern science has parted from philosophy, Hannah Arendt wrote: [S]cientific and philosophical truth have parted company; scientific truth not only needs not to be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. (Arendt 1998, p. 290) Position (c) has a number of champions. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of modern phenomenology, wanted to make philosophy a science (despite what is written earlier with regard to position [a]). Also, the neo-positivists of the Vienna Circle argued that philosophy was a science, and that philosophy of science was about the foundation of both science and philosophy. Logical empiricism – the bringing together of logic and analytical philosophy on the one hand and empirical science on the other hand – meant that science and philosophy merged into one discipline.17 Even if that was not Husserl’s intention, the position makes science more fundamental than philosophy. A further development of this thought, with the superiority of mathematically based science, has been labelled scientism18 (Hayek 1942; Voegelin 1948). Position (d) has a supporter in Carnap, who with reference to a thought experiment involving geographers and a mountain stated: What is true to the mountain is true for the external world in general. Since we consider only factual content as the criterion for the meaningfulness of statements, neither the thesis of the realism that the external world is real, nor that of idealism that the external world is not real can be considered scientific meaningful. This does not mean that the two theses are false; rather, they have no meaning at all so that the question of their truth and falsity cannot even be posed. (Carnap 2003, p. 334; original emphasis) One could argue, as Rorty (1979) did, that post-positivism – the post-war ­development in which neo-positivism has merged with pragmatism and the sociology of science –

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represents the end of any discussion about the foundation of science. Science is simply an activity in society that follows its own rules.19 There is not necessarily one science, and therefore discussions of ‘the foundation’ of science do not have any relevance. Rather, the issue concerns methodology, and the discussion should be about good and bad methods, and what approach is most useful for science.20 In this book, I argue that all four of the positions described here are part of the philosophy and sociology of science, and since no final verdict exists, or could ever exist, on the right approach, they are seen as positions that live on and form the debate that is philosophy of science. Science stands in relation to society, not outside it, and it is integrated in social development: there is not just one way that science generates knowledge, but many. Thus, science is not only defined by its philosophy and methodology but is also a social activity. Despite the plurality of scientific approaches and that science is a social activity integrated into societies’ development of knowledge, we can still discuss the rationality of scientific knowledge: What is it to know something? Where does knowing come from? In particular, how do we form knowledge about things beyond our immediate observation or sensing of things? As I show in this book, the term ‘knowledge’ is itself ambiguous.21 For example, it is both a possession and a process (known and knowing), it is both explicit and embedded in customs and skills, and it refers both to something abstract and to something specific and material. Thus, one could argue that scientific knowledge is made in the sense of created, and that making it requires skills and is a kind of art. By art, I mean an ability to make judgements or to see through what is taken for granted. Good art brings us something new: a new insight or a new aspect of the world. Art is unique; we can hardly call something art if it is mass-produced or merely copied. Of course, we can make replicas of art, just as we can replicate the methods used by great scientists. However, just as copies are not art, knowledge does not become scientific simply because an established method is repeated. I argue that development of knowledge within science is an art: an art form.22 What is meant by this? The answer is that it means that science is not a method or a methodology. What makes something into science is not the following of a certain rule or procedure but involves a combination of different skills that allow for an understanding of what lies behind the current knowledge in the discipline, and to develop conjectures that bring new dimensions to the knowledge. It is an art, a king’s art (to use the metaphor), in the sense that doing science requires skills and judgements that include knowledge about scientific methods, as well as the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. In the words of the British mathematician, philosopher, and historian of science Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), science is the meeting between abstract principles and practical facts: All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in ‘irreducible and stubborn facts’: all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophical temperament who have been absorbed

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into weaving of general principles. It is the union of passionate interests in detailed facts, with equal devotion to abstract generalisation, which form the novelty of our present society. (Whitehead 1967, p. 3) Science is a balancing act between the unique and the abstract, and between the specific and the general. What is the relation between art and knowledge? Plato discussed work and art in the dialogue Statesman (Plato 1996). The theme of the dialogue is what is a good statesman (or king). As a background for the discussion, Plato divided knowledge into theoretical knowledge and practical/applied knowledge, as illustrated by the dialogue between a stranger and the young Socrates (470–399 BC), referred at the beginning of this chapter. If we look at the use of the word ‘art’ in this dialogue, we can see that it is not related to a kind of knowledge (theoretical or applied) but rather to the capacity that one (the king) has to practise different kinds of knowledge. Thus, art has to do with the capacity for judgement, to be able to read a situation and to understand what is appropriate, and subsequently to apply theoretical insights on that basis. Therefore, I argue that ‘a king’s art’ also is a good metaphor for the development of scientific knowledge in practice.

1.2  Science meets philosophy 1.2.1  Four traditions and three positions Whitehead stated ‘Modern science was born in Europe, but its home is the whole world’ (Whitehead 1967, p. 3). He claimed that science is a European invention, even if it is now a global concern. The references I make in this book are for the most part geographically located in Europe and the USA, even when inspirations come from beyond their borders. I discuss how European philosophy has formed what today is generally regarded as science. This book identifies four philosophical traditions that impact modern science. Three of the four traditions are examined in depth in this section. The three traditions and the scientific positions that they have inspired provide different answers to questions such as what is true, how do we form knowledge about the world, what is the right way of generating scientific knowledge, and what processes drive scientific inquiry. The traditions also influence some of the conflicting answers to issues raised by science in society today. Accordingly, this book explains how the three traditions, and the philosophy and sociology of science positions related to them, despite being different, are still fundamentally linked to the discourse on science that has developed in the postRenaissance Western world. One of the contributions of this book is to argue that, although the three traditions are different, they have much in common. I argue that by having a deeper understanding of their main insights, we can have a richer perspective on what the discourse on science is about.23

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Science is a human construction of knowledge that interplays with society, and it is vulnerable just as all kinds of knowledge are vulnerable. Therefore, science should concern us all. I argue that a sane society24 is dependent on reason and rationality as drivers of knowledge development, while at the same time, I acknowledge the complications of establishing what is reason and rationality, and what is true knowledge. Doing science is about generating knowledge. This sounds banal, but my emphasis should be placed on the generating. I argue that science is not something given; it is not knowledge that emerges either from following a fixed procedure or only as a result of calculation. The knowledge we choose to call science has been developed and formed by scientists who have revealed new aspects of the world, either by their ability to combine existing knowledge, develop new knowledge, and make us aware of new phenomena, or by rejecting existing assumptions and replacing them with new ones. The ­Austrian-American philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) wrote the following in Science in a Free Society: There are two questions that arise in the course of any discussion of science. They are: (A) What is science? – how does it proceed, what are its results, how do its standards, procedures, results differ from that standards, procedures, results of other fields? (B) What’s so great about science? – what makes science preferable to other forms of existence, using different standards and getting different results as a consequence? What makes modern science preferable to the science of Aristotelians, or to the cosmology of the Hopi? (Feyerabend 1987, p. 73)25 These two questions are relevant both internally in science, as part of the internal discourse on quality and validity, and increasingly in an external perspective, in relation to how society uses and refers to science. Feyerabend’s first question addresses what knowledge is, and how we come to have knowledge at all. His second question addresses both what makes scientific knowledge a certain kind of knowledge, and how we know that this knowledge is good? David Papineau (2007) argues that we should divide philosophy of science into two areas: the epistemology of science, which deals with the justification of claims to scientific knowledge; and the metaphysics of science, which deals with features of the world described by science – what we call reality. Whereas the epistemology of science asks whether scientific knowledge is true, the metaphysics of science asks what the scientific description of the world tells us. It could be claimed that epistemology deals with issues related to the data, information, and knowledge that scientific iniquity provides, such as how valid is it, how sure are we that it is correct, what are relevant methods, and what is the logic of inquiry. Papineau’s epistemological question can be regarded as similar to Feyerabend’s question A.

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By contrast, metaphysics deals with the meaning and implications of scientific discovery – what does it tell us about the world, and, if true, what does the world really look like, what are the consequences of the discovery, and what precautions do we need to take if they are true? These issues are implicit in Feyerabend’s question B, and are referred to collectively as the ontological question. The two questions or aspects of philosophy of science are interrelated. The three positions in philosophy and sociology of science that I discuss in this book are all associated with statements that directly and implicitly make claims about both questions. Even though the epistemological issue (Feyerabend’s question A) is the most central issue in my discussion, I show that most positions also imply metaphysics (question B). Hence, Papineau argued that the epistemology of science could be divided into three major groups: idealism, realism, and scepticism (Papineau 2007, p. 5). To these, I add a fourth group, sensationalism (Table 1.2). Table 1.2 lists four extremes, yet rarely has anyone ever had opinions that correspond to them. Rather, they can be seen as pure versions of arguments, and therefore they are known as philosophical traditions. They are logically consistent and, as I show in this book, each one of the multitude of philosophy and sociology of science positions refers to at least one of the four traditions. Still, hardly any of these positions completely overlaps the four traditions. In the following, I consider some examples in anticipation of the later discussion in the book. Phenomenology and phenomenalism contain references to idealism. However, John Locke, who is regarded as a phenomenalist, was also a realist. Furthermore, Edmund Husserl was the founder of modern phenomenology and a realist.26 Even Hegel, who developed absolute idealism, claimed that his own philosophy was about reality. However, it is unlikely that Hegel’s understanding of reality would have been accepted by, for example, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), who was a strong defender of realism and a Platonist. Plato was an idealist in terms of how we perceive the world, but a realist in terms of the ontological status of ideals. Furthermore, George Berkeley is often seen as one of the few sensationalists,27 but according to Peirce (1998), he was also a realist. Scepticism inspired the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), but many

Table 1.2  Traditions in philosophy The ontology/epistemology divide Can we have correct knowledge about the world (epistemology)?

Is the world independent of how we perceive it (ontology)? Yes No

Yes Realism Scepticism

Source: Based on and extended from Papineau (2007)

No Idealism Sensationalism

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supporters of SSK are also realists and some are idealists. Added to this, many realists and idealists are also sceptics. Thus, the four philosophical traditions idealism, realism, scepticism, and sensationalism have to be regarded as pure forms of consistent arguments that have hardly ever been observed in practice. They are what the French philosopher Jules Vuillemin (1920–2001) called philosophical systems (Vuillemin 1986). The purpose of this book, as indicated in the book’s title, is twofold: (1) to explain why science is diverse, and (2) to explain that this does not reduce the significance of science but strengthens it. In the following four chapters, I  aim to explain what the disputes are about. In the concluding chapter (Chapter  6), I discuss the second purpose of the book, namely how the diversity is a strength for science. The four philosophical traditions help us to distinguish between the manifold positions in the scientific debate, and they serve as references in current debates. For the purpose of distinguishing the manifold positions, my discussion emphasises three main philosophy and sociology of science positions that define the current debates within science: logical empiricism, phenomenology, and sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). With the modifications I have argued earlier, the three positions can be broadly placed within the framework of the four traditions. The logical empiricist position has a main reference to realism, the phenomenology position relates strongly to idealism, and the sociological position has strong roots in scepticism.28 The fourth tradition, sensationalism, only has a marginal role in my discussion. The traditions of realism, idealism, and scepticism, as major divides in philosophy, were identified by Francis Bacon in his book Novum Organum. He confined idealism to Plato, and naturalism or realism to Aristotle (384–322 BC). However, he also argued that the Platonic Academy had increasingly developed scepticism: The school of Plato induced scepticism, first as it were in joke and irony, from their dislike of Protagoras, Hippas, and others, who were ashamed of appearing not to doubt upon a subject. But the new academy dogmatized in their scepticism and held it in their tenet. (Bacon 2017, p. 19) Given Papineau’s analysis, the three traditions still divide the scientific debate.29 Realists at all times have argued that there is a world in the form of a hard reality of facts, and that we can know it if we investigate it thoroughly. For realists, our knowledge about the world comes from our sensing, but this sensing relates to a real world outside us. The sensing is not completely random; it tells us something about the real world. Therefore, based on our sensing, we can form an objective understanding of the world. Idealists have argued that the world as we see it will always remain a function of our human perspective of the world. There might be a reality ‘out there’, but the closest we can get to it is our picture of the reality; we can never know the world for certain. However, we can know more than we can

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sense about the world by applying our thinking. Sceptics argue that realists and idealists will never agree about the fundamental nature of things, and therefore we should instead concentrate on more practical issues. 1.2.2  The methodological approach in this book Thus far, it should be clear to readers what this book is about. I now address some of the methodological issues that my treatise faces. Preparing a text that compares thinkers from different times of history, and who wrote in different languages and within different contexts and discourses, implies that several methodological challenges will be encountered. First and foremost, how should we understand today something written several hundred years ago? We could argue for taking a word-by-word approach; for example, if the word ‘trust’ was used, we could assume that trust means the same today as it did in, for example, the Middle Ages. Alternatively, we could translate the word and argue, for example, that its meaning in the Middle Ages corresponds to the meaning of a different word today. The Austrian philosopher Karl Popper (1902–1994) made the argument that philosophy (and science) is problem-driven, in the sense that there is no philosophy (or science) as such, but only to the extent that there are problems to be solved (Popper 1972). There are two aspects of this view: one relates to what we can learn from the history of science, and the other relates to what is science today and how we should think about science today from the perspective of the challenges we currently face. With regard to first aspect, the implication is that we need to address the history of science when we apply theories to the problems that we try to solve. There is no immediate transfer from this historical insight to today’s world. With regard to the second aspect, we need to reflect on the possible implications of previous debates for science today. Thinkers in the distant past, as well as contemporary thinkers, have used concepts and words in ways that have different meanings, and they have often changed their opinions during their lifetime. This raises the question of which version we should rely on when conducting research. In addition to this question, we have the problem that texts are often responses to other texts, and they enter into a discourse in which the arguments are not necessarily meant to be considered in isolation, but rather meant to moderate or challenge other arguments.30 A further problem relates to the use of names and authors, which can be formulated as follows. Is it the case that a theory is only the product of one author? Is there not a greater story related to the development of theory in which others than the ‘big names’ have taken part? Are we not giving too much credit to a few names, and is this not a kind of ‘celebrating heroes’ game? All these are relevant questions. So, how should we deal with them? First, the questions represent real limitations to the arguments made in this book. Regarding which version of an author’s argument to use, I place emphasis on the way the author has been and still is interpreted in common reference

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to his or her work today. This approach might be right or wrong. Great thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle or Descartes and Kant have left a legacy that lives on in contemporary debates. We are more interested in this legacy than discussing whether or not it gives credit to the author. To satisfy this interest, we rely on secondary literature. Furthermore, there are arguments for concentrating on only a few names; for example, when we refer to the Vienna Circle, we only mention a few names, although many more scholars made important contributions.31 The Vienna Circle was a discussion group with certain common perspectives. Similarly, reference to general terms such as antiquity, scepticism, and empiricism implies that their general features are treated as common references. Cited persons might have been the originators of ideas, but sometimes they were only representative of their field. Furthermore, selected names can be used as labels to identify a theory or position. Thus, for example, the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) can be seen as representing post-structuralism, and by mentioning his name, I give the position a face. In this short book, albeit one with a wide scope, this is a pragmatic way of dealing with important methodological issues. At the same time, readers should be aware that individual ­philosophers often made contributions to many areas of thought, and they cannot necessarily be framed within one position. Furthermore, a thinker might have changed his or her view during their lifetime. Ludwig Wittgenstein is one such person, as his thinking underwent several transformations during his lifetime, as argued by his biographer Ray Monk: This points not to a change of opinion, but to a change of character – the first of many in a life that is marked by a series of such transformations, undertaken at moments of crisis and pursued with a conviction that the source of the crisis was himself. (Monk 1991, p. 3) It is obvious in a book such as this, in which several thinkers are referred to, that justice cannot be done to each thinker’s project. In the case of Wittgenstein, I make the relatively common reference to the distinction between his early work and his later writing. Clearly, this approach does not give sufficient credit to the complexity that Monk presents. A further consideration is that even if we can document the positions of thinkers through citations, discussions of them have relied on interpretation. Some of these interpretations have been contested, and in some cases, there have been strong disputes about what the right interpretation is.32 Who should we listen to? I might not be completely consistent on this point, but as a ground rule, I relate to interpretations that sympathise with the tradition within which the interpreted author worked or is working. The argument for this approach is that if someone (e.g. an idealist) criticises or makes an alternative interpretation of a realist or of scepticism, the main points of such an alternative interpretation

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have already been acknowledged in the three traditions. However, I also point out some main disagreements about interpretations, even when this crosses traditions. Today, we use a modern repertoire of concepts when presenting historical discussions. For example, in antiquity, the great philosophers had a particular world view that influenced their thinking. However, when for example we refer to Plato’s arguments about epistemological issues, we can do so without accepting the truth of his ontology. We can take a contemporary view of antiquity, and think of it as if we are tourists being guided through that world, and we interpret it with the vocabulary of today. There are different ways of studying history.33 One might want to know what happened in the distant past and to follow its consequences over time and thus read history forward. One can also discuss history from what was the case in historical terms. A good example is controversial history, and whether it should be read with today’s eyes or read in the context in which it happened. One might read historical events in relation to their reception, an approach known as ‘reception study’ (Machor & Goldstein 2001). So, in discussing a particular author, one can try to understand them based either on the intention behind their writing or in terms of how others have received them. Finally, one can look at history backwards, taking today’s thinking as a point of departure and asking what inspired today’s ideas. Referring to terms such as epistemology, ontology, and methodology, and using them to classify thinking and knowledge, is in itself a methodology. It is not a repertoire of concepts that can be found in antiquity or in the Enlightenment. Even talking about methodology is a relatively recent invention. Take, for example, Plato’s and Aristotle’s methodology. Plato never commented on his own approach to science in the same way as Aristotle did. Today, we can say that Aristotle even wrote on methodology, and six of his texts were later collected in his book Organon.34 This implies that our discussion in this book uses a repertoire of concepts that were not used in the antiquity, at least not in the same way as we use them today. In structuring the book, I  have grouped together the discussions of philosophy of science into three major positions, which are based on three philosophical traditions: realism, with its emphasis on logical empiricism; idealism, with its emphasis on phenomenology; and scepticism, with its emphasis on sociology of knowledge.35 I argue, with the use of a metaphor, that the three traditions can be perceived as three main tracks through the wood. In order to maintain some of the complexity, I point to where a discussion in one tradition continues in another tradition or builds on one along another track. This makes the text less fluent, and readers might find that references such as ‘I discuss this later in Chapter [number]’ are slightly irritating. However, the idea is that readers should be able to jump from one chapter to another if they want to find the more complete story of a certain discussion or a more comprehensive presentation of a certain thinker. Alternatively, the reader simply has to wait until I embark on the other track. If

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all the connecting lines between different discussions were to be drawn on a map, the map would appear extremely complex. It would probably look like a map of London Underground. Science consists of disciplines and of discourses, and increasingly there have been references to paradigms. A discipline is often thematically and administratively determined. A paradigm can be defined as a research tradition with consensus on method, empirical facts, epistemology, or theory. Paradigms are used to denote normal scientific practice. The American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) talked about scientific revolutions when a shift occurs in paradigms (Kuhn 1970). Discourses can be seen as different language games, meaning linguistic practices within a set of rules, norms, customs, and traditions. However, all the terms discussed here are ambiguous. Therefore, I have avoided them as much as possible. Instead, I  have adopted a slightly different vocabulary of ­metaphors. The following definitions relate to my general use of these terms in this book: • • • • • •

World view (in German: Weltanschauung): I refer to a comprehensive world view. I also refer to ideology. Tradition: This term is used within philosophy and refers to a system of philosophy or a consistent argument over time. Position: This term is preferred to the term paradigm and represents a consistent argumentation by scholars over time. Thus, over time, there can be several positions in a given tradition. Tracks: This a metaphor for meta-traditions, to which philosophy and sociology of science positions refer. Trail: This metaphor might be regarded as similar to paradigm. Trails are more limited discussions or positions in philosophy and sociology of science. They are crossing tracks. Lines of thought: This term refers both to tracks and to trails. They are constant discussions over time or even in time, with a certain focus. They resemble discourses, but as discourses are often defined as more comprehensive discussions and meanings systems, lines of thought are more narrowly defined as continuous discussions.

We live in a time when science is playing an important role in society. We also live in a time of scientific pluralism, and there are big divides and disagreements among scientific positions. At the same time, science is entering into more fields and involving more researchers, who are using a larger repertoire of methodologies and methods than ever before. Furthermore, we live in a knowledge society, in which there are conflicting interests, and conflicting knowledge, but in which we are also dependent on common reason. How can science both be diverse and contribute to pluralism in society, and at the same time provide true, valid, and good knowledge, in the sense of sustainable knowledge? Through the discussion in this book, I aim to address this question.

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Notes 1 In this chapter, I argue that a criterion for goodness could be what might be called the sustainability of scientific knowledge. See also Chapter 6.2. 2 For a discussion of the post-truth society, see Fuller (2018). 3 For a discussion of the origin of the term ‘immanent critique’, see Finlayson (2014). 4 Translated as General Theory of Knowledge, originally written in 1918 and revised in 1925 (Schlick 1985). 5 First published in 1928, and translated as The Logical Structure of the World. 6 Later in this book, I  show that the question of whether metaphysical questions are outside science or not has been debated (see Chapter 5.2.2). 7 See Heidegger (2004). 8 See Wittgenstein (1998). 9 See Gadamer (2006). 10 See Børsen Hansen (2006). On the democratisation of science, see Habermas (1991). 11 See Chapter 5.1.1. 12 For example, Isaac Newton’s main work, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in Latin in 1687 (Newton 1999). 13 See Descartes (1998b). For a discussion of his ‘first philosophy’ versus metaphysics, see Zöller (2004). 14 Later in history, it was referred to as just Novum Organum. English translation: The New Scientific Method. It was the second part of an unfinished treatise on natural philosophy (science). 15 See Chapter 4.3. 16 The German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, who supports this claim, argue for a sharp distinction between philosophy and science (Habermas 2018). 17 See Chapter 4.2.3. 18 Eric Voegelin (1948) argued that scientism was characterised by three dogmas: (1) the assumption that the mathematised science of natural phenomena is a model science to which all other sciences ought to conform; (2) that all realms of being are accessible to the methods of the sciences of phenomena; and (3) that all reality that is not accessible to sciences of phenomena is either irrelevant or, in the more radical form of the dogma, illusionary.(Voegelin 1948, p. 462) 19 For a discussion, see Brandom (2000). 20 This book is not intended to be about methodology or method as such. Rather, the interest is in the kind of knowledge that science in a general sense is generating, and how this knowledge is different from other kinds of knowledge. Questions of method are only relevant to the extent that one considers the use of scientific method as the defining characteristic of scientific knowledge. 21 For a discussion, see Weigelt (2007). 22 For a discussion, see Svedberg (2014). 23 As I  argue in this book, ‘creating’ scientific knowledge is an art, which implies the ability to judge how insights from one tradition can illuminate discussions in another. 24 The formulation is inspired by Erich Fromm’s book The Sane Society (Fromm 2017). See also Steven Pinker (2021), who argues for the importance of rationality in society. I discuss rationality in several places in this book, in particular in Chapter 4. 25 The Hopi are a native America tribe, predominantly located in Arizona and they have the status of a sovereign nation within the USA. 26 Harrison Hall (1984) argues that Husserl was neither an idealist, nor a realist. 27 Some will refer to him as a solipsist (Grey 1952).

18  A king’s art 28 The three positions are discussed in depth in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 respectively, in which I also say more about their differences in terms of their philosophy and sociology. 29 Engler and Renn (2018) argue that the divide and even the dialogue between idealist and realists in science happened at the beginning of the 1900s, when analytical philosophy started questioning metaphysics. Michael Friedman argues in his book A Parting of Ways (2000) that the split can be identified at a particular meeting between Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, and Rudolf Carnap in Davos in 1929 (see also Chapters 3.2.3 and 4.2.3). 30 This position is taken by the British historian Quentin Skinner (b. 1940), who in his treatise Hobbes and Republican Liberty states: I have tried to show how Hobbes’s successive attempts to grapple with the question of human liberty were deeply affected by claims put forward by radical and parliamentarian writers in the period of civil war, and by Hobbes’ sense of the urgent need to counter them in the name of peace. (Skinner 2008, p. xiii) Following this argument, we might also ask whether an author was arguing in a certain way several hundred years ago, and whether we can be sure about what position the author might have taken if he or she lived today; I think not. 31 The Vienna Circle is only a consistent term at a certain general level. It is not the case that everyone who was engaged in the Circle represented one, unified meaning. 32 An example is the legacy of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) and his thesis on the Protestant ethic. Was it meant as a theory, a historical law, or an empirical study? What does theory mean in this case? For a discussion, see Bargheer (2017). 33 The methodology of studying the history of philosophy is an academic field. For a general discussion, see Normore (2016). 34 Organon is published in The Basic Works of Aristotle (McKeon 1941, pp. 7–117). The six works on logic collected in Organon are: Categories, which deals with classification; On Interpretation, which deals with propositions; The Prior Analytics, which discusses indictive inference; The Posterior Analytics, which specifically deals with scientific knowledge; The Topics, which deals with valid arguments; and The Sophistical Refutations, which deals with logic. Aristotle’s rhetoric and poetics have sometimes been included in more recent editions of the book (McKeon 1941). 35 I have attempted to narrow down the complexity of the discussed positions. In order not to lose track of the larger issues, I use metaphors. The metaphors serve as ‘baskets’, into which I can put arguments. For this purpose, I use metaphors related to movement and landscape, roads, tracks, and trails, as well as woods.

Chapter 2

Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science

2.0  The line of argument in the chapter In this chapter, I  examine the philosophical and historical origins of science. I look at how the thinking of Plato and Aristotle influenced not only antiquity but also the Middle Ages, and was a point of criticism during the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century. The origins are the key to understanding the contributions of Middle Ages and Renaissance thinkers that paved the way for modern science. A first reference for modern European science is what can be called the Plato/ Aristotle controversy. A second reference is what happened to their ideas in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Today, too, Platonists or Aristotelians are references to certain philosophical and scientific positions. Given this strong presence of Plato and Aristotle in the origins of science, and arguing that modern science started in the 17th century, one could ask whether anything at all was added during the time of the Roman Empire or in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance? The Catholic Church was clearly more interested in religion than in science. However, it was from Catholic thinkers that the precondition for modern science emerged during the Renaissance. One could argue that their logical investigations were essential to the development of the logical foundation of scientific thinking. Plato and Aristotle had a dispute over epistemology and methodology, and how to understand nature. Many have argued that the two philosophers shared the same metaphysical position, but that their methods of advancing knowledge differed. Broadly classified, while Plato wrote about Socrates’ method and use of dialogical reasoning, Aristotle provided more empirical-based approaches to knowledge. To some extent, and by using a modern terminology, it could be argued that Plato used a deductive methodology, while Aristotle used an inductive approach. Also, partly based on this interpretation, Plato is often seen as the father of philosophy1 and Aristotle as the father of science.2 In this chapter, I focus on the concept of knowledge. In the first part, ‘Science before science: the Plato/Aristotle controversy’, I take the Plato/Aristotle controversy as appoint of departure. I try to show how their differences in defining the concept of knowledge were related to their philosophical thinking. In the second part, ‘The emergence of modern logic’, I start with how the interpretation of Plato DOI: 10.4324/9781003326878-2

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and Aristotle was received in the early 17th century, and I present a framework for the modern discussion of knowledge.

2.1 Science before science: the Plato/Aristotle controversy 2.1.1  The nature of knowledge I start my discussion with reference to antiquity, a time when both science and philosophy were struggling with the questions about the nature of the world and our mind, and the concepts we use when we try to understand the world. We do not know when abstract thinking started, but, according to Alfred North Whitehead, one of the largest leaps in human history came when man discovered he had six fish and called them six, and three apples and called them three (Whitehead 1967, p.  19). The numbers six and three remove all individual characteristics from the object. Thus, the abstract notion of six and three (which is neither fish nor apples) was established (Whitehead 1967, p.  19). The notion allows us to say that the man had twice as many fish as he had apples. To say something like that is completely meaningless unless one has two thoughts in mind, namely that there are things such as fish and apples, and that there are abstract notions such as numbers. In terms of things, fish and apples have nothing in common; it is only by abstracting them into numbers that we can say that the man had twice as many fish as apples. By bringing the concrete (e.g. fish and apples) into the abstract (e.g. numbers) – that is, neither the one nor the other – it was possible to start to think beyond the concrete and in abstract terms. It was possible to calculate, and to add, subtract, and divide. Thinkers in antiquity discovered the logic of mathematics and of geometry, which enabled them to understand the greater world of which they were a part. It follows that our references start from the time of the Academy in Athens in c. 350 BC. The Academy was founded by Plato as a school for higher education. One of the Academy’s most prominent students was Aristotle. The works of Plato and Aristotle later became the most important references for science up to modern times. As emphasised by Karl Popper, both Plato and Aristotle believed in a certain form of things.3 However, they disagreed about the origin and nature of the forms. The discussion about these issues turned out to be the first big controversy on record and one that still defines some of the most fundamental disagreements in science. There are conflicting stories about the controversy. One story is that Aristotle, who had attended Plato’s Academy, was leaving Athens in 347 BC, the year that Plato died, and that his departure was due to his disappointment with the Academy’s direction after control passed to Plato’s nephew Speusippus (408–339 BC). It is even argued that Aristotle feared for his life.4 It is assumed that the core of the controversy was disagreement about methodology, which probably was the first big debate on methodology in science.5

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The Renaissance painter Raphael (1483–1520) captured the disagreement between Plato and Aristotle in his painting of the Academy, in a fresco known as The School of Athens that is part of Stanze di Raffaello in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. In the fresco, Plato is portrayed with his right hand pointing upwards towards ideas, in contrast to Aristotle whose right hand is pointing downwards towards nature. From a closer look at the fresco, it can be seen that a whole range of ancient philosophers and scientists, both before and after Plato, are represented. Plato and Aristotle were still, in the 16th century, the two greatest names of science, and even though in Raphael’s fresco Plato is depicted as having the face of the genius Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Plato is shown holding in his left hand his book Timaeus (in which he addresses the issues of mathematics and forms), and Aristotle shown is holding in his left hand his book Nicomachean Ethics, in which he presented the categories that guide our practical life (A. Paolucci 2011). Furthermore, the richness of Raphael’s fresco appears to convey the whole history of Greek philosophy and science. There seems to be three groups of people in the fresco besides Plato and Aristotle, around whom they are arranged. To Plato’s right (the left side of the fresco) are idealists, engaged in theoretical discussions. Possibly the main idealist is Socrates, who is depicted arguing with Alcibiades (450–404 BC), a military commander in Athens. To Plato’s left, there is a group around the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras (570–495 BC) that includes the Islamic philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushed) (1126–1198). The inclusions and celebration of an Islamic philosopher in the Pope’s the Room of the Segnatura were probably a courtesy, acknowledging both the fact that it was in the Islamic world that the works of Plato and Aristotle and Greek philosophy in general had been preserved during the early Middle Ages, and the fact that it was there that the work on further developing their ideas had begun. To the right of Aristotle, the fresco depicts the realists, a group that was engaged in studying the world and the universe, as well as a group around the astronomer Euclid (b. c. 300 BC), and who is shown explaining his geometry. On the staircase, in front of Plato and Aristotle, there is a third group comprising just two figures: the cynic Diogenes (412–325 BC), and the philosopher Heraclid (540–480 BC) in the image of the Italian sculpturer and architect Michelangelo (1475–1564). They are both sceptics. While Heraclid is depicted sitting in an inward-facing position, contemplating and seemingly uninterested in what is going on around him, the cynic Diogenes is deliberately shown, by his posture, as exposing his disrespect for the whole scene. Science has never really recovered from the dispute between Plato and Aristotle. The reason is, as mentioned earlier, not necessarily a true interpretation of their original work but how those work have been read and interpreted over the years. Regardless, many major disputes in science today can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. So, what was their dispute about? Raphael’s fresco, The School of Athens, illustrates the general opinion of the time that Plato believed that it was possible to know how things logically have to be, even if they could not be observed, while Aristotle used his observation to put

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both the natural world and the human world into categories that would reveal the natural order of things. Aristotle described this eternal order, which was shared by other thinkers, as a picture of the world where everything was governed by divine forces or a natural form. Despite the differences in the thinking of Aristotle and Plato, many of the concepts of knowledge developed from Plato’s work are inherent in Aristotle’s conceptualisation.6 However, one could argue that while Plato was searching for the one and only ultimate source of knowledge, Aristotle simply accepted that there were several knowledge forms that existed side by side, and that the one was not necessarily a result of or subordinate to the other. Few philosophers have denied that knowledge is used in everyday conversation to demarcate what we regard as the case and to contrast it with things that are inaccurate and untrue. Knowledge is often confused with everyday opinions, reflections, and assumptions. It refers to what we know, in the sense of what we regard as the case or the matter of facts. Some, as I show in this chapter, have included in the concept of knowledge, tacit knowledge, or things we do without reflecting, such as habits.7 For this reason, the same philosophers of science have often referred to scientific knowledge as a special version of knowledge to which they can apply more strict criteria. Support for the strategy could be to argue that science presents some very solid kinds of knowledge that can inform and be absorbed into everyday, less accurate knowledge. Thus, put briefly, scientific knowledge will be in constant tension with everyday knowledge. This way of looking at scientific knowledge adds a historical and social dimension to knowledge: at any point in time, society has had a reservoir of knowledge that has been challenged by certain, more special groups of knowledge within that reservoir. Among these groups is science.8 However, before discussing this point further, I first consider some alternatives. One could argue that knowledge should be defined in strict terms, such that the divide between everyday knowledge and scientific knowledge is removed. By using this strategy, a definition of the concept of knowledge would be relevant for all kinds of knowledge. Thus, for example, if we were to agree that for something to be knowledge it has to be transparent, to refer to facts, be documented, and so forth, we would remove assumptions, intuitions, and reflections from the concept of knowledge. To a large extent, this strategy was used by logical empiricist Moritz Schlick9: To know something . . . is to designate facts by means of judgements in such a way as to obtain a unique correlation while using the smallest number of concepts. (Schlick 1985, p. 171) However, this definition of knowledge and knowing is not necessarily shared by all.10 So, with regard to the first question concerning what knowledge is, we simply have to argue that it differs according to the three main philosophical traditions under discussion in this book – realism, idealism, and scepticism.

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What about the relation between knowledge and other concepts, such as truth and certainty? To some extent, one could argue that if we ask the question ‘Is the knowledge true?’, we would avoid a definition of knowledge because the question is now whether or not it is true. This is why philosophers often prefer to discuss truth, rather than defining knowledge. Regardless, what is truth?11 It might be that the ‘truth discussion’ is less complex than the ‘knowledge discussion’. However, as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) argued, inherent in knowing is also certainty and truth: The difference between the concept of ‘knowing’ and the concept of ‘being certain’ isn’t of any great importance at all, accept where ‘I know’ is meant to mean: I can’t be wrong. In a law court, for example, ‘I am certain’ could replace ‘I know’ in every piece of testimony. (Wittgenstein 1969, p. 3) The argument in the quotation can be exemplified as follows. Assume that I tell someone that I saw a black cat cross the street. What I say is that I am certain that a black cat crossed the street, so in this case ‘to know’ means ‘to be certain’. If the other person asks whether it was the neighbour’s cat, I might reply ‘I am not sure that it was, but I think that it was’. I might also say ‘As far as I know, it was the neighbour’s cat’. What this example illustrates, and what might be in line with Wittgenstein’s argument, is that the concept of knowing is used in different ways and some of these ways are not meant to describe certainty. Rather, by ‘knowing’, we mean, for example, ‘assertions’ and ‘assumptions’. In his later works, Wittgenstein emphasised how the meaning of a concept related to its use.12 The following is another example. I go to the doctor (my GP) with some symptoms (pain) and he (or she) gives me some medicine. Now, my friend asks me whether I think it is a good idea to take the medicine. I respond by saying that, as far as I know, this is a good idea. My friend then asks on what grounds I know that this is a good idea. My response is that (1) I think the doctor wants me to get well, (2) as far as I know, he is a good doctor, and (3) the testing of medicines is such a comprehensive process that I believe that there is good chance of a positive effect and few chances of side effects from this particular medicine.13 Then my friend replies, ‘So, you are not certain’. Of course, I am not certain. Lots of things I take to be knowledge are things I rely on. As long as the knowledge works, and as long as it does not conflict with my experience, I will rely on that knowledge, even if I am not able to explain how it came about. This is why we need parallel concepts such as facts, truth, and certainty. It is how we use the concept of knowledge, the language game it is used in, that poses the challenge. Sometimes we argue that we know something, meaning we are certain, but in other times, we say we know something, but actually we are relying on our beliefs. We can compensate for some of these shortcomings by adding concepts such as facts, truth, and certainty to knowledge. In the aforementioned case of the cat, I can say that it is a fact that it passed the street and hence it

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is true. I can claim that I filmed the incidence using a video camera, so I can prove it (so it is also certain). Still, there is a distinction between the three concepts of facts, truth, and certainty. There seems to be a general agreement that there are at least two main kinds of truth, and they can be combined. If I say I had a dream about an elephant last night, the truth of my claim will depend on whether I really did have the dream. So, logically, it could be said that my claim is true if I had that dream. Empirically, it is likely that we are facing a problem in establishing the truth in this case. We can easily understand what is meant when we refer to truth. In the case of the dream, the problem is not truth, but certainty: do I really know for certain that I had a dream about an elephant, and can others know this for certain. One could argue that certainty is a metaphysical term because it deals with questions of whether things really exist. Therefore, certainty has to do with the nature of reality. It follows that to have certain knowledge means to know reality – we know how things really are. Truth simply means that the knowledge fulfils some logical criteria that establish the conditions for the knowledge claim, for example that claims correspond to facts.14 This is why truth is preferred to certainty: truth is something within our reach; it is not speculative. By contrast, certainty is often outside our reach. It is argued that a discussion about certainty is a kind of Platonism, a reflection of how things really are. By contrast, Wittgenstein wanted to avoid metaphysics. Thus, according to Hamilton (2014), Wittgenstein’s way to move beyond the problem of things we know for certain but cannot prove empirically was to argue that there are simply foundational things that we need to accept as certain in order to make sense of the world.15 2.1.2  Plato on knowledge and truth The deductive/logical approach used by Plato can best be illustrated by geometry. It has been claimed that, at an early stage, Plato learned about and became fascinated by the work of Pythagoras (580–495 BC)16 (Meinwald 2002). What was fascinating was the purely abstract way of reasoning found in geometry. Popper (1972) argued that the reason for Plato’s fascination was that Pythagoras helped to give meaning to Plato’s theory of forms. What caused Plato concern was his realisation that the challenges related to irrational numbers.17 Impressively, Plato focused on some of the problems that would concern scientists 2,000 years later. He assumed that behind the appearance of things, there was an abstract reality that could be explained in mathematical form. This was an idea that would reappear in the Late Renaissance and later. For example, in his book Novum Organum, Francis Bacon wrote: The investigation of nature is best conducted when mathematics are applied to physics. Again, let none be alarmed at vast numbers and fractions, for in calculation it is easy to set down or to reflect upon a thousand as a unit, or the thousandth part of an integer as an integer itself. (Bacon 2017, p. 59)

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Also, Galileo Galilei is renowned for having stated in Il Saggiatore18 that we cannot understand the universe, which is like a great book that lies open before our eyes, unless we learn the language of the symbols in which it is written (Spiller 2004). Galileo wrote: Philosophy is written in this all-encompassing book, the universe, which stands continuously open before our eyes, that is the universe; but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to understand the language and knows the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures; without these it is humanly impossible to understand a word of it, and one wanders around pointless in a dark labyrinth. (Galilei 2008, p. 183) Deductive reasoning relates to how one can know something without observing it, and how one can know something of a general kind, independent of time and space. This also means that if one has deductive insight, one can transfer it to numerous practical situations. Hence, in all such situations, deductive insight will be equally valid. If one has a whole deductive system – that is, a whole set of propositions about a field, such as the characteristics of materials and of geometrical forms – one will be able to perform calculations for a structure, such as a bridge, before one builds it. From this simple example, it should be easy to see how deductive knowledge can be extremely powerful: we can know a lot without having experienced it. Hence, we can reach out in our thinking beyond our limited world of experience, and since logical reasoning is true, the knowledge has to be true. The axiomatic approach, or the deductive system, allows us to do abstract calculations beyond any real, experienced reality. There are two aspects to this: 1. First, if we know something, we can know (deduce) the rest (e.g. if we know the length of two sides of a right-angled triangle, we can know the length of the third side). 2. Second, anything in practice and things we experience have or relate to something general – a general abstract form, of which they are some sort of practical application. The second point indicates that there was a dualism in Plato’s thinking, between thinking and observing.19 Consider the following quotation from the Phaedo dialogue, in which Socrates argued as follows: Surely the soul can best reflect when it is free of all distractions such as hearing or sight or pain or pleasure of any kind – that is, when it ignores the body and becomes as far as possible independent, avoiding all physical contacts and associations as much as it can, in its search for reality. (Plato 1996, p. 48)

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The quotation is interesting because it briefly describes how Plato, in the words of Socrates, thought about thinking and reality: there is a reality that can be better reached through thinking, if we suspend or ignore the factual world in which we live. Thus, reality is beyond the factual, experienced world. There seems to be an ‘ideal’ or role model for everything, which things strive for. Take the example of a horse: no two horses are completely the same, but all horses have some ‘horseness’ in them. This ‘horseness’ is the divine (the ideal horse). The dialogue Greater Hippas contains the following passage (Plato 1996, p. 1548): SOCRATES:  

Oh dear! Then the chances of finding out what the beautiful really is, has slipped through our fingers and vanished, since the appropriate has proved to be something other than beautiful. HIPPAS:   Upon my word, Socrates, I would never have thought of it! SOCRATES:   But still, my friend, do not let us give up yet. I have a sort of hope that the nature of beauty will reveal itself. The discussion in the passage is about what constitutes beauty, and at the beginning of the Phaedo dialogue, Socrates tried to define beauty by discussing things regarded as beautiful. However, this turned out to be impossible. Induction cannot help us understand what beauty is. However, one can find out how beauty reveals itself. Hence, there is a dualism between thinking of the ideal (how things really are) and the factual, experienced world. To illustrate further where the Platonic argument leads us, we can look at one of the other discussions in the Phaedo dialogue. In that discussion, Socrates took the example of two groups of things that contained different objects. For example, assume that we have a basket with apples and a basket with pears. Assume, to, that one has to choose between the two, and that one considers them equal, so one is indifferent to which one is picked. Even if one is indifferent because one regards the two baskets as equal, someone else might not agree, and could argue that they are unequal and that they would prefer to one basket to the other. In this example, both persons have an idea about equality but they disagree about what it means in a concrete situation. This means that the concept of equality is a general concept that does not rely on any material distribution. Socrates argued: So before we began to see and hear and use our other senses we must somewhere have acquired the knowledge that there is such a thing as absolute equality. Otherwise, we would never have realised, by using it as a standard of comparison, that all equal objects of sense are desirous of being like it, but are only imperfect copies. (cited in Plato 1996, p. 58) Based on this argument, we could say that equality is something we derive from the ideal concept of absolute equality. This ideal concept exists as an abstract idea

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in our mind, and that things in the world strive towards this kind of ideal, but that the things in the world are imperfect copies. Therefore, it is the ideal that is real. So, where does this ideal come from? Socrates argued: So, as I maintain, there are two alternatives. Either we are all born with knowledge of these standards, and retain it throughout our lives, or else, when we speak of people learning, they are simply recollecting what they knew before. In other words, leaning is recollection. (cited in Plato 1996, p. 58) The two options that Plato, with reference to Socrates, provided became a major point of dispute in the Enlightenment, particularly in the dispute between David Hume (1711–1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). While Hume subscribed to social learning theory,20 Kant argued for the transcendental character of knowledge.21 For Plato, this reasoning implied that either way, if the ideal concepts are conscious in our mind, or if they appear through learning, they are still ideal standards that are formed independent of our experience. Thus, Plato tried to reach the right understanding of things through reasoning. One of the metaphors he used was the myth of the cave,22 in which truth is hidden from us in its pure form: truth is outside the cave but we are trapped inside the cave. We can acquire lots of knowledge about reality based on indirect access, such as from the shadows formed in the cave by the light outside it. Hence, from our understanding of how things have to be in order to make sense, we can form opinions about the truth of things. Thus, there are two dimensions to reasoning in the Platonic sense. First, one can deduct from a priori knowledge an understanding of how things have to be in order to comply with universal principles. Second, one can reason from observation, arguing that if we know a certain number of facts, logic can help us to develop the remaining facts (as in geometry). In later references to Plato and Platonism, it is this dualism between that abstract and the concrete, and the relation between deductive reasoning about the ideal and the specific material knowledge to which attention was paid. This is the argument that we can know more than we observe because we have the capacity to understand the abstract nature of things, and in their abstract form, things are logical. Our abstract knowledge guides our practical knowledge. However, even if there is truth, how can we be sure that the knowledge we have is true and even certain?23 This is a key question throughout this book. 2.1.3  Aristotle and the order of things In contrast to Plato, Aristotle practised a very different way of arguing in his work.24 He built on Plato and wrote a treatise about his approach, titled Categories, that became part of his book Organum. His categories can be seen as related to

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Plato’s forms.25 However, as the Canadian philosopher and priest Joseph Owens (1908–2005) argued, [T]he Aristotelian metaphysics is believed to give primacy to the concrete individual, in contrast to the Platonic primacy of form! (Owens 1960, p. 84) One of the main objectives of both Plato and Aristotle was to understand the nature of the world, even though they had different approaches: This constancy of shape and general arrangement of constituent parts is called form by Plato. Aristotle uses the same word in a different meaning. He considers it one of Plato’s greatest mistakes to have identified form with a general concept, as if there were a particular form (an ideal Horse) for every group of living beings referred to by a particular name. .  .  . Aristotle sees form as a formative ‘principle’ governing the regularity of the process by which things originate from each other, grow and pass away. . . . Formative principles can only be experienced if they are materialised, i.e. at work in the actions or motions of things. (Huppes-Cluysenaer 2007, p. 68) The distinction between form and formative principles might seem marginal, but modern interpretations of Plato and Aristotle have emphasised a difference. The phenomenalist René Descartes adopted Plato’s forms in terms of mathematics (Shapere 1963),26 while the German philosopher and idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) built on Aristotle’s formative principles when he wrote about the potential in things and the idea of becoming.27 There was probably also a lot of influence from Aristotle when the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote the following in his book Was heißt Denken?28 We learn to think by giving our mind to what there is to think about. (Heidegger 2004, p. 4) Aristotle established a set of concepts that corresponded to characteristics of nature, and his approach was to group nature into categories according to those characteristics. The question, then, is what is the current status of the categories or forms. As Plato’s forms were abstract, they were also claimed to be universals. However, if Aristotle’s forms or categories are substantial, can they also be universals? Joseph Owens’ response to this dilemma was to argue that it was based on a mistaken assumption: it was assumed that categories are concepts in the mind, rather than characteristics of nature itself (Owens 1960). Thus, according to this view, a realist assumption will remove this dilemma. Aristotle also applied his categorisation to human thinking. Our ways of knowing are many (Eikeland 2008).29 We can know things through use, through

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reflection, through theorising, or through practice. Knowing is a sort of practice, and such practice is something more comprehensive than theoretical (logical and rational) knowledge alone. However, prior to knowing, there are some fundamental categories that we need in order to make sense of the world. Therefore, I briefly look at these categories and how they interplay with the way we form knowledge about the world. Assume that I ask how tall a certain person is. Would an adequate answer be that he or she is red, or 52 years old? No, adequate answers would relate to metres and centimetres, or to feet and inches, or to adjectives such as high or low. How do we know that? We can know it because there are some necessary and logical relationships between concepts. These relationships range according to the complexity of what we want to say. If I say ‘Socrates’, I just say a name and probably point to a person. If I ask how tall Socrates was, I expect a specific reply. When we say something about a thing, we describe it, and we predicate it. When we just denote something, we do not assume form or structure. When we say that Socrates was a small man, we denote a composition and structure, and the categories of big and small are general and universal. Thus, the first, only saying the word ‘Socrates’, is not true or false, but the second, the claim that Socrates was a small man, can be true or false. Thus, truth or false relates to predicates about subjects that assume composition and structure, and that relate to existing categories. These compositions or structures may either be in the thing, such as what the subject does or say, or is, or they may be outside the subject, such as how it appears or its size. This implies that there are lots of things for which the truth/ false claims do not apply. Thus, very subjective things or very general things, may not be things we can predicate, that we can say something truthful (or false) about.30 Hence, we are left with those things about which we can say something that is accurate. Aristotle believed that if we can classify and categorise nature correctly, we will be able to see the order that governs nature. At the same time, he believed that such categories are the foundation for understanding the world. Without them, the world does not have any meaning to us. As Gilbert Ryle argued, What did Aristotle think that his list of Categories was a list of? The word ‘category’ meant what our word ‘predicate’ means and shared all the vagueness and ambiguity of this English substantive. But Aristotle’s list of categories was not a glossary of all the predicates that there are. On at least a plausible interpretation of the doctrine, Aristotle’s list is intended to be a list of the ultimate types of predicates. (Ryle 1938, p. 89) Aristotle’s categories are fundamental characteristics that apply to most phenomena, such as similar and different, bigger or smaller, hard or soft, and for and against. Such characteristics can be applied to most things. Hence, as they were part of Aristotle’s methodology, they would also apply to knowledge. There is

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no contradiction between studying nature and believing in a divine order. On the contrary, the two are closely linked, since by having a deeper insight into nature, the divine order will reveal itself. Plato believed that many things in nature and among humans are imperfect. Still, Aristotle thought that everything has something of the divine in it. As a rough description, one could say that, for Plato, things in the world strived towards perfection that was beyond the world, while for Aristotle, the potential for perfection was in the things themselves. Aristotle, in his quest to disclose the nature of things, made classifications that came to define science and knowledge for a long time, many of which fitted within the later definition of science. For example, the falsification argument used by Karl Popper31 could, in Aristotle’s system, be defined as theoresis. The perspective on science as only theoresis ignores Aristotle’s other concepts of knowledge: theoria, tekhnê, and phrónêsis. However, Aristotle also argued that theoria, tekhnê, and phrónêsis were different things: theoria would never be able to deal with (explain) what happens in practice.32 Knowledge about the practical world can come from both perception and experience. The plurality of knowledge forms relates to the fact that knowing things has many aspects to it. For us as individuals to know something, implies for example to engage in social life, relate to others, be able to take part in dialogues, and be able to perform a profession. It could be said that our theoretical knowledge is integrated into practical knowledge. One could also argue that Aristotle’s project was to find the essence of things, and that he believed that by studying things in detail, one might find their essence. Our way to understand the world is largely through our experience of the world. For example, by dissecting animals, Aristotle could identify their differences, and the core things that made them what they were. As such, a comprehensive system of classification was to a large extent started with the work of Aristotle (H. B. Weiss 1929). However, following the argument of Norwegian philosopher Olav Eikeland (b. 1955), one cannot become a good violin player (in the sense of knowing how to play violin) without practicing. By deconstructing a violin, one can understand how it was made, but doing that would not enable one to learn how to play it. So, one form of knowledge alone is not comprehensive. A certain knowledge form will afford one some insights if one studies or dissects it, but not all insights. Thus, there are many forms of knowledge, and they can be related to the purpose of whatever one is doing. However, for each form, there is a sort of virtue or goal, just as there are good or bad ways of playing a violin. Hence, what we can discover through different forms of knowledge is the form of things (Eikeland 2008). Thus, there are two aspects of Aristotle’s inductive system: first, induction can help us to classify things into more general classes; second, induction can help us to identify the formative principles of things. So, even though Aristotle emphasised the importance of observing things and engaging in practice, and that there are many knowledge forms, he still believed that there are some ideals that these forms strive towards. The plurality of knowledge forms means that there is no

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hierarchy of knowledge. There is no One. A clue to why Aristotle differed from Plato in this respect is given by Armand Marie Leroi (2014), who argues that Aristotle did not believe in the origin of things; he simply thought that the forms we see around us have always been there. This argument was later used by pragmatists: the whole ambition of striving for the one, the right, the origin, or the foundation of things is a fruitless, Platonic, and idealistic enterprise that builds on a wrong idea.33

2.2  The emergence of modern logic 2.2.1  Critique of Plato’s and Aristotle’s methodologies One of the most influential positions in the theory of knowledge is the claim by Plato that knowledge is justified true belief (Plato 1996, p.  908). In its aim for truth, knowledge deviates from hopes and dreams. Truth is understood as something undeniable, something that actually happened, or is actually the case. In Plato’s sense, truth is an ideal. Looking at knowledge as justified true belief is to acknowledge a divide between knowledge and truth, where knowledge is something we have in our heads and truth is something ‘out there’ – events or states of affairs that we try to reach. In the dialogue Epinomis, Plato discussed knowledge, particularly the relation between knowledge and beliefs: And as for the right, the good, the noble, and the like, no man who has given his adherence to a true belief, but without knowledge, will ever enumerate them in the way to bring conviction to himself and to others. (Plato 1996, p. 1521) So, belief is not the same as knowledge, as also stated by Socrates in the dialogue Theaetetus: Socrates: But if true belief and knowledge were the same thing, the best of jurymen could never have a correct belief without knowledge. It now appears that they must be different things. . . . [H]ow can there ever be knowledge without an account and right beliefs? (Plato 1996, p. 908) The point in the quotation is that there were different ways of knowing and not all of them were knowledge. For something to be knowledge, it is not sufficient to have dreamt it or to believe in it. It has to be justified in order to count as knowledge. Plato’s idea that knowledge was justified true belief has been heavily debated (Gettier 1963; Goldman 1979; Sartwell 1992; Southerland et al. 2001), and the dimensions in that debate follow the divide in the philosophical debate in general, namely more or less for or against Plato. This is because the theory

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of knowledge was a cornerstone in Plato’s thinking. Before commenting on this further, I briefly contrast Plato’s concept of knowledge with that of Aristotle. A well-known argument against Plato’s deductive logic by Edmund Lee Gettier (1963) is as follows. Suppose you and a colleague have applied for a job, and you have certain information that your colleague, who has the same gender as you, will get the job. Suppose you also have certain information that your colleague has 10 dollars in his/her pocket. You can now claim with certainty that the person who will get the job has 10 dollars in his/her pocket. Now, as it happens, you get the job and you also happened to have 10 dollars in your pocket. In this case, your deduction is right, but is based on false premises. So, a justified true belief is no guarantee that your knowledge is true. Thus, even if we correctly predict an outcome, it does not necessarily imply that our knowledge about the process that led to the outcome is true. This tells us that we as human beings cannot have complete knowledge about things because knowledge is supposed to be true and truth is something beyond human perception. So, we can strive towards the truth, but there is always a dialectics between knowledge, beliefs, and truth. If we adopt Aristotle’s conception of ways of knowing (Eikeland 2008), the divide between knowledge, beliefs, and truth will close. Knowing, as used by Hegel, is a subjective concept that describes how we comprehend the external world. In The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel wrote: The knowledge or knowing which is at the start or is immediately our object cannot be anything else but immediate knowledge itself, a knowledge of the immediate or of what simply is. Our approach to the object must also be immediate or receptive; we must alter nothing in the object as it presents itself. In apprehending it, we must refrain from trying to comprehend it. (Hegel 1997, p. 58) Later, the philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) used knowing as a concept that integrates our own mental state with the external world, and argued for a radical rethinking of philosophy (Grene 1977). For example, he linked knowing to meaning (Polanyi 1969). The philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1945, 1990) made a distinction between knowing that and knowing how. Knowing how to play a violin is different from knowing quantum mechanics.34 Eikeland (2008), in building on Aristotle, argues that the different knowledge forms can be distinguished by the relation between the knower (subject) and the known (object). When we study the universe, we get to know something, but the things we know cannot be changed by us. We are merely spectators. When we know how to ride a bicycle, we also practise cycling. When we know how to paint, we even manipulate or change things through our painting. Knowing how to behave implies behaving. Thus, our relation to the object changes as we relate to different kinds of knowledge. Later in this book,35 I show that one deep disagreement within science relates to what kind of knowledge is appropriate for science. Should spectator-based

Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science  33

knowledge be the only scientific knowledge? Furthermore, there is a deep philosophical divide related to true knowledge and whether it is based on cognition, understood as calculative knowledge (as in logic), or based on thought as a reflective process. This divide is emphasised by phenomenological thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt.36 One could argue that knowing is a pragmatic concept, as it presupposes that the different ways or forms of knowing are something that exists in a certain time and place. We do not find the same distinction between knowledge and other epistemic forms in Aristotle as in Plato. Although debated (Chappell 2012), Plato is often seen as having emphasised the relation between knowledge and the unity of virtues, including the truth and the good (Devereux 1992), as illustrated by the following quotation from Socrates in the dialogue Protagoras: Most people think . . . what rules him is not knowledge but rather anything else – sometimes anger, sometime pleasure, sometimes pain, at other times love, often fear; they think of his knowledge being utterly dragged around by all these other things as if it were a slave. Now, does the matter seem like that to you, or does it seem to you that knowledge is a fine thing capable of ruling a person, and if someone were to know what is good and bad, then he would not be forced by anything to act otherwise than knowledge dictates, and intelligence would be sufficient to save a person? (Plato 1997, p. 782) From this perspective, knowledge is a warrant for truth, an ambition to seek truthfulness, different from virtues, but still closely related to them. In modern times, the discussion by Plato was reopened by René Descartes, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. The deductive system of Plato became a key position for criticism, as I have shown earlier in this chapter, but it also inspired discussions. The ambiguous relation that later thinking had to Plato might relate to the fact that deductive thinking is part of our way of logical reasoning, while at the same time, it is probable that most scientists would reject Plato’s metaphysics.37 Plato claimed that knowledge and truth are two different things, and that knowledge strives towards becoming true. However, Plato also believed that there is an absolute truth.38 Knowledge is our ambition to know something that is true rather than false. This means that knowledge refers to things for which the true/ false dichotomy can be applied. Knowledge is therefore different from fantasies or dreams, which do not have any claims to truth. It is also different from religion and personal values, even though having knowledge and wanting to know the truth can also be values. When we go about in the world, we gain lots of impressions that we recognise or interpret. Hence, we believe that we know something. How can we know that the beliefs we have in our heads have reached the truth level? David Hume makes the argument that our first-hand impressions, later illustrated by the British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) and by Karl Popper as seeing

34  Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science

a white swan in the water, are the easiest to verify. If we are sure that the swan is there (we are not hallucinating), that it is real and alive (it is not a plastic swan or a hologram), and that we know that we are not mixing up a duck with a swan, we can be quite sure that our belief that we see a white swan is true. The process whereby we believe that we see or know something, and then justify it by doing some checking, illustrates justified true belief. Why can it be said that it is a belief? Well, in the case of the swan, the argument is that what we claim is our perception of the thing in the water is not the thing itself. It is a picture, concept, or an idea of the swan we have in our head, not the swan itself. Some have argued that what we have in our head, if it is knowledge, is the fact itself, not a belief in the fact.39 Seeing knowledge as justified true belief decouples knowledge from facts, in the same way as it decouples knowledge and truth. Knowledge can never be the fact or the truth itself. Consider two alternatives that might seem relevant, and which are defined in Table 2.1: knowledge is truth and knowledge is true beliefs. In the case of knowledge is truth, in simplified terms, something is knowledge if it is true and is not knowledge if it is untrue. The problem with this claim is that it erases the whole epistemological dimension. That means that, in this claim, there is no thinking person, and therefore the whole process of knowing and thinking is out of the equation. With regard to the second alternative, knowledge is true beliefs, this statement is advocated by Crispin Sartwell (1992). His argument against justification is that it adds a dimension that conflicts with knowledge as true belief. He states that our beliefs are knowledge when they are true. If we say they should be justified truth, it might imply that our beliefs become less true, as justification is a criterion that we cannot guarantee will imply more truth. Sartwell’s point does not solve the problem of how we know that a certain belief is true. As pointed out by Gettier (1963), referred earlier in this section, we can be justified in believing something, and it might still be wrong.40 So, when does something become knowledge? The answer to this question is that it depends on the process of justification. The discussion is summarised in Table 2.1. What we owe to antiquity and bring with us into the modern discussion of science is a conceptualisation of knowledge as different knowledge forms and the acknowledgement of different epistemologies, as well as different methodologies. Even though the context of discussion changes as we move more than 1,000 years forward in time, these generic categories are still at the centre of the scientific and philosophical debate. Thus far, my discussion has revealed that it is not easy to say what is knowledge. In fact, my argument is that the discussion about what is knowledge is at the centre of the encounter between science and philosophy. This discussion might have been continued simply by defining knowledge, thus: ‘in this treatise I use the concept of knowledge in the following way’. However, first, that would not solve the problem, and second, the process of trying to solve it is at the core of my intention. This implies that as we go along, we both use the concept of knowledge and at the same time, through our use, try to move closer to what it

Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science  35 Table 2.1  Knowledge as justification, truth, and beliefs Knowledge is . . .

Means that . . .

Criticism

truth

knowledge and truth are the same

beliefs

knowledge is reduced to beliefs only

justification

knowledge is defined by how it is established

true beliefs

knowledge is what we truly believe

justified truth

something becomes knowledge only when it has been justified as truth knowledge is beliefs, but only beliefs that are justified

This contradicts common sense. People will often claim that they know something that others oppose. Not all this knowledge can be true. This position reduces knowledge to being only subjective opinions. It relativises the concept of knowledge completely. This understanding of knowledge reduces it to a process of justification, rather than what it expresses (what we know). We might easily believe something that is not true. We face the same problems as with beliefs mentioned here. Such a criterion for knowledge meets the same objections as does justification mentioned here. This argument is meaningful and probably close to what people understand by knowledge. However, by ignoring the truth dimension, any justified belief will count as knowledge.

justified beliefs

is. The formal understanding of knowledge as justified true belief, despite being much contested, is still a key reference.41 2.2.2  After antiquity: science and religion From antiquity, we move to the late Middle Ages. We are now in Europe in the 13th century, to which the reader might ask: did nothing happen in the preceding 1,500 years? To which the answer, slightly arrogantly, might be that it probably did. In fact, the answer is not a sign of arrogance, but rather of ignorance. It is from Francis Bacon in the 17th century, later supported by, among others, Charles S. Peirce (Peirce 1998) and Whitehead (Whitehead 1967), that we have the claim that very little of fundamental interest to science happened between antiquity and the Renaissance. This has become the standard story. The Romans had more or less adopted the Greek world view, and Aristotle’s work was the reference in

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many fields of knowledge. However, from the Roman period, we acquired the system of law and the logic of bureaucratic organisation. Bacon wrote: The sciences we possess have been principally derived from the Greeks; for the addition of the Roman, Arabic, or more modern writers, are but few and of small importance, and such as they are, are founded on the basis of Greek invasion. (Bacon 2017, p. 21) For there are deserts and wastes in times as in countries, and we can only reckon up three revolutions and epochs of philosophy. 1. The Greek. 2. The Roman. 3. Our own, that is the philosophy of the western nations of Europe: and scarcely two centuries can with justice be assigned to each. (Bacon 2017, p. 25) during the second epoch (that of the Romans), philosophy meditation and labour was chiefly occupied and wasted in moral philosophy (the theology of the heathens): besides, the great minds in these times applied themselves to public affairs, on account of the magnitude of the Roman empire, which required the labour of many. (Bacon 2017, p. 26)42 Whitehead more or less subscribed to Bacon’s accounts, as late as in the beginning of the 20th century: [I]n the year 1500 Europe knew less than Archimedes who died in the year 212 B.C. (Whitehead 1967, p. 6) During the history of the Catholic Church in Europe until the 12th century, there was no focus on scientific knowledge: scientific activity was forbidden, books were banned and locked away, and much of the heritage from antiquity was simply forgotten. This situation changed in the 12th century, partly because by then the works of Aristotle became available in the Western world. The study of Aristotle’s work was approved by the University of Paris in 1255 (Kretzmann  & Stump 1993). It soon became clear that scholastic theology, in particular in the version of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), had become fascinated by Aristotle’s empirical method and his system of classification of the physical world. One might reflect on why Aristotle merited this reception, as the Catholic Church had for centuries banned books that supposedly were in conflict with ‘the gospel’. There is an extensive body of literature in which authors try to understand and argue why Aquinas accepted Aristotle’s thought and integrated it into his own thinking (Kretzmann  & Stump 1993). In particular, it has been argued that Aquinas

Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science  37

identified with Aristotle’s systematic inquiry, and system of classification, not least his division of knowledge into practical and theoretical knowledge. It has also been argued that his concept of knowledge was of a kind that combined human knowledge with an acknowledgement of the divine: Both ground all naturally attainable human knowledge on external, sensible things, instead of on sensation, ideas, or language. (Owens 1993, p. 38) Another reason is that the works of Aristotle were so extensive that they were hard to ignore. However, it seems that also the Aristotelian approach played a role, as investigating and understanding nature can be a way of worshiping nature. Regardless, in the early 1200s AD, readers could once again open the books of Aristotle and consider his research, which opened up for a further development, not only on the topics Aristotle had investigated but also of the Aristotelian method. The latter was advanced through the work of Roger Bacon (1214–1294), who was not related to the later Francis Bacon and has often been described as the first scientist (Clegg 2003).43 However, there was one important break in Roger Bacon’s thinking, compared with that from antiquity: the ancient way of thinking, which we find in Plato and Aristotle, puts the divine at the centre – we study in order to understand the divine. Bacon was perhaps the first scholar to state that we study in order for us, as human beings, to understand things: scientific knowledge is the human knowledge about the world, not the world itself. Roger Bacon realised that one had to investigate the findings of Aristotle, and in order to do so, he argued that we need to see nature more clearly. Bacon emphasised two major methodological arguments: (1) the importance of and need to use mathematics in scientific investigation, and (2) the need to extend Aristotle’s methods to experiments (not only observation), which Bacon did, to the disapproval of Aquinas. Experimentation led Bacon to investigate optics, and he is regarded (although not confirmed) as one of the inventors of both the microscope and the telescope. Thus, science was to look deeper into nature, and wider onto nature. Bacon also argued for reconciling his science and theology. Even so, his work was banned in 1277, and he was placed under house arrest.44 One of the chief architects behind the drive to make the work of Aristotle the main science reference for the Catholic Church, as I  have shown earlier, was Thomas Aquinas. He had endorsed Roger Bacon’s new reading of Aristotle, but gradually Aquinas became more restrictive and conservative. Added to this is the fact that not all persons within the Catholic Church supported the relation to Aristotle. So, even Aquinas’ fascination with Aristotle was met with opposition.45 Aquinas rejected Plato’s idea of universals and adopted an idea close to that of Aristotle’s: universals are not abstract categories, but real categories. This is illustrated by the American professor of philosophy, Jeffrey E. Brower, in the quotation ‘Plato and Socrates were two white human beings’ (Brower 2016, p. 717).

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Aquinas accept the realness and uniqueness of Plato and Aristotle, but in what sense can we say that they belonged to the group whiteness or to the group human beings, and are these groups real? In particular, should we say that both individuals are members of the class of white things in virtue of possessing the universal whiteness? Or are we to account for their joint membership in the class in some other way – say, by taking it as primitive? To ask these sorts of questions just is to raise the contemporary problem of universals. (Brower 2016, p. 717) Aquinas rejected that concepts like that of white things or whiteness are universals in an abstract sense, and he acknowledged that they are equally concepts that we have in our mind. However, following Aristotle, he believed in natural order. Thus, according to Aquinas, ‘Natures are common both in reality and in the mind’ (Brower 2016, p. 724). For Aquinas, this assumption gave him a very powerful tool. It meant that he could develop claims about reality from purely deductive thinking. The approach he developed was later referred to as rationalism.46 Nominalists reacted against the claim that natural categories are real. For nominalists, the general categories we make are only products of our own mind. Foremost among the nominalists, and thus of Aquinas critics, was William of Ockham (1287–1347), who, according to Larry Siedentop (2014), was an important thinker in transforming Western thinking in a liberal direction: Instead of terms designating classes of phenomena being deemed to have a substance or reality in their own right, terms began to be seen as mental constructions, as what we now call concepts. From Abelard in the twelfth century to Ockham in the fourteenth, that contributed to a debate between ‘realists’, who defended the objective, extra-mental reality of general terms or concepts, and ‘nominalists’ who insisted that ‘a universal thing does not exist, except in individual things and through individual things’. This latter view rapidly gained ground. (Siedentop 2014, p. 219) Nominalism inspired a more constructive role of the mind in our perception of reality. It implied that we could start rethinking how we come to know things, as Siedentop argues: Logical studies developed astonishing rapidly during the twelfth century. The egalitarian foundation of cannon law immediately raised the question of how general terms are related to the experience of the individuals, and it engendered a debate between ‘realists’ and ‘nominalists’. Did general terms correspond to something with an independent existence or were they merely convenient ways of bringing together individual experience, giving

Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science  39

them linguistic unity. Increasingly, general terms ceased to be understood on the model of Platonic ideas, as having a reality superior to that of mundane experience. (Siedentop 2014, p. 229) When concepts are used to denounce experience, they are used in a different way than when they are used to denounce abstract terms such as logic. Ockham had insisted that there was a distinction between demonstrative reasoning and causal explanation, between “rational science” and “experimental science” (Siedentop 2014, p.  313). Thus, logical reasoning is different from observation. However, for both, Ockham insisted on the hypothetical nature of human knowledge. This implies that human knowledge is always open for revision. Following the later argument by David Hume and Immanuel Kant, as I explain later,47 we can call statements that refer to experience, synthetic statements, while purely abstract statements can be called analytical statements (Russell 2015). Thus, a split between the faculty of abstract reasoning in terms of logic and the faculty of concrete experiences is apparent. For Ockham, who developed these thoughts, the split led him into conflict with both the Catholic Church and Thomas Aquinas, a conflict that was institutionalised between the Franciscan order and the Dominican order of the Catholic Church, as Siedentop observes: It was a bittersweet moment. Distinguishing between knowledge of nature and knowledge of culture did not merely challenge traditional assumptions about the unity of knowledge. It also called into question the possibility of proving God’s existence by constructing a ‘natural’ theology, the enterprise which Aquinas, under the influence of Aristotle, had pursued. Thus, Ockham’s emphasis on faith and freedom confronted Aquinas’ rationalistic account of natural law. (Siedentop 2014, p. 313) We can see this divide with reference to Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and his rejection of natural law.48 Against this, Hobbes proposed a law of nature that was empirically (inductive) based. One could trace this difference to the underlying metaphysical question: Is the world, orderly or not? For those who were seeking traces of the divine order in the world, such as Aquinas and the natural law theorists, the underlying metaphysics was the orderliness of the world. For those rejecting it, such as Ockham and Hobbes, and later the empiricists, with the possible exception of Berkeley, the world was, metaphysically speaking, not seen as orderly. For them, order was something we make, in our mind. In this respect, I  could mention the British scholastic thinker Duns Scotus (1265–1308), who developed a position that was somewhere between Aquinas and Ockham (Peirce 1998), a position that came closer to the later reasoning both of George Berkeley (1685–1783) and Kant. Scotus rejected universals and accepted the nominalist argument that the forms and concepts that we need to classify the world are

40  Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science

products of our mind. However, at the same time, he claimed that the forms that nominalism gave us were real. Thus, he was a nominalist-realist. Despite the ambiguous relation between Catholic religion and science in the Middle Ages, Alfred North Whitehead argues that without the systematic logic developed by Scholastics, there would not have been modern science. In his book Science and the Modern World,49 he wrote: But for science something more is wanted than a general sense of the order of things. It needs but a sentence to point out how the habit of definite exact thought was implemented in the European mind by the long dominance of scholastic logic and scholastic divinity. The habit remained after the philosophy had been repudiated, the priceless habit of looking for an exact point and of sticking to it when found. (Whitehead 1967, p. 12) In line with Whitehead’s thinking, it can also be argued that the development of science is integrated into a general change in perspectives in society, which makes it difficult to understand how things were perceived before we developed our modern perceptions of things. This is what Polanyi called tacit knowing: We may say that a scientific discovery reduces our focal awareness of observations into a subsidiary awareness of them, by shifting our attention from them to their theoretical coherence. This act of integration, which we can identify both in the visual perception of objects and in the discoveries of scientific theories is the tacit power we have been looking for. I shall call it tacit knowing. (Polanyi 1969, p. 140) The Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright (1916–2003) made the point that what constitutes science as we know it, and the reason that we argue that it appears in the 17th century, is that the whole enterprise of investigation goes from understanding to explaining: The Galilean tradition in science runs parallel with the advances of the causal-mechanistic point of view in man’s efforts to explain and predict phenomenon. (von Wright 1971, p. 2) The methods of understanding are quite different from those of explaining.50 The Aristotelian thinking had understanding as its core idea. The project was to find out how the world works, including its meaning, and the logic of the natural order of things. Explaining has a different perspective from understanding, as it implies that we can identify the mechanisms that make things happen, and thereby start arguing for manipulating the order of the world, which is the core of the modern

Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science  41

project.51 Many have argued that the breakthrough of this modern science came with astronomy (see H. Floris Cohen 2010), even though astronomy is about things we cannot change or manipulate.52 The period that became known as the Enlightenment undoubtedly represented a strong belief in reason among European intellectuals, as indicated by the following quotation from Kant: All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time out, then in the end it destroys itself and the highest cultivation of it is at the same time the point of its decline. (Kant 2004, p. 167) However, although the Enlightenment brought new knowledge that enlightened people in general, it paved the way for the Industrial Revolution, democracy, the rule of law, and an increase in general welfare. As a body of knowledge, it contained different and partly conflicting ideas that set the scene for the scientific debate that has occurred during the last 200 years. The Scientific Revolution at the beginning of the 17th century was both a continuation of the thinking of Plato and Aristotle, and a break with it. Astronomers had proved that Aristotle’s astronomy was wrong, and consequently the hegemony of Aristotle thinking was broken. However, even though the new science was a break with some of Aristotle’s theories, it also embraced some of the fundamental ideas of Aristotle, predominantly the idea that the world is orderly. Moreover, the old divide between Plato’s claim that the world is imperfect and Aristotle’s idea that it is orderly seemed to reappear. The assumption was that there is an underlying, logical structure governing the world, which is for us to discover. This generated enormous energy in natural science. It gave it a programme and a direction, which possibly culminated with Isaac Newton’s discoveries. In the preface to Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica from 1687, in which he formulated his laws of motion, Newton wrote: Since the ancients (according to Pappus) considered mechanics to be of the greatest importance in the investigation of nature and science and since the moderns – rejecting substantial forms and occult qualities – have undertaken to reduce the phenomena of nature to mathematical laws, it has seemed best in this treatise to concentrate on mathematics as it is related to natural philosophy. (Newton 1999, p. 27, original emphasis) The fascination with discovering that an underlying mathematical logic of the world later inspired rationalistic, deductive thinking, which means that we can know a whole lot of things, even the most essential things about the world, not by observing, but by logical, deductive reasoning. It became a strong position in philosophy, inspired by Descartes,53 but further developed by the German

42  Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science

philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716). Leibniz’s logic inspired the founders of logical empiricism.54 2.2.3  The language of science Philosophical positions hold different opinions on whether or not there is a reality independent of us. Aristotle had described the natural world as a reality, and as a physical fact. For Aristotle, physics was the material world. Long after Aristotle’s own time, a metaphysical discussion emerged concerning the question of what is the fundamental nature of reality? Scholars started to divide Aristotle’s work into physics and metaphysics. Some argued that physics is what is visible and existing, whereas metaphysics is about how we understand reality and look beyond it. Still, there is no agreement about how to define both physics and metaphysics. Descartes used the terms to distinguish between knowledge that comes from sensation and knowledge that is purely a product of thinking. Logical positivists used it to make distinction between those features of reality that can be documented as facts and those that are purely assumptions. For example, if we say that a thing is red, we are referring to a fact that can be tested, but if we say that the thing is beautiful, it cannot be tested and therefore it is metaphysical. Broadly speaking, we can say that metaphysics goes beyond physics, and asks what constitutes what is? ‘What is’ is more than physical objects. It might include discussions about the existence of God or ideas. Ontology is the study of the existence of things, so in this respect, it could be seen as a category of metaphysics. Also, epistemology can be seen as metaphysics because it refers to the study of knowledge – how we come to know something, and what is it to know. Hence, if one is concerned with metaphysical issues (i.e. the fundamental nature of reality), one probably has opinions about ontology (what is) and epistemology (how one comes to have knowledge about what is). However, if one rejects metaphysics,55 one probably has a different opinion about the world, and how one comes to have knowledge about the world. In order not to be associated with those concerned with metaphysics, one might not want to refer to ontology and epistemology. The philosopher David Woodruff Smith summarises ontology as follows: Ontology is the theory of being, of what is, and how things are. Ontology is also called metaphysics, though there are somewhat different usages of the terms. Some philosophers define metaphysics as the speculative theory about reality beyond the reach of our evidence; the positivists and, before them, Kant rejected metaphysics in this pejorative sense. Other philosophers define ontology as the theory of what types of things exist and then define metaphysics as the further theory of time and space and causation, of whether there is a first cause of everything (perhaps God), of the special attributes of God, of whether there is a life after death, and so forth; in this sense metaphysics is focused on certain specific issues of what exists and of the order of things. (D.W. Smith 2013, p. 51)

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It could be said that epistemology is knowledge about knowledge. It is a concept that mainly appeared in the neo-Kantian discussion (Friedman 2000), referring to Kant’s argument that conditions for how we form knowledge have an impact on what we see and actually also on what is. This, saying that epistemology is important, implies arguing that there is, indeed, a need to discuss the foundation of the knowledge, which also relate to science. This is the reason some argue against epistemology.56 The argument against epistemology is as follows: if we argue that we need a theory about knowledge, where does the theory about the theory about knowledge come from? The whole positivist movement, including logical empiricists,57 was dedicated to the avoidance of metaphysics, and thereby avoided epistemology in the way it is perceived within metaphysics. Rudolf Carnap states: The realist language, which the empirical sciences generally use, and the constructional language have actually the same meaning: they are both neutral as far as the decision of the metaphysical problem of reality between realism and idealism is concerned. (Carnap 1995, p. 86) Carnap’s argument was that the discussions about metaphysics, which include discussions of both ontology and epistemology, are outside the scientific discourse. Science has nothing to say about these things. They may be part of philosophical speculations, but not of science.58 Even though Carnap maintained his argument that metaphysical speculations are outside science, he acknowledged that the terms ontology and epistemology are in general use, and thus indicated that they might be applied in a non-metaphysical way. The different understandings of the concepts of ontology and epistemology are summarised in Table 2.2. The main point evident from Table 2.2 is that ontology and epistemology can be understood as non-metaphysical in the sense that they do not imply anything beyond personal perception and cognition. However, being metaphysical implies that we assume something beyond personal perception or cognition. It should be added that the use of the concepts differs within the three traditions discussed in

Table 2.2 M etaphysical and non-metaphysical understandings of ontology and epistemology

Metaphysical meaning Non-metaphysical meaning

Ontology

Epistemology

Essence of things, what they really are How things appear

Different knowledge forms related to different realities

Source: Based on Carnap (1995)

How to get a correct understanding of the perceived world

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this book. Broadly speaking, with the exception mentioned earlier, idealists use concepts of ontology and epistemology with a metaphysical meaning, whereas realists most often use them as non-metaphysical concepts. Sociologists criticise the concepts of ontology and epistemology, and in general this criticism refers to both meanings. Based on the earlier discussion, I  attempt to use epistemology as a general concept and hopefully the reader can determine from the context when it refers to idealism and when it refers to analytical philosophy. Still, the term epistemology is central to my discussion. It is a main arena where philosophy and science overlap. For science, epistemology, in the meaning of a theory of how we perceive things, is a fundamental question underlying all methodologies, whereas for philosophy, it is a fundamental issue in the sense of demarcating what we can know about from experience and what we can only speculate about, not least the relation between physics and metaphysics. In both cases, the dualism between ontology, meaning the nature of things, and epistemology, meaning how we came to have knowledge about the world, is at the centre of discussions. However, I also use the term epistemology in a less fundamental and narrower way, as referring to the theory of how we perceive things. If I say that there is an epistemological dimension, it simply means that our perception of something is formed not only by what we observe but also by our beliefs, dreams, wishes, hopes, wisdom, and values. It might be claimed that the purpose of an epistemological process is to form knowledge or knowing. In other words, epistemology is our theory about the process by which we form knowledge. This implies that there may be many different epistemologies, meaning that there are many different theories of how we come to know things. It also implies that we can use terms such as ontology and epistemology in relation to both how we perceive the physical world and how we understand the social world of meaning. Thus, when we refer to epistemology, we refer to how we perceive the world, either as facts or as meanings. The point here is that we interpret what we see or sense. What we see and sense is not the thing itself, but our sensing and interpretation of the thing. It is probable that we are not able to perceive something if we cannot make sense of it.59 So, interpretation is an inherent part of perception. The ontological question is of a different kind. Ontology refers to the nature of things. Even the world of meanings can be seen to have an ontological status as social facts. If a person says he or she had a dream, that in itself is an ontological fact; at least, it is an ontological fact that he or she says so, even if the dream itself is a phantom. One of the issues I refer to later in this book60 is whether we can access an ontology without referring to epistemology; scientism argues that we can. If I were a realist, I would probably argue that something is knowledge if it would give an accurate description of reality. If I were a sceptic, I would probably argue that whatever knowledge I have is a subjective opinion. If I were an idealist, I would probably argue that knowledge is about our ideas, but that we still have the potential for understanding the essence of things; the more essential one’s insight into something is, the more knowledge it represents. In all cases, one

Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science  45

could argue that knowledge is formulated in words that indicate a phenomenon. The knowledge would be a result of our thinking about the world. However, if knowledge is a concept among other concepts, it tries to say something about the other concepts. Thus, knowledge as a product of thought faces a kind of circular challenge because we must assume that we know something in order to know what knowledge is. A way out of the circularity is to define knowledge, not in the form of being superior to all other things, but simply as one thing among other things; knowledge is simply a concept that defines certain properties of our thinking in the form of beliefs, opinions, reflection, understandings, and the like. In this sense, the concept of knowledge is a claim about something that has been verified somehow.61 This way of understanding knowledge makes it a sociological phenomenon. Knowledge is a name we give a certain social practice by which we sort out certain things and call them knowledge, as distinct from non-knowledge. If I say ‘x) the world is round and orbits the sun’, I will express something that is regarded as knowledge. If I say ‘y) the world is flat and that the sun orbits it’, what is expressed will not be regarded as knowledge. Thus, although both x) and y) are propositions of similar form, and both are logical and reasonable formulations that make it clear what is meant, x) is still knowledge and y) is not. Hence, according to this way of reasoning, we cannot define knowledge merely on formal grounds. Thus, our thinking can refer both to knowledge and to non-knowledge. In this book, I use Kant as a reference for all three traditions discussed (realism, idealism, and scepticism), even though Kant was in disagreement with all of them. I present a framework, based on Kant, as a reference for the remaining part of the book,62 which I use to position discussions and the philosophical divides. I assume that knowledge derives from thinking, and that thinking can be expressed in statements. Thus, if I observe a cat, I can make the statement: ‘there is a cat’. However, if independent of observation, I assume and think that 1 + 2 = 3, I can formulate that in the statement ‘one plus two equals three’. Hence, I can have the knowledge that there is a cat, and that one plus two equals three. Accordingly, the model presented in Table 2.3 assumes that there are two kinds of propositions about the world: abstract propositions that exist independent of experience, and practical propositions that come from experience. They both represent a dualism, or a dialectic: To be sure, the distinction between a world disclosed by the senses and a world disclosed by the understanding was a standard feature of the metaphysical partition. It went back to Plato’s distinction between the realm of appearance and the realm of Form (ideas) and had been recast by Leibnitz as the distinction between the realm of nature and the realm of grace. But Kant rethought the dualism of worlds in a significant and consequential way. In particular, he reassessed the status of the world of sense and its basis in sense perception. (Zöller 2004, p. 11)

46  Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science

Immanuel Kant argued that there is no finite answer to the relation between the two kinds of propositions, as we as human beings have the capacity to understand things in their general form, such as principles of ethics, and to make judgement in concrete situations, but the two will never converge into one. No concrete event will ever cover all that is in the abstract category it refers to, and no abstract category can be reduced to concrete events, and neither category will be able to cover all types of experience. Table 2.3 is based on Hume’s concepts interpreted by Kant.63 Propositions, in which we express our knowledge, are a combination of sources and logical form of thinking. We may call these knowledge forms or judgements. Thus, there are a priori sources of knowledge (knowledge that exists independent of experience) and a posteriori sources of knowledge (knowledge based on experience). Then, there is knowledge based on experiences of the world (synthetic) and on knowledge in purely abstract form (analytic). How can these forms and sources be combined? Kant made the following observation on a priori knowledge: Thus one would say of a person who undermined the foundation of his house, that he might have known a priori that it would tumble down, that is, that Table 2.3  The basic structure of truth claims Knowledge (propositions) derived from logical form and source of thinking

Source of our thinking

A priori: thinking prior to observation (universal) Logical form Analytical (pointing A) Pr opositions of an of thinking to ideas): all abstract kind that knowledge is are true by pure contained in logic (tautology) the sentence These propositions (statement) are abstract and universal. Synthetic (pointing C)   Propositions not to real things derived from in the world): observation, they a sentence say something (statement) that about reality provides new (synthetic/a knowledge about priori) the world These propositions are universal, but real.

A posteriori: thinking based on observation (contextual) B)   Propositions derived from reality (rationalism) These propositions are abstract, but contextual. D)   Propositions about reality that are based on observation (empiricism) These propositions are contextual and based on real sensing.

Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science  47

he need not wait for the experience of its really tumbling down. But still he could not know this entirely a priori, because he had first to learn from experience that bodies are heavy, and will fall when their supports are taken away. (Kant 2001a, p. 25) Kant used the example to illustrate what a priori knowledge is not. This is made clear in the quotation: Knowledge a priori, if mixed up with nothing empirical, is called pure. (Kant 2001a, p. 25) Thus, there is pure and impure a priori knowledge. However, Kant’s use of the term implies pure a priori knowledge. At the same time, there are synthetic and analytical statements. An analytical statement does not bring any new knowledge: the knowledge is inherent in the statement. By contrast, there is knowledge of a concrete specific kind that is formulated in synthetic statements. Synthetic statements are statements about the world, about things, and about events in the world. As I show in this book,64 Kant argued that mathematics is synthetic. Being synthetic means that it brings some new knowledge. If I say ‘there is a cat out there’, I will provide some new knowledge about the world. If I say ‘a cat is a mammal’ (which is how we define cats as species), I will not provide any new knowledge about the world, I will merely refer to a definition. However, the latter statement, even if abstract, is contextual in the sense it is based on observations and definitions that have led to the conclusion that cats are mammals. Hence, the statement is synthetic. The analytical philosopher Bertrand Russell (2015) argued that there are only two knowledge forms: analytical a priori knowledge and synthetic a posteriori knowledge (positions A and D in Table 2.3). As shown in the quotation given earlier, Carnap argued that knowledge of the type of position C in Table 2.3 is outside science (Carnap 1995). As I show later in this book,65 Heidegger argued, against Kant, that all thinking starts in the lifeworld, the Dasein (there-being) (in position D in Table 2.3). Contrary to Kant, he argued that this thinking can lead us to a fundamental understanding of things (position A in Table 2.3). David Hume argued66 that the only knowledge we have for certain is synthetic a posteriori knowledge (position D in Table 2.3). It could be said that induction is empirically informed, whereas deduction is logically informed. Each of the knowledge forms implies different uses of these logics. The question is whether one can use induction or deduction to overstep knowledge forms, in example so called transcendental deduction (Engstrom 1994). Kant, as we will see,67 argued that we cannot. That contrasts with Plato who could be seen as arguing that type A statements relate to knowledge that links our understanding of the world with this ideal, non-experienced world. Subsequently, A becomes a representation of the ideal for which our knowledge of D

48  Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science

strives. Hence, deduction from A to D and from B to D can inform us about D. Aristotle could be seen as starting with D and developing B through a form of induction process, such as the example of the swan. He might then have assumed that B is a kind of material representation of the ideal A. An overall theme of philosophy and sociology of science relates to the concept of knowledge. Knowledge has to be discussed in relation to beliefs, truth, and certainty, which in turn is related to mental activity, or to perception, observation, reflection, and thinking. Furthermore, our thinking is related to assumptions about reality, about ontology, and about epistemology. Our way to understand these is defined by our way of reasoning.

Notes 1 Alfred North Whitehead declared stated: ‘The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’ (Whitehead 1978, p. 39) 2 Some have called modern science, post-Aristotelian science (Curd & Psillos 2014). 3 Popper (1966a, p.  21) wrote the following about Plato: ‘This belief in perfect and unchanging things, usually called the Theory of Forms or Ideas, became the central doctrine of his philosophy.’ 4 However, it is known that Aristotle visited Lesbos, the home island of his student Theophrastus (371–287 BC). On Lesbos, Aristotle discovered, and probably was extremely fascinated by, the animal life in and around Kalony Bay. The research Theophrastus and Aristotle carried out on the botany and biology of the island over the following years became reference works for centuries afterwards (Leroi 2014). 5 There are several differing accounts of why Aristotle left Athens. One version links it to the conflict between Athens and Macedonia (F.G. Weiss 1929). 6 René Descartes made this argument in his book Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, published in 1641 (Descartes 1998a), which I refer to later, in Chapter 5.1.1. 7 See Chapter 5.2.3. 8 This position is in line with the sociology of knowledge, as I discuss in Chapter 5. 9 In Chapter 4.2.2, I elaborate on Schlick’s theory of knowledge and in particular what it implies for our understanding of reality. 10 As I show in Chapter 5.1.1, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl defined intuition as part of knowledge. 11 I show in Chapters  3.2.1, 3.3.2, 4.2.2, and 5.2.1 that positions deviate. F.G. Weiss (1974) argues that a main divide is between an atomistic and a holistic concept of truth. 12 See Chapter 4.3.1. 13 In the article ‘ “It’s a razor’s edge we’re walking”: Inside the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine’ (The Guardian, Friday 27 March 2020), Samanth Subramanian gives a rare insight into the process of developing vaccines, including all uncertainty related to it. The COVID-19 pandemic is used as a case later in this book (see Chapters 5.3.2 and 6.1.2). 14 For a further discussion, see Chapter 3.3.2. 15 I discuss Wittgenstein’s argument in more depth in Chapter 3.2.1. 16 Pythagoras is known for his theorem of how, in a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. The algebraic expression is a² + b² = c², where c is the hypotenuse. 17 See John McDowell ‘Identity mistakes: Plato and the logical atomists’ (McDowell 1998b).

Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science  49 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

Translated as The Assayer, published 1623 (Galilei 2008). Application is used to describe the practical use of abstract knowledge. See Chapter 3.1.2. See Chapter 4.1.2. The allegory of the cave is presented in Plato’s work Republic, Book VII (Plato 1997, pp. 971–1223). The relation between knowledge and truth is a key issue discussed throughout the book. The arguments of realists (Chapter 3), idealists (Chapter 4), and sceptics (Chapter 5) all related to this question. It might be described as the concern with the order of things. It should be noted that the term ‘The order of things’ forms the English title of the philosophy and sociology of science book by Michel Foucault (Foucault 1994). Aristotle’s ten categories were: 1. Substance, 2. Quantity, 3. Quality, 4. Relation, 5. Place, 6. Time, 7. Position, 8. State, 9. Action, and 10. Affection. In Chapter  4.1.3, I compare Aristotle’s categories with the categories of Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that the Aristotelian categories were not sufficiently systematic (Seung 1989). See Chapter 3.1.1. See Chapter 4.1.2. First published in 1926. Translated as What Is Called Thinking (Heidegger 2004) Eikeland (2008) discusses the following knowledge forms: Theôrêsis as epistêmê (deduction, demonstration, didactics), Páthos, Khrêsis, Tékhnê (calculation), Poíêsis, Praxis, Phrónêsis (a special form of deliberation), Praxis (critical dialectics/dialogue as reflection, as well as the way from novice to expert, from tacit to articulate knowing), and Theôría as epistêmê (dialogue, deduction, deliberation). These are things that are too subjective or do not have substance. An example (not taken from Aristotle) of a subjective thing might be that if one said: ‘I feel good.’ An example of a general thing might be if one said that something is tall. Neither of these claims can be said to be true or false. See Chapter 5.2.3 on the distinction between explaining and understanding. See Eikeland (2008). Among the critics are Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and pragmatists, as I show in Chapter 5.3.1. See Peirce (1998). See Chapter 4.2.1. See the discussion about the problem of demarcation in Chapters 3.2.2 and 3.3.2. For a discussion, see Vasterling (2007). I return to this discussion in Chapter 4. I discuss the concept of becoming in the works of Hegel and Heidegger in Chapter 5.2.1. See Chapter 3.2.2. For a discussion, see Gettier (1963). For example, it was the theme of one of Frank Ramsay’s well-known papers, ‘Facts and propositions’ published in 1927 (Ramsay 1990a), and it is a point of reference and criticism in the contemporary philosophical debate, ref. Popper (1979), see Chapter 3.3.2. and Bloor (1991). As I, the author of this book, am a Norwegian and thus descended from the early Vikings and thus from heathens, it is slightly embarrassing to think that ‘we’ delayed the development of science. Roger Bacon was educated at Oxford but in 1237 was hired by the newly established University of Paris. In his late work, the Opus Majus, probably published (sent to the Pope) in 1268 (Bacon 1928), Bacon both reconstructed the discussion between Plato and Aristotle and argued why we should resume the discussion that started in antiquity, but he also tried to reconcile that with theology (Clegg 2003).

50  Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science 44 This type of destiny was to become the rule rather than the exception for scientists over the next almost 300 years. Still, it later turned out that science was a ‘Trojan horse’ in the Catholic and religious world. During the Renaissance, the renewed interest in studying nature was to have extraordinary implications. 45 The later breakup of the Byzantine Empire, which culminated in the Muslim’s conquer of Constantinople in 1453, led to a wider understanding of ancient Greek philosophy in Western Europe (Giannakopoulos 1962). This in turn created more diversity and opposing views within the discourse of the Catholic Church. 46 Fredrich August von Hayek discussed different kinds of rationalism and he argued (Hayek 1967, p. 89): The attitudes of the different kinds of rationalism to abstraction requires somewhat fuller discussion because it [abstraction] is the source of frequent confusion. Perhaps the difference is best explained by saying that those who recognize the limits of the powers of reason want to use abstraction to extend it by achieving at least some degree of order in human affairs, where they know it is impossible to master the full detail, while the constructivist rationalist values abstraction only as an instrument in determining particulars. 47 See Chapter 4.1.2. 48 The rationalistic conception of natural law based on Aquinas, and further developed by thinkers such as Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694), was a deduction of a system of law from some fundamental, irrefutable principles. 49 Based on his Lowell lectures at Harvard in 1925. 50 I elaborate on this in Chapter 5.2.3. 51 This is discussed further in Chapter 4.1.3. 52 Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) is regarded as the first person to claim and give a logical description of how the Earth orbits around the Sun, not vice versa. His book titled On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres was published in 1543 just before his death in the same year (Copernicus  & Wallis 1939). Often, the notion of the ‘Copernican Revolution’ is regarded as parallel to the notion of the Scientific Revolution. Other astronomers followed, such as Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) contributed to improve the description of the universe. At the same time, it was a period when the Italian physicist Galileo was put under house arrest. In 1633, the Catholic Church imprisoned him for his book titled Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632, in which he argued for the heliocentric system (Galilei 2008, pp. 190–271). During his house arrest, Galileo wrote Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (Original title: Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze, published in 1638), a book that summarises his scientific achievements in physics (Galilei 2008, pp. 295–367). In the same period, René Descartes made his main philosophical contribution. By 1650, F. Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes were dead, a new map of Europe that resembles the one we have today had been drawn, and the Earth’s place in the universe as we today know it was more or less accepted. 53 See Chapter 4.1.1. 54 See Chapter 3.2.1. 55 See Chapter 4.2.2. 56 Notably, the argument was made in the doctoral thesis of the German sociologist and co-founder of the Frankfurt school of critical theory Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), which was later published as Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies (Adorno 2013). Later, the American pragmatist Richard Rorty (1979) made the same argument. Adorno rejected epistemology because he did not want to think of knowledge as dependent on the individual mind.

Antiquity and the origin of the divides in philosophy of science  51 57 As I discuss in Chapter 3.2. 58 Against Carnap’s and logical empiricists’ strong resistance to metaphysics, Max Horkheimer (2002), as part of the critical theory tradition, argued that the reason why positivist science goes wrong is that it has ignored the concept of meaning, which is inherently metaphysical. 59 This statement is further argued in Chapter  5.3.1 with reference to Franz Brentano (1838–1917). 60 See Chapter 3.1. 61 The argument here is reminiscent of the film The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, written and directed by Christopher Monger and released in 1995. The plot concerns a Welsh village that claims that the height of its neighbouring mountain is slightly less than 1,000 feet and is thus a hill and not a mountain, and how the villagers manage, through enlarging the hill with mud and stones, to convince two English cartographers that it is indeed a mountain. Thus, concepts such as hill and mountain are words to which we give content, not reality itself. 62 In Chapter 5.1.3, I give a more detailed description of this aspect of Kant’s position. 63 A similar approach can be found in Popper (1979, p. 92). 64 See Chapter 4.1.2. 65 See Chapter 4.3.2. 66 See Chapter 3.1.2. 67 See Chapter 4.1.2.

Chapter 3

The realist track towards logical empiricism The problem of conceptualising reality

3.0  The line of argument in this chapter This chapter discusses issues that are traditionally treated as philosophy of science1 and sometimes called philosophy of natural science.2 I start with the empiricists. Francis Bacon’s book Novum Organum is seen as a reference for modern inductive science. In the book, he argued that science should be a systematic activity of empirically testing hypotheses. Bacon inspired British empiricism. The main treatise on British empiricism is in the work of John Locke, who argued that all our knowledge comes from sensation or experience. In the first part of this chapter, I follow the debate initiated by Locke, particularly the arguments of David Hume. Thereafter, the line of thinking leads to the 19th-century thinkers Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill. Common to their thinking was positivism. For Comte, positivism was about the removal of all metaphysical speculation from science, and a society based only on science and scientific facts. Mill took positivism forward and developed the hypothetical deductive methodology. In the second part of this chapter, I  discuss logical empiricism. The Vienna Circle played a major role in initiating discussions about science in the period between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s. Three developments inspired the discussions of the group of philosophers in the Vienna Circle: one came from a new perspective on mathematics and language theory, called analytical philosophy, represented by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; a second came from physics, through the theory of Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein and not least theory of relativity, and the third came from the empiricist/positivist tradition. In this chapter, I attempt to explain how the three developments formed the basis of a new perspective on science and scientific knowledge, which initially was called neo-positivism and later called logical empiricism. This discussion links up to the third part of the chapter, on post positivism, where I show how logical empiricism merged with pragmatism. The merging of logical empiricism and pragmatism occurred in a number of stages. First, I discuss the transformation of Wittgenstein’s thinking towards the sociology of language and Willard Van Orman Quine’s criticism of the analytical approach to science. Second, I  discuss Karl Popper’s critical rationalism, and finally I discuss Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigms and emphasis on scientific DOI: 10.4324/9781003326878-3

The realist track towards logical empiricism  53

practice. Throughout this chapter, I  follow what I  call the realist track, even though many of the mentioned scholars did not consider themselves realists. Still, the main philosophical problem that the discussion circles around concerns the relation between concepts and reality: How can we know that the way we conceptualise reality really corresponds to reality?

3.1 Empiricism 3.1.1 Phenomenalism I begin with Francis Bacon, who was a scholar and statesman, and heavily engaged in political events in England. I have already presented his main argument.3 Bacon was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, and although he had a long career as a lawyer and politician, he had a lifelong ambition to renew approaches to natural philosophy as a science. In a letter to Lord Burghley, probably written in 1592, he wrote: Lastly, I confess that I have as a vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province; and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confusions, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and imposturous that committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries; the best state of the province. (Bacon 2008, p. 20) The quotation reveals not only Bacon’s ambition but also his assessment of the state of scientific knowledge at the time. The mention of ‘blind experiments’ probably refers to the alchemists of his day, while ‘frivolous disputation’ was probably directed against speculative philosophy. Bacon criticised both Plato for his unfounded theory of ideas and Aristotle for unfounded categorising. About Aristotle, he wrote: He corrupted natural philosophy by logic – thus he formed the world of categories. (Bacon 2017, p. 16) Bacon called for a way of doing science that should be based purely on observation and testing hypotheses – what today we call induction.4 He argued that the right way of producing scientific knowledge was through systematic empirical studies that would gradually build knowledge about a phenomenon as more and more verification was obtained, and in that way, science could produce truth5: There are and can exist but two ways of investigating and discovering truth. The one hurries rapidly from the senses and particulars to the most general

54  The realist track towards logical empiricism

axioms, and from them, as principles and their supposed indisputable truth, derives and discovers the intermediate axioms. This is the way now in use. The other constructs its axioms from the senses and particulars, by ascending continually and gradually, till it arrives at the most general axioms, which is the true but unattempted way. (Bacon 2017, p. 6) He also observed that scientific knowledge had become extremely powerful: Knowledge and human power are synonymous, since the ignorance of cause frustrates the effect; for nature is only subdued by submission, and that which in contemplative philosophy correspond with the cause in practice science become the rule. Man, while operating can only apply or withdraw natural bodies; nature internally preforms the rest. (Bacon 2017, p. 5) Bacon’s treatise can be seen as a sociological observation of his time. In New Atlantis, a novel that he never finished but was published posthumously in 1627 as a kind of futuristic fable about a travel to a foreign, partly isolated, mythical country called Bensalem with a university called Salomon’s House, Bacon wrote: That every twelve years there should be set forth out of his kingdom two ships, appointed to several voyages; That in either of these ships there should be a mission of three of the Fellows or Brethren of Salomon’s House; whose errand was only to give us knowledge of the affairs and state of those countries to which they were designed, and especially of the sciences, arts and manufactures, and invention of all the world; and withal to bring unto us books, instruments, and patterns of every kind. (Bacon 2008, p. 471) It could be said that Bacon envisioned the knowledge society.6 The reason why the Middle Ages had ‘got things’ wrong (e.g. about the universe) was collective mental biases that Bacon called idols7: idols of the tribe implies that human sensation is not a correct measure of things; idols of the cave refers to what today we call cultural or cognitive biases8; idols of the market place can be translated into biases created by economic and material interests; and idols of the theatre are biases originating in ideology, values, and conviction. At the same time, Francis Bacon criticised rationalism by arguing that we cannot gain knowledge from thinking alone.9 What, then, constitutes our knowledge about the world?10 In the same way as Francis Bacon’s work is seen as a reference for a new perspective on science,11 the work by René Descartes, whom I discuss in the next chapter,12 is often seen as a reference for a new perspective on philosophy. Both Bacon and Descartes put human cognition at the centre of our view of the world. However, Descartes made the more radical claim that the world that we see is not

The realist track towards logical empiricism  55

the world itself, but how our mind reconstructs the world. What empiricists had in common was their understanding that all substantial knowledge comes from sensation. They were also for the most part phenomenalists.13 John Locke can be seen as a main contributor to empiricism. He wrote the following in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1689: Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? (Locke 1977, p. 89) The mind becomes furnished by sense impressions, and such impressions are the basis of our thinking. Furthermore, knowledge development is a social learning process. Locke saw the need for a new philosophy as clearing the ground for the new science: [I]t is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge; which certainly had been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavours of ingenious and industrious men had not been much compared with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into science, and there made an art of, to the degree that philosophy, which is nothing but the true knowledge of things, was thought unfit or incapable to be brought into well-bred company and polite conversation. (Locke 1977, pp. 58–59) A starting point for such a philosophy should be to ask questions such as: How can we know for certain what the world looks like? If our perception comes for sensation and phenomenalism, how do we know reality? According to the British philosopher Howard Robinson (b. 1945), there are at least eight different realist options in our perception of the world (Robinson 2009, p. xiv). The options are listed in Table 3.1, together with my examples. John Locke took the position that today is called representative realism, meaning that the things that we perceive are not the real world, but the representation of the real world in our mind. One could say that the sense impressions of the real world are processed and reconstructed as pictures in the mind. This leads to tension, as phenomenalism claims that everything about the real world exists in terms of such pictures, impressions, or ideas.14 How do we know that these ideas are true representations of the real world? In contrast to Descartes’ dualism, Locke’s thinking is called monism. One could say that monism implies that there was a desire to get rid of the divide between thinking and experiencing. This would have implications for the subject/object distinction: dualism can establish a distinction between subject and object, as our mind is not supposed to be an object, while in principle monism cannot establish such a distinction because everything is nature and because subjective experience

56  The realist track towards logical empiricism Table 3.1  Kinds of realism

1a 1b 2a

Kind of realism (Robinson 2009)

Example

Naïve or direct realism Primary quality direct realism Simple representative realism

If I see a cat, the cat that I see is the real cat. If I see a cat, I see the ‘idea’ of a cat, but this idea is close to the real cat. We have ideas in our mind, but these ideas (both their primary and secondary qualities) are direct copies of the real world. So, the cat and the attributes I give to that cat are both part of the real world. I have ideas in my mind, and when I see a cat, I recognise (the primary qualities of ) the real cat. However, my mind can add secondary qualities to the cat. My ideas and the real world only resemble each other in terms of the form of the structural features. Thus, I see a cat and can know that it is not a dog. My mental representation adds something more than that to the object. We can know more or less nothing about the mind-independent world. The cat that I see is only the mental representation of the cat, not the cat in itself. Mind and nature are one, and therefore the only thing that exists is our experience of the world. The cat exists in terms of my awareness of the cat. However, my thoughts about the cat are real. The only thing we can know about the world is our experience of the world, and the patterns that we discover. Experience tells us that there is a certain thing out there with certain properties, and we have decided (collectively) to call things like that ‘a cat’.

2b

Scientific or Lockean representative realism

3

Structured representative realism

4

Kantian or ‘barely representative’ realism

5

Berkelian idealism

6

Sceptical or Humean phenomenalism

happens within nature, not outside it. It could be claimed that according to Locke, the world was a self-referential system: the biology I  am observing is also the biology that made me. What is the relation between the nominalism of the scholastics and the phenomenalism of the empiricists? One could argue that there are two differences: one is that phenomenalists deny a distinction between sensing and thinking in contrast to scholastics nominalism that was based on dualism; the second difference is that nominalism, even though it rejected realism in the sense that we can know reality as it is, is still concerned with a material world. Phenomenalism argues that the

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only thing we can know is the phenomenon, meaning the world as it is represented in our mind. Locke used understanding as the overall concept of our knowledge of the world, and he claimed that the primary source of understanding and therefore of knowledge is sensation: the mind is a blank sheet until it is confronted with sense data. What, then, is the process that leads from sensing to knowledge? The systematic scheme presented by Locke is summarised in Table 3.2. Table 3.2  Locke’s line of argument Primary process

Elaboration

Further extension

Sensing, sense data

The mind receives several kinds of sense data.

Reflection

The mind has a capacity to reflect on its own operations. Simple ideas are acknowledgements of simple form, such as shape, hardness, hot/ cold, and light/dark.

Sense data are bundled into forms (that correspond to objects). Reflection leads to ideas.

Ideas = sensing + reflection

Thought = sensation + ideas Communication =  thought + words

Knowledge

Propositions

Thoughts on simple things can be verified by their correspondence to facts. Words put names to things. Language organises words. Knowledge becomes external only through communication. Since no two persons sense the same thing, no two persons have the same knowledge. Internal knowledge (thoughts/ideas)

Propositions are claims about the world. Propositions can be about simple things or more complex things.

Ideas further elaborate abstract ideas such as relations, trust, and totality. Even further elaborations are ideas about abstracts and universals. Thoughts about more elaborate things are harder to verify. Sharing of knowledge happens through communication, and knowledge learned through communication can lead to new ideas. Words can be used to elaborate further abstract ideas. Social knowledge is the result of communication between people who share experience and language. Complex propositions are almost impossible to verify.

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There are different kinds of sensing. By reflection, Locke meant the ‘the mind’s reflection on its own operation’ (Locke 1977, p. 90). Thus, reflection and sensing are able to give us ideas. Ideas are the representations in our mind of the form of external objects. However, Locke’s theory of ideas is ambiguous and has been much debated (Nathanson 1973; Ayers 1975). Since he rejected Descartes’ claim that ideas are to some extent given to us,15 he had to ground ideas in something else. Are ideas an internal ordering device in the mind or are they something we retrieve from our sensing of the world that the world comes to us as ideas?16 Either way, Locke could establish a criterion for the validity of our thinking that its ideas correspond to reality, at the same time as he rejected universals: His theory of ideas provided him with grounds for holding that the basic units of knowledge are the beliefs we have about our own sense perceptions, that some metaphysical questions cannot be profitably discussed, that universals do not exist in nature, and that some language is without significance. (Nathanson 1973, p. 42) Furthermore, it seems that Locke divided our source of knowledge into our internal knowing and knowledge as shared by people in general. Internal knowing is knowledge that is unique to the individual because it is only based on his or her reflection and sensing. Thus, Locke wrote: For children, idiots, savages, and illiterate people, being of all other the least corrupted by custom, or borrowed opinions; learning and education having not cast their native thoughts into new moulds, nor by superinducing foreign and studied doctrines, confounded those fair characters nature had written there; one might reasonably imagine that in their mind these innate notions should lie open fairly to everyone’s view, as it is certain the thoughts of children do. (Locke 1977, p. 77)17 Thus, Locke distinguished between knowledge before and after communication, but was critical towards the socialisation of our thoughts; while our innate thoughts are pure but unsophisticated, our learned and copied thoughts are contaminated.18 By contrast, Locke’s writing gives us a perspective on general shared knowledge and how it develops. This points towards the sociology of knowledge and can be read as an early exponent of discursive thinking. What is apparent from Locke’s reasoning is that the source of knowledge is in the subjective sensation, and that the more elaborated our social knowledge becomes, the less solid and the more speculative it becomes. Why did Locke introduce the concept of ideas? Was this left over from Descartes’ thinking?19 Among those who criticised Locke’s concept of ideas was

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the Irish priest George Berkeley (1685–1753). In his book Principles of Human Knowledge published in 1710, Berkeley addressed the following dilemma: if our sense impressions, which by nature are multiple, complex, and chaotic, only acquire meaning because we organise them in our mind, how can we know that these organising principles are reconstructing the sense impressions so that they correspond to the ‘real thing’ ‘out there’. Since all our knowledge comes from sense impressions, there are no correcting devices outside sense impressions that we can use as a way of evaluating these impressions (Berkeley 2009).20 One could say that the problem is that the sensing device and the thing that is checking the sensing device are one and the same thing.21 As Anthony Clifford Grayling (2001) explains through an example, a person wakes up in the morning and collects the morning newspaper, and as they sit reading it while enjoying a cup of coffee, they discover that someone they know is now dead. They then ask themself: Can this really be so? Because they want to have the information confirmed, they rush out to the nearby news stand and buy five new copies of the same paper to see whether they confirm that the person is dead (Grayling 2001). Thus, Locke’s dilemma is that of how self-reference can give knowledge beyond itself.22 Berkeley’s argument is that we cannot solve the dilemma. The only way out of it is to acknowledge that the way we see the world is defined by our ideas. Thus, the things we can know are those things that our ideas define. If it is the case that the world as we know it simply is the result of the sense impressions that come into our mind, how can we be sure that the world exists at all? Does this question imply that reality might not exist at all? On this issue, Berkeley argued that there is a reality, but we can only know about it through our senses, and in the form defined by our ideas. Hence, it is a mistake to think there is a reality beyond our ideas. What about our accurate description of the world? Is that not real? If I say that one thing is bigger than another, is that not true?23 On the one hand, Berkeley accepted the existence of an external world, but on the other hand, he rejected the idea that the world is independent of our sensing of the world. How could this be possible? The answer is that the world exists but is dependent on our perception of it: The objects of our senses exist only when they are perceived: the trees therefore are in the garden, or the chairs in the parlour, no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them. (Berkeley 2009, p. 42) There is no mind-independent reality. There is a reality, but it is in the form of ideas. For this reason, the substance of reality corresponds to the ideas we have in our mind. That is why we can perceive and understand the world. The external world is a mind-dependent world.

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3.1.2  All science is science of man Locke’s argument based on monism – the claim that there is only one source of knowledge – was dependent on showing that we not only respond to nature mechanically, but we also have individual reflection. Furthermore, reflection on sensation and forming of ideas will give us more or less accurate descriptions of the world, but it will also allow us to understand things beyond our immediate sense experiences. However, Locke encountered a dilemma when he made the distinction between knowledge and reality. George Berkeley tried to solve this dilemma by arguing that the world is mind-dependent. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) thought that he could solve Locke’s dilemma without adopting Berkeley’s argument. Berkeley had pointed out some very important aspects of empiricist philosophy that Hume further developed, and that led to Kant’s comment that Hume had bought him out of his intellectual slumber: I freely admit: it was David Hume’s remark that first, many years ago, interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my enquiries in the field of speculative philosophy. (Kant 2004, p. 67; original emphasis) Hume simply argued that experience cannot give us ideas that go beyond experience. In his work A Treatise of Human Nature, first published in 1739,24 he made the following claim: Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on science of Man, since they lie under the cognizance of men. (Hume 1985, p. 42) Hume made a distinction between concrete knowledge and abstract ideas, and thereby introduced distinctions between a posteriori knowledge forms and abstract a priori knowledge forms, and between synthetic and analytical sources of knowledge.25 He rejected Locke’s argument that the world comes to us as ideas. In Hume’s terminology, ideas are the forms or logic we use to process sense impressions. It became his ambition to show that we can form correct knowledge about the world, even if all knowledge is based on impressions. He thought that Isaac Newton had been able to show this in his discoveries. Hume’s project was to make a science of man (the foundation for all knowledge)26 in a similar way to Newton had done with physics (Stanistreet 2002). If one thinks that all our knowledge comes from sense impression, and prior to that the mind is like a blank sheet, two questions arise: (1) How can one sort out impressions so that they give reasonable representations of the objects one sees,

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and (2) How can one know about things one does not see (or sense)?27 Hume was sceptical about inductive reasoning.28 His argument was later illustrated by John Stuart Mill, with reference to the black swan: even if all swans we observe are white, we cannot rule out the possibility of a black swan.29 The argument is that while deductive logic can be formulated in rules, similar to in mathematics, inductive logic cannot be formalised in a similar logical way because it is contextdependent.30 Hume argued that we cannot know things for certain beyond our immediate observation. When we form knowledge, we do it as much because of customs and habits, as on solid individual reifications based on sense impressions. For example, he wrote: [T]hat the supposition that the future resembles the past, is not founded on arguments of any kind, but is derived entirely from habit. (Hume 1985, p. 184, original emphasis) Hume also argued that norms and habits are not necessarily deliberately chosen but have developed thorough evolution.31 There are two ways in which we can form knowledge about the world, which often are referred to jointly as Hume’s fork.32 Knowledge can be formed either through ideas (abstract categories) or through observable fact (impressions), even if both originate in sensation. Hume stated: All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS. (Hume 1985, p. 49; original emphasis) Hume rejected Descartes’ argument that, by doubting, one can prove that one thinks, and thereby deduce truth about the world from thinking. As all our thinking belongs to the physical world, it starts with sense impressions. However, there has to be some kind of way by which we process sense information. Hume called this processing mechanism ideas. The equivalent term today might be thought. Our ideas apply some sort of logic to the sense impressions. Furthermore, our ideas simply develop because we have observed regularities or adopt habits about such things.33 Thus, there is no mystery about the issue of where our thinking comes from: it comes from the same source as sense impressions. Even logic is not a priori knowledge; it is derived from impressions. Furthermore, Hume argued that cause and effect are the only assumptions about which we need for our logical reasoning. More provokingly, he argued: [A]ll our reasonings concerning cause and effect are derived from nothing but custom. (Hume 1985, p. 234)

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He did not call this logic a priori logic, but he referred to it as fundamental assumptions. It was not until later that Kant, and later still Russell, argued that it is a priori logic. Hume (1985) argued that we use eight categories of logic to sort out things (our own formulations), all of which emerge from natural reasoning: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Cause and effect must be continuous in time. The cause must be prior to effect. There must be a constant union between cause and effect. The same cause always produces the same effect, but the same effect can come from many sources. If several different objects produce the same effect, it must imply that they share some quality that is common to them. If there is regularity in effects, it must come from there being different causes. If many elements combine to produce a certain affect, then the removal of an element will impact that effect. If a thing at a given time is similar to another without being affected by the same cause, it must mean that cause is not complete.

The eight principles are like Newton’s ‘laws of human behaviour’. They are the categories of logic that we need to make in order to understand the world. Our ability to understand the division between cause and effect, which is learned, helps us make sense of the world. Hume wrote: Here is all the LOGIC I think proper to employ in my reasoning; and perhaps even this was not necessary but might have been supplied by the natural principles of our understanding. (Hume 1985, p. 225; original emphasis) Our reasoning about cause and effect that allows us to treat our sense impressions as containing an element of logic is merely derived from custom. Hume pointed out that this thinking was against scholars who thought of logic as some sort of superior knowing that links us to the divine. All universal generalisations are human beings’ attempts to make sense of nature (not nature itself). They are relevant as long as they seem to give good descriptions of what we experience. However they can never be anything beyond our attempt to make sense of the world. Hence, all science is science of man, which means that science is a human product.34 Despite this, Whitehead (1967, p.  51) argues that the Hume’s antirationalism and extreme scepticism have never been taken seriously by scientists. He regards Hume’s scepticism as an assault on rationality35: Some variant of Hume’s philosophy has generally prevailed among men of science. But scientific faith has risen to the occasion, and has tacitly removed the philosophical mountain. (Whitehead 1967, p. 4)

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Still, I  will now examine the logic of Hume’s scepticism argument in slightly more depth. According to the English philosopher John Watkins (1924–1999), the starting point for Hume’s argument can be formulated in three propositions, to which all empiricists (even John Locke) could subscribe:    I. There are no synthetic a priori truths about the external world.  II. Any genuine knowledge we have of the external world must ultimately be derived from perceptual experience. III. Only deductive derivations are valid. (Watkins 1984, p. 3) Watkins referred to these propositions, respectively, as the anti-apriorist thesis, the experientialist thesis, and the deductivist thesis. He claimed, as did Berkeley, that this creates a dilemma. Watkins explained the problem in a more precise way, as follows: They [his three points, I, II, and III] entail that for any factual statement h to constitute knowledge, there must exist true premises e that report perceptual experiences and from which h is logically derived. But if h speaks about the external world and e speaks only of perceptual experiences, h goes beyond e and therefore cannot logically derive from e. (Watkins 1984, p. 3) As already mentioned, Hume’s own response to the dilemma was that there is no epistemological answer to it, and that it is only a problem in theory and philosophy, since in practical life, we are able to deal with it. Watkins calls this strategy naturalistic.36 However, several philosophers have directly and indirectly attempted to deal with this scepticism and have found anti-scepticism strategies (Watkins 1984). The aprioristic strategy will be discussed later in this book.37 Kant’s reply to Hume38 was to suggest synthetic a priori knowledge, which compensates for the fact that synthetic a posteriori knowledge is unreliable (subjective). This means that Watkin’s proposition I is rejected. There is synthetic a priori knowledge, and this knowledge helps us to sort out how to process sense impressions (proposition II), so that we can make logically correct deductions about the world (proposition III). According to Watkins (1984, p. 4), another strategy is to apply a transcendental argument that modifies proposition II. This argument is that certain truths are not discovered by the individual but exist as common knowledge and are transmitted, for example, in the form of scientific knowledge. Such common knowledge transcends the individual perception. I show later39 that this position was adopted by supporters of critical theory, including Jurgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. Critical rationalists deny Watkins’ proposition II. It is not the case that all our knowledge comes from sense impressions. We are able to think independently about the world. Our mind is not determined by nature; at least, the complexity of

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the mind opens for subjective thinking. The fact that we can conjecture40 denies proposition II and can be used to argue that scientific knowledge about the external world is not derived from experience at all. If proposition II can be denied, then the scepticism argument fails. However, according to Watkins (1984), one can also accept the three propositions and still avoid scepticism. One strategy is the probabilistic strategy,41 for which the argument is as follows: Probabilistic strategy: retain proposition (III) but add that probability logic, or logic of partial entailment, is a legitimate extension or generalisation of classical logic, and in the case of a hypothesis h that is not entailed by evidence e we may be able to establish, with the help of probabilistic logic, that h is more or less strongly confirmed by e. (Watkins 1984, p. 4) So, even if we do not know things for certain, we have methods that can compensate for our subjective incompleteness. Pragmatists might buy into this argument. Furthermore, phenomenalists might argue that certain properties of our perception in combination with certain properties of the external world close the gap between Watkins’ propositions I and II. This argument was made by Rudolf Carnap and others among the logical empiricists.42 Vindicationists insist that inductive methods will work. To this, it should be added that idealist philosophers did not regard empirical verification as the way to prove the external world. They simply avoided it by rejecting or easing one or more of the three propositions (I, II, and III) formulated by Watkins (1984). Watkins tried to argue how we can accept propositions I, II, and III and still avoid the dilemma described earlier.43 Hume’s advice was to disregard philosophical speculation and instead focus on practical life. 3.1.3 Positivism The French sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857)44 started his book Cours de philosophie positive with a broad perspective on the implications of scientific development: In order to explain properly the true nature and particular character of the positive philosophy, it is indispensable that we should first take a brief survey of the progressive growth of the human mind viewed as a whole; for no idea can be properly understood apart from its history. (Comte 1988, p. 1) As a concept, positivism has many meanings. It has appeared as a major contribution to philosophy of science through the work of Comte, who probably adopted the concept from his mentor, Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825).45 Positivism is

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inherently linked to social development and should not be understood as just a scientific perspective. Comte wrote in the spirit of the French Revolution, with a strong belief in social reform. He denounced the terror of the French Revolution and was searching for a peaceful alternative. He thought that scientists and technocrats could engineer social structures and solutions in the best interests of everyone. He also denounced hedonism and prized altruism that everybody should act for the good of society.46 He emphasised the concepts of order and progress as part of a social reform programme.47 Comte envisioned three stages in epistemological and social development. In the theological stage, God is personalised, and particles and natural things are believed to have spirit. In the metaphysical stage, this reference to God becomes more abstract. Things are still justified with reference to God, such as the idea of sin, but God does not play the same role as direct manifestation as it does in the theological stage. In the third and final stages, which Comte envisioned as the positive stage, society’s reference to knowledge is based on scientific method and explanation, involving observation, experiment, and comparison. Comte thought that the three stages could coexist. For example, a religious society could easily coincide with excellent knowledge of mathematics. Therefore, real modernism and positivism will not be achieved until all branches of science and knowledge in general have become positive. Comte also believed that science itself involved areas of more and less development. Thus, all sciences should have the positive stage as their ideal. Furthermore, it followed from Comte’s approach that science should play a role in society in terms of practical improvements. He subsequently developed a distinction between pure science and applied science. Since Comte thought that mathematics was the science that had made the greatest advances in terms of abstract knowledge, he argued that all the other branches of science – astronomy, chemistry, physics, biology, and sociology – should strive for the same level of abstraction. Furthermore, not only should science be useful for society, but it should also take over the role previously occupied by religion: In the final, the positive state, the mind has given over the vain search after Absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomenon, and applies itself to the study of their laws – that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance. Reasoning and observation, duly combined are the means of this knowledge. (Comte 2009, p. 26) For Comte, the positivist method implied doing empirical observations, and from them, developing general abstract theories. The ambition for science was to describe things in mathematical form. Comte believed that the more

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mathematically precisely a phenomenon could be described and the simpler the theory is, the closer it is to truth. According to Comte, astronomy had almost reached the positive stage, while social science was lagging: [W]e have repudiated the practice of reducing science to an accumulation of desultory facts, asserting that science, as distinguished from learning, is essentially composed, not of facts, but of laws, so that no separate facts can be incorporated with science till it has been connected with some other, at least by aid of some justifiable hypothesis. . . . [A]nd science progress essentially consists in gradually diminishing the number of distinct and independent laws, while expanding their mutual connection. (Comte 2009, p. 799) The ambition of Comte, and later of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), was for all science to develop in basically the same way. As researchers in the natural sciences try to find the common patterns of changes and motion, this should also be done in the social sciences. For example, when studying how family structure, religion, industrialisation, and urbanisation impact our lives, we can find parallels in natural laws, such as the Boyle – Mariotte law,48 since there are constant patterns of social change.49 In De La Division Du Travail Social, which was published in 1893, Durkheim wrote about solidarity: But in science we can know the causes only through the effects that they produce. In order to determine the nature of these causes more precisely science selects only those results that are the most objective and that best lend themselves to qualification. Science studies heat through the variations in volume that changes in temperature cause the bodies, electricity through its physical and chemical effects, and force through movement. Why should social solidarity prove an exception? . . . Thus, the study of solidarity lies within the domain of sociology. It is a social fact that can only be thoroughly known through its social effects. (Durkheim 1997, pp. 26–27) In other words, positivists were optimistic about the development of society based on science. As the purpose of science is to serve society, it has an ethical dimension. Comte had coined and emphasised the term altruism in order to explain how he believed that development should be in the best interests of society, not for selfish individuals. However, this would require the unity of science, which could be threatened, as Durkheim observed: Yet the science, carved up into a host of detailed studies that have no link with one another, no longer forms a solid whole. What perhaps best demonstrates this absence of harmony and unity in the theory, so widespread, that each special science has an absolute value, and that the scientist must devote himself

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to his special research without caring about whether it serves any purpose or leads anywhere. (Durkheim 1997, p. 294) August Comte would hardly have been remembered by philosophers of science if it had not been for John Stuart Mill (Meany 2012). Mill became fascinated by Comte’s thinking early on and saw his concept of altruism as a possible supplement to Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism.50 Mill defended and supported Comte until his death. However, Mill had reservations about Comte’s intellectual development towards a new humanistic religion, and he did not buy into Comte’s comprehensive system of thought. Mill might have felt that he needed to make his position clear, and therefore wrote his book Auguste Comte and Positivism, which was published in 1865, almost 10 years after Comte’s death.51 Mill starts by arguing that Comte was the first to make a complete systematisation of science, and that both the extent and the quality of his analysis were impressive: The fundamental doctrine of a true philosophy, according to M. Comte, and the character by which he defines Positive Philosophy, is the following: – We have no knowledge of anything but Phenomena; and our knowledge of phenomena is relative, not absolute. We know the essence, not the real mode of production, of any fact, but only its relation to other facts in the way of succession or of similitude. These relations are constant; that is, always the same under the same circumstances. The constant resemblance which links phenomena together, and the constant sequence which unites them as antecedent and consequent, are termed laws. The laws of phenomena are all we know respecting them. Their essential nature, and their ultimate causes, either efficient of final, are unknown and inscrutable to us. (Mill 1865 p. 5) It was a smart move by both Comte and Mill to avoid a discussion about the essence of things, as they also avoided all discussion related to Kant, and the question of whether we can know things in themselves. Knowing the laws of nature does not presuppose that we know things in themselves. The only thing we need to know is the relations between things. Mill, together with Durkheim, saved positivism from being a general philosophy, a theory of society, and a religion; instead, it became a philosophy of science. Verification is the goal of scientific method. Mill addressed his method as a criticism of an exaggerated belief in induction, directed against William Whewell and against an exaggerated belief in deduction, directed against Comte. Still, both induction and deduction play a central role in verification. In his book with the main title A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, published in 1843, he wrote: Induction, then, is that operation of mind, by which we infer that what we know to be true in a particular case or cases, will be true in all cases which

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resemble the former in certain assignable respects. In other words, Induction is the process by which we conclude that what is true of certain individuals of a class is true of the whole class, or that what is true at certain times will be true in similar circumstances at all times. (Mill 2017, p. 176) About deduction, he wrote: But in order to discover the cause of any phenomenon by Deductive Method, the process must consist of three parts: induction, ratiocination, and verification. Induction (the place of which, however, may be supplied by a prior deduction) to ascertain the laws of the causes; ratiocination, to compute these laws, how the cause will operate in the particular combination known to exist in the case in hand; verification, by comparing this calculated effect with actual phenomenon. (Mill 2017, p. 11) Mill developed a systematic philosophy and methodology of science. He had a particular admiration for Berkeley. His core thesis was that science is man’s best attempt to understand the world. We can never know what the world really is, only how we see it.52 Our knowledge about the world is never absolutely true in a metaphysical sense. Science is our most systematic way of collecting knowledge about the world. In arguing this, Mill wanted, in contrast to Comte, to limit the scope of science. He thought that Comte had made some excellent insights into the status of the different sciences. Both Mill and Comte agreed on the anti-metaphysical foundation of scientific knowledge, and that science had played an important role in the development of society, but Mill did not subscribe to science as a comprehensive system of knowledge and values that should replace more or less all other institutions in society: The philosophy of a Science thus comes to mean the science itself, considered not as to its results, the truths which it ascertains, but as to the processes by which the mind attains them, the marks by which it recognizes them, and the co-ordinating and methodizing of them with a view to the greatest clearness of conception and the fullest readiest availability for use: in one word, the logic of science. . . . A philosophy of science consists of two principle parts: the methods of investigation, and the requisites for proof. The one points out the roads by which the human intellect arrives at conclusions, the other the mode of testing their evidence. (Mill 1865, p. 30) One could argue that Mill developed a philosophy of science that limits itself to the logic and methodology of scientific inquiry. This was to become the role model for later positivistic approaches to science. Furthermore, Mill reformulated

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the inductive and hypothetical deductive method. He tried to reconcile the optimism of Bacon with the scepticism of Hume. Thus, Mill was the philosopher who popularised the ‘black swan’ argument.53 The fact that scientific knowledge has the potential to improve and adjust previously wrong assumptions is at the core of scientific development.54 It requires both a systematic process and methodology that apply not only logic but also common sense. The individual choices and the perception of the scientist are always essential to science. Science is a process of gradually adjusting hypotheses and assumptions, as more evidence points to shortcomings in our previous assumptions. A consequence of this is that science works at its best when the processes, forces, and relations that we observe are relatively constant. This implies that there are limits to what science can say something about, and this makes human science more ambiguous and complex than natural science. Even if we cannot know the absolute truth, science should be able to verify the best available knowledge, and it follows there should be no reason to dispute scientific knowledge, other than in cases when further research modifies the existing knowledge: Mill made the case that there is only one logical way of doing science, even if application of this logic varies from discipline to discipline. He also acknowledged John Locke’s argument that what we discuss in science is words, not reality itself. Reality is represented by words, and therefore science should be concerned with the clarity of language. In these and other observations, Mill was admirably modern. However, to use a metaphor, even if Mill got the sailing ship right, he did not anticipate the steamship. He straightened up the scientific discussion in the empiricists’ traditions and updated it to a modern toolbox in a logical and common-sense way. He did not anticipate what was to come: the linguistic turn and the new developments in logic, and the atomic age. The former would have shown him that the problem of language was more important than having exact definitions of concepts, while the latter might have surprised him to the extent that taken-as-given assumptions about the nature and the world would have needed to be reconsidered.

3.2  Logical empiricism 3.2.1  The non-existent King of France Neo-positivism or logical positivism is the name given to the perspective on scientific knowledge that developed predominantly within the Vienna Circle and related circles during the 1920s and 1930s. Several parallel developments in philosophy and in science, as well as historical conditions in society, paved the way for the perspective. In this section, I attempt to unwrap some of the main insights and events that inspired the Vienna Circle and later the development of neo-­positivism into logical empiricism. The first event was the linguistic turn that occurred within philosophy and formed the foundation of what today is known as analytical philosophy (Dummett

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1993; Glock 2008). Three philosophers were central to the early development of analytical philosophy: the German philosopher Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.55 All three men were connected through parallel developments in linguistic theory, logic, and mathematics, and the fact that when Wittgenstein started his dissertation in philosophy, he consulted Russell in Cambridge as his supervisor, who then introduced him to Frege. Wittgenstein’s dissertation, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, written before and during World War I and published in 1922 (Wittgenstein 2007),56 was to have a strong influence on the philosophy of science. Mathematics has played a decisive role in science from its beginning, and August Comte made a strong argument when he called mathematics the most advanced science; it was advanced in its abstract logic, and it seemed to have distanced itself from any metaphysical content. Mathematics continued to develop, but what was the foundation of mathematics? Mathematics had been a way of calculating things in the world. To a large extent, it had been an abstract representation of things in the world. Geometry, developed by the Ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, had uncovered the logic that is inherent in nature. Plato, who was enthusiastic about Pythagoras, believed that mathematics was the language of gods. Aristotle had defined the basic principles of logic that was included in the book Organon.57 Scholastic scholars believed that logic could help us to understand the divine and therefore they allowed the use of Aristotle’s work. Newton’s breakthrough in calculating the movements of objects opened up for new insights into the logic of the world. Still, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) had argued that the ultimate foundation of mathematics was outside mathematics itself and therefore mathematics would not help in the discovery of God, nor was it in conflict with Christian faith. Comte built on Pascal’s argument when he was writing in the 1840s. Whitehead observed: We are entering upon an age of reconstruction, in religion, in science, and in political thought. Such ages, if they are to avoid mere ignorant oscillation between extremes, must seek truth in its ultimate depths. There can be no vision of this depth of truth apart from a philosophy which takes full account of those ultimate abstractions, whose interconnections it is in the business of mathematics to explore. (Whitehead 1967, p. 34) Russell argued against the idea that logic or mathematics was a revelation of the divine forces in the world. Hume had argued that all logical principles can be derived from the simple notion of cause and effect, and Kant had argued that mathematics was synthetic a priori knowledge. Russell’s project was a criticism of both the mysticism of mathematics and Kant.58 He wanted to show both the a priori and analytical nature of mathematical logic, but was confronted with the

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problem of how mathematics could be defined by mathematics itself (Whitehead & Russell 1927). Russell, Whitehead, and Frege all argued that the same basic logic was at play in mathematics and in language; thus, there was a logical foundation for semantic meaning in mathematics and language (Dusek 2006).59 In his well-known 1905 paper ‘On denoting’, Russell addressed some of the issues and problems in the logic of language discussed by Frege (Russell 1905). Russell tried to show how language could be reconstructed as purely logical statements. By doing that, one distinguishes between the form of language, its syntax (which is analytical), and its content and its semantics (which is synthetic). Thus, the phrase ‘The present king of England’ (England had a king in 1905) denotes a certain person. However, by denoting, we can also logically know something beyond our acquaintance: The distinction between acquaintance and knowledge about is the distinction between the things we have presentations of, and the things we only reach by means of denoting phrases. (Russell 1905, p. 479) It follows that if one says that the present King of England is bold, one is saying something that is logically meaningful, namely that the person who is king of England is also bold. Since it is not unusual that an old male person is bold and kings tend to be rather old males, the sentence has meaning. Assume that we claim that (a) all men are mortal, and (b) the King of England is a man, we can also say (c) that the King of England is mortal. If (a) and (b) are true, then (c) is true. We can then also say that if somebody argues that (a) and (b) are true but still claim that the King of England is immortal, that argument would be meaningless because it would be illogical. What about the present King of France? Is he mortal? Well, the phrase ‘the present King of France is mortal’ is false, not because the sentence is illogical, but because France does not have a king (nor were there any kings in 1905).60 Russell’s argument was that this dual aspect of a sentence – its denotation and its meaning – creates some confusion because sometimes, in a sentence, we refer directly to what it means, whereas in other cases, we refer to the denotation. For example, assume that we state: ‘The King of France is not bold’. The sentence is true if it means that there is no king of France, but false if it implies that there is a king, but he is not bold. It follows that in order to know whether a sentence is true, we might need to look at both its logic and its meaning.61 Russell’s argument makes it possible to distinguish logical sentences from nonsensical ones. Furthermore, it allows us to distinguish true sentences from false ones. Russell argued that the only way we can check the truthfulness of sentences with denotations is by simple acquaintance with the thing denoted. For complex phenomena, this is not possible, and for such phenomena, he argued for a reduction. Reduction means that the sentence is reduced to its logical form. Its

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truth content has to be checked against the real world. Russell gave the following example: But how can a non-entity be the subject of a proposition? ‘I think, therefore I  am’ is no more evident than ‘I am the subject of a proposition, therefore I am’, provided ‘I am’ is taken to assert subsistence or being, not existence. (Russell 1905, p. 486) Russell argued that Descartes’ phrase about being and thinking could be read analytically as simply meaning that (a) all people being are also (b) thinking. Thus, it describes a logical relation between (a) and (b): for any (a), there is also (b) (Russel 2015, p.  17). Thereby, Russell made Descartes’ often-quoted observation into a platitude. Consider the sentence from Tractatus Logico-­ Philosophicus: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (Wittgenstein 2007, p. 75). Could not even this be seen as a platitude? It simply says that ‘(a) whatever we cannot speak about’ equals ‘(b) one must be silent’, in other words a = b, which is a logical argument but one without any content.62 Thus, language read analytically (i.e. as logic) is form without any content. ­Russell observed: One interesting result of the above theory of denoting is this: when there is anything with which we do not have immediate acquaintance, but only definition by denoting phrases, then the propositions in which this thing is introduced by means of a denoting phrase do not really contain this thing as a constituent but contain instead the constituents expressed by the several words of the denoting phrase. (Russell 1905, p. 493) Since mathematical logic is analytical, a priori knowledge (in a non-divine way), its existence has to be defined by itself. Sometimes this has been portrayed as the problem of ‘the barber who shaves everybody but does not shave themself’. Who shaves the barber? We could answer: another barber. However, the problem here is that there is no other barber that meets the standard. This problem has been called Russell’s paradox.63 Since both Frege and Russell worked within set theory, the problem can be described as follows: what is the set of all sets that are not members of themselves? If it is a set and thus included in the set, then it includes itself, which is a paradox. The significance of this problem can be expanded to the general problem in science of how we can formulate a theory that includes itself without leading to contradictions.64 The central works that initiated the linguistic turn were two short articles by Gottlob Frege: Über Sinn und Bedeutung and Ueber Begriff und Gegenstand.65 The philosophical significance of Frege’s argument is the separation between the

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physiological process of sense on the one hand, and the reference of language on the other hand. He wrote: If we found ‘a = a’ and ‘a = b’ have different cognitive values, the explanation is that for the purpose of knowledge, the sense of a sentence, vs. the thought it expressed by it, is no less relevant than its referent, i.e. its truth value. If now a = b, then indeed the referent of ‘b’ is the same as that of ‘a,’ hence the truth value of ‘a = b’ is the same as that of ‘a = a’. In spite of this, the sense of ‘b’ might differ from that of ‘a,’ and thereby the sense expressed in ‘a = b’ differs from that of ‘a = a.’ In that case, the two sentences do not have the same cognitive value. If we understand by ‘judgement’ the advance from the thought to its truth value . . . we can also say that the judgements are different. (Frege 2003, p. 34) Language can be seen as an independent phenomenon, between thinking on the one hand, and the world on the other hand. It is different from thought. The sense of a word (and thus its relation to thinking) is different or decoupled from its meaning and reference (the thing in the world it refers to).66 This might be illustrated by a story referred to in the Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim’s book Objectivism and the Study of Man (Skjervheim 1959. It is the story of a guest who arrives at an inn and says to the host that he has been riding over the snowcovered plain for several hours. The host replies that in fact he has been riding over the ice-covered Boden See. Realising the danger of riding over the shallow ice of the Boden See, the guest falls down dead. The point here is that the two sentences ‘riding over the snow-covered plain’ and ‘riding over the ice-covered Boden See’ refer to the same thing, namely the trail that the guest had actually been following. However, with regard to sense, the two sentences represent two different things. Thus, language can have references independent of sense. This challenges some of Kant’s ideas and his argument for synthetic a priori knowledge.67 Mark Textor argues: Frege claims, against Kant, that in arithmetic we don’t need to have intuitions, representations of particular things in space and time, to justify our judgements. Our ability to define general concepts and to draw inference is our source of arithmetic knowledge. (Textor 2011, p. 12) We do not need intuition and judgements to define the truth of arithmetic. Its truth can be defined analytically a priori (as the logic of language), not by its meaning or sense. Michael Dummett (1925–2011) called this process ‘the extrusion of thought from the mind’ (Dummett 1993, p. 21). The argument is a rejection of psychologism.68 There is a distinction between sense, which is something in one’s

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mind, and reference, which is something in one’s act of expression and is therefore something in the world. Language expresses sense, not meaning: Frege was concerned only with the logical ‘content’ of signs, not, with their ‘coloring’, the mental associations they evoke. In ‘On sense and Meaning [reference]’ he distinguished two aspects of that content: their meaning [reference] (Bedeutung), which is the object they refer to, and their sense (Sinn), the ‘mode of presentation’ of the referent. While the ideas (Vorstellungen) individuals associate with a sign is subjective (psychological), its sense is objective. It is grasped by any individual who understands the sign, yet it exists independent of being grasped. The meaning of a sentence is its truth value; its sense is the ‘thought’ it expresses. Like truth values and concepts, thoughts are mind-independent abstract entities. They are true or false independent of someone grasping or believing them, and they can be shared and communicated between different individuals. (Glock 2008, p. 29) However, Frege’s concept of meaning has been contested. According to Hillary Putnam (1974), Frege reduced meaning to reference in order to remove the psychological state in the logic of language. Thus, we can talk about reference independent of sense.69 In building on the work of Saul Kripke (1972),70 Putman made the point that Frege’s clear divide does not work: The extension of our terms depends upon the actual nature of the particular things that serve as paradigms, and this actual nature is not, in general, fully known to the speaker. Traditional semantic theory leaves out two contributions to the determination of reference – the contribution of society and the contribution of the real world; a better semantic theory must encompass both. (Putnam 1974, p. 711) Russell took the empiricists’ position as a point of departure: there is nothing in our mind as we enter the world. We start out as a blank sheet, but with the capacity for logical thinking. Russell rejected Hume’s idea that even logic is something learned, and he argued that it is a priori logic (Russell 2015, p. 63). Part of Russell’s way of arguing for a form of a priori logic that is not speculative was to introduce an argument for realism.71 We can distinguish between the knowledge that is developed because of our thinking, and the knowledge that merely appears because we, through our thinking, become aware of reality. Hence, for example, when we find out that Edinburgh is north of London, it is not because of our thinking that this is the case, but rather that our thinking was able to discover a reality that already existed. Russell used the term universals for such already existing realities, and argued as follows: All a priori knowledge deals exclusively with relations of universals. .  .  . No fact concerning anything capable of being experienced can be known

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independent of experience. We know a priori that two things and two other things make four things, but we do not know a priori that if Brown and Jones are two and Robinson and Smith are two, then Brown and Jones and Robinson and Smith are four. . . . [T]his we can only know by experience. (Russell 2015, p. 89) Thus, the solution to the Russell paradox in mathematics is that mathematics is a universal reality. However, even if we assume that there is a reality, how do we establish that the things we observe are actually this fact or reality, and not merely our subjective perception of it? To pose the same question using terms from antiquity, how do we justify truth beliefs? Russell’s answer to this question was to combine correspondence (with facts) and coherence (of our thinking): Thus our intuitive knowledge, which is the source of all our other knowledges of truth, is of two sorts: pure empirical knowledge, which tells us of the existence and some of the properties of particular things with which we are acquainted, and pure a priori knowledge, which gives us connections between universals, and enables us to draw inference from particular facts given in empirical knowledge. Our derivate knowledge always depends upon some pure a priori knowledge and usually depends upon some pure empirical knowledge. (Russell 2015, p. 123)72 Russell embraced Wittgenstein’s picture theory of language. Wittgenstein’s main claim in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is that things we can express something about can only be known by being put into language, hence his claim: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (Wittgenstein 2007, p. 75). Languages define the domain of knowledge. In order for a sentence to be true, it has to be built with elements that are each true. We can know true things, even if they are not the whole truth. Furthermore, the reason we can say something truthful about things is that we assume that the world exists and represent states of affairs that we can visualise through language. We see certain things because they exist as orderly states of affairs. We do not see things, but facts. Thus, facts are more than things; one could say that they are things in a context. What we see in the world is not a bundle of things, but facts and states of affairs that appear as ‘pictures’ in the mind. Thus, our thought has intention, and the reality has some order: If we exclude the element of intention from language, its whole function then collapses. . . . What is essential to intention is the picture: The picture of what is intended. (Wittgenstein 1975, p. 11)73 Bertrand Russell had supported Wittgenstein, and he thought that his own logical atomism74 was to a large extent the same as the ideas presented in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: there are structures in the world, and at the bottom, there

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are the most essential structural elements, sense data, which give us physical experience, from which in turn we build physical objects. Physical objects are constructions of actual and possible sense experiences (Grayling 2001). We start with sense data and then apply thinking in order to know things outside our own mind. We infer an external world from these internal states. This represents a major problem because the way we see the world is through language, but language has limitations as to what it can say something about. Thus, language limits knowledge. According to Wittgenstein, the reason language gives meaning to us, as well as a correct picture of the world, is that the structure of language and the structure of the world are basically the same. To express this in another way, the things that language can say something about are things that have the same structure as language itself. On these things, language can say something clearly and truthful. In line with Grayling (2001), this can be seen as follows: the basic connection happens at the lowest, most fundamental level because the arrangements of names in an elementary proposition will be a picture of the arrangement of objects that constitute a state of affairs. Hence, there is a parallel between the structure of the world and the structure of language (Grayling 2001; Russell 2007). Thus, one has to assume that the structure of the world is such that the world is made up of facts that are states of affairs that themselves consist of objects. Similarly, language has a structure that corresponds to this structure of reality. Language consists of propositions, which are made up of elementary propositions, which in turn are made up of names (which are the basic units of language). The structure of Wittgenstein’s argument is based on a set of seven main propositions (Wittgenstein 2007, pages indicated in parentheses): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The world is everything that is the case. (p. 29) What is the case – the fact – is the existence of atomic facts. (p. 29) A logical picture of facts is the thought. (p. 35) A thought is the significant proposition. (p. 44) The elementary propositions are the truth-arguments of propositions. (p. 65) The general form of a truth-function is . . . This is the general form of proposition. (p. 90) 7. Whereof we cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (p. 108) The world consists of facts and we perceive these facts as states of affairs. When we make statements, we make propositions about these states of affairs. This means that an endless number of statements can be made about the world, in the same way as pictures can be painted from different angles and all of them can be correct but none of them captures everything. How do we know that the picture we have of the world is correct or true?75 Expressed in more common-sense language, the answer is: A proposition P is true if and only if it is made up of elementary elements that are all true, and if all negations of these elements are false.76

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I demonstrate the meaning by using the following simple example (even though it might not have met with Wittgenstein’s approved). Proposition P: The British head of state is King Charles III. P is true if the following is true: (a) there is a state called Britain, (b) Britain has a head of state, (c) the head of state is a king, and (d) the king’s name is Charles III. However, P is not true if any of the following statements are true: (a) there is no state called Britain, (b) Britain does not have a head of state, (c) the head of state is not a king, and (d) the king’s name is not Charles III. Wittgenstein’s point was that this way of testing the possibility to falsify any of the elements that make up a proposition is the only way to establish truth. However, since any sentence, such as ‘The British head of state is King Charles III’, probably can be infinitely broken up into subpropositions, the truth content of language probably has an infinite structure. Wittgenstein, following Russell, believed that the world consisted of some elementary facts that he called atomic facts. Furthermore, he wrote: We feel that even if all possible scientific questions [could] be answered, the problems of life [would] have still not been touched at all. (Wittgenstein 2007, p. 107) The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wishes to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain sighs in his proposition. (Wittgenstein 2007, p. 108) Wittgenstein placed language in the world. Language has a structure and logic in the same way as mathematics. When thoughts are formulated in language, they have to comply with the rules of language, not the other way around. Similarly, these structures and rules are paralleled in the structure of the world. The world is comprised of states of affairs. Thus, language pictures reality and these states of affairs, and thereby brings reality and thought together. Moreover, the things that we have in our mind that cannot be transformed in this way cannot be communicated either. They are things that we have to be silent about. The argument described earlier could be translated into an everyday situation in the following way. Let us assume that one goes to a concert and has an exceptional experience in enjoying the music. One might feel that the music ‘talked to you’, opened up one’s emotions, and that one started crying without knowing why. When one wants to communicate the experience the day after, one might say all these things, yet in no way could the descriptions replace the full experience one had the day before or allow others to have the same experience of the concert.77 Even though Wittgenstein later changed his mind about the topics that he had discussed in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,78 in particular the picture

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theory, and had developed a new understanding of how language worked, there was considerable continuity in his thinking. His basic idea of language as something external to the mind resonated with his later insistence on the impossibility of a private language,79 hence the limits to thought. 3.2.2  The Vienna Circle In Vienna in the beginning of the 20th century, there was a tremendous amount of experimentation with new ways of seeing things. Several authors have tried to capture that special period in time and place, when many of the central ideas that have dominated Western thinking up to our own time were developed.80 Specialists in art, music, literature, and architecture were all searching for new forms and rules.81 Both in science and in art, people started questioning ‘the rules of the game’, as both perform and create knowledge within conventions. It was argued that one should rethink these conventions, and the label discontinuity was used in this respect (Bradbury & McFarlane 1991; Gay 2009). The people who questioned these structural conditions were called modernists: people who were looking for new formal procedures and rules to govern the way we think and look at things.82 The breakthrough in physics came to have a tremendous impact on scientific thinking (Engler  & Renn 2018). Similar to the Scientific Revolution in the Renaissance and the way Newton inspired the Enlightenment, the breakthrough in atomic physics renewed a debate on scientific knowledge. The physical theories that were developed in the early 1900s challenged some of our basic conceptions of time, space, and causation. The Austrian physicist Ernst Mach (1838–1916) had provoked the debate with his argument that atoms do not exist.83 The work of the French physicist Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) contained similar traits. Duhem criticised the Cartesian heritage in his search for the foundation of physics. In a short book, published in 1908, Sauver les phénomènes. Essai sur la notion de théorie physique de platon à galilée (Duhem 1985),84 he stated: Despite Kepler and Galileo, we believe today, with Osiander and Bellarmine, that the hypotheses of physics are mere mathematical contrivances devised for the purpose of saving the phenomena. But thanks to Kepler and Galileo, we now require that they save all the phenomena of the inanimate universe together. (Duhem 1985, p. 117) In the quotation, the part ‘saving the phenomena’ can be interpreted as implying that a theory captures a certain aspect of a phenomenon at a certain time and place. Although Duhem’s argument probably exceeded his intentions, it opened up for a hypothetical understanding of scientific theory. Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

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presented his special theory of relativity in 1905 and developed the general theory of relativity between 1907 and 1915. In April 1918, he gave a lecture with the title ‘Motive der Forshung’, in which he stated: [T]hat the world of perception determines the theoretical system practically unambiguously, yet no logical path leads from perception to the basic foundation of the theory.85 (Engler & Renn 2019, p. 67; my translation) Among the audience was Moritz Schlick, who saw that what Einstein had discovered had some clear philosophical implications. That meant that some of the basic assumptions in philosophy, in particular the universality of space and time, were not as fundamental for thinking as Kant had assumed. This lack of a foundation supported Ernst Mach’s arguments about the primacy and the ‘non-givenness’ of sensation (Couture-Mingheras 2019). In turn, this acknowledgement changed metaphysics as a whole. Einstein’s theory of relativity was something that seemed to enable us to explain the working of the world that was not perceivable with the use of common assumptions. Rather, it was by suspending our normal ideas of time and space that the theory of relativity was made possible. Engler and Renn state: Immanuel Kant, whose work Einstein had already read as a student, was awakened from his ‘dogmatic slumber’ by Hume. However, while Kant saw space and time as rigid forms of intuition that should be independent of experience, Einstein used Hume’s thinking experiment in the special theory of relativity from 1905 about how space and second quantities behave depending on the state of motion of an observer. The reflection on space by Hume enabled Einstein to formulate the principles of new physics on the basis of practical conventions for space-temporal measurements.86 (Engler & Renn 2019, p. 67; my translation) Hume’s scepticism,87 in combination with the radical sensationalism of Ernest Mach88 (Cohen & Seeger 1970), was among the factors that influenced Einstein.89 Nevertheless, Einstein had remained a realist (Hacking 1983). To put his position in perspective, I briefly look at the further development in physics. During the first decades of the 20th century, not only was the theory of relativity discovered, but also the whole picture of the physical world, broadly known as quantum physics, was altered. Central to this development were, among others, both the German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), who formulated the uncertainty principle,90 and Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), who also used the example of a cat that is both simultaneously alive and dead to illustrate some of the features of waves in quantum physics. The new insight into the physical world was formulated in what is called the Copenhagen interpretation.91

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The Copenhagen interpretation argued that the new insight in physics had epistemological implications. Heisenberg claimed that the world corresponds to the way we describe it (Heisenberg 1989).92 He rejected Berkeley’s thinking, and with it also Mach’s idea of a mind-dependent reality, albeit without mentioning Mach. His argument was not about sensation; he argued for a theory-dependent reality, as explained by Paul Davis: In a classical world our observations do not create reality: they uncover it. Thus atoms and particles continue to exist with well-defined attitudes even when we do not observe them. By contrast, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which Heisenberg here expounds so lucidly, rejects the objective reality of the quantum microworld. (Davis 1989, p. xii) It was this Copenhagen interpretation that Einstein rejected, and it was against the thinking of Bohr and Heisenberg that Einstein made his often-misquoted remark that ‘God does not play dice with the universe’.93 For Einstein, there was no randomness in the physical world; the world is governed by laws that, even if they are hard to understand, it is our task to uncover. Thus, Einstein was a realist. Drawing implications from Einstein’s thinking for the philosophy of science was to become the main task of the founder of the Vienna Circle, Moritz Schlick.94 In his book Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, published in 1918, Schlick wrote: [W]e repeat that acquaintance with nature of reality is not obtained through knowledge of reality. The former, where it is possible at all, must precede the latter, because what is to be designed is prior to designation. Thus, we are directly acquainted with the whole realm of our own data of consciousness; it is simply there, before any questioning, any cognition. Nothing in it can be altered by cognition, nothing taken from it, nothing added to it. These immediately given data are the only reality with which we are acquainted: but it would altogether be wrong to conclude that therefore they must be the only reality, or even the only known, knowable, desirable, reality. Such a conclusion, nonetheless, has often been drawn. (Schlick 1985, p. 173) Einstein had provided an entirely convincing argument against Kant’s synthetic a priori knowledge and thus the foundation of German idealist philosophy. Moritz Schlick, who took over the chair of Naturphilosophie at the University of Vienna in 1922, invited his colleagues to discuss these new perspectives on science, including not least the newly published ideas of Wittgenstein, in what became known as the ‘Schlick Circle’.95 According to the Austrian philosopher and historian of science Friedrich Stadler (b. 1951), the ‘Schlick Circle’ had an informal existence until 1929, when it became officially known as the Vienna Circle (Stadler 2007, 2022).96 The background for this change was the publication of the

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manifesto Wissenschaftliches Weltanschauung. Der Wiener Kreis (Verein Ernst Mach 1929), which had been developed by key members of the group. Still, the Vienna Circle continued to be a relatively open discussion forum with a few common perspectives, which Stadler summarises as follows: The main theoretical elements of the scientific world-conception – empiricisms, positivism, and logical analysis of language geometry, biology, psychology, and social science. Traditional system building philosophy was to be dethroned as ‘the queen of the sciences’, and in its place a more practical, this-worldly orientation was promoted. This approach culminated in the slogan ‘The scientific world-conception serves life and life receives it.’ (Stadler 2007, p. 15) How did the Vienna Circle and neo-positivism or logical positivism97 take the new insights from physics and language theory into account? First, they did not formulate a doctrine or normative theory of how to do science; second, they demanded that all thinking should be based on observable facts; and third, they were concerned with how to create a language for scientists that would be empirically adequate and sufficiently precise. Their ambition was to avoid integrating metaphysical assumptions in our use of language. Basically, logical positivists applied two different arguments to deal with this question, both of which are inherent in the dual term logical positivism: logical, meaning the argument leading from logic to fact; and positivism, meaning the argument from empirical observation. The German philosopher Rudolf Carnap had studied at the University of Jena and attended Gottlob Frege’s lectures on mathematical logic.98 Upon an invitation from Moritz Schlick, he was appointed as a professor at the University of Vienna in 1926. At that time, Carnap had been working on his dissertation Der logische Aufbau der Welt.99 He became an active member of the Vienna Circle. Carnap made rather radical claims in Aufbau (Carnap 2003), which in turn created much discussion in the Vienna Circle. First and foremost, he argued that it was possible to develop an epistemology that would be objective and at the same time independent of ontology and metaphysical assumptions.100 Carnap was building on the work of Hume: the constitution of our perception is based on impressions (sense impressions) and ideas (logic). Furthermore, he was building on Russell’s logical atomism and Wittgenstein’s discussion of logic in language. Carnap’s claim was that we can construct a language that is meaningful and can be tested by scientific methods. Such language would be objective.101 At the same time, Carnap also claimed that we can identify language that is not scientific and that makes claims that cannot be tested. He called these claims ‘pseudo problems’. Thus, it is possible to have a demarcation between a logical language that deals with scientific problems, and a pseudo-language that only gives rise to pseudo-problems. In this context, some examples might prove instructive. The sentence ‘The sun is smiling today’ has a logical structure but is meaningless

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because the verb smiling cannot be used in conjunction with objects such as the sun. The sentence, ‘I feel the sun is smiling today’ is a pseudo-sentence in the sense that there is no way that the claim in the sentence can be tested. The sentence ‘The horse has pain in its leg’ is both logical and scientific, even if it is difficult establish how a horse feels. The argument here is that if we observe that the horse is limping, we can assume that it also feels pain. Thus, the sentence can be transferred or reduced to something observable and testable, and thus scientific. Carnap, with his background in neo-Kantianism, early on had an interest in phenomenology. As the American professor of philosophy Michael Friedman argues in his book A Parting of Ways (Friedman 2000), the philosophical discourse in Europe until the 1930s was a common discourse without the clear divide between ‘schools’ or directions that came later.102 There was an ongoing discussion between philosophical camps, and arguments were used across positions.103 Nevertheless, Carnap argued against Kant’s idea of a synthetic a priori knowledge (propositions that are true independent of experience but that say something absolutely and universally true about reality).104 Classical mathematics dates to antiquity, to the time of Euclid and later. Euclid had developed mathematical proofs and presented a set of further logical theorems, such as the one that states that if there is a straight line and a point outside that line, there is one and only one line that goes through that point and that line does not intersect with the other line (Hacking 1983). Kant assumed that these insights were part of the synthetic a priori knowledge that we need in order to make sense of the world. Non-­Euclidean geometry showed that such assumptions were not as universal as Kant had assumed.105 How can we verify that what we observe is true? It requires that we are absolutely sure that what we observe are facts. In this respect, initially neo-positivists adapted a rather radical position, which they later abandoned. Empiricists such as John Locke had claimed that the human mind is void before receiving sense data, and Hume had argued that such sense data are probably the only true facts that we have, and in principle, we should therefore be able to reduce all true knowledge to ‘elementary experience’. Carnap wrote: In order to be able to construct the physical world, we need certain constituents of elementary experience, especially sensations with their determinations of quality and intensity, later on also spatial and temporal order which must refer back to certain characteristics of sensations which themselves do not have to be of a spatial or temporal nature in the proper sense. (Carnap 2003, p. 125) Furthermore, he argued that this true, observed knowledge should be formulated in ‘protocol sentences’, meaning sentences that are irrefutable. This implies that

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more elaborate propositions could be tested for their truth content by reducing them to protocol sentences. In an essay titled Die Wende der Philosophie, published in 1930, Schlick wrote: By means of philosophy, statements are explained, by means of science they are verified. The latter is concerned with the truth of statements, the former with what they actually mean. (Schlick 1989, p. 56) Logical positivism saw the role of philosophy as to clarify concepts, and to identify a foundation for science that would be able to verify truth. In that sense, philosophy and science were separated. There are two implications of this: first, science is about how things are, not what they should be, and thus normativity and normative statements are non-scientific; second, as factual statements can be separated from normative statements, it is possible to detect metaphysics inherent in language. However, the Vienna Circle soon adopted the idea of the unity of science and claimed that it included philosophy. This unified science was based on what was then (from the 1930s onwards) termed physicalism. Carnap had outlined the concept of physicalism in a paper published in 1932, which was translated into English in 1934 as a short book titled The Unity of Science (Carnap 1995). The book very closely resembled Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, including repeating some of the same arguments about what constitutes true statements.106 The logic of language is the same for all sciences, and a unified science would rule out the discussion of psychology and meaning. The focus should be on language and the logical structure of propositions. Neurath made the following claim: The physicalistic language, unified language, is the Alfa and Omega of all science. There is no ‘phenomenal language’ besides the ‘physical language’, no methodological solipsism besides some other possible position, no ‘philosophy’, no ‘theory of knowledge’, no new ‘Weltanshauung’ beside the others: there is only Unified Science, with its laws and prediction. (Neurath 1959, p. 293) There is a distinction between what qualifies as good and bad reasoning. For example, Neurath claimed that Max Weber’s theory of Protestant ethics and the growth of spirit of capitalism (Weber 2013) was a metaphysical theory, and was without any scientific foundation. Both ‘Protestant ethics’ and ‘spirit of capitalism’ are ambiguous terms. The growth of the spirit was even more ambiguous, and Weber’s attempt to prove the growth by identifying historical developments in the course of the 17th century in Europe was more or less impossible empirically. By contrast, Karl Marx, with his historical materialism, was more scientific because his theory was more factual and material (Neurath 1959).107

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Neo-positivists went far in trying to develop an entirely new beginning for science. In that new beginning, the neo-positivists were eager to develop new tools for acquiring knowledge of reality. However, as mentioned, some of their early attempts to do that were later abandoned (Stadler 2007), as I show in the following.108 3.2.3  Discovering truth by observation and logic The Vienna Circle shared with Wittgenstein an ambition to remove all forms of metaphysical assumptions inherent in language, even in Kant’s version, and even though Russell, who was not a member of the circle but was associated with the thinking, gave some credit to a priori logic.109 The argument was that all scientific statements must be based on facts. At that point, the members of the Vienna Circle fully agreed with Hume. They also acknowledged that Wittgenstein had pointed to something important when he said that all we can know about the world, we have to know through language. Logical positivists argued that this challenge was the same for all sciences, which supports the idea of a unity of science: all scientific problems have the same basic structure, in the sense of making true statements about the world. Carnap presented a constructional theory in his book Aufbau: The present investigations, as far as their method is concerned, are characterised by the fact that they attempt to bring to bear upon one another two branches of science that have so far been treated separately. Both branches have been developed independently to a considerable extent, but in our opinion, they can make further progress only if they are conjoined. Logistics (symbolic logic) has been advanced by Russell and Whitehead to a point where it provides a theory of relations which allows almost all problems of the pure theory of ordering to be treated without great difficulty. On the other hand, the reduction of ‘reality’ to the ‘given’ has in recent time been considered an important task and has been particularly accomplished. . . . The present study is an attempt to apply the theory of relations to the task of analysing reality. This is done in order to formulate the logical requirements which must be fulfilled by a constructional system of concepts. (Carnap 2003, p. 7; original emphasis) Carnap’s argument was that we can construct the logic of the world, or what could be said to be our logical picture of the world, through our scientific methods. However, all knowledge is hypothetical and relative. Thus, induction is possible only if we accept this relativity and probabilistic aspect of knowledge. Carnap later argued as follows in his book An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, which was first published in 1966: The truth of an inductive conclusion is never certain. I do not mean only that the conclusion cannot be certain because it rests on premises that cannot be

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known with certainty. Even if the premises are assumed to be true and the inference is a valid inductive inference, the conclusion may be false. The most we can say is that with respect to a give premises, the conclusion has a certain degree of probability. Inductive logic tells us how to calculate the value of that probability (Carnap 2015, p. 20) Logical positivists early on adopted the correspondence theory that for a statement to be true, it either has to correspond to a fact or it has to be logically connected to other statements that are based on facts. In relation to this, the logical positivists developed what they called protocol statements, which are statements that are solid, even if not irrefutably true. Carnap proposed that the structure of a scientific statement (or sentence ‘S’) should fit with the following four questions (Carnap 1995, p. 62): 1. What sentence S is deducible from and what sentences are deducible from S? 2. Under what condition is S supposed to be true, and under what condition false? 3. How is S to be verified? 4. What is the meaning of S? Logical positivists wanted to lay down a foundation for scientific statements that could help in verifying scientific results and findings. Science has a practical/ methodological dimension and practitioners of science need to have practical criteria that can guide their scientific activities. The search for truth should be replaced with degrees of confirmation (Kraft 1953). In other words, rather than trying to uncover reality, theories should be predictively adequate and successful. This discussion gradually led logical positivists to change their approach to truth (Kraft 1953, p. 117): instead of proposing a correspondence theory of truth, they proposed a coherence theory of truth. This implied a deviation from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the deviation occurred in three stages (Hempel 1935). The first stage was to argue that no statement is true, and all statements are hypotheses in some form. Thus, the choice is not between true and untrue statements, but finding what is the better or more preferred statement. Logical positivists argued that this was being sorted out through the scientific process. The second stage in the deviation from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus refers to Wittgenstein’s claim that any statement could be tested according to some underlying, basic statements in the example of the proposition concerning the British King.110 However, if statements are hypotheses, they cannot be tested in the way Wittgenstein claimed. There is no absolute first statement in science. This leads to the third deviation from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: science develops and evolves, and this process makes it impossible to ‘go back to’ some original, basic protocol statements.

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Thus, the term ‘protocol sentence’ must be treated as more elusive than originally intended: Originally, Carnap introduced the concept of protocol statements to denote the basis of testing empirical statements; in divorce from Wittgenstein’s principles, he showed that even singular statements have the character of a hypothesis in relation to the protocol statements: they cannot be finally verified but they may only be more or less confirmed by them. And there is no precise rule stipulating a minimum degree of confirmation as necessary for a statement to be adopted: in the end, the adoption or the rejection of a statement depends upon a decision. (Hempel 1935, p. 58) Furthermore, degrees of confirmation will, over time, give us a system of knowledge that is comparable. Thus, we can apply principle of coherence: [I]t is possible to formulate each statement of Logic of Science as an assertion concerning certain properties and relations of scientific propositions only. So also, the concept of truth may be characterized in this formal mode of speech, namely, in a crude formulation, as a sufficient agreement between the system of acknowledged protocol-statements and the logical consequences which may be deduced from the statement and other statements which are already adopted. (Hempel 1935, p. 54) However, we still need to have some solid foundation for our knowledge. At this fundamental level, we can know that things are true as a matter of fact. Hempel referred to matters of fact as solid points of contact between knowledge and reality. We can know facts from simple observation and accepted knowledge. Furthermore, Hempel argued as follows: [I]n fact, by far the greater part of scientist will sooner or later come to an agreement, and so, as an empirical fact, a perpetually increasing and expanding system of coherent statements and theories results from their protocol statements. (Hempel 1935, p. 57) At that point in time, the mid-1930s, the differences between the logical positivists became more apparent. This can be shown with reference to Carnap and Hempel. Both were important scholars who took the logical positivist tradition forward after they emigrated to the USA in the mid-1930s and late 1930s, respectively.111 That later version of logical positivism is often referred to as logical empiricism.112 However, there were certain differences between the two philosophers. According

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to the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking (b. 1936), while Carnap remained a phenomenalist, Hempel could be seen as a scientific realist (Hacking 1983).113 Carl Gustav Hempel (1905–1997) had a background in mathematics and physics before he joined the Berlin Circle.114 He is perhaps best known for his work on confirmation (Salmon 1999). The logical problem of confirmation can be illustrated with reference to the black raven paradox, also known as ‘Hempel’s Raven’ (Ernst 2009). Let us assume that all ravens are black. Thus, we know that a bird if it is a raven, we know it is black. From a logical point of view, we then also know that if something is not black, it is not a raven. If we want to confirm these assumptions, any black raven we observe will serve to confirm that ravens are black, and any non-black thing we observe that is not a raven will also confirm that ravens are black. Let us then assume that the world consists of 100 things in total, even if this is unrealistic, and further that 50 things are black and 50 things are not black. From the original assumption, we expect ravens only to be in the black group of things. If we now pick one thing at a time, randomly, as we approach the total number of 100, and given that all ravens so far have been in the black group, the assumption will be more and more confirmed. The paradox is that the confirmation of all ravens being black is also supported by the observation that, in the non-black group, there are no ravens. So, if I were to pick a green apple, it would confirm that all ravens are black, which from a common-sense perspective is nonsense. The purpose of this and similar logical paradoxes was to explore the limits to logic and the boundary between logic and empirical analysis. Can the raven paradox be solved? Hempel’s argument was that confirmation is dependent on how we construct the problem (Hempel 1943).115 The construction, in line with Carnap, builds on a reasonable understanding of the empirical reality. For instance, if we were to have a control group for analysing whether ravens are only ever black, we would probably restrict it to other birds or to other birds of similar shapes and sizes as ravens. However, this could not be done at an analytical level. Rather, it would have to involve an empirical/ pragmatic dimension in the sense of our knowledge of the world. For example, we know that there is a group of things called birds and that there are subgroups of birds, and so forth. As confirmation is the intention of science and as induction is possible, a scientific method must be a meeting between theory and practice. Thus, we need principles of logic, and we need methodology. Due to his Jewish ancestry, Hempel had to leave Germany in 1934, and was invited to stay in Belgium by Paul Oppenheim. Together, they wrote their paper ‘Studies in the logic of explanation’ (Hempel & Oppenheim 1948).116 What does it means for something to be an explanation? Logical positivists had discussed deduction as a complex concept. In their 1948 paper, Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim addressed the deductive-nomological model (the DN model) of scientific explanation (Salmon 1983). According to the model, for premises to explain something, called explanans (what is explained), they must specify the precise conditions for the phenomenon to be explained,

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known as explanandum. The explanans must both have a logical and empirical element. The explanandum has to be formulated in a logical and meaningful way and follow from the explanans. One could argue that an explanandum must be anticipated by explanans.117 It could be argued that Rudolf Carnap had a slightly different focus than Hempel. His intention in his book Aufbau had been to show that, even if all knowledge has a subjective origin, it is possible to construct a language that gives an objective description of the world: Even though the subjective origin of all knowledge lies in the contents of experiences and their connections, it is still possible, as the constructional system will show, to advance to an intersubjective, objective world, which can be conceptually comprehended, and which is identical for all observers. (Carnap 2003, p. 7) The ideas of the world, as we communicate them and share meaning about them, are constructed through language. Consequently, idealist and realists, as well as phenomenologists, who differ in their understanding of metaphysics (ontology and epistemology), can all relate to concepts and objects. For example, let us assume that a certain word is a name of something. The word expresses a concept. A concept is a representation in the mind of an object that is given a name by a word. Therefore, the word ‘tree’ is both a representation of the mental concept of a tree and a representation of the reality of a tree. The word is a name that links our mental concepts to reality. This implies that we can use words that name reality as a representation. However, the structure of language is insufficient for deciding the underlying reality. Therefore, there is also a need for empirical insight into the object in question: The first aim, then, is the construction of objects; it is followed by a second aim, namely, the investigation of the nonconstructional properties and relations of the objects. The first aim is reached through convention; the second, however, through experiences. (Carnap 2003, p. 289) However, according to this constructivist theory, since scientific statements can say something about the structural characteristics of the relations between objects, the statement will be relevant independent of the nature of the objects. Since knowledge of all objects must be formulated in words and in language, they all have constructed dimensions, independent of what might otherwise be assumed about their nature. Michael Friedman summarises Carnap’s constructivist theory as follows: For Carnap, all objects whatsoever, whether formal or empirical, ‘ideal’ or real, are rather defined or ‘constructed’ at definite finite ranks within a

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hierarchy of types in the particular relational structure he is constructing. And, in this way, Carnap’s constitutional system is in fact entirely neutral between ‘realism’ on the one side and ‘transcendental idealism’ on the other. (Freidman 2000, p. 85) Carnap argued that constructivist theory could work as a unity of science. It is a position that acknowledges the fact that science is evolving, and it is socially and historically embedded. Nevertheless, several of the arguments in Aufbau (Carnap 2003) were criticised, and Carnap himself abandoned them (Hacking 1983). However, his preoccupation with the construction of logical sentences and a logical language remained the same. In his book Logische Syntax der Sprache, published in 1934, he defined pure syntax as follows: Pure syntax is concerned with the possible arrangements, without reference either to the nature of the things which constitute the various elements, or to the question as to which of the possible arrangements of these elements are anywhere actually realized. (Carnap 2001, p. 6) Furthermore, he stated: The logic of science (logical methodology) is nothing else than the syntax of the language of science. (Carnap 2001, p. 7) The argument in Carnap’s book is that there are several, logical ways of constructing a logical syntax, and furthermore, that we can not say that one is better than the others.118 This argument was further developed in his chapter ‘Foundations for logic and mathematics’ (Carnap 1938), in which he discussed the parallel developments, within mathematics, of logicism (Russell/Frege), intuitionism (Brouwer), and formalism (Hilbert)119 as parallel and consistent language systems or metalanguages. Subsequently, he formulated the Principle of Tolerance,120 according to which ‘no language is inherently definitive or “correct”; there is no logical “reality” for language to “correspond to” ’ (Carus 2007, p. 36). In his book An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Carnap maintained that inductive conclusions are never certain, and that conclusions only have a certain degree of probability: ‘Inductive logic tells us how to calculate the value of this probability’ (Carnap 2015, p. 20). The Vienna Circle, logical positivism, and logical empiricism can be seen as part of a discourse that evolved between 1920 and the mid-1930s. By the late 1930s, many of the participants in the discourse had left Austria, due to the hostile political climate, and many of them ended up either in Britain or in the USA. Moritz Schlick, the initiator of the circle, was killed by an insane student in 1936, and even that homicide was interpreted politically. However, the international

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series of Congresses for the Unity of Science continued until 1941. The final one was held in Chicago, USA.121 By being held in the USA, that congress bridged the relation to American pragmatism. The book series The International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science, edited by Carnap, comprised 19 monographs in total, published between 1938 and 1969, and included Thomas S. Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970), which was published in 1962 (Stadler 2007). One can argue that logical positivism and logical empiricism became diluted by their merger with pragmatism. However, as Steve Fuller (2003) argues, the inflow of highly schooled philosophers from central Europe to the USA also implied that pragmatism became upgraded and was induced with a much-needed formalism and philosophical content. At the same time, the change probably implied that the divide between continental philosophy and analytical philosophy widened as the interaction and debate between them was discontinued, thus leading to the divide in science that emerged after World War II.

3.3 Post-positivism 3.3.1  The logic of scientific discovery After World War II, logical empiricism and pragmatism gradually developed jointly into post-positivism. A  key figure in meditating this development was the American analytical philosopher Willard Quine (1908–2000). Quine argued that philosophical problems had to be solved with reference both to their logical content and to their reference to real world. Thus, he rejected the analyticalsynthetic distinction. The rejection was inherent in his notions of holism and ­natural language (Quine 1980). Furthermore, Quine questioned whether the logic of language allowed, in an analytical sense, for a complete and comprehensive definition of scientific problems. His answer was emphatically, no. In his article ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’, Quine argued: The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. (Quine 1951, p. 39) Quine discussed two of the dogmas that had been made within logical positivism: that of distinguishing analytical statements (that are only logical) from synthetical statements (that imply meaning or correspondence with facts), and that of reduction of statements to facts. He argued that none of them could satisfy logical

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criteria. Analytical statements cannot be distinguished from synthetic statements, merely because the words we use in analytical statements are developed (given meaning) from our experience. Furthermore, Quine argued that all theories were insufficiently supported by empirical data. No empirical investigation will ever cover all possible events or all possible data, and no definition of a problem will guarantee that all relevant factors are considered. Quine argued further that all propositions or statements could be revised, and all hypotheses in science were underdetermined. He referred to and updated the thesis originally put forward by French physicist Pierre Duhem, that no hypothesis can include enough background information in order to be comprehensive in determining all conditions for its confirmation. The thesis has since become known as the Duhem–Quine thesis. Similarly, Quine argued that controversies about ontology could not be solved through logic alone. In fact, knowledge development in science moves along two parallel traditions, one empirical and one logical. Quine wrote: Here we have two competing schemes, a phenomenalistic one and a physical. Which should prevail? Each has its advantages; each has its special simplicity in its own way. Each, I suggest, deserves to be developed. Each, may be said, indeed, to be fundamental, though in different senses: one is epistemologically, the other physically, fundamental. (Quine 1980, p. 17) What might be the contribution of each of these arguments for the philosophy of science? Hans-Johan Glock states: The result of Quine’s assimilation of the analytic and synthetic, the a priori and the empirical, is a thoroughgoing naturalism. Philosophy is a branch of, or continuous of, natural science (metaphilosophical naturalism). There is no genuine knowledge outside natural science (epistemological naturalism), and that later provides the sole standard for what is real (ontological naturalism). The naturalistic conception of knowledge in turn requires a new, ‘naturalised epistemology’. Like traditional epistemology, this novel discipline investigates the relationship between beliefs and the empirical evidence for them. Yet, it does so not by providing an a priori ‘rational construction’ (a la Carnap) of the reasons we have for accepting scientific theories, but through a scientific investigation – behaviourist psychology or neuropsychology – of what causes us to adopt them. In the wake of Quine, this naturalistic conception of philosophy has achieved the status of orthodoxy, especial in the USA. (Glock 2008, p. 46) I have shown that logical empiricists had acknowledged incompleteness of scientific methods, even though they maintained the ambition of confirmation.122 Carnap had argued that scientific language is an analytical construction. His ambition,

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in line with analytical philosophers, had been to show that language can be a logical structure without any real content and without any moral content, and consequently that challenges within language relate to its internal consistency and logic, not to any real-world reference. Quine was a naturalist, but even though he believed in the pluralist argument, he objected to Carnap’s principles of tolerance (Richardson & Isaacson 1994). In a dispute over these principles, Quine argued, in line with what we referred earlier, against the idea that first-order logic, such as mathematics, was an analytical a priori logic that defined the context for propositions – the ‘analytical-synthetic distinction’. Natural language acquires meaning precisely because it refers to reality already. For example, in order for the sentence ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ to be understood at all, it has to have some reference to empirical reality. Karl Popper did not object to the arguments for natural language, but he disagreed with Quine. Popper was not a member of the Vienna Circle, but he had communicated with many of its members and had written his doctoral thesis Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft in 1934123 as an argument against induction, and thereby against some of the core arguments in the circle. He wrote: The theory to be developed in the following pages stands directly opposed to all attempts to operate with the ideas of inductive logic. (Popper 1976, p. 30) However, there are still reasons why Popper was later seen as a positivist and as associated with the Vienna Circle. First, Popper was searching for the logical foundation of science. It follows that he believed in the unity of science. Second, he was normally be seen as a realist,124 even though he called his position critical rationalism. Third, he shared with members of the Vienna Circle the intention that science should aim at improving society, even though he denounced the socialist arguments of Neurath and positioned himself as a political liberal. According to Steve Fuller (2003), there are four main dimensions in Popper’s philosophy, which are normally seen as separate but should be seen as a consistent whole: his dialectical thinking (anti-essentialism), his anti-inductivism, his individualism (anti-holism), and his liberalism (antiauthoritarianism).125 Popper engaged in the debate on how to demarcate science from other kinds of knowledge: Since I reject inductive logic, I must also reject all these attempts to solve the problem of demarcation. With this rejection, the problem of demarcation gains in importance for the present inquiry. Finding an acceptable criterion of demarcation must be a crucial task for any epistemology which does not accept inductive logic. (Popper 1976, p. 35) Popper suggested falsification as an alternative to the logical positivist argument. The demarcation problem was a central issue for logical positivists, and Carnap

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had initiated the discussion by talking about pseudo-problems in science. Pseudoproblems are problems that cannot be meaningfully treated by applying scientific methods. For Carnap, they were problems that referred to metaphysics – questions related to the real nature of the world beyond our experience and sensing (Carnap 2003). Popper argued that, as a consequence of his rejection of inductive thinking, he would have to reject Carnap’s demarcation principle and hence his definition of pseudo-problems in science.126 Furthermore, Popper did not support Carnap’s avoidance of metaphysics in scientific language. According to Popper, metaphysical speculations have played an important part in advising science by suggesting new hypotheses that could be tested (Popper 1972). He argued that the hypotheticodeductive method and the principle of falsification were sufficient to sort out good from bad theories, and that new hypotheses should address shortcomings in existing theories. In the introduction to Conjunctures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Popper wrote: The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which errors are systematically criticised and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there. In most other fields of human endeavour there is change, but rarely progress (unless we adopt a very narrow view of our possible aims in life); for almost every gain is balanced, or more than balanced, by some loss. And in most fields, we do not even know how to evaluate change. (Popper 1972, p. 216) This optimistic view by Popper on behalf of science (and a gloomy view on behalf of society) was based on his understanding of what science is and how science advances. In short, even though Popper had a pluralistic liberal attitude to scientific development, he still had a very restricted opinion of what science could form knowledge about. For Popper, science was an evolutionary process of conjectures and refutations (Popper 1972). He did not subscribe to any procedures for conjectures.127 His pluralist argument allowed for enormous freedom to propose new conjectures. Karl Popper was a realist, but still he agreed with Carnap on the probabilistic and pluralistic nature of science. Popper criticised essentialism on the one hand, and on the other hand what could be called relativism or subjectivism (instrumentalism) in science (Popper 1972, p. 103). For him, subjectivism became a way of manipulating scientific thinking. The most readily apparent form of subjectivism is induction: the idea that one can conclude things from one’s subjective perception of the world.128 Popper’s attack on the discourse of truth was directed against the platonic idea of truth as justified truth beliefs (Popper 1979, p. 6). The key element is belief,

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which places truth in the subjective realm. The problem with the idea of true beliefs is that one can claim that anything can be believed and thus use that argument to manipulate knowledge. We make false inferences if we confirm things based on subjective sensation, and when we apply coherence as a form of justification, since we know that assumptions can give accurate predictions, even if they are based on the wrong premises. However, Popper was not alone in his critique of coherence: Some extreme idealists and positivists, who identify truth and justification, may harbour such a view. If one has a coherence theory of truth and also a coherence theory of justification, for example, then one may simply count as knowledge whatever beliefs are generated by whatever procedures turn out to embody justification; if it was supposed to be a sheer fact that we ought to follow such procedures, if there were no further goal in mind, this would be a deontological position in my sense. (Sartwell 1992, p. 170) Can we rather formulate an objective theory of truth, meaning one that is not based on beliefs? The critique of correspondence theory, of how we can know that words, concepts, and sentences give a meaningful description of an observed phenomenon, is relevant for induction. In addition to the problem of how language corresponds to reality, there are internal reference problems in language, such as the insufficiency of language for solving its internal paradoxes. 3.3.2  Towards critical rationalism We have seen how Wittgenstein inspired the logical positivist discussion with his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 2007). Before and after World War II, Wittgenstein had increasingly denounced his original ideas about language, and had started arguing for a different way of understanding of how we use language, how language is a game, and how it influences the way we see the world. This approach was outlined in the texts that were published posthumously, in particular Philosophische Untersuchungen.129 In the first part of that book, Wittgenstein introduced the concept of language game: The word ‘language-game’ is used here to emphasise the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life. (Wittgenstein 2009, p. 15) Wittgenstein extensively discussed what it is possible to communicate through language, as our subjective understanding and perception differ. What does a word really mean, and from where does it get meaning? His point was that we do not share each other’s minds, and therefore we cannot know what a word is

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intended to mean when it is spoken by another person. For example, if I exclaim ‘I have pain!’, what other people might hear will not concern my actual feeling of my pain but their imagination of my pain based on their own experience. What, then, makes words have common meaning? According to Wittgenstein, it is not our perception of the world, but our shared practice. Only when words relate to a common shared practice, a ‘form of life’, can we be sure that we have a common understanding or sense of what the words mean. Peter Munz states: Wittgenstein’s theory of communal practiced language games amount to a total rejection of his Tractatus. According to the former theory, meanings are determined by communal usage; according to the latter, meanings depend on direct reference to reality. (Munz 2004, p. 9) Thus, with the concept of language games, Wittgenstein initiated the communicative turn in philosophy.130 While the linguistic turn had focused on the meaning of words, the inherent logic in propositions, and the foundation of language, the communicative turn changed the focus to linguistic practice. It also marked a shift away from the idea a formal language that Carnap and neo-positivists had discussed. Frank Ramsey – the young scholar who had taken the job of translating Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus from German to English, and who had been in close dialogue with Wittgenstein in the following years – persuaded Wittgenstein to consider the arguments of pragmatism (Misak 2020). In a paper titled ‘Facts and propositions’ (Ramsey 1990b, pp.  34–51) that was first published in 1927, Ramsey wrote: My pragmatism is derived from Mr Russell; and is, of course, very vague and undeveloped. The essence of pragmatism I take to be this, that the meaning of a sentences to be defined by the references of the actions to which assertion it would lead, or, more vaguely still, by its possible causes and effects. Of this I feel certain, but of nothing more definite. (Ramsey 1990b, p. 51) Ramsey argued that from the perspective of analytical philosophy, pragmatism could overcome the dualism between the meaning or sense of a proposition, which relates to the ideas or thoughts we have in the mind, and the reference to a proposition, which refers to the facts it describes. The sentence ‘Julius Caesar was murdered’ is a proposition with a truth condition: whether or not Julius Caesar in fact was murdered. The internal reference relates to what is the meaning of the sentence. In logical terms, the sentence ‘Julius Caesar died quietly in his bed’ is of more or less the same logical form as the one about him having been murdered. Pragmatism implies that when one forms meaning (i.e. sense) about the death of Julius Caesar, one refers to the actual historical person Julius Caesar, not to an

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empty concept. Thus, the sense has a reference. More generally, Ramsey argued that philosophy had to be useful: Philosophy must be of some use, and we must take it seriously; it must clear our thoughts and so our actions. Or else it is a disposition we have to check, and an inquiry to see that this is so; i.e. the chief position of philosophy is nonsense. And again, we must take seriously that it is nonsense, and not pretend, as Wittgenstein does, that it is important nonsense! (Ramsey 1990a, p. 1) The development of Wittgenstein’s thinking did not follow exactly the same path as Ramsey’s. The turn in his thinking from the 1930s onwards inspired a renewed study of how language works. The changes that led to that development have been referred to as having occurred at a particular event and time, namely March 1928, when the Dutch mathematician Luitzen E.J. Brouwer (1881–1966) went to Vienna to deliver some guest lectures. Upon recommendation from Ramsey, Wittgenstein attended the lectures. Ray Monk writes: It would be wrong to infer . . . that Wittgenstein underwent a sudden conversion to Brouwerian intuitionism – although there can be no doubt that hearing Brouwer was a tremendous stimulus to him and may well have planted a seed that developed during the following years. (Monk 1991, p. 249) Wittgenstein increasingly saw language from the perspective of being a human and social creation: language is a game (or games), a rule-following activity, and one that acquires meaning from practice. This change of perspective inspired Wittgenstein’s student Stephen Toulmin (1922–2009), who in his book The Philosophy of Science argued for what scientists do, and not for philosophising on issues that have no practical implication for how everyday science happens (Toulmin 1953). He argued that science was not concerned with essential issues, but with practical problem solving. This thinking did not necessarily mark a fundamental break with positivism.131 Theories are not absolutely right (or wrong), they are more like maps (cf. Toulmin 1953, p. 95). They are useful guides to reality. Nobody expects a map to be the same as reality. Furthermore, in his book, The Uses of Argument, published in 1958, Toulmin observed that there is no one way that science argues (Toulmin 2008). Rather, different sciences have different ways of arguing, and thus they represent different practices and ways of reasoning (language games). Wittgenstein inspired the practical, communicative turn, but in parallel, he was also concerned with fundamental philosophical questions, even though he claimed that there were no philosophical questions.132 In the second part of his book Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 2009), readers can find the often-quoted ‘duck-rabbit argument’. Based on a drawing that might indicate both a rabbit and duck, Wittgenstein reflected on how our sense impressions can be inconclusive

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and consequently cannot provide solutions to questions about the meaning of the drawing. Wittgenstein used the term family resemblance when many words can point in the same direction, and they acquire meaning within a language game. Wittgenstein had argued in Philosophical Investigations that there were unlimited amounts of language games (Wittgenstein 2009). A language game is defined by the communication in the game. Thus, we have games in the form of discussions, games in the form of negotiations, games in the form of teaching and learning, and games in the form of coordinating actions, to mention some. For example, in the case of two bricklayers who co-ordinate their actions – one throwing the brick to the second, who then puts the brick in place – the first bricklayer might simply exclaim ‘Here it is!’ or even ‘Uh!’ to signal that he (or she) is throwing the brick to the other bricklayer. By contrast, developing quantum physics requires a rather complex language game. British philosopher John Austin (1911–1960) made the argument that there are a few generic types of what he called performative utterances. In a lecture he gave at Harvard University in 1955 and that was published posthumously as How to Do Things With Words (Austin 1962), he presented his theory of locutionary acts. He argued that there are basically only two kinds of speech acts: illocutionary and perlocutionary. While illocutionary acts are directed towards meaning and understanding, perlocutionary acts are directed towards claiming and convicting. A single sentence might contain both types of acts, as one might both describe and prescribe something at the same time.133 The two types of acts were elaborated upon by the American philosopher John Searle (b. 1932) in his book Speech Acts (Searle 1969).134 The discussion here leads us back to the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper and his criticism of Wittgenstein, which was manifested in one of the more dramatic episodes in the history of philosophy.135 The encounter happened on 25 October 1946 at the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge University. Wittgenstein chaired the meetings at the club, and Popper was invited to give a lecture titled ‘Are There Philosophical Problems?’ Peter Munz, who was present at the meeting, stated: Wittgenstein and Popper sat by the fire, facing each other. In the in another armchair, facing the fire, there was Bertrand Russell, smoking a pipe, Popper on his left, Wittgenstein on his right. Popper began to say that although he had been invited to name a puzzle, he himself believed that there were genuine philosophical problems, and that he preferred to talk about genuine problems rather than waste time puzzling about puzzles. Wittgenstein stared to frown and interrupted: ‘Name a problem!’ He was accustomed to being able to demonstrate that any problem was really a puzzle and would not have happened to be a problem if correct language had been used. Popper was not intimidated and replied, unperturbed: ‘For example the problem of “induction”.’ Wittgenstein got excited and retorted: ‘What do you mean by “induction”?’ Instead of waiting for the answer, he gave physical expression of his irritation

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by grasping the poker that was in the fire and gesticulated it in front of Popper’s face, or, at least near enough to Popper’s face to make Russell take his pipe out of his mouth and say in his scratchy voice: ‘Wittgenstein, put down this poker at once.’ Wittgenstein had to admit the justice of Russell’s command. He replaced the poker, but almost immediately got up and walked out of the room, slamming the door. (Munz 2004, p. 67) The episode, commonly referred to as ‘Wittgenstein’s poker’,136 illustrates a deep divide in philosophy of science, which Karl Popper was later to articulate. Popper denounced Wittgenstein’s claims that all philosophical problems were problems of language.137 He also rejected the idea that we can only know reality through language, and that we can unwind our thinking back to some original point.138 For Popper, the insight of Alfred Tarski of how language has both a synthetic dimension and a semantic dimension was instructive.139 In his article ‘The semantic conception of truth’, Alfred Tarski stated: Thus, if the definition of truth is to conform to our conception, it must imply the following equivalence: The sentence ‘snow is white’ is true if, and only if, snow is white. Let me point out that the phrase ‘snow is white’ occurs on the left side of this equivalence in quotation marks, and on the right without quotation marks. On the right side we have the sentence itself, and on the left the name of the sentence. (Tarski 1944, p. 343) Tarski’s argument was that identifying semantically that a word or statement (e.g. ‘snow is white’) could correspond to a fact (e.g. that the snow really is white) created adequate conditions for a theory of truth (Popper 1979, p. 44). Thus, it gives us a purely objective (in the sense of not subjective) definition of correspondence truth. Furthermore, Tarski’s argument was that we need a precise language to make such a claim. Therefore, he proposed a metalanguage that could help us to make precise formulations of relations between language and reality.140 Popper argued that if we critically test whether our theory corresponds to facts and can critically adjust (falsify) the theory to make it more advanced, so that it corresponds more closely to facts, and if this is an ongoing (scientific) process, then we will be on the track to truth. However, more importantly, this semantic (analytical) argument allows us to say something about the relative goodness (and thus truthfulness) of science’s claim. Therefore, Popper argued that the following claims were in accordance with Tarski’s argument. Let us assume that we have two statements with claims to truth: t1 and t2 (the lower case letter indicates that these are not claims to absolute truth, meaning the Truth, but truth claims as assertions of truth). Then, following Popper (1979, p. 33), we can argue that t2

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corresponds more to truth than t1 if one or more of the following six conditions are true: 1. t2 makes more precise assertions than t1, and these more precise assertions stand up to more precise tests 2. t2 takes account of, and explains, more facts than t1 (which will include for example the aforementioned case, that, other things being equal, t2’s assertions are more precise) 3. t2 describes and explains the facts in more detail than t1 4. t2 passes tests that t1 fails to pass 5. t2 has suggested new experimental tests, not considered before t2 was formulated (and not suggested by t1, and possibly not applicable to t1), and t2 has passed these tests 6. t2 has unified or connected various hitherto unrelated problems. The idea of t2 overruling t1 is proposed theoretically and there is no fixed procedure for how to do hypothetical deduction. Popper argued that the source of the new claim t2 can come from anywhere, which means there is no procedure or methodology for proposing new hypotheses. According to Popper, this situation gives science its pluralistic character. However, t2 has to meet at least one of the criteria listed earlier (i.e. to be a better hypothesis than the established t1), and therefore progress in science happens within scientific discourse. Thus, Popper defended the term critical rationalism.141 According to Popper, coherence, and pragmatic and instrumentalist theories were based on the idea that truth is justified beliefs (Popper 1979, p.  25), and they all mistook consistency, knowledge, or usefulness for truth. Although agreeing with the criticism of essentialism, he still disagreed with relativists. Popper saw logical positivism as a form of fundamentalism, which he rejected, while at the same time, he argued for objectivity of knowledge. His theory of objective knowledge refers to three worlds: the individual world of subjective experiences, the physical world of objects, and the social world of meaning (Popper 1979, p. 106).142 Popper wrote about the belief philosophers who related everything to the subjective world, against which is often presented the second world, the physical world. However, he wanted to place knowledge in what he called the third world; it could be thought of as the social world, but for Popper it was the world of human products, such as books, ideas, and concepts. Popper’s argument for the growth and objectivity of scientific knowledge should be read against the background described earlier. He argued that the reason for science to replace a theory with a new theory is when the new one gives a better description of the facts or covers more facts than the original one through a hypothetical-deductive process. In Popper’s view, the hypothetical-deductive model does not give us conformation, but it has the potential to refute theories. We can talk about degrees of falsification, in the sense that a higher degree of falsification implies a more

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advanced explanation of something, by virtue of the fact that we remove false hypotheses. In that way, science makes progress. Also, Popper was aware that purely speculative or metaphysical statements could, in principle, be falsifiable. He therefore also included the criteria that a theory had to be testable. Popper’s theory of falsification, and hence his theory of demarcation for science, has been criticised. Nicholas Maxwell (1972) argues that although he is sympathetic towards Popper’s ambitions, there are flaws in the logic of Popper’s argument because it does not give us any instructions on how to do falsification in a way that would give us better theories. A similar critique is found in the work of Richard Jeffrey (Jeffrey 1975). The criticism can be formulated in the following, non-technical way. Given that Popper rejected induction, empirical evidence is not seen as sufficient to verify a theory or thesis. There are two reasons for this: (1) any confirmation cannot rule about disconfirmation (the white swan argument); (2) the conditions that have to be take into account in order to verify a theory can never be comprehensively stated (the Duhem–Quine thesis). For Popper, the problem was that if the two arguments were good, how could a theory be falsified empirically? If empirical data are to be used to falsify a theory, true empirical data will be needed. However, if the data are true, they will also be true in an inductive process. Thus, the argument against induction backfires on falsification. A more significant problem is as follows. Hypothesis testing follows the form of a valid deductive scheme. The scheme implies that one can both confirm and falsify a hypothesis. The Duhem-Quine thesis implies that hypotheses are not tested in isolation. Popper accepted falsified observations. However, what if the one factor that goes against a hypothesis is wrong? Popper was unclear on what he would do in such cases. Thus, there might be reasons to be more sceptical towards disconfirmation of some hypotheses than of others. Popper did not offer any clear advice in this regard. Popper’s discussion has to be seen against the background of his experience of the early-20th-century scientific debate. He positioned himself against some of the thinking of the Vienna Circle, not least against Rudolf Carnap. Both Popper and Carnap agreed that there was a need for criteria on what constitutes good science, but they disagreed on what those criteria should be: Carnap thought it is important to make the distinction in terms of language, while Popper thought that the study of meanings is irrelevant to the understanding of science. (Hacking 1983, p. 3) It follows that, for Carnap, scientific statements should in principle have been verifiable, while Popper argued that was sufficient that such statements were falsifiable. As Hacking observes, The difference here betrays a deeper one. Carnap’s verification is from the bottom up: make observation and see how they add up to confirm or verify

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a more general statement. Popper’s falsification is from the top down. First form a theoretical conjecture, and then deduce consequences and test to see if they are true. (Hacking 1983, p. 3) The disagreement discloses the fact that there were several similarities and a lot of common ground between the two thinkers. Both agreed that there was a sharp distinction between observation and theory, and hence between the context of the discovery and the context of justification. Also, both thinkers believed that science in general was cumulative, and that there was growth of knowledge. Additionally, as Hacking observes, Both think that science has a pretty tight deductive structure. Both hold that scientific terminology is or ought to be rather precise. Both believed in the unity of science. (Hacking 1983, p. 3) In the next section of this chapter, I  show that these beliefs were attacked by Thomas Kuhn.143 By arguing the way he did, Popper (and to some extent Carnap) omitted questions related to everyday social and human issues, as he did not consider them scientific. Even though Popper, as a contributor to the dispute on positivism,144 discussed social science in particular, and argued how it could be perceived within his philosophical thinking,145 very few questions can be empirically tested in practice in the scientific way to which Popper referred.146 Furthermore, in line with Popper’s falsification criteria for demarcating science, only a few theories are really capable of being falsified, such as Newton’s theory of gravity, James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, Einstein’s theory of relativity, Dimitri Mendeleev’s periodic table, the theory of quantum mechanics, and Darwin’s theory of evolution (Grundmann & Stehr 2012), and they are most likely to be found within natural science. 3.3.3  The practical turn Ian Hacking makes the argument that a philosophy of natural science can be written in two different ways: as a discussion about scientific theories and their philosophical foundation, what he calls representation, or as a discussion about the scientific practice, which he calls intervention (Hacking 1983). Scientific realism is about both representation (making theories) and interventions (making experiments that test the theories). Theories represent the epistemological dimension: how we form ideas about the world; while interventions represent the ontological dimension; and whether reality really is as we think it is. Hacking is sceptical about this divide, which he argues is also found in the work of Kuhn. Nevertheless, Kuhn played an important role in shifting the philosophy of science debate from representation to intervention.

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In order to understand how scientists work, and hence how scientific results are produced, there is a need to understand the micro-sociological processes within scientific communities (Kuhn 2000). It can be demonstrated that the development of science is far more a result of those processes than any reference to abstract ‘search for truth’. As Hacking observes, when contrasting Kuhn, the positions of Carnap and Popper, Kuhn holds: There is no sharp distinction between observation and theory. Science is not cumulative. A  live science does not have a tight deductive structure. Living scientific concepts are not in particular precise. Methodological unit for science is false: there are lots of disconnected tools used for various kinds of inquiry. (Hacking 1983, p. 6) Thus, science is a plural practice and a social phenomenon. Pragmatism implies a new way of looking, not only at philosophy but also at the foundation of science. Richard McKay Rorty wrote the following in the late 1970s: In recent years, debates about the possibility of epistemology as opposed to heuristics have gained a new concreteness as a result of the work of T. S. Kuhn. His Structure of Scientific Revolutions owed something to Wittgenstein’s criticism of standard epistemology, but it brought those criticisms to bear on received option in a fresh way. (Rorty 1979, p. 322) Kuhn called his own approach the historical philosophy of science (Kuhn 2000, p. 95). Hacking contrasts Kuhn’s approach with the following concepts and traditional image of science (Hacking 2004, pp. 1–2). Science tries to investigate the real world (realism). It has clear ideas about its demarcation. Science is cumulative, and there is an observation-theory distinction. Science has philosophical foundations, theories have deductive structure, and scientific concepts are to some extent precise. There is a context of justification, a context of discovery, and a unity of science. Against this, Kuhn argued that there was normal science and scientific revolutions (Kuhn 2000, p. 13). The development in science is not cumulative. Different approaches to science are incommensurable, as science happens within paradigms. Changes might occur as sudden shifts, but not as a natural evolution (Hacking 2004, pp. 2–3). Kuhn argued that the history of science did not support the idea that science is constantly progressing, even if over time there is an evolution in science. Rather, most science is done within normal science that establishes a set of procedures and rules (lexicons) that form a paradigm. Progress in science normally happens when somebody breaks with an existing paradigm and forms a new one. Thus, there is normal science and scientific revolutions. In his book The Road since Structure, Kuhn wrote: I scarcely know a foundationalist anymore. But for me, this way of abandoning foundationalism has a further consequence which, though widely

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discussed, is by no mean widely and fully accepted. The discussions I have in mind usually proceed under the rubric of the rationality or the relativity of truth claims, but these labels misdirect attention. Though both rationality and relativism are somehow implicated, what is fundamentally at stake is rather the correspondence theory of truth, the notion that the goal, when evaluating scientific laws or theories, is to determine whether or not they correspond to an external, mind-independent world. It is that notion, whether in absolute or probabilistic form, that I’m persuaded must vanish together with foundationalism. What replaces it will still require a strong conception of truth, but not, except in the most trivial sense, correspondence truth. (Kuhn 2000, p. 95) Thus, 30 years after the publication of his seminal thesis, Kuhn argued that his aim had been to vindicate truth. Even though he rejected an overall idea of progress in science, he accepted the idea that there was some form of evolution in science: As time goes on, however, one notices that the new shoot seldom or never gets assimilated into either of its parents. Instead, it becomes one more separate speciality, gradually acquiring its own specialists’ journals, a new professional society, and often also new university chairs, laboratories, and even departments. Over time a diagram of evolution of scientific fields, specialities, and sub specialities comes to look strictly like a layman’s diagram of biological evolutionary tree. Each of these fields has a distinct lexicon, though the differences are local, occurring only here and there. There is no lingua franca capable of expressing, in its entirety, the content of them all or even of any pairs. (Kuhn 2000, pp. 97–98) Thus, evolution does not add up to any greater or lesser whole, as the different sciences and their different knowledge forms cannot be compared. Unity of science breaks down because there does not exist one scale for evaluating science. On this incommensurability, Kuhn wrote: Lexical diversity and the principle limit it imposes on communication may be the isolating mechanism required for the development of knowledge. Very likely it is the specialisation consequent on lexical diversity that permits the sciences, viewed collectively, to solve puzzles posed by a wider range of natural phenomenon that lexical homogenous science could achieve. (Kuhn 2000, p. 99) Kuhn defined the term lexical as follows: What I have been calling a lexical taxonomy might, that is, better be called conceptual scheme, where the ‘very notion’ of a conceptual scheme is not that of a set of beliefs but of a particular operation mode of mental module

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prerequisites to have beliefs, a mode that at once supplies and bounds the set of beliefs it is possible to conceive. (Kuhn 2000, p. 94) In arguing this way, Kuhn supported both pluralism and methodological anarchy, and his argument was against attempts at a unity of science.147 However, at the same time, this specialisation in the form of different sciences posed some problems related to dialogue within the scientific community, and could be a way of explaining science wars.148 For example, what does a non-correspondent truth look like, and will the different language games in the different paradigms within science undermine the quest for truth? Kuhn argued that this would not be the case: In one form or another, the rules of the true/false game are thus universal for all human communities. But the result of applying those rules varies from one speech community to the next. In discussion between members of communities with different structured lexicons, assertability and evidence play the same role for both only in areas (there are always a great many) where the two lexicons are congruent. (Kuhn 2000, p. 100) Kuhn was a committed realist: First, the world is not invented or constructed. The creatures to whom this responsibility is imputed, in fact, find the world already in place, its rudiments at their birth and its increasing full actuality during their educational socialisation, a socialisation in which examples of the way the world is play an essential part. (Kuhn 2000, p. 101) Kuhn argued that his project was not to discuss the truth about the world: The ways to being-in-the-world which a lexicon provides are not candidates for true/false. (Kuhn 2000, p. 104) By making a historical analysis of science, what Kuhn (1970) showed is what at one time was regarded as truth and at other times was overthrown. This in itself is not surprising, as normal science is a type of scientific activity that happens within a framework of accepted truths. However, scientific revolutions might overthrow such truths. Put differently, any normal scientific activity happens within a paradigm, and as there are paradigms, there are also competing paradigms. Kuhn’s approach led to new divides in the philosophy of science.149 However, is that a discussion that is only internal to science? With regard to a discussion of the unity of science versus pluralism, it is important to distinguish between a

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discussion that is internal to science and a discussion about the role of science in society. It could be argued that Quine and Kuhn were concerned with the former, while Popper was concerned with the latter. In both cases, the turn to practice implied an increased focus on the relation between science, the organisation of science, and society. Still, Popper, and probably also Quine,150 believed in some sort of unity of science. If they were pluralists, they still believed in some basic principles that guide science (Popper) or simply the negation of such principles, replaced by naturalism (Quine). On this, Kuhn explicitly argued that science was a non-confirmative bundle of practices. However, the argument does not imply that there are no longer philosophical questions involved, but it does imply that the philosophical issues change.

Notes

1 2 3 4

See Ladyman (2002) and Godfrey-Smith (2003). See Hacking (1983). See Chapter 2.2.2. The book History of Inductive Science by William Whewell was published in 1837. In the book, Whewell used the term inductive science as a general term. Today, it is called natural science. Whewell traced the roots of inductive science to Ancient Greece and gave Bacon credit for renewing the tradition. 5 The concept of truth is problematic, as shown later in this chapter, in Chapter 3.2.3. Given that our perception of the world comes from sensation, as empiricists claim, what science gives us is solid knowledge, but not truth in a metaphysical sense. 6 See Chapter 5.1.3. 7 Douglas Walton (1999, p. 386) stated: ‘The idols are described by Bacon as “anticipations” that are “powerful in producing unanimity” because they are “of familiar occurrence” and “immediately hit the understanding and satisfy the imagination”.’ 8 Today, the term echo chamber could be used. 9 For the same reason, the British scholar Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) rejected the Roman idea of some superficial principles that should govern human life, so-called ‘natural law’. Law is not given by God or some supreme authority, but by human beings. At the same time, nature imposes some ‘laws’ on us, in the sense that certain things in our lives have to comply with the forces of nature. In this respect, Hobbes reinterpreted the idea of natural law in the form of nature’s law. 10 Bacon could be interpreted as concerned with the metaphysical questions of truth, namely how the unperceived, can be confirmed by our perception. 11 It should be mentioned that this legacy has been contested (Cohen 1926). 12 See Chapter 4. 13 Strictly speaking, phenomenalism is an anti-realist position that holds that we can only conceive the world as it appears to us, and hence we cannot make claims about how it is in itself. Still, we can also use the term more generally, as the basis of our perception is sensation. 14 It could be termed Locke’s dilemma, as I elaborate later in this section. 15 As I show in Chapter 4, the thought was at the heart of the later development in idealist philosophy. 16 Later in this chapter, I show that logical positivist, which embraced Locke’s thinking of sensation, rejected his concept of ideas (Chapter 3.2.2). In Chapter 4, I show that Locke’s thinking on ideas, and the unsolved dilemmas it represented, was a basis for the discussions by Brentano and Husserl that led to phenomenology (Chapter 4.3.1).

106  The realist track towards logical empiricism 17 It could be speculated if Hans Christian Andersen drew inspiration from the quotation for his story The Emperor’s New Clothes, or perhaps the saying that one can learn the truth from small children and drunk people is really an old idea. 18 Possibly, this was a response to Bacon’s idols. 19 Anthony Douglas Woozley (1977) seems to think so, and that it thereby undermines Locke’s phenomenalism. 20 The question raised here is whether claims about the external world can be justified. It can be called Locke’s dilemma. 21 This kind of problem was discussed by Wittgenstein as part of the more general selfreference problem in philosophy (Wittgenstein 2007). I have referred the self-reference problem in the discussion of Locke and Russell in Chapter  3.2.1, and the problem has been the subject of analytical philosophy. I  will later argue that the dualism of mind avoids this problem (Chapter 4.1.3). As Alfred Jules Ayer wrote with reference to Immanuel Kant, ‘In Kant’s system, the transcendental ego stands outside this world. Its labours make our experiences possible, but because it is not a possible object of experience, it is not itself in space or time’ (Ayer 1990, p. 119). If one is inside the world, how can one see the world? 22 This could be formulated as follows: if the only source of knowledge is experience, and the only justification of the source of knowledge is also experienced, there is a self-reference problem. 23 To illustrate Berkeley’s argument, take as an example that I  and my neighbour are discussing my cat, and my neighbour makes the comment that my cat is fat. I reply that it is not fat, it is normal. We decide to weigh the cat and find that its weight is 4.5 kg. We conduct an Internet search via Google and find that cats normally weigh between 3.6 kg and 4.5 kg. Therefore, I maintain that my cat is not fat, but my neighbour still argues that it is fat. However, weighing the cat would not bring us closer to reality, as the process of weighing and defining what is normal is as much a human invention as any other ideas that we might have. 24 He later criticised this work, which had not been very well received, and he wrote a new book Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, which was published in 1748 (Hume 1975). There has been much debate about the similarities and differences between the two books. 25 Table 2.3 in Chapter 2.2.3 is based on Hume’s concepts. 26 Hume accepted the distinction between moral science and natural science, but also believed that one can systematically understand human beings, that there is a science of man. He thought that moral science could develop methods that would be different from, but still similar to, natural sciences, thereby developing a true understanding of human beings and society (Levison 1974). 27 Let us assume that one enters a room. If there is a table in the room, how does one know it is a table? If one had never seen a table before, how could one know that it is a table? Furthermore, when leaving the room, one’s memory might still have a picture of the room, but now it is not sensed, it is only a thought (and in principle the same as a fantasy). How does one know that the room still exists? 28 Hume situated the problem of induction in A Treatise of Human Nature, as part of his wider discussion on the nature of causes and effects (Hume 1985, pp. 231–238). 29 A black swan was discovered in Australia in 1697. 30 It could be argued that the logical positivist tries to establish similar rigorous rules for induction to those for deduction (see Chapter 3.2.3). 31 Cf. F.A. Hayek (1967). I elaborate Hume’s argument in Chapter 5. 32 For a discussion, see Millican (2017). 33 Hume was alluding to what Karl Popper later called the uniformity principle (Popper 1972, p. 132).

The realist track towards logical empiricism  107 34 As I show later in this Chapter (3.2.1), Einstein referred to this when he was able to break away from the Newtonian universe and formulate his theory of relativity. 35 According to Popper, Russell made the same comment, as did Popper himself (Popper 1979). 36 It is not easy to define Naturalism. Ronald Giere suggested the following definition: ‘Naturalists insist that all aspects of the world can be accounted for naturalistically’ (Giere 2014, p. 254). 37 In Chapter 4.1.2. 38 See Table 5 in Chapter 2.2.3. 39 In Chapter 5.2.2 40 Cf. Karl Popper, as discussed in Chapter 4.3.2. 41 This is discussed in Chapter 4.3.2. 42 See Chapter 4.3.3. 43 For realists and philosophers within the empiricist tradition, this became one of the key obstacles they needed to pass. It was in some way an initial assumption for logical positivists. 44 Comte was born in the town of Montpellier, France, and grew up in the period after the French revolution. He developed his philosophy of positivism in the period 1830– 1840. In his later years, he became emotionally involved with a younger woman who died within two years. This changed his focus and he devoted the last years of his life to developing a positivistic religion for humanity. He lived in an apartment in Paris in the last part of his life and died in 1857. The apartment is now a museum dedicated to Comte. 45 See Paquette et al. (2017, p. 19), who write: ‘The form of government envisioned by the positivists was concerned with the transformation of the social environment instead of the direct regulation of social behaviours.’ 46 However, some might argue that hedonism and altruism are not opposites. 47 The two concepts, order and progress, inspired social reform in Brazil and they are written as a slogan on the Brazilian flag. 48 The law is also known as either Boyle’s law or Marriot’s law. It was confirmed by Robert Boyle in 1762, and it states that the absolute pressure and volume of a given mass of a confined gas are inversely proportional if the temperature remains unchanged within a closed system (Girill 1972). 49 The parallels are known as ‘social-functional theories’. 50 Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) formulated the principles of utilitarianism. He wrote: Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them to point out what we ought to do, as well as determine what we shall do. .  .  . By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have augmented or diminishes that happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness. (Bentham 1983, p. 65) Bentham’s slogan became ‘The greatest pleasure for the greatest number!’ 51 However, when it comes to Comte’s later thinking, Mill called it false and misleading. When he aligned with positivism, it was in relation to its epistemology. 52 For this reason, many (e.g. Peirce 2022) have regarded Mill as a sensationalist. 53 Even if we cannot rely on observations and even if continued observations do not confirm that there is no black swan, Mill still believed that, when done properly, induction was a good scientific approach that would provide knowledge through an interplay between logical and empirical elements.

108  The realist track towards logical empiricism 54 On this point, Karl Popper, with his falsification principle (Popper 1972), was close to Mill in his thinking. 55 Still there are discussions if Wittgenstein was an analytical philosopher. See Stadler (2023). 56 Although not a big issue, it is interesting that many references give the original publication date as 1922, even though David Stern (2007) argues that it was published in German in 1921, translated into English by C.K. Ogden and Frank Ramsey, and published in Great Britain in 1923. The reference I refer to in this chapter is Wittgenstein (2007). 57 See McKeon (1941), as cited in Chapter 1. 58 Stadler (2007) comments on the anti-Kantianism in analytical philosophy. Engler and Renn (2018) discuss how the new philosophy of the Vienna Circle represented the end of the Kantian influence in natural science. Heidelberger (2009) discusses (and questions) how radical the break with Kantianism was and argues for a continuation. 59 Following Searle (2001), one of Frege’s great achievements was to make logic something ‘in its own right’, thereby distancing it from the Kantian thinking of it as being some sort of ‘psychological state’. 60 This discussion of non-existing objects is known as the Russell-Meinong debate (J.F. Smith 1985). Russell’s reply was directed towards the Austrian physiologist Alexius Meinong (1853–1920). Smith states: ‘With his 1905 invention of the theory of descriptions, Russell believed he had simultaneously found a way to deal with apparent reference to nonexistents in ordinary grammar and a new analysis of classes’ (J.F. Smith 1985, p. 306). 61 This argument of denoting was a response to Frege. By ‘meaning’, Russell went beyond Frege’s idea that meaning is only reference, meaning, also implies recognition, which in a phonemics sense is grounded in our sensing of the world. 62 However, with the sentence, Wittgenstein had the intention to denounce the boundaries of our verbal knowledge. It is possible that this analytical argument by Russell might explain why Wittgenstein later argued that Russell had never understood him (Eilenberger 2020). 63 Another example of mathematical/logical paradoxes is the Banach – Tarski paradox: ‘A ball .  .  . can be decomposed into finitely many pieces which can be rearranged by rigid motions and reassembled to form two balls of the same size as the original’ (Dougherty & Foreman 1994, p. 75). 64 A parallel to this is the ancient myth of the paradox of the liar. The Polish-American philosopher Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) argued that such contradictions could be solved (Tarski 1944). He made this point by using as an example the anatomy of a liar, in which the contradiction is as follows: A person who is supposed to be a liar says ‘I am a liar.’ If, indeed, he (or she) is a liar, then his statement ‘I am a liar’ is a lie, which means he is not a liar. However, if he is not a liar, then he is lying in saying he is a liar. How can this paradox be avoided? According to Tarski, a language can be seen as a hierarchy, in which some part is at a higher level and can guide statements at a lower level. This implies that the first part of the paradox (that the person is a liar) is at a higher level than the second part (what the liar says). Since, at the higher level we know that the person is a liar, we should not pay much attention to what he (or she) says. An evaluation of this argument, but one that breaks the purely analytical analysis, was given by Saul Kripke, who argued that a truth statement has to be grounded in some description of reality (Kripke 1972): if we know that the person is a liar, what follows should not surprise us, because the person is not trustworthy, whatever he or she says. For a general discussion of ‘the liar problem’, see Murzi and Carrara (2015).

The realist track towards logical empiricism  109 65 The English translated editions are respectively On Sense and Reference (Frege 2003) and Concept and Object (Frege 1951). It should be noted that On Sense and Reference has sometimes translated with the title On Sense and Meaning. 66 Even though Russell rejected this distinction, I refer it because it also became a theme in phenomenology, as I will discuss with reference to Husserl in Chapter 4.1.1. 67 See the discussion in Chapter 4.1.2. 68 Psychologism has many definitions. Sober (1978, p.  166) writes: ‘ “Psychologism” denotes a family of views, all tending to downplay or deny distinctions between epistemology and logic on the one hand and psychology on the other.’ For a discussion of psychologism, see also Mohanty (2003). 69 Later in this book, in Chapter 4.3.1, I show that the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl rejected this idea. 70 Kripke later made the same argument in his book Naming and Necessity (Kripke 1980). 71 The British analytical philosopher Michael Dummett (1925–2011) argued that there is a realist and anti-realist version of analytical philosophy. Dummett called himself an anti-realist, while he argued that Russell and Frege were realists (Dummett 1982). 72 Although Whitehead and Russell had explained how to solve paradoxes and inconsistencies in mathematics, it should be mentioned that Kurt Gödel, a member of the Vienna Circle, later argued that the Russell and Whitehead solution did not work. This can be demonstrated by the incompleteness theorem. Hofstadter raises the following questions: ‘What, after Gödel, is mathematical truth? Indeed, what is truth at all? These are the central issues that still lie unresolved, seventy years after Gödel’s epochmaking paper appeared’ (Hofstadter 2001, p. xv). For a general discussion of Gödel’s philosophy, see Crocco and Engelen (2021). 73 The book Philosophical Remarks (Wittgenstein 1975), originally published in 1930, contains a discussion of what inspired Wittgenstein, and how his concept of intentionality refers to his contemporary philosophers (Harney 1984). As I  show later (in Chapter 4.3.1), the concept of intentionality was strongly supported by Franz Brentano (Jacquette 2004). It is unclear whether it is Brentano’s theory that Wittgenstein had in mind. In general, he included only a few references to the works of others. 74 Logical atomism refers to the facts (i.e. logical facts or ‘atoms’) of the world that cannot be broken down any further. However, the concept is complex and interpreted in different ways, as shown by Elkind (2018). 75 Wittgenstein’s truth function (point 6 in the list) is possibly the most debated part of his book. He also devoted a large part of the book to exploring, developing, and supporting this function. The function is set in very technical, mathematical language, building on Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction and Frege and Russell’s logical structure of language. 76 This does not help us to know what is true; it only defines the relation between the overall truth and its logical connection to its elements. 77 Thus, one might see Wittgenstein’s proposition 7 as a way to silence science on issues related to aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics, because debates on these are meaningless. 78 See Chapter 3.3.1. 79 For a discussion, see Kripke (1980). 80 The fact that Vienna was a multicultural metropolis was one thing, while the fact that Austria was an empire in need of reform was another. For many, the old world had outdated itself and society needed a new start. It should also be mentioned that even if Austria shared language and history with Germany, it was an independent cultural environment that allowed for opposition to dominant German trends. For some, German philosophy in the Kantian tradition was seen as an apology for the old regime. Moritz Schlick called Kant’s synthetic a priori knowledge/logic ‘conventionalism’ (Schlick 1985, 1989).

110  The realist track towards logical empiricism 81 The book Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin (1973) should be mentioned, as should a more recent books by Karl Sigmund (2018) and David Edmonds (2020). 82 It is tempting to put these discussions into historical context in the sense that parallel developments in literature, architecture, and art experimented with the same idea, namely that people were deceiving themselves with many taken-for-given ideas. The trend could by symbolised by the Austrian avant-garde architect Adolf Loos’ essay Ornament and Crime, which was published in 1910 (Loos 2019). 83 During a meeting of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna in 1897, Mach declared abruptly in response to a lecture by Boltzmann: ‘I don’t believe that atoms exist’ (Bächtold 2010, p. 3). See also Popper (1972, p. 171). 84 In another work from 1906, La théorie physique: son objet et sa structure, he had argued that theories in physics tend to be underdetermined in terms of the conditional factors that are relevant (Duhem 1991). This argument was later elaborated by the American philosopher Willard Quine what became known as the Duhem–Quine thesis (Hacking 1983) that I present in Chapter 3.3.2. 85 ‘dass die Welt der Wahrnehmung das theoretische System praktisch eindeutig bestimmt, trotzdem kein logischer Weg von den Wahrnehmungen zu der Grundnetzen der Theorie fuhrt’ 86 ‘Immanuel Kant, dessen Werk Einstein bereits als Student gelesen hatte, war durch die Lektüre Humes au einem “dogmatischen Schlummer” erweckt worden. Während Kant jedoch Raum und Zeit als starre Anschauungsformen auffasste, die unabhängig von der Erfahrung sein sollten, Griff Einstein Humes Gedenken Experiment auf, um in der speziellen Relativitätstheorie von 1905 darüber nachzudenken, wie sich Raum- und Zweitgrößen in Abhängigkeit von Bewegungszustand eines Beobachters verhalten und messen ließen. Der von Hume geschaffen Reflexionsraum ermöglichet es Einstein, die Prinzipien der neuen Physik auf der Grundlage einer praktischen Übereinkunft ober Konventionen für raum-zeitlichen Messungen formulieren.’ 87 As I have shown (Chapter 3.1.2), Hume is interpreted both as a realist and as a sceptic. 88 For a comprehensive discussion of Mach, see Stadler (2019). 89 Fuller’s argument is that while the Mack/Popper side of this debate saw some of the legitimation of science in its relation to progress in society, the Plank/Kuhn argument saw science as an activity in its own right (Fuller 2018). 90 According to the uncertainty principle, the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known and vice versa. See Heisenberg (1985). 91 Even the Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885–1962) subscribed to the same position. 92 See Heisenberg (1985). This implies, if we generalise the principle, that if we chose to focus on one aspect of a phenomenon, we lose sight of other aspects, but also that what we see has a formative effect on the things we see and thereby on what actually is. 93 The remark was originally made in 1926 in a letter to Max Born. See Einstein (2014). 94 Schlick had a close dialogue with Einstein when developing those thoughts (Schlick 1915). For a general discussion, see Stadler (2022). 95 Discussion circles, such as the Schlick Circle, were not uncommon in Vienna at the time. For example, the physicist Ernst Mach (1838–1916), who between 1895 and 1901 initiated the chair in history and philosophy of the inductive sciences at the University of Vienna that Moritz Schlick was later to hold, had initiated discussions on the foundation of physics’, arguing for phenomenalism in a way that was closed to George Berkeley. Furthermore, due to his radical views and claims, he provoked a strong discussion with the German physicist Max Planck (1858–1947). Mach’s insisted that science was a tool for improving society. Even in that case, Mach was

The realist track towards logical empiricism  111 to find an antagonist in Max Planck. As Steve Fuller (2018) argues, this Mach-Plank debate anticipated the later Popper-Kuhn debate on the integrity and role of science in society. 96 The early members of the discussion group included Hans Hahn (1879–1934), Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Herbert Feigl (1902–1988), Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), Otto Neurath (1882–1945), and Friedrich Waismann (1896–1959), but soon several more joined and, over the years, intellectuals from Europe and the USA participated in the discussions. A parallel discussion circle emerged in Berlin, where Carl Gustav Hempel and Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) were the main figures. I have already referred to Cambridge (Chapter 3.2.1), where Russell and Wittgenstein, as well as Frank Ramsey (1903–1930), were located and were part of the same discussion. 97 The term ‘logical positivism’ was used by the English philosopher A.J. Ayer (1910– 1989), an early participant in the Vienna Circle, as the title of an anthology of contributions from the circle that he edited (Ayer 1959). 98 Later, he also attended seminars on phenomenology given by Edmund Husserl. 99 Translated as The Logical Structure of the World, but often referred to only briefly as Aufbau (Carnap 2003). 100 Cf. the case in Chapter 1.1.2 concerning of the two geographers, an idealist and a realist. They could agree on the height of the mountain independent of their metaphysical beliefs. 101 This avoided Locke’s self-reference problem. 102 According to Friedman, one can detect the parting of ways to a particulate time and place, namely a seminar in Davos, Switzerland, held in March and April  1928, in which Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Carnap, and the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer (1874– 1945) participated. 103 Frans Brentano inspired both phenomenologists and neo-positivists, and all German philosophers were more or less educated in Kant’s thinking. 104 See Chapter 4.1.2. 105 Non-Euclidean geometry was discussed among others, by Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) in the early 1800s. A key reference in the 19th century was Felix Klein (1871). Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) discussed it in a book titled Science et méthode, which was published in 1908 and later translated with the title Science and Method (Poincaré 2003). 106 According to Stern (2007), Wittgenstein reacted to the fact that Carnap did not refer to his work, and partly for that reason he broke with the Vienna Circle. 107 Karl Popper (1972) later objected to this demarcation of scientific theory and made the opposite argument. Marx’s theory was unscientific because it could not be falsified, while Weber put forward a limited scientific hypothesis that could be tested and falsified. 108 See Chapter 3.2.3. 109 What they rejected was synthetic a priori knowledge. 110 One reason why logical positivists might have rejected Wittgenstein on the issue of language as a picture of reality and thus as corresponding with a fact – besides the philosophical discussion of whether the truth function he proposed is correct or not and that they wanted to remove ‘the mind’ from the equation – is that Wittgenstein’s claim made the truth test of even simple statements such as the mentioned example of ‘The British head of state is King Charles III’ (Chapter 3.2.1) into a more or less endless regress. 111 Carnap emigrated to the USA in 1935 for political reasons, where he was appointed as a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and later at UCLA. Carnap managed to secure a position for Hempel at the University of Chicago when Hempel emigrated to the USA in 1937.

112  The realist track towards logical empiricism 112 Together with Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, Gustav Hempel is seen as the originator of the development of logical positivism into logical empiricism (Salmon 1999). For a historical discussion, see Sandner (2019). 113 See also Salmon (1999). 114 For e discussion of Hempel, see Fetzer (2000). 115 For a discussion, see Ernst (2009). 116 According to Salmon (1999), the argument in the paper published in 1948 was later published in Hempel’s book Aspects of Scientific Explanation (Hempel 1965). 117 The debate about the deductive-nomological model relates both to the possibility to specify sufficient explanans and to what is meant by confirmation, namely causation, explanation, or understanding (Friedman 1974). 118 Carnap later studied semantics, and under the influence of American philosopher and pragmatist Charles Morris (1901–1979) at University of Chicago he studied the pragmatics of language (Richardson & Uebel 2007). 119 It refers to the German mathematician David Hilbert (1862–1943). 120 For a discussion, see Richardson and Isaacson (1994) and Restall (2002). 121 Interestingly, the Hegelian-inspired pragmatist John Dewey was one of the participants: On Dewey, see Chapter 5.3.1. 122 In Chapter 3.2.3 123 The English translation of the title is ‘Logic of Research: On Questions of Method in the Psychology of Thinking’. An extended version of the thesis was published in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper 2005). 124 This explains how he differed from the logical positivists and their anti-realist programme (even though some of them were also realists). 125 Popper expressed some of his broader perspectives on philosophy and society after he had emigrated from Austria. Prior to and during World War II, two of his books were published: The Poverty of Historicism which was first presented as a paper in 1936, then as a series of journal articles in Economica in 1944 and 1945 and finally as a book in 1957 (Popper 2013) and The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1945 (Popper 1966a, 1966b). He shared with his Austrian colleague Frederick August von Hayek the concept of critical rationalism, as well as scepticism towards the thinking of the neo-positivists and towards idealism and the historical school in Germany. Both Popper and von Hayek were concerned about the possibility of a science would lead to some sort of relativism (defined as instrumentalism). They were also concerned about the possibility of a science that would have some absolute claim on truth (essentialism) and knowledge (Popper 1972, p. 103). 126 Popper argued that his criticism was primarily against Carnap’s book Aufbau (Carnap 2003). Carnap’s later discussions about demarcation came closer to Popper’s own discussion (Popper 1972). 127 This is often referred to as the distinction between context of discovery and context of justification. (Hoyningen-Huene 1987). Popper’s argument is that there are no formal rules for discovery, but there are ridged rules for justification. Hoyningen-Huene (1987) makes the argument that this logical-positivists distinction more or less erases human science in the Hegelian tradition form of the discourse of science. 128 See the discussion on Hume’s philosophy in Chapter 3.1.2. 129 The book was translated as Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 2009) The investigations are in two parts: the first part is on philosophy and, it could be claimed, the sociology of language, whereas the second part is on the philosophy of psychology or what might be called the psychology of language. 130 As we shall see later, also Austin is central in initiating the communicative turn. 131 Similarly, the founder of the Berlin Circle, Hans Reichenbach, who emigrated to the USA in 1938 and was appointed as a professor of philosophy at UCLA, is often regarded as both a positivist and a pragmatist.

The realist track towards logical empiricism  113 132 Interestingly, Wittgenstein was also concerned with certainty. His reflections on uncertainty were posthumously collected by his student, the Finnish philosopher George Henrik von Wright, and published in the book On Certainty (Anscombe & von Wright 1969). 133 If one says to someone else ‘There is a bull running towards you’, one is both describing something and warning the other person at the same time. 134 Austin and Searle influenced the German philosophers Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, and not least Habermas’ concept of communicative rationality, as I will argue in the next chapter, on idealism (Chapter 4.3.3). 135 I argued earlier (Chapter 2.1.1) that it might have been the case that Aristotle fled Athens after Plato’s death because he feared for his life. We know that Galileo was put under house arrest, and that Descartes changed his address constantly because he feared the secret police of the Catholic Church, Thus, the history of philosophy has not been without its dramatic moments. However, in general, discussions between philosophers have taken place peacefully, and philosophers have seldom encountered each other in a physical way. Thus, Popper’s encounter with Wittgenstein can be seen as an exception. 136 Popper was not the first and only person to experience Wittgenstein waving a poker. Wittgenstein’s second cousin, Friedrich A. Hayek mentioned an episode in the same club in Cambridge in either 1940 or 1941: It was at the end of one of these meetings that Wittgenstein quite suddenly and dramatically emerged. It concerned a paper which had not particularly interested me and the subject of which I have no recollection. Suddenly, Wittgenstein leapt to his feet, poker in hand, indignant in the highest degree, and proceeded to demonstrate with the implement how simple and obvious matter reality was. (Hayek 1977, p. 21) 137 The fact that Wittgenstein made the claim at a time when he argued that he denounced the original argument in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 2007) might indicate that even as he moved from the linguistic turn to the communicative turn, he was still positioned within analytical philosophy. 138 He had detected the call for essentialism as the root of totalitarianism, in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper 1966a, 1966b). He argued instead for a methodology that would build on critical rationalism in the sense that the purpose of science is to improve knowledge, not to find the ultimate source of knowledge. 139 Popper dedicated his book Objective Knowledge to Tarski (Popper 1979). 140 A metalanguage can help in finding a solution to the ‘paradox of the liar’, which is that given statement A ‘I am a liar’ and given statement B ‘This statement (A) is false’, implies that the person labelled ‘I’ is not a liar. Thus, the sentence ‘I am a liar’ is false. However, if one is a liar, the sentence ‘I am a liar’ would be false, meaning that one is not a liar. Tarski’s solution was to say that the first half of the sentence was a metalanguage that says something about the object language. 141 Robert Nozick was not impressed by this argument. He made the point that one of the big challenges for science is the lack of procedures for how to replace an existing theory with a new and presumably better one (Nozick 2000). 142 This was a distinction that Habermas later referred to, see Chapter 4.3.3. 143 See Chapter 3.3.3. 144 See Chapter 5.2.2. 145 See Karl Popper’s paper ‘The logic of the social sciences’, which was presented at a conference in Tübingen in 1961 (Popper 1976). 146 For example, if one were to argue that capitalism is better for society than socialism, it would be difficult to imagine what sort of test could support or falsify such a claim.

114  The realist track towards logical empiricism

147

148 149 150

Most data relating to society and humans are contextual in some sense, and therefore comparisons of cases and data in ways that meet the criteria of natural science, with its controlled experiments, are problematic. A  similar argument has been made by many scientists. It should be noted that there is a paradox regarding Kuhn’s claim in his book The Road since Structure (Kuhn 2000), in that the first version of his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions book (Kuhn 1970) was published in the Unity of Science publishing series, of which Carnap approved. I discuss the concept of science war in Chapter 5.3.3. I discuss incommensurable paradigms in Chapter 5.3.3. For Quine, this unity was not defined by methods, but rather in the sense that all sciences have logic as their common reference (see Quine 1980).

Chapter 4

The idealist track towards phenomenology The problem of objectivity of thinking

4.0  The line of argument in this chapter In this chapter, I present positions that are often discussed under the heading of philosophy of social science.1 The positions are also often termed collectively as continental philosophy.2 Both the heading and the term might be misleading because the positions, even though they originated in Europe, are used beyond that continent and they do not cover issues that are relevant only for the social sciences. Furthermore, it could be argued that most of the positions are relevant for all sciences. In the first part of the chapter, Constructivism: thinking at the centre of everything, I argue that modern idealism started with the work of René Descartes. From Descartes, I  follow the development of predominantly German idealism from Immanuel Kant via romanticism to Friedrich Hegel. In the second part of the chapter, Science in the post-Kantian world, I argue that romanticism was a reaction to Kant’s thinking. It also had an influence on Hegel, who initiated existentialism, which in turn inspired Lebensphilosophie3 and the interpretive position in science developed by the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. In the third part of the chapter, Phenomenology, I argue that the idealist tradition acquired a new philosophical foundation through the work Edmund Husserl. He claimed that philosophy is at the core of science and that science should relate to the fundamental problems that philosophy has revealed: Let the idea guiding our medications be at first the Cartesian idea of a science that shall be established as radically genuine, ultimately an all-embracing science. (Husserl 1999, p. 7) Philosophy is not speculative but systematic, and it is a ‘first science’ that is called phenomenology. Martin Heidegger’s further development of this thinking and partly the reaction to it by the hermeneutical tradition, as well as critical theory, represent a comprehensive alternative line of thought to that of logical positivism. DOI: 10.4324/9781003326878-4

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Furthermore, Jürgen Habermas’ communicative turn was intended to save the Kantian project in light of insights from phenomenology and hermeneutics. Phenomenology has a strong standing in science today, not least because many researchers within the humanities and social studies relate to it, but also because it had a tremendous impact on French thinking after World War II, through postmodernism and post-structuralism.4 The general problem that idealists address today is how a mind-dependent reality can be regarded as objective.

4.1 Constructivism: thinking at the centre of everything 4.1.1  A mind-dependent reality Why is the French lawyer and later philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650)5 regarded as having such a central place in the history of science and the history of philosophy?6 His dualism maintained that the mind is independent of nature; thus, human thinking is independent of nature: I am therefore precisely nothing but a thinking thing; that is, a mind, or intellect, or understanding, or reason-words whose meanings I  was previously ignorant. Yet I am a true thing, and I am truly existing: but what kind of thing? I have said it already: a thinking thing. (Descartes 1998a, p. 65) The controversy concerning Descartes’ idea in the quotation here, and the hostility towards it, is illustrated by the following quotation from Gilbert Ryle: [My] object has been to show that the (Cartesian) two-worlds story is a philosopher’s myth, though not a fable, and, by showing this, to begin to repair the damage that this myth has for some time been doing inside philosophy. (Ryle 1990, p. 310) Why did Descartes’ dualism provoke such strong resentment? Descartes is renowned for his principle of ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ (I think, therefore I am) (Descartes 1998a, p. 18).7 The fact that thinking is prior to nature (being) means that mind and nature are governed by different logics.8 In contrast to Francis Bacon, who criticised both Plato and Aristotle, and tried to present his new science of induction as an alternative to both Plato and Aristotle, Descartes tried to some extent to reconcile the two Greek philosophers: The first and chief whose writing we possess are Plato and Aristotle, between whom there were no differences, except that the former, following in the

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footsteps of his master, Socrates, ingeniously confessed that he had never been able to find any certainty, and that he was contented to write what seemed to him probably, imagining, for this end, certain principles by which he endeavoured to account for the other things. Aristotle, on the other hand, characterised by less candour, although for twenty years the disciple of Plato, and with no principle beyond those of his master, completely reversed his mode of putting them, and proposed as true and certain what is probable, he himself never esteemed as such. (Descartes 2016, p. 4) For Descartes, the problem was that Plato doubted everything, even what might not be doubted, while Aristotle assumed as true, things that should rather have been subject to scrutiny. Descartes referred to the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC), who argued that the size of the sun was exactly as it appeared in the sky. Thus, experience cannot be the sole source of knowledge. Eventually, Descartes’ project was to ask: how can we maintain doubt and still make advances in science and find truth?9 Descartes had studied mathematics and physics before he graduated with a degree in law. He was supposed to become a lawyer, but instead he travelled around Europe, but he lived most of his adult life in Holland. He wrote on many subjects and even practised medicine.10 So, what makes Descartes so central in modern thinking? One argument is that he managed to reflect on the whole range of philosophical issues that were up for discussion in his time (Spiller 2004), and to systematise them in a way that gave philosophy a new start. Furthermore, the roots of several positions in the divisions in modern science can be traced back to Descartes. Support for each of the four philosophical traditions I have presented11 can be found in the works of Descartes if they are only read in part. Sceptics could emphasise his doubt, realists could emphasise his empiricism, idealists could emphasise his cognitive theory, and sensationalists could emphasise his deductive idealism. However, there are also good reasons to believe that Descartes thought of these traditions as elements in a system, one that encompassed all elements.12 Descartes, like the Renaissance astronomers, realised that some of Aristotle analyses were not correct, yet he did not entirely reject ancient philosophy or argue for only doing empirical research. Rather, he created a dualism, which he likened to a tree: Thus, all Philosophy is like a tree, of which Metaphysics is the root, Physics the trunk, and all the other sciences the branches that grow out of this trunk, which are reduced to three principals, namely, Medicine, Mechanics, and Ethics. By the science of Morals, I understand the highest and most perfect which, presupposing an entire knowledge of the other sciences, is the last degree of wisdom. (Descartes 2016, p. 9)

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Descartes argued that there is a physical world, but there is also our knowledge about the physical world, and this knowledge comes from our thinking. With this argument, he managed to create a divide between our mental existence (res cogitans – a thinking thing), meaning our mind and thoughts, as well as our religion and beliefs, and our physical existence (res extensa – an extended thing). This dualism decoupled the study of the psychical world from metaphysical speculation. For Descartes, the physical world consisted of mechanics, medicine, and ethics – in modern terms, natural sciences, life sciences, and human sciences. However, he wanted to establish the foundations of metaphysics, which he understood as meaning issues beyond our experienced reality. According to Descartes, such knowledge must be based on thinking. A first question, which can be labelled ‘X’, is how do we attain an accurate understanding (true knowledge) of the world? It implies conducting investigations both empirically (inductive) and rationally (thinking, reasoning, and deducting). Mathematics plays an important role in this respect because we use logic and mathematics when deducting. Since, for Descartes, the physical world included not only physics but also biology and human values (the three branches of the tree); it followed that moral principles and ethics were part of the physical (social) world. In this regard, metaphysics means the essential and foundational feature of reality beyond our observation. This metaphysical reality includes God. Thus, we can know something about God, through our deductive reasoning. A second question, which can be labelled ‘Y’, is how do we come to know where thinking comes from? This question is not answered by observation or experimentation; it can only be answered through reasoning, intuition, and deduction. Descartes called the foundation of reasoning, intuition, and deduction the first philosophy.13 It denounces the roots of our understanding of the world, meaning its metaphysics. Even though Descartes was building on insights from scholasticism, his thinking marked a clear break with scholasticism (Peirce 1998, p. 86). He argued for universal doubt, while scholasticism never questioned fundamentals. Furthermore, Descartes argued that the ultimate test of certainty was found in individual consciousness, while scholasticism believed in the statements of the Catholic Church. While scholasticism had a multiform way of arguing, Descartes replaced it with a single thread of inference. Finally, scholasticism had the ambition to explain ‘everything’, while Descartes argued that some things could not be explained. Descartes placed our whole system of seeing the world, our whole knowledge system, in the perception of the individual. This individualism, or subjectivism, represents the big leap from the pre-modern to modern thinking and to the modern world: all knowledge is rooted in the individual mind. Descartes reflected on this subjectivism in his Discours de la méthode,14 first published in 1637, in which he discussed the relation between person’s own thinking and the physical world outside that person (question X). In the Meditationes de prima philosophia,15 first

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published in 1641, he reflected on thinking (question Y). At the beginning of Discourse on Method, he wrote: [T]he power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from false (which is, properly speaking, what people call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’) is naturally equal in all men, and that the diversity of our opinions does not arise from the fact that some people are more reasonable than others, but solely from the fact that we lead our thoughts along different paths and do not take the same things into consideration. (Descartes 1998a, p. 1) In the essay Meditation on First Philosophy, Descartes made it clear that even though we can apply reason in order to achieve a more accurate understanding of the world, we cannot apply the same reason in order to understand our own reasoning (thinking). What, then, is thinking?16 Descartes addressed this question (question Y) in Meditation on First Philosophy and, as the title of his essay indicates, the core of understanding the metaphysical world is meditation. Where does such meditation lead us? First, Descartes reasoned that our capacity to understand the world and ourselves as bodies cannot itself be of the world or our body. It must be something else; otherwise our understanding of the world and ourselves would be circular. Therefore, Descartes located our thinking in what he called the soul or the mind. The soul or the mind is a non-physical substance that allows us to understand the physical world. Second, how can we know that such a substance exists? Descartes’ method was to apply doubting: I can doubt everything, but not the fact that I am doubting. This led him to formulate his first principle of philosophy ‘I think, therefore I am’ (Cogito, ergo sum) (Descartes 1998a, p. 18), by which he meant one can think about one’s body and about the external world because thinking itself is not in one’s body. According to Descartes, the body (res extensa) was like a machine, but the mind (res cogitans) was not like a machine. He thought the body could be mended by understanding its physiology. Thus, medicine, as a science, is not in contradiction with metaphysics because the body is part of the physical world, not the metaphysical world. For the metaphysical world, we can apply thought. Descartes in some way reintroduced Plato’s concept of ideas because also in Plato’s thinking, ideas existed beyond the physical world and we could only reach those ideas by deductive reasoning. However, there is also a big difference between Plato’s thinking and Descartes’ thinking in that Descartes did not see a direct link between the world of ideas and the physical world17: Thus, a geometrical treatment of bodies will, for Plato, be only a rough treatment: their shapes are and can be only imperfect embodiments of the ideal shapes in terms of which they are described, these latter belonging to the eternal, unchangeable, intelligible realm of mathematics. Descartes, on the other

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hand, provides a metaphysical groundwork for the new science – and makes a clean break with the Platonic-Aristotelian view of the relation between mathematics and the physical world – by proclaiming that bodies are geometrical shapes, describable, as their behavior is explainable, in exact. (Shapere 1963, p. 575) Descartes’ dualism means that not everything can be reduced to ideas (which is how Plato’s thinking might be interpreted), nor can everything be reduced to nature (which is how Aristotle’s thinking might be interpreted). The ideas that Descartes referred to were within the subject, in their mind, not outside the subject as Plato had assumed: our thinking has roots in the metaphysical world and is able to reason about that (this relates to question Y). From our categories of thinking, we can make assumptions about metaphysics. Since thinking is separate from experience, we can think about experience and hold it against set of principles or concepts about what is right and wrong, or meaningful or meaningless. F.A. Hayek stated: There seems to me to exist a sort of rationalism which, by not recognising these limits to the powers of individual reason, in fact tends to make human reason a less effective instrument than it could be. . . . Its modern influence however begins only in the 16th and 17th century and particularly with the formulation of its main tenets by the French philosopher René Descartes. It was mainly through him that the very term ‘reason’ changed its meaning. To the medieval thinkers, reason had meant mainly a capacity to recognize truth, especially moral truth, when they met it, rather than a capacity of deductive reasoning from explicit premises. (Hayek 1967, p. 84) Descartes’ dualism stared discussions.18 The following quotation from the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) may illustrate why Descartes’ thinking came to be at core of the divide within the philosophy of science, namely between analytical and continental thinking: This amounts to saying that theory of knowledge and theory of life seem to be inseparable. A theory of life that is not accompanied by a criticism of knowledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the concepts which the understanding puts at its disposal: it can but enclose the facts, willing or not, in pre-existing frames which it regards as ultimate. It thus obtains a symbolism which is convenient, perhaps even necessary to positive science, but not a direct vision of its object. On the other hand, a theory of knowledge which does not replace the intellect in the general evolution of life, will teach us neither how we can enlarge or go beyond them. It is necessary that the two inquiries, theory of knowledge and theory of life, should join together, and, by a circular process, push each other on unceasingly. (Bergson 1998, p. xii)

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We have seen that the aim of analytical philosophy was to erase the mind from the scientific argument.19 For the continental theory of science, human life, human existence, and human cognition were always at the centre of the scientific process. 4.1.2  Kant’s Copernican revolution Descartes inspired the thinking of a French movement in which the followers called themselves the encyclopaedists.20 They were part of what we today more broadly call the Enlightenment, which included both empiricist thinking and continental thinking.21 Enlightenment implied not only a strong belief in rationality but also an acknowledgement of its limitations.22 The related concepts of rationality, reason, common sense, and sanity all refer to the human capacity to make meaningful calculations and decisions. Rationality23 is inherently linked to logical calculation and mathematics,24 and is a logical way of thinking and reasoning.25 Rationality is also related to perception, decisions, and behaviour. To be rational means that one can argue for one’s decisions and actions in a logical way. One can claim that a decision one made was the best and most logical in the given circumstances. As Descartes observed, the reason for disagreement among people is not necessarily lack of rationality, but the fact that people consider different things in their reasoning.26 Imagine that one has one pound (£1) to spend and that a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk each cost one pound. Furthermore, assume that one prefers bread to milk. The rational thing to do would be to use the money to buy bread. Critics of rationalism do not argue that one should rather buy milk. As in the case of ‘the swan’,27 irrationalism would imply that one maintains that all swans are white, even though one has seen a black swan. Likewise, arguing that all ravens are black without any foundation in observation or anything else is seen as speculative. Critics of rationalism have a different kind of argument. In the ‘milk and bread’ case, the choice is rational, given the stated conditions. A rationalist argument is that this ‘closes the case’, but according to critical views of rationalism, there is more to the case than assumed: why did one happen to prefer bread to milk, and why were other items not considered? Assuming that the choice was between buying a fox fur or a hat, there might have been ethical issues to consider. If so, where did those issues come from? The discussions following Descartes influenced Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant lived his whole life in the somewhat remote German town of Königsberg. However, his articles were published in academic journals in Berlin and he became one of the Western world’s best known thinkers. Kant’s achievement was to bring together and criticise different ideas that had dominated his time. He not only tried to reconcile the disagreement between Descartes and Hume but also tried to respond to Berkeley’s criticism of Locke and to rationalistic thinking in general, and thereby to establish a new system of thought. The empiricists’ discussion about induction, had not settled the debate, nor had the rationalistic idealism on the continent managed to do so. David Hume had awakened Kant from his

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intellectual slumber, and Kant’s ambition is perhaps illustrated by the following often-quoted statement: Weary therefore of a dogmatism the teaches us nothing, and equally of scepticism that promises us nothing at all. (Kant 2004, p. 79) Dogmatism referred to what Kant saw as the unfounded metaphysics and deductive thinking (i.e. rationalism) of his time. His reference to scepticism indicated that even though he was inspired by the work of David Hume, he did not buy into his thinking completely. Rather, Kant’s project was to find a new way forward, between the two extremes. He called this new way his Copernican revolution. In the preface to Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) that was first published in the 1781, Kant wrote: We have here the same case as with the first thought of Copernicus, who, not being able to get on in the explanation of movements of heavenly bodies, as long as he assumed that all the stars turned around the spectator, tried whether he could not succeed better by assuming the spectator to be turning around, and the stars to be at rest. A similar experiment may be tried in metaphysics, so far as the intuition of objects is concerned. If the intuition had to conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could know anything of it a priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the constitution of the faculty of intuition, I can very well conceive such a possibility. (Kant 2007, p. 12) The Copernican revolution implies that instead of the mind being accountable to the world, the world is accountable to the mind. By turning the whole argumentation around in this way, Kant managed to proceed with questions that had haunted philosophy, in particular emphasised by Berkeley in his criticism of Locke: How do we know that the representations of objects in our mind correspond to the real objects? For Kant, this became the wrong question because the objects should correspond to our images of them, or at least the basic structural properties of the object should conform to the forms that are already in the mind: Rationalistic metaphysics is not the only target of Kant’s shafts. The Lockian empiricism, too, he is convinced, has turned out to be a failure. (Thilly 1925, p. 331) Kant agreed that Hume had raised an important question: How do we get from specific knowledge (based on our observation) to general knowledge? Hume had asked the right questions, even though he did not have the right answers. Thus, Kant disagreed with the empiricists’ claim that all knowledge comes from sense impressions and experience. He thought that Descartes was right in pointing out

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the dualism: the question of where thinking comes from, and the question how we use thinking in practice. However, all knowledge is synthetic. Kant inspired what was later called epistemology (Friedman 2000), which is the theory of how we come to have knowledge. For Descartes, thinking was always deliberate and consciousness was rational; it was in the person. For Kant, consciousness could also be tacit and transcendental. Broadly speaking, Kant divided our thinking into pure reason and practical reason, and he wrote three of his most important works as a critique (discussion) of the two types of thinking: Kritik der reinen Vernunft,28 published in 1781; Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,29 published in 1788; and Kritik der Urteilskraft,30 published in 1790. In short, in his criticism of pure reason, he declined the rationalist ideas that we have analytical a priori knowledge. His critique of practical reason and of judgement was less of a criticism, since its purpose was to show the complexity and dilemmas involved in making practical judgements: He regards his age as the real age of criticism, and he insists that everything must submit to criticism, even religion and legislation, for these cannot gain universal respect unless they are subjected to the free and public examination of reason. (Thilly 1925, p. 331) Kant directed some of his criticism against the metaphysical speculations of the rationalists, foremost among whom were two rationalist philosophers with a strong influence in Germany, Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) and Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Leibnitz was a contemporary of Isaac Newton and made important contributions to logic and mathematics. His work was influential in the later work of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. He could be seen as having combined Galileo Galilei’s idea that the world was logical, with Descartes’ idea that the human mind can understand the world independent of sensation. Leibnitz also came close to thinking in the same way as George Berkeley, who argued that the world looks like it does simply because what we see is in fact a picture or an idea in our mind. Even though his work was fragmented, Leibniz took a rather clear stand on philosophical questions, as is clearly illustrated by the following quotation: And, in fact, our soul always has in it the quality of representing to itself any nature or form whatsoever, when the occasion to think of it presents itself. And I believe that this quality of our soul, insofar it expresses some nature, form or essence, is properly the idea of the thing, which is in us and which is always in us, whether we think of it or not. . . . This agrees with my principles, for nothing even enters into our mind naturally from the outside; and we have a bad habit of thinking of our soul as if it received certain species as messengers and as if it had doors and windows. We have all these forms in our mind; we even have forms from all time, for the mind always expresses all its future thoughts and already thinks confusedly about everything it will

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ever think about distinctly. And nothing can be thought to us whose idea we do not already have in our mind, an idea which is like the matter of which our thought is formed. (Leibnitz 1989, p. 58) The first part of the quotation claims that the forms with which we observe the world are already in our mind, independent of what is observed. Thus, it is a clear anti-empiricist statement. The second part of the quotation goes even further in claiming that everything we perceive about the world is already in the mind; the mind is a ready-made system that is uninfluenced by experience. This is the complete opposite to tabula rasa. The final sentence in the quotation here indicates that the fact that we can also have a correct understanding of reality is because the logical structure of the mind and the logical structure of reality are one and the same. This idea was later referred to by analytical philosophers. Kant argued that the mind had a priori knowledge in the form of, for example, categories and concepts, but these acquired meaning only in the context of their application in practice. If we were to imagine that we do not live in a practical/ physical world, would concepts such as time and space have meaning? The answer is they probably would not. For Descartes, propositions in the form of analytical a priori knowledge were metaphysical, and might have pointed to a reality beyond our imagination. Analytical a priori knowledge comprises the abstract categories that we need in order to be able to think, which means our logical capacity, such as we use in mathematics. These are preconditions for sorting out the form of things, such as whether something is bigger or smaller or longer and shorter, or for summarising or dividing things. However, they do not give any clear direction on how to act or what to do. Francis Bacon, John Locke, and David Hume might have accepted propositions based on sensed, experienced knowledge as expressing only true knowledge. This kind of knowledge derives from experienced facts. Can we develop abstract law from observation, which points outside or beyond our experience, and can we draw practical consequences and implications from abstract categories of thought? To both questions, Kant argued emphatically that the answer was no. Space and time have to be preconditions that are installed in our mind so that we can perceive things. Perception requires some structure, and such structure cannot be part of perception. Kant called this way of perceiving pure reason and argued that since the things perceived as are pure reason cannot come from sense impressions or experience, they must be of a very abstract and general kind: That all our knowledge begins with experience there is no doubt. .  .  . But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience. (Kant 2001a, p. 24) We can know things in an abstract form that does not arise from experience but exists as synthetic knowledge that is fundamental to our thinking. Accordingly, Kant argued that he had solved Hume’s problem of how can we know something

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beyond our experience? In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason,31 he wrote: The first man who demonstrated the properties of the isosceles triangle (be it Thales or another) had his eyes opened, for he found that he did not have to investigate what he saw in the figure, or in the mere concept of the figure, and thereby learn its properties; but that he had to achieve his knowledge through construction, by means of what he himself, according to concepts, had a priori placed into that figure. (Kant 2007, p. 15) The implication of this argument is that the way things are is neither a product of experience nor of some divine capacity to see the ideal forms of things, but simply our mental capacity to make sense of the world. Kant argued that we cannot know things in themselves, which he called noumenon (Kant 2004, p. 117), and he argued further that things are not merely subjective impressions, but rather that the world is constructed by the a priori categories and pure concepts that humans have, and that are transcendental. The isosceles triangle does not exist (in itself); it is a product of our a priori thinking capacity. Moreover, basic, logical principles are not something we have invented; they exist prior to our thinking, and they are capacities in our mind, in anybody’s mind, which means that they are transcendental. Kant’s argument was that our mind consists of a dualism between two different kinds of knowledge. We have practical reason that comes from our specific experiences in the real world, but we also have a form of pure reason, a synthetic a priori capacity to know things. He wrote: Hence the pure concepts of the understanding are those under which all perceptions must first be submitted before they can serve as judgements of experience, in which the synthetic unity of the perceptions is represented as necessary universally valid. (Kant 2004, p. 44) Practical reason does not define pure reason, and pure reason cannot be reduced to sense impressions. Pure reason is synthetic a priori knowledge, as indicated in the following quotation: This deduction presents the true concepts of the understanding (and with them all theoretical a priori knowledge) as principles of the possibility of experience, and presents experience as the determination of appearances in space and time in general – and, lastly, presents this determination from the principles of the original synthetic unity of apperception, as the form of the understanding in references to space and time, the original forms of sensibility. (Kant 2007, p. 170) It could be said that the synthetic a priori knowledge induces us to see things the way we do, not the things in themselves.

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4.1.3  Synthetic a priori knowledge Kant argued that Isaac Newton could not have made his discovery based in induction. According to Kant, concepts such as time and space, which were central in Newton’s thinking, could not come from induction. Furthermore, he claimed that if we did not have the ability to understand time and space a priori, we would not be able to perceive it: Kant was the first modern philosopher to recognize that Newton’s monumental achievement in physics specifically his formulation of the law of universal gravitation – required the recasting of philosophical inquiry about knowledge. As geometry was Plato’s paradigm through which he explored the nature of knowledge, Newtonian physics was Kant’s. He regarded aspects of Newtonian theory as necessarily true – specifically the assumption of universal causation, and the reality of space and time. But he also agreed with David Hume that such necessity was not given, or seen, in experience. Thus Newton’s truths – Kant’s paradigm of a knowledge claim – could not be accounted for by saying that the mind conformed to reality, rather the mind had to provide these necessities. This is the beginning of Kant’s famous, or for some infamous, intrusion of the knowing subject into the object of knowledge. (Southerland et al. 2001, p. 329) We have the capacity to understand general and abstract things, and we have the capacity to understand specific things through sensing and experiencing. This dualism defines our way of knowing, and thus defines our capacity to make sense of the world. Without these two capacities, we would not be able to develop a decent, civilised world. Kant took Descartes’ divide and dialectics as a point of departure and argued both against Berkeley and Locke’s idea that all knowledge is derived from sensation and sense impressions, and against Hume’s claim that there is no a priori knowledge (Gadamer 2006). However, Kant also acknowledged Hume’s critique of induction, and he agreed with all those who argued that science should not be based on metaphysics. Kant proclaimed a mind-dependent reality, even though this mind-dependent reality was not subjective, but was intersubjective and transcendental: On Kant’s analysis, space and time are nothing ‘objective’ and ‘real’ with existence independent of or minds. Rather space and time are something ‘subjective’ and ‘ideal’ without existence independent of our minds. To be sure, the subjective and merely mind-based (‘ideal’) character of space and time is not a matter of the particular and contingent constitution of individual human minds. The forms of intuition do not vary from one human individual, or any number of them, to another individual or any number of them. Rather space and time are the universal and necessary forms of intuition. (Zöller 2004, p. 13)

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Space and time are fundamental (pure) categories and concepts that guide our perception of reality. However, this argument poses a fundamental problem: How could it be that the categories, which thus seemed to be mere figments of our mind, told us anything about the way things are? (Zöller 2004, p. 14) Kant’s often-mentioned response to this kind of objection is known as his togetherness principle32: [T]houghts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. (Kant 2007, p. 116) Kant invited people to accept his idea of a whole system in which the individual element acquires meaning as part of that totality. The key elements of the system were concepts, intuition, categories, judgement, and imagination. A summary of Kant’s argument is provided in his short book Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik,33 which was published in 1783 as a short follow-up to his monumental work Critique of Pure Reason. Intuition is our capacity to recognise abstract, pure, and general concepts. Thus, concepts can be divided into pure and non-pure concepts. Pure concepts, such as the logical concepts of mathematics, are not related to any specific practical application. Non-pure or material concepts are related to experience. Thus, we have empirical intuition (with which we recognise things that we can sense), but we also have non-experience intuition, with which we recognise abstract, a priori things. Combining experience and intuition allows for judgement. Judgement can be both logical and material, and it is a kind of rule that we apply in order to state that something is meaningful (Seung 1989). Kant’s theory of cognition has been debated, and Mark Textor (2011) argues, with reference to Frege, that the proper term for our cognition should be judgement. Moritz Schlick argued, based on the general idea that judgement is about bringing of two concepts together, that judgement can be defined as follows: The essence of the concept [judgement] consists simply in its being a sign that we coordinate in thought to the objects of which we are thinking. It is therefore natural to suppose that a judgement also is nothing other than a sign. (Schlick 1985, p. 40) Analytical philosophers and logical empiricists argued that our reasoning starts with concepts.34 By contrast, idealists maintained that our intuition is a preconceptual capacity to understand things beyond concepts.35 It might be said while intuition gives us categories, judgement helps us to place things in the right category. Thus, there are basic logical categories and material categories, which we need in order to make judgements.36 Kant defined 12 transcendental categories (see Table 4.1) that referred to Aristotle’s ten basic a priori categories but deviated from them:

128  The idealist track towards phenomenology Table 4.1  Categories of transcendental understanding Of quantity

Of quality

Of relation

Of modality

Unity

Reality

Plurality

Negation

Totality

Limitation

Inherence and Subsistence Causality and Dependence Community

Possibility and Impossibility Existence and Non-existence Necessity and Contingency

Source: Based on Kant (2001a, p. 59)

Furthermore, there are different categories of judgements. Kant argued for the same four main groups of judgements as for intuition – quantity, quality, relation, and modality (Kant 2004, p. 108). For each group and category, there is a corresponding concept: the concept of singular refers to the intuition of totality, the concept of infinity refer to the category of limitation, and so on. Decisions are made based on concepts of judgements that themselves are based on transcendental categories, which in turn are based on universal concepts. As we move backwards in the chain of arguments that starts with where we make our fundamental decisions, we move to a higher level of generality and higher level of universality. All transcendental concepts must be universal. Imagination is our capacity to transcend a situation. It denotes our ability to know things that are not based on experience or sensation. Imagination goes beyond judgement. Kant used the category ‘imagination’ to explain how we can overstep a kind of fixed scheme of perception and cognition. We can go beyond what is given and foresee something creative and non-existing. Tom Nenon argues as follows: Moreover, it is the imagination that extends the possibility of communication beyond the limits of discursive concepts of the understanding, and also makes possible the kinds of speculative histories that employ and further moral ideas as expressions of the purposiveness of human life. (Nenon 1993, p. 145) However, the basic structure of epistemology has to be seen as the totality of the elements that construct our perception of the world: On Kant’s advanced view, the objects of experience are as much shaped by the forms of sensibility (space and time) as they are shaped by the forms of understanding (categories, such as substance and accident or cause and effect). Through sensibility and under the guise of intuitions, objects present themselves to us or are given to us; through the understanding and

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under the guise of concepts, an object given in intuition is recognized for what it is or is being thought. . . . Separated from each other, intuitions are cognitively inert (‘blind’) and concepts are mere contentless forms of cognition (‘empty’). (Zöller 2004, p. 15)37 Kant responded to Descartes’ question about where thinking come from, at the same time as he denounced Descartes’ metaphysics. Kant claimed that there is synthetic a priori knowledge, but where does this a priori knowledge come from? Kant refused to accept Descartes’ speculative theory that there is some sort of mind/spirit that exists beyond the material word, and at the same time, he refused to accept Hume’s idea that everything comes from experience. What remained was transcendental reason: the basic a priori categories are simply categories that are there and that all human beings share. A test of Kant’s system is his discussion of where mathematics comes from. For centuries, the main argument of Platonists had been that mathematics is analytical a priori knowledge, which at the same time had been seen as a poof of metaphysics and realism, meaning a reality beyond our perception. It was therefore crucial for Kant to demonstrate that in fact mathematics was synthetic a priori knowledge. Kant used the term imagination to refer to when judgement of one kind was applied to judgement of another kind.38 One way to think about this is to assume that imagination is the creative part of our cognition, whereas judgement is the calculative part. Furthermore, one’s imagination can help one see things beyond the limited scope of calculating. For instance, one can perceive a situation as, for example, in symmetry or in balance with another situation, as more or less in harmony, or as more or less attractive than another situation. Kant addressed the problem of moral and ethics in one of his later works, Metaphysik der Sitten,39 published in 1797 (Kant 2001b). Again, the basic argument and structure of thinking was the same, but while the material philosophy was related to our understanding of the physical world, our moral philosophy referred to our freedom as human beings. Kant’s argument was that freedom was not metaphysical, but real and constrained by similar principles and categories as the ones we use to understand the material world. The most basic transcendental a priori concepts are space and time, but there is also transcendental logic and principles in moral judgement, foremost of which is the categorical imperative.40 What is the relation between pure reason based on a priori knowledge and practical reason based on experience? Kant rejected the idea that the one can be reduced to the other, which means that they represent a dialectic relation, where the two kinds of knowledge influence each other; we can know general things, and we can know specific things. This became apparent in Kant’s discussions of

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ethics and of politics and law. His argument regarding ethics was that, as humans, we are able to perceive a priori principles of ethics. One of the main discussions in Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 2001b) relates to how different interpretations of general principles lead to antinomies.41 We can agree on principles because they are a priori available to us, and yet still practise some degree of subjectivity when it comes to implementing those principles.

4.2  Science in the post-Kantian world 4.2.1  The parting of ways: rationalism versus humanism In this section, German idealism is used as a general term that encompasses several positions, including humanism, romanticism, existentialism, and interpretivism. Kant was initiating the further development in German philosophy, even though many criticised him. One of the pioneers of analytical philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead, showed a certain degree of recognition of Immanuel Kant’s work but disregarded the later development into German idealism as scientific.42 Whitehead stated: For this reason, the whole of the great German idealistic movement will be ignored, as being out of effective touch with its contemporary science so far as reciprocal modification of concepts is concerned. Kant, from whom this movement took its rise, was saturated with Newtonian physics. . . . But philosophers who developed the Kantian school of thought, or who transformed it into Hegelianism, either lacked Kant’s background of scientific knowledge, or lacked his potential of becoming a great physicist if philosophy had not absorbed his main energy. (Whitehead 1967, p. 139) Whitehead was ready to erase all German idealist philosophy from the scientific debate. In the discussion that follows, I look at the development of Kant’s thinking into German idealism. Kant celebrated enlightenment (Kant 2009). In his view, it was the free thinking among free persons that constituted enlightenment. Enlightenment presupposes individual and political freedom. Obedience stands in contrast to enlightenment. Kant believed in reason and that individuals have the capacity to understand abstract principles. For him, freedom, rule of law, and democracy were abstract categories that we could relate to, but they had to be interpreted in a concrete, historical situation.43 The neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) made the following observation: The eighteen century is imbued with a belief in the unity and immutability of reason. Reason is the same for all thinking subjects, all nations, all epochs, all cultures. . . . For us the word ‘reason’ has long since lost its unequivocal

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simplicity even if we are in essential agreement with the basic aims of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. (Cassirer 1952, p. 6) Michel Foucault argued that what Kant described through his argumentation was modernity (Foucault 1984). Kant’s proclaimed attitude of not being obedient to anything and the need to follow one’s own knowledge and beliefs is a rather modern and radical way of seeing the individual in society. It contradicted respect for history, and for customs and traditions. It also gave rise to dilemmas, due to the fact that enlightenment, when understood in the way that Kant and later modernists interpreted it, led to a permanent situation of social criticism, with no clear direction.44 This was also the case with humanism.45 Foucault’s remedy was to see criticism in a historical context and as relevant to a given historical situation.46 Thus, he tried to make Kant’s argument less universally relevant. Jürgen Habermas makes much the same argument as Foucault, namely by questioning the rationalistic assumption that one can deduce arguments based on predefined categories and concepts (Habermas 1995). However, as I show in the following discussion, Habermas has tried to support Kant’s project by arguing that the concepts and categories (e.g. what is meant by justice) can be mediated in a social content. According to Habermas, their universality can be taken care of in an ideal talk situation (McMahon 2002).47 Kant did not abandon metaphysical thinking, but he tried to put it into what he considered was its proper place. He was a great architect, even an interior architect, in the ‘house of knowledge’. All our ways of understanding the world we live in have their proper place in this house. Some have thought of Kant as a rationalist, with his a priori concepts and deduction, even though Kant distanced himself from speculative rationalism. Some have emphasised his phenomenalism, arguing that he denounced reality and the possibility for true knowledge. They argue that according to Kant knowledge was merely social. Some, such as Rawls (1980), emphasised his constructivism, particularly related to his moral theory. Since Kant had argued that moral (human) science cannot proceed along the same lines as natural science, he adopted an approach to moral science that can be termed constructivism.48 The first major opposition to Kant’s thinking came with romanticism.49 It went parallel with the development of Hegel’s philosophical system. Hegelians predominantly criticised Kant for his dualism – the argument that there is an a priori set of concepts and categories that form our mind independent of how we experience the world. According to Kant, the mind and body were separate, as argued by Descartes. Hegel’s concept of existentialism was an attempt to close this divide, and thus implies a criticism similar to the criticism developed by romanticism in Germany, which was also present in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s critique of Kant, exemplified by the concept of freedom. Thus, romanticism became a humanistic opposition to the rationalisation of the human being. Kant argued that on the one hand that there is freedom, and that on the other hand, this freedom is constrained.

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Fichte saw this as a contradiction, and in arguing against it he came close to the absolute idealism of Hegel. In his Die Wissenschaftslehre50 published in 1804, Fichte claimed that any science or philosophy must start by assuming absolute freedom; without absolute freedom of thinking, thinking itself becomes meaningless (Fichte 1986). Still, romanticism51 held a fascination for the mechanical nature, the world as a whole, and human beings as part of it. Newton’s mechanics had revealed how the different parts of the world system were bound together in a logical whole, akin to the inner workings of a big clock, where the big and small gears interact, and all of them have their place. Thus, one could study a small gear and still get a glimpse of the large machinery. Some romanticists reflected on the lack of spirit, and they searched for deeper meaning in the discovery of the material and mechanical working of the world. As pointed out by Seamon and Zajonc, the poetical dimension in romanticism should not conceal the fact that romanticists’ thinking made important contributions to science: Scientific investigations become individualised – a process profoundly dependent on the person and his or her capacity to see pattern, form, and the archetype within the multiplicity of nature. We find, therefore, the theme of human development, or Bildung, to be an essential feature of Goethe’s mode of scientific investigation. In addition, we witness his attempt to reaffirm experience over abstraction and to remain with the phenomenon even when they become a symbol or emblem to the ideal. (Seamon & Zajonc 1998, p. 27) The brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt influenced thinking on science and the development of universities in Prussia in the early 19th century. Alexander (1769–1859) was an explorer and a great discoverer who exemplified a universally educated man. Around the year 1800, he made long journeys to Latin America, where he observed nature and culture, and pioneered the idea of seeing nature and culture as an integrated ecological system.52 Wilhelm (1767–1835) was a politician and political thinker who laid the foundation for a new type of university in Berlin,53 where the development of the human mind and the formative role of education was at the centre of teaching.54 If society is a self-reflective entity, individual understanding is the only road to knowledge. The idea of a university based on the German tradition of self-cultivation – Bildung – reflected this understanding.55 Holism56 was an inherent part of romanticism and was apparent in both the pioneering work on ecology by Alexander Humboldt and the concept of Bildung. Both concepts imply our need to see the larger picture of that in which we engage. If the advances in science and more generally in the truth of knowledge are dependent on the human mind, and the human mind makes judgements in order to find out what is right or wrong, true or not true, acceptable and not acceptable, then the mind must be cultivated in order to develop the

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competence to see this totality and to make these judgements. As Hans-Georg Gadamer argued, Thus even a preliminary glance at the linguistic history of Bildung introduces us to the circle of historical ideas that Hegel first introduced into the realm of ‘first philosophy’. In fact, Hegel has worked out very astutely what Bildung is. We follow him initially. He saw also that philosophy (and we may add the human sciences, Geisetswissenschaft) ‘has in Bildung, the condition for its existence.’ For the being of Geist (spirit) has an essential connection with the idea of Bildung. (Gadamer 2006, p. 11) Romanticism is therefore closely related to Bildung, as can be exemplified by the work of Goethe and the Humboldt brothers, who shared the romantic ideas about the world as an integrated system with human beings as an inherent part. The way we understand the world is through our reflection of the world, in the world (Seamon & Zajonc 1998). At the same time, romanticists were sceptical about the notion of instrumentalisation of thinking, not least that human beings in the modern world were removed from reflections and decisions, which were taken over by specialists or by instruments. In line with this, the Humboldtian model was a comprehensive perspective on education, in which studies and research were integrated. Still, Humboldtian ideas would be challenged from two sides: those who did not think that they took human self-development far enough – the idealists – and those who argued that science should be about explaining the natural world, not only reflecting on it – the rationalists.57 4.2.2 Existentialism Friedrich Hegel’s absolute idealism implied that the world is a whole (which denounced the dualism between mind and body and between the individual and the world) and is driven by a will, a spirit, which is materialised in the realisation of the state. Hegel was celebrated by two opposing groups58: the old or right-wing Hegelians and the young or left-wing Hegelians. While the right-wing Hegelians celebrated Hegel’s historical view – his rationalism, his fascination with Napoleon,59 his distaste of parliamentarianism, his description of the development of moral and ethics, and his description of the historical development of Germany – the left-wing celebrated, for example, his materialism, his methodology, his dialectics, and his criticism of rationalism. Both groups found support in Hegel’s work, as he argued beyond the thinking of Kant, and developed idealism and speculative philosophy. Hegel claimed that the foundation of our understanding of the world is our existence. He criticised the rationalism of the Enlightenment, arguing that there was more to knowledge than pure logical thinking. He also argued that there was a certain destiny in history. We might interpret Hegel by saying that we live in a flow of knowing60 that goes beyond our individual perception.

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As humans, we have a place in history. Hegel argued that the world we live in is basically dialectical and filled with contradictions (De Boer 2010). It is important to emphasise that Kant’s philosophy, romantic thinking, and Hegel’s philosophy were not in complete opposition to each other. Rather, they represented an internal dialogue and a variety of perspectives that had much in common, as commented upon by Karl Löwith: Kant’s reflection on ‘reason’ in its reality, as beauty standing objectively before the eyes (in art) and as organization (in nature), already defined formally the true concept of reason, although he was unaware that with his idea of intuitive understanding he was in the realm of speculation. In fact, with the notion of an archetypical understanding, he already had in his hands the key to unlock the riddle of the relationship between nature and freedom. Hegel and Goethe – and Schelling too – took this latter idea from Kant and used it as a point of departure. Both attempted the ‘adventure of reason’ by placing themselves – disregarding discursive understanding – in the middle between personal existence and the existence of the world. The difference between their ways of mediation resides in the fact that Goethe sees the unity from the point of view of nature as it is perceived, but Hegel from the point of view of the historical spirit. This corresponds to the fact that Hegel recognises a ‘cunning of reason’, and Goethe a cunning of nature. In each case, it lies in the fact that the affairs of man are subordinated to the service of the whole. (Löwith 1991, pp. 8–9) In the following discussion, I refer to two aspects of Hegel’s thinking, which are interrelated: his important analysis of existence and being, and his analysis of history. In his great work Phänomenologie des Geistes61 published in 1807, he defined existence in a way that inspired the later existentialist tradition.62 Habermas (1987) argues that Hegel’s insight into existence and being was a turning point in Western philosophy that led us to modernity: Hegel was the first to raise to the level of a philosophical problem the process of detaching modernity from suggestions of norms lying outside itself in the past. .  .  . Kant had already expressed the self-understanding of modernity. But only at the end of the eighteenth century did the problem of modernity’s self-reassurance (Selbstvergewisserung) come to a head in such a way that Hegel could grasp this question as a philosophical problem. . . . As modernity awakens to consciousness of itself, a need for self-reassurance arises, which Hegel understands as a need for philosophy. . . . Hegel see the modern age as marked universally by a structure of self-relation that calls for subjectivity: ‘The principle of the modern world is freedom of subjectivity, the principle that all essential factors present in the intellectual whole are now coming into their right in the course of their development’. (Habermas 1987, p. 16)

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Hegel brought this self-centredness of modernity to the forefront of philosophy and science. The fundamental subjectivity was essential to his absolute idealism and this implied a rationality of experience, not filtered by any construction of categories in the Kantian sense. Our absolute experience of the world represents the foundation of our existence. However, there is a second aspect of Hegel’s thinking, namely his theory of history: For Hegel, the history of philosophy is not a process parallel to or outside of the world, but ‘the heart of the world history’. What dominates both equally is the Absolute in the form of ‘world spirit’, the essence of which is movement, and hence history. Not only does Hegel’s work include a philosophy of history and a history of philosophy, but his entire system is historically oriented to an extent which is true of no previous philosophy. (Löwith 1991, p. 31) Even though Hegel’s thinking was inspired by the dialectical thinking of Plato, he was also a humanist. His perspective was the dynamics of social development; he argued against universal rational laws and instead pointed to how society had been formed by history. In combining his humanism and dialectics, Hegel not only introduced the complex and controversial concept of the spirit and the comprehensive relation between man and history, a conception that came to be criticised, but also inspired revolutionary and social reformist movements, such as the Left Hegelians. Hegel claimed that our existence is a self-realisation of mind and body in the world that at the same time is trapped in the historical context, hence the concept Hegelianism.63 Hegel criticised Kant and his transcendental reason, and instead argued that human beings were part of something bigger, something more holistic, and he proposed that this bigger thing was history. He claimed that we are part of a historical development and a spirit that defines who we are, and that this spirit represents that increased rationalisation of society, in which science plays an increasingly important role. This explains why we are subjective individuals and still have much in common: we are embedded in a historical context together, and there is a force in history, a spirit (geist), that drives history forward.64 Our individuality is interrelated with the collective entity of which we are part, which in practice is the state. Therefore, we will be free and autonomous if the state is free and autonomous.65 Hegel thought that his generation represented the highest point in historical development. Hegel’s philosophy was so comprehensive that it eventually framed German philosophy.66 Both supporters and critics of Hegel argued within the Hegelian system of thought; they remained inside the whale.67 They included Karl Marx, even though he attempted a comprehensive criticism of Hegel. Marx, together with Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), wrote the following in Die deutsche Ideologie68: This dependence on Hegel is the reason why not one of those modern critics has ever attempted a comprehensive criticism of the Hegelian system, however much each professes to have advanced beyond Hegel. (Marx & Engels 2007, p. 40)

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The Hegelian idea that Marx was unable to escape was that our life and mind is interrelated with society and history. Hegel thought about this in terms of teleology; things have a purpose, and an end.69 The Hegelian idea is also inherent in Marx and Engel’s idea of historical development.70 The Hegelian spirit is intangible; however, we can experience the world in its material form, here and now. One can imagine what the world might have looked like in Plato’s time and Aristotle’s time, but one can only experience the world in which one lives now. Thus, experience is here and now: it is embedded in the material reality that we live within. Through imagination, we can know about how the world has changed, but we can only imagine why it changed or what it was like to live in it in the past. Thus, there was both materialism and speculation in Hegel’s thinking. However, Marx and Engels turned the thinking around (Popper 1979): they argued that instead of the mind forming the world, the world formed the mind: The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the materials intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. (Marx & Engels 2007, p. 47) Hegel rejected foundationalism (Rockmore 1999). He argued that our thinking does not need a foundation, such as Plato’s forms, or Descartes’ scepticism that convinced him that he was thinking, or Kant’s synthetic a priori judgement. Our thinking is interrelated with the material reality and does not start or stop somewhere. It is, to use a present-day term, contextual. Similarly, in line with the critical theory tradition, Jürgen Habermas (1974) argues against the Marxist universal theory of historical materialism that claims to be both objective in origin and universal in application: Critique understands that its claims to validity can be verified only in the successful process of Enlightenment, and that means: in the practical discourse of those concerned. (Habermas 1974, p. 2) The non-foundationalism that Habermas supports has been used to link Hegel’s thinking to Aristotle’s thinking; things in the world are just there and do not have any origin. Hegel departed from Aristotle with regard to the idea of evolution. Aristotle did not believe in evolution (Leroi 2014). Even though he tried to develop an overall ‘system’ of thought, Hegel contributed to the understanding of subjective existence, and what was later called existentialism. Absolute idealism implies that we do not talk about the ‘structure’ of our thinking (i.e. epistemology). The human mind and body is in direct contact with reality. Human beings exist and form knowledge about the world in a specific and concrete social

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environment. It is from this immediate environment that we develop concepts and learn to comply with customs and traditions. We embed some of this knowledge in a tacit kind of knowing, and we try to make sense of the world from this point of view. As society evolves, the human mind evolves too. In Wissenschaft der Logik,71 published in three volumes between 1812 and 1816, Hegel developed an argument about the underlying structure of the world as the basis for his phenomenology. Phenomenology refers to the idea that we cannot know things in themselves (noumenon), we can only know things from how they appear.72 Hegel’s phenomenology is a criticism of sensationalism. Sensationalists, such as George Berkeley, argued that the only true knowledge we can have about the world is what we sense, and even that the way we see the world might not correspond to reality at all, and reality might in itself be just an idea. Therefore, Kant had argued that we need synthetic a priori categories to make sense of the world. Against this, Hegel wrote the following at the beginning of The Science of Logic: In no science is the need to begin with fact itself, without primary reflections, felt more strongly than in the science of logic. (Hegel 2010, p. 23) Hegel continued as follows: Logic, .  .  . cannot presuppose any of these forms of reflection, these rules and laws of thinking, for they are part of its content and they first have to be established within it. And it is not just the declaration of scientific method but the concept itself of science as such that belongs to its content and even makes up its final result. Logic, therefore, cannot say what it is in advance, rather does this knowledge of itself only emerge as a final result and completion of its whole treatment. Likewise its subject matter, thinking or more specifically conceptual thinking, is essentially elaborated within it; its concept is generated in the course of this elaboration and cannot therefore be given in advance. (Hegel 2010, p. 23) The logic that Hegel discussed is neither the foundation of our thinking nor a correction to our thinking in the way it was understood by Kant and later by Bertrand Russell. Rather, this logic penetrates our thinking and becomes an inherent part of it. Our thinking happens within the world. The reality that forms it becomes materialised through history in the form a spirit. Thus, Hegel wrote: What is anticipated . . ., therefore, is not intended to ground as it were the concept of logic, or to justify in advance its content and method scientifically, but rather to make more intuitable, by means of some explanations and

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reflections of argumentative and historical nature, the standpoint from which this science ought to be considered. (Hegel 2010, p. 23) The distinctions that Kant had made between the subjective and the objective were non-existent, as things are subjective and objective at the same time. Things are also concepts and objects at one and the same time. Thus, in his system of logic, Hegel wanted to capture this ‘many-sidedness’ of things. Some of the main elements of Hegel’s system of logic are listed in Table 4.2. Table 4.2 can be read in the following way. Things exist in terms of pure concepts and pure being. At the same time, they are being and nothing. Together, the two determine each other and determine becoming. As Hegel wrote, Pure being and pure nothing are therefore the same. The truth is not being nor nothing, but rather that being has passed over into nothing and nothing into being – ‘passed over’ not passes over. . . . Their truth is therefore this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which the two are distinguished, but by a distinction which has just as immediately dissolved itself. (Hegel 2010, p. 60) In the same way and at the same time, pure objects appear in the world in the form of being in the world. In the world, being gets its form in terms of quantity and quality. It also gets existences and later on appearance and actuality, while at the same time, it maintains its essence. Thus, all these forms are inherent in objects. In a more common-sense language, one might say that Hegel showed and deconstructed how objects are constituted both objectively and subjectively, and

Table 4.2  Hegel’s science of logic Level of abstraction

Thesis

Antithesis

Synthesis

Pure knowledge: unity of subject and object Being in the world

Being

Nothing

Becoming

Existence = quality + quantity Reflection determines existence Existence Shine (seemingness). Essence Shine is the immediate non-existence Essence = truth + being, In itself, For itself Appearance = Being + Essence Actuality = Essence + Existence

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both essentially and physically, including the subject itself, in one and the same integrated process. Habermas sees Hegel’s thinking in the context of historical development, as a dialectical process over time, during which we have become self-reflecting and have gained a more advanced self-understanding73: Enlightenment does not in the present context refer to progress in scientific knowledge as such, but rather to an improvement in our self-understanding as a consequence of a specific advance in knowledge about the world. Science is the medium of a form of enlightenment understood by Herder, Humboldt, and Hegel as a liberating process of intellectual formation. (Habermas 2018, p. 148) Hegel inspired a strand of thinking that the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) later called existentialism. The strand started with Descartes and Kant and then went via Fichte and Hegel to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and subsequently through Husserl and Heidegger to Sartre. All of these thinkers argued for a subject that goes beyond the sensing machine that the empiricists had portrayed. All of them thought that the subject, the individual, and thus freedom were beyond sensing and sense impressions. Descartes made the individual into a thinking thing: we are primarily intellect.74 Kant put freedom at the centre of human science but argued also that our freedom is constrained by pre-existing categories, and by concepts that define limits to our practical freedom. Fichte questioned these constraints and called for freedom as something absolute. Hegel argued that existence, our whole existence, is the starting point of our self-awareness and our self-reflection. This self-reflection is central to the constitution of the self. Still, this constitution happens within a whole, which can be called history. As self-reflection requires concepts and categories, it is unclear whether Hegel really managed to liberate himself completely from the Kantian arguments. In a critique of Hegel, the Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) questioned whether there was any meaning in existence and, if not, how to overcome that absence. In Kierkegaard’s interpretation, Hegel had thrown the human being into an abyss, where anxiety was predominant. The realisation of this deep reality of no meaning is referred to as existentialism. It discloses the superficial nature of how we create an illusion of meaning against the background of meaninglessness. Anxiety arises from our deep recognition of these false and illusionary beliefs. Still, Jon Stewart argues that the relation between Kierkegaard and Hegel is closer than has previously been assumed (Stewart 2003). Kierkegaard’s criticisms were directed more towards Hegelians than against Hegel himself. Also, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is seen as a strong critic of Hegel but still within the Hegelian discourse, in the sense that he reflected on and speculated about the nature of the world and existence from the point of view of existence (Löwith 1991; Dudley 2002). He took his I as a point of departure

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and reflected on reality. He saw this I as part of reality, thus ‘I am nature’. However, in this respect, there is a kind of materialism. Nietzsche’s materialism was probably different from that of his contemporary philosophers. There are no predefined structures, such as logic, to explain our thinking. Nietzsche entirely rejected the idea that logical analysis can be applied to our understanding (Sherratt 2006, p. 127). He argued that modern society and modern thinking had influenced our own thinking to the extent that it distorted our understanding of the material world.75 Following Nietzsche, we have to free ourselves from these ideas in order to see the material reality as it is. Nietzsche’s early work, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, published in 1872,76 can be read as a criticism of modern society and a call to return to the Greek dramas as sources of true knowledge.77 Inspired by Darwin, Nietzsche claimed that there was no meaning in the world, there was no God, and there was no overall idea that linked us to the world. Therefore, we create meaning in order to exist. This can be seen as a rejection of Hegel’s idea of a geist. In line with this argument, Nietzsche suggested genealogy78 as an approach to understand history. As Yvonne Sherratt argues, First, genealogy is not a theory of knowledge. It does not tell us how we come to know the truth about the world. It is instead, ontological, it is a theory about the way the world actually is. In fact, it is a view about the world’s nature, as one of historical existence. Secondly, Nietzsche’s theory of genealogy can be characterised as nominalist. (Sherratt 2006, p. 130) Nominalism implies a rejection of essentialism. Husserl later re-established the Cartesian mind in the sense of the reflective essence-seeing subject.79 Heidegger, in building on the work of Hegel and Nietzsche,80 came to argue that we cannot start our understanding of existence based on predefined concepts that predate existence. Rather, we are thrown into existence, Dasein (there-being), as a total and complete reality. This formed the background for the work of Sartre, who similarly argued that we are thrown into the world and that we have to make meaning out of it. However, Sartre’s project went further and established what constitutes the I and then the other.81 His argument was that the ‘I’ is constituted in the perspective of the other, thus indicating a whole sociology. This humanism is integrated into our existence. In this regard, the philosophical problem here is how is it that the ‘I’ comes to know my existence? If I argue that there is a concept of I, it follows that I exist. If I argue that existence precedes concepts, how can we be sure that I really exist? Nietzsche wrote the following on the concept of nihilism: But truth is not taken to be that highest standard of value, still less the highest power. The will to appearance, illusion, deception, becoming and change (to objective deception) is here taken to be a more profound, more primordial,

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more metaphysical than the will to truth, reality and being – the latter is merely a form of the will to illusion. (Nietzsche 2017, p. 484) In modern terms, it could be argued that Nietzsche tried to reach a more real reality than the one disclosed by modern means such as science and rational thinking. He wanted to move beyond that: Against positivism, which goes no further than the phenomenon and says, ‘there are only facts’ I should say: no, facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations. We can establish no fact ‘in itself’; perhaps it is nonsense to desire such a thing. ‘Everything is subjective’, you may say, but that is already and interpretation; the ‘subject’ is not something given, but an embellishment, and interpolation. It is necessary to postulate the existence of an interpreter behind interpretation? Even that would be a piece of fiction, a hypothesis. (Nietzsche 2017, p. 287) The argument that we as human beings are part of something greater, namely nature, is implicit in the quotation. Nature imposes constraints, and our nihilism is about handling those constraints.82 The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) reflected on the modernist period in his book Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung, published in 1911.83 He discusses two opposing forces in social and economic development: the rational agent as the manager who optimises and streamlines production,84 and as the entrepreneur, inventor, and even rebellious actor who has to be creative and come up with new ideas85 (Schumpeter 2008). Schumpeter saw this dualism in a wider social context, and later in the same publication, there is a discussion of what Schumpeter later called creative destruction,86 a concept that is both Nietzschean and futurist in style, meaning a form of development that is not only groundbreaking, unpredictable, and threatening, but also liberating.87 Thus, Schumpeter had captured the dilemma of modernism and had seen how it played out in society. 4.2.3  Explaining and understanding In the second half of the 19th century, a new interest in Kant emerged and inspired what has been called neo-Kantianism. Neo-Kantianism was not a coherent movement but rather consisted of different groups and persons who focused on selected aspects of Kant’s thinking. Foremost among those often mentioned were the Marburg school of neo-Kantian idealism and the Baden school of neo-Kantianism. It could be said common to the neo-Kantians was a rejection of Kant’s idea of pure intuition (synthetic a priori judgement). They differed in what they embraced, but broadly speaking the Marburg school emphasised Kant’s epistemological theory, while the Baden school emphasised his methodology. With regard to the Marburg

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school, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) argued against Kant’s intuition in his discussion about non-Euclidean geometry: Thus the belief in the immediate certainty and persuasiveness of geometrical ‘evidence’ was profoundly shaken within the confines of classical rationalism itself, not to be reinstated even by Kant’s theory of a priori forms of pure intuition. (Cassirer 1978, p. 28) However, even though Kant’s pure intuition does not seem to have been as universal as Kant claimed, Cassirer maintained that our capacity to understand the world is essential to the discussion about the nature of the world, and even if the world is shaped by the way we see it, our way of seeing is in itself subject to improvement. Cassirer saw this as a development and learning process, thus maintaining a positive perspective on Kant’s enlightenment project. He moderated and defended Kant, as shown by the following quotation: Kant’s transcendental idealism does not aim to eliminate the special nature of empirical knowledge; instead, its essential merit is to be sought in its affirmation of its nature. Kant’s saying that his field is the ‘fertile lowland of experience’ is well known. But his general counsel holds also for the new critical determination of the concept of experience itself: that here as well we have to begin, not with observation of objects, but with the analysis of knowledge. (Cassirer 1982, p. 162) Cassirer has become known for the Cassirer – Heidegger debate, an encounter between him and Martin Heidegger.88 The event subsequently led to the disruption of continental philosophy, which the American historian of philosophy Peter Gordon (b. 1966) has called the continental divide (Gordon 2012). In short, even though reports on the event mention a polite discussion on Heidegger’s dismissal of Kantian thinking, and given the prominence that Heidegger was about to receive, the encounter between Cassirer and Heidegger meant a blow to German idealism. Nevertheless, Cassirer retained his idealism (Cassirer 1972). Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) was one of the main exponents of the Baden school. The Baden school’s interest in Kant related more to his methodology than to his philosophy and metaphysics. Windelband was particularly interested in how different aspects of the world are perceived through different concepts and capacities. His distinction between a nomothetic approach and an idiographic approach to knowledge was based on Kant’s work. Whereas nomothetic knowledge relates to the universal – the structures and laws that govern nature (as in natural science), idiographic knowledge is related to the particular – the unique and the contingent elements in the world. With ideographic knowledge, an attempt is made to understand rather than to explain.

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German idealism took many forms and inspired a wide range of philosophical discussions. It both inspired Lebensphilosophie, which was a reaction both to positivism and empiricism, and Kantian abstractions and rationalism. The German scholar Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911)89 was a main exponent of Lebensphilosophie and argued for a special foundation for the human and social sciences. He became convinced that the study of nature and the study of man and society could never be the same kind of science. While we can explain nature, we can only understand the human world. Dilthey criticised the neo-Kantian philosophy that developed in Germany. He took the controversy over positivist and empiricist science back to Descartes and Hegel, both of whom had discussed the dualism of subjectivity and objective reality. Dilthey did not reject empiricism. On the contrary, he had great respect for its achievement in natural science. However, he argued for basing human and social sciences in the understanding of life, history, and social context, thereby developing the dualism of the concepts explaining and understanding. He became an exponent of the scientific approach called the interpretive method. Dilthey put experience at the centre of how we understand the world, and he defined some main concepts that are central to our insights into experience (Betanzos 1979): the concept of Erlebnins (lived experience) relates to our immediate, prereflective experience, whereas Vorstellung (representation) relates to how we put experience into relations with other things or other concepts, and Verstehen (understanding) is a form of objectification of life. Thus, our experience shifts from the immediate to the objective. However, the relation between the natural sciences and human sciences is not as clear as might be expected, they are closely interlinked: At this point one can see how relative the boundary is which separates these two classes of sciences from each other. . . . Knowledge of natural science blends with that of human science. As a matter of fact, in accord with the double manner in which the process of nature conditions the life of the mind, knowledge of the formative influence of nature is frequently intertwined with establishing the influence nature exercises as the materiel contend of activity. (Dilthey 1979, p. 86) The dualism of natural science and human science was highlighted in a dispute known as Metodenstreit (dispute over method), in which Austrian philosophers and scientists reacted against German idealism and historical orientation. The German Historical school, which elaborated Hegel’s argument about history, claimed that there was a particular way of thinking at a particular point in time, and that in turn influenced the way that we look at things. Austrians agreed with empiricists and positivists that the foundation of our thinking is sensing.90 Members of the German Historical School strongly objected to universal social laws, and they had a strong focus on the institutional aspects of social development. In short, that meant in practice that an economic theory that could be applied in

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England would not necessarily be appropriate for Germany.91 It could be said that the Austrian opposition to German thinking was a reaction to Hegel’s attempt to encompass everything, including history, into one unified system. The core of the controversy was whether historical development was contextually specific and culturally specific, or whether there were universal, a priori dimensions that transcended historical particularities.92 The German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) can be seen as intellectually close to Dilthey and as a scholar who helped to develop the interpretive methodology. In his book Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus,93 published in 1904, he argued that there was something distinct about the capitalist production system that developed in Europe from the 17th century onward. The German Historical school economist Werner Sombart had used the term capitalism in his book Der moderne Kapitalismus, published in 1902 (Sombart 2019). Although there was capitalist production in other parts of the world at that time, and rational economic calculation was not specific to Western cultures, the specific form of capitalism that developed in Western countries was different from any of the forms what had existed earlier.94 Thus, Weber wanted to explain the Western form of capitalism, with its bourgeois type of capitalist and the rational organisation of free labour that was unique in world history. This form of capitalism was dependent on the development of institutions in society, such as the development of natural and rational sciences, the system of rule of law, and a rational system of justice. These institutions, which helped a rational form of capitalism to develop, were not in themselves to be explained by Protestant ethics. However, it is a known fact that the development of these institutions happened in Western societies after the 17th century.95 Weber argued that the specific rationalism in the social culture was defined by a special practical-rational way of life, which could be traced to a specific rational mentality found in mysticism and religion, and in a certain understanding of ethics as duty. Weber emphasised this as mentality. Such a phenomenon is not the result of only one cause. Thus, Weber had tried to elaborate on the issue of how, historically, certain religious perceptions had developed and how that development had influenced ideas of social organisation. Common to the Protestant movements was that the internal, moral policing was stronger than any force in civil society. The voluntary obedience and the communal forces created a form of voluntary collectivism. The rational, collective organisation of society became the immediate response to the call for God’s mercy. The rationalised everyday life in the duty of commerce was at the same time the realisation of the ascetic behaviour in the name of God. An interpretative methodology implies that in our orientation towards reality, there is a need to combine understanding and explaining. Society is more than the sum of individuals. The totality cannot be reduced to individual agents. In turn, this anti-reductionism implies that we can understand individuals as both subjects and society. Furthermore, we can understand social differentiation as different

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meaning systems. This implies that knowledge is socially situated, which points to the sociology of knowledge.96

4.3 Phenomenology 4.3.1  Striving towards the infinite horizon The tradition that became what we today understand as phenomenology was introduced by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) in his two-volume work Logische Untersuchungen.97 Phenomenology similar to logical positivists may be seen as a reaction to German idealism, as expressed by Whitehead: If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations. (Whitehead 1967, p. 17) It has been rather common to argue that Edmund Husserl changed his mind and moved from a more realist interest in mathematics and psychology to a more neo-Kantian interest in phenomenology. Furthermore, scholars have often divided Husserl’s work into four phases. His studies of logic and mathematics predominantly published in Philosophie der Arithmetik. Psychologische und logische Untersuchungen in 189198 represents the first phase. The second phase started with the publication of Logische Untersuchungen in 1900 and 1901. In the third phase, Husserl shifted towards neo-Kantianism with the publication of Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie in 1913, in which his thinking came close to transcendental idealism (Husserl 2012). Finally, his fourth phase started with his Cartesianische Meditatione,99 published in 1931, in which he adopted a more sociological perspective. However, more recent discussions have increasingly seen a continuity in Husserl’s thinking (D.W. Smith 2013). Furthermore, David Woodruff Smith argues that phenomenology is not the foundation of Husserl’s thinking, but rather it is an integrated part of it: According to this alternative interpretation, Husserl was constantly expanding his overall system of philosophy. The shifts observed in Husserl’s writing were not radical (nearly schizoid) turns of mind, but rather recurrent efforts to get the large scheme right. (D.W. Smith 2013, p. 34) Smith’s argument may explain why phenomenology developed in different directions when integrated into other philosophers’ work. Phenomenology is not a dogmatism or a doctrine; it is a general perspective on the totality of fundamental concepts such as epistemology and ontology. Following Smith’s argument,

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and to put Husserl’s theories in perspective, reference could be made to Wilhelm Dilthey who initially was rather fascinated by Husserl’s Logical Investigations. He thought that the work responded to some of his own discussions (Betanzos 1976), and Husserl had praised Dilthey’s essay Ideen über eine bechreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie,100 published in 1984. Furthermore, Dilthey had tried to develop a philosophy of human science that acknowledged the achievement of empiricism, rationalism, and idealism (Betanzos 1976; Damböck 2012). Still, Husserl came to argue that this development did not go far enough. It could be said that Husserl’s entire project was to bring the interpretivist tradition out of the ‘blind alley’ that it had entered.101 His intention was to sort out what he saw as the confusion and muddling of the earlier philosophy and science debate, and to replace it with a strong and firm foundation of thinking. John E. Jalbert argues that a precondition for understanding Husserl’s project is knowledge of the discussion between the Hegelian-inspired interpretivism of Dilthey and the neoKantian position (Jalbert 1988). Husserl is mainly known for his proclamation to the things themselves, by which he meant that Cartesian philosophy had been preoccupied with discussing the relationship between things and how they are perceived. Instead, Husserl wanted to put brackets around his problem and focus on the thing itself and its phenomenological appearance. In that way, Husserl tried to break free of the classical divide between subject and object.102 Whereas positivist sciences study the relations among objects, phenomenology studies relations between subject and object. Phenomenologists aim to find what is necessarily common to all subject – object relations, which is their a priori formal structure. Accordingly, Husserl was not oriented towards empirical science but towards the transcendental subject. In phenomenology, the aim is to transcend the social veil and the psychological veil in the search for the real, authentic, and transcendental truth. One way of understanding Husserl’s thinking might be to contrast it with the thinking of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941). Bergson made intuition a major concept in his philosophy of metaphysics and rejected Kant’s limited scope of the concept. For Kant, two main human capacities in terms of thinking were required to make propositions: intuition and judgement. As I have shown,103 intuition provides us with basic and general concepts of space, time, cause, and effect, among others. Judgement is our ability to apply these concepts to specific situations. One’s intuition will tell one that something is bigger than something else. One’s judgement could be that one’s cat is bigger that one’s neighbour’s cat. Both of these capacities are ‘in the world’; they are synthetic knowledge. Bergson reacted to Kant’s thinking and wrote: With Kant, space is given as a ready-made form of our perceptual faculty – a variable deus ex machina, of which we see neither how it arises, nor why it is what it is rather than anything else. ‘Things-in-themselves’ are also given, of which he claims we cannot know nothing: by what right, then, can he affirm their existence, even as ‘problematic’. (Bergson 1998, p. 205)

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For Bergson, intuition was a capacity that enabled people to know ‘things in themselves’. Husserl, who was also concerned with intuition, rejected both Kant’s and Bergson’s use of the term: Most generally stated, unlike Husserl, Bergson does not aim to provide a description of the essence of acts of consciousness; and unlike Bergson, Husserl is not at all interested in developing a metaphysics that would ‘penetrate more deeply into the interior of matter, of life, or reality in general’. (Jacobs & Perri 2010, p. 101) More recent developments within phenomenology have tried to reconcile the two positions (Morros 2005). Both positions were sympathetic to deductive reasoning. Their disagreement might be referred to as a question about analytical a priori knowledge that Bergson accepted and Husserl rejected. On the basis of the idealist tradition from Descartes, Bergson thought that it was possible to come close to understanding the essence of things, but Husserl did not make the same argument. It was not the nature of things in themselves that concerned Husserl, but people’s mental capacity to understand the things themselves, and these ‘things themselves’ are always a product of our mind. This point can be demonstrated with reference to the following example, which Husserl used (Husserl 1999). Assume that we (an individual) live in a culture, a lifeworld, and within this lifeworld, we have reached a transcending understanding of things. They are thus true as we perceive them. However, they are limited to the life horizon that we have. We then meet someone from another culture who similarly see things, but in a different way. How do we decide on the truth? The answer is that we must embark on the same process by which we had come to the earlier belief, and then, together with the other, a new transcendental truth will appear. Husserl was inspired by the work of Franz Brentano104 when he attended his lectures at the University of Vienna in the years 1884 and 1885. Among the problems Brentano had tried to solve was one that the empiricists, from Locke to Hume, had struggled with: if the world comes to us as sense impressions, how is it that we can sort out things from these impressions? Locke’s solution to the problem was to argue that the world presents itself in the form of ideas.105 Hume had argued against this solution and claimed that only simple impressions make sense.106 It was an argument that inspired analytical philosophy and logical positivism. On the one hand, Brentano had criticised empiricism and the idea of a passive mind that experienced sense impressions, a mind that only respond to sense impulses; on the other hand, he criticised the Cartesian thinking machine, a mind that operates independent of external objects. Brentano also responded to the interpretivist discussions of meaning, and he proposed a rather radical alternative to them. His reconciliation was referred to as intentionality or directedness: the mind is always directed at something and gives that thing an intention. The mind is always intending something.107 He argued that instead of thinking of the

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mind as a passive receiver of sense impressions, one could think of it as an active searcher for sense impressions. The core of Edmund Husserl’s scientific programme was to develop a theory of transcendental subjectivity based on an interpretation of both Hume and Brentano. Phenomenology and neo-positivism shared many things, primarily the call for a solid foundation for science. However, Husserl criticised neo-positivism, mainly for ignoring the human dimension. Still, he argued that phenomenology is not psychology. Husserl’s attack on neo-positivism was explicitly directed against natural sciences. He said that they (natural science) had ‘discovered’ the true world of atoms, which is superior to our lifeworld and determines it, and consequently, if man consists of atoms that are causally determined, he/she will be causally determined too, and his/her freedom and consciousness will be illusions or epiphenomena. According to Husserl, it was forgotten that the natural sciences only serve as an instrument of predictions, and that their predictive function is applied within our lifeworld. Intentionality implies that when we see something, hear it, or dream it, we direct our intention towards that thing (picture, sound, or dream). The reason we see a certain thing is that we intend to see it. This opens a new way of understanding how our mind works,108 and why it selects some types of information rather than others. For Husserl, this idea of intentionality and directness inspired his further thinking (Moran 2002). It was already present in his Philosophie der Arithmetik. (Husserl & Willard 2003), and was interpreted by Gottlob Frege as sort of psychologism, meaning that one explains mathematics as a psychological process (D.W. Smith 2013). A late reply from Husserl to Frege109 came in as an essay titled The Origin of Geometry.110 The discussion with Frege illustrates the core divide between phenomenology and analytical philosophy. Frege had argued for the distinction between sense and reference in that sense is decoupled from reference. Frege used this distinction to argue that we can analyse references to concepts independent of their sense.111 Husserl objected to Frege’s argument, and Frege termed the objection psychologism, because he assumed that the only alternative to his theory was that references had links to the human mind. It could be argued that phenomenology first emerged when Husserl embarked on the task of showing that the mind cannot be erased from language, logic, and mathematics and still argue that this does not mean that everything is reduced to psychology. Phenomenology might be seen as a generalisation of the question of how can things like logic, language, and mathematics be mind-dependent and still objective? Husserl stated: [T]he primally establishing geometer can obviously also express his internal structure. But questions arise again: How does the latter, in its ‘ideality’, thereby become objective? To be sure, something psychic which can be understood by others (nachverstandbar) and is communicable, as something psychic belonging to this man, is eo ipso objective. (Husserl 1970, p. 359)

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Thus, Husserl made two claims: the first was that geometry had an origin, and the second was that geometry had developed through a historical process. In a lengthy comment, Derrida questioned both claims (Derrida 1989). Husserl argued that at one time, a time before the existence of science, geometry had originated as a human invention and was based on a human need to solve problems. The process of objectivisation implies that over time things become abstract and lose their connection to their origin. The problem is that in doing so, there is a possibility for manipulation. For Husserl, the crisis in science was precisely that modern science had come into this kind of manipulative stage; humans had lost track of the origins of their ideas. Derrida’s argument was that the two claims were not sufficiently documented. First, the origin of geometry, even if it happened in a time before the existence of science, could still be seen as an abstraction. It required a language and abstract thinking, which must have already been present. Hence, Husserl’s second claim regarding the evolution of history was problematic too. Does this mean that history moves towards higher degree of abstraction? In decomposing Husserl’s argument, Derrida questioned Husserl’s second claim.112 At the risk of oversimplification, the following example might serve to illustrate the same argument. Assume that one says ‘I see a tree’. By saying that, one expresses a psychic state: one’s mind is now filled with the image of a tree. However, the fact that one has a psychic experience of a tree does not mean that the tree does not exist. On the contrary, the fact that one claims to see the tree might bring the actual (objective) tree to the attention of others. However, this does not tell us anything about the origin of the tree – Husserl did not argue for idealism or realism; that was not his concern (Dreyfus 1984) – and it does not tell us much about the objective existence of more abstract forms. David Woodruff Smith states: For Husserl, ‘pure logic’ is about the logical and semantic properties of ideal meanings, propositions and constituents. And Husserl’s challenge remains on the table for subsequent logicians of more nominalistic persuasion: what makes an inference valid, if logic addresses only the forms of sentences that a given group of people happened to use in a certain way? (D.W. Smith 2013, p. 49) Where, then, does the objectivity or pure logic, mathematics, geometry, and the like come from? Smith states: Husserl joined with other 19th century Platonistic logicians (Bolzano, Lotze, Frege) in assuming a range of ideal or (as we say today) abstract meanings, which include the ‘thoughts’ or propositions expressed by given language. Human languages are themselves social artifacts that serve the purpose of communication between people . . . Husserl posited ideal meanings in order to account for the objectivity of logic. And he proposed a theory of speech

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activities in order to account for human communication. In Husserl’s theory of logic and language, then, activities of speech relate to ideal meanings. (D.W. Smith 2013, p. 50) What are ideal meanings? They are not something ‘out there’ or, as Plato had assumed, some ideal existing beyond the human world. Rather, they are inherent in our language as intentional objects. The ideal forms are anchored in our mind. Husserl argued, in line with Plato, that there were two kinds of ideal things: ideal forms and ideal matter. For example, two persons might represent two ideals in terms of matter (they are different humans), but share the same ideal in terms of form (they are both humans). In line with this, Husserl defined phenomenology ‘as the science of the essence of consciousness’ (D.W. Smith 2013, p. 54). Consciousness concerns how we experience the world: for example how we think, touch, feel, and see the world around us. Such experiences are all marked by the intentionality of the mind. Thus, our consciousness represents an intentional relation between the mind and an intentional object. Phenomenology can thereby be defined as the process of finding the essence of this relation, not the essence of objects themselves. Husserl called the essence noema: Husserl’s view is that the directedness of the act should be accounted for not by object toward which the act is directed, but by a certain structure of our consciousness when we are performing the act. This structure Husserl calls the noema. (Føllesdal 1984, p. 36) How do we come from this structure or the essence of consciousness, to the essence of our relation to the world? Michael Dummett argued that Husserl’s project was to re-establish the relationship between mind and thought/expression. Dummett wrote: [T]here is just a single act, that of uttering the words as having a certain meaning, which has two aspects of constituents, one physical and the other mental. (Dummett 1993, p. 41) Husserl stated: In speaking we are continuously performing an act of meaning which fuses with the words and, as it were, gives them life. The effect of thus giving them life is that the words and the entire utterance as it were, embody in themselves a meaning, and bear it embodied in them as their sense. (Husserl, cited in Dummett 1993, p. 43)

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In Cartesianische Meditationen, Husserl wrote-: But science looks for truths that are valid and remain so, once and for all and for everyone; accordingly seeks verifications of a new kind, verifications carried through to the end. Though de facto, as science itself must ultimately see, it does not attain actualisation of a system of absolute truths, but rather an obligation to modify its ‘truths’ again and again, it nevertheless follows the idea of absolute and genuine truth; and accordingly, it reconciles itself to an infinite horizon of approximations, tending towards that idea. (Husserl 1999, p. 12) Since science is striving towards an infinite horizon, it is still a human enterprise. Therefore, Husserl was not interested in dividing science or in having a speculative philosophy. Instead, he was interested in integrating science and philosophy into a single coherent way of thinking that would seek the truth: Anything belonging to the world, any spatiotemporal being, exists for me – that is to say, is acted by me – in that I experience it, perceive it, remember it, think of it somehow, judge about it, value it, desire it, or the like. Descartes, as we know, indicated all that by the name cogito. The world is for me absolutely nothing else but the world existing for and accepted by me in such conscious cogito. It gets its whole sense, universal and specific, and its acceptance as existing, exclusively from such cogitations. (Husserl 1999, p. 21) There are two dimensions to the process of cognition. One is the purely subjective sensing of things, and the other is transcendental, in the sense of a common process of understanding things. As one’s attention to the things in the world is intentional, one can project an understanding of how things are. This requires that one moves beyond one’s subjective sensing and tries to understand what the phenomenon is. Such an understanding requires that one abstains from some of one’s subjective and emotional reactions to things and dedicate one’s attention to what things really are. In that way, one can come to know how things really are. Husserl used concepts such as bracketing and epoché to define such a process. Still, we are left with one important issue: There remains the task of defining the relationship between the perceptual noema and the thing perceived. (Gurwitsch 1984, p. 68) At the risk of presenting the relationship in a form that is too banal, it might be instructive to see the phenomenological process as one by which one transforms

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oneself into a transcendental self. That is, instead of asking what it means for oneself, one asks what it means for mankind in general. This approach might account for why Husserl claimed that phenomenology was not a subjectivist philosophy. By transforming one’s mind in the way described earlier, one can reach a general and universal understanding of things that is closer to the essence of knowing. At the same time, one avoids the idiosyncrasy that had been so problematic for empiricists. Furthermore, Aron Gurwitsch (1984) suggested that we can talk about a noematic system, a process by which we add insights into the nature of things by addressing different angles or aspects of those things. Still, Husserl never ventured deeply into sociology or questions of how to organise science, and he did not describe how to apply phenomenological methods in practice. His ambition was to develop a first philosophy, a precondition for philosophy and science. The most fundamental criticism of phenomenology is the question of whether such a first philosophy or even epistemology is needed, which became the discussion both between Husserl and his student Martin Heidegger and a criticism of phenomenology by critical theory, as I show in the following section.113 4.3.2  Fundamental ontology In his later career, the British scholar Alfred North Whitehead, who co-authored the book Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, turned to the philosophy of science. He also engaged in metaphysics, and he went to Harvard University, where among other work, he supervised the dissertation of the analytical philosopher/pragmatist Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000). With regard to the philosophy of science, Whitehead was a realist and defended realism against its critics, such as David Hume. He also denounced German idealism from the time of Kant onwards.114 Whitehead’s relation to phenomenology started with reflection on the work of George Berkeley. Berkeley represented sensationalism,115 one of the four basic philosophical traditions presented in Chapter 1, and the only one not discussed in this book, mainly because it is anti-scientific. To the extent that science is engaged with the outer world, the tradition of sensationalism holds that there is no outer world in which to engage. At the same time, I have shown that Berkeley’s argument has been very inspiring and has had a creative impact on the scientific discourse.116 In one respect, he was also a realist. Whitehead argued that there were two ways of interpreting Berkeley’s argument. The most common of the two can be illustrated with an example that parallels Whitehead’s example (Whitehead 1967, p. 70).117 Assume that one is in an aeroplane and one sees an object at a distance that one assumes is a house. One can only see the contours of a building. As one moves close to the house, one can see details, such as doors and windows. Assume also that one later goes inside the house and sees its interior.118 Berkeley’s discussion concerned whether one sees the same object and whether the object exists at all. In all three situations,

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one’s perception gives one an image of an object, and in each of them the object is completely different. Whitehead agreed with Berkeley that our perception of the object would be completely altered in the three situations. Which one is the real object? In fact, all three situations are real, but they involve different perspectives of the object. This is how we see the world; we see it as something. If we assume that an object exists, there will always be a perceptual dimension to what we see. The fact that we can see an object in different ways is not an argument to claim that the object does not exist. In this regard, Whitehead’s thinking resembled phenomenology, without making direct reference to phenomenology.119 However, his argument parallels that of Martin Heidegger. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was the most influential of Husserl’s students.120 His main work Sein und Zeit was published in 1927.121 He argued for the need to address the ontological question: What is the nature of things? The most fundamental ontological question is what is being? In a lecture series given parallel to the publication,122 Heidegger summarised the divide between Kant and Hegel as follows: The subjectivity of the subject is therefore synonymous with self-­ consciousness. Self-consciousness constitutes the actuality, the being of this being. Hence it comes about that, in an extreme version of Kant’s or Descartes’ thought, German idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) saw the true actuality of the subject in self-consciousness. From there, following upon the start made by Descartes, the whole problematic of philosophy was developed. Hegel says: ‘The most important point of the nature of the mind is not only the relationship of what it is in itself to what it is actually but also to what is knows itself as to what is actually is; because spirit [is] essentially consciousness, this self-knowing is a basic determination of its actuality’. (Heidegger 1982, p. 152) Heidegger was among those who took Hegel’s thinking forward, building on his science of logic. He wrote: We assert now that being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy. This is not our own invention; it is the way of putting the theme which comes to life at the beginning of philosophy in antiquity, and it develops its most grandiose form in Hegel’s logic. At present we are merely asserting that being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy. Negatively, this means the philosophy is not a science of being but of being or, as Greek expression goes, ontology. We take this expression in the widest possible sense and not in the narrow one it has, say in Scholasticism or in modern philosophy in Descartes and Leibniz. (Heidegger 1982, p. 11)

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Following this, Heidegger suggested fundamental ontology as the core theme of philosophy. He distanced himself from both Kant’s epistemology and Hegelianism’s subjectivism. The road from res cognitans via subjectivism was a way of arguing that the world was a form of interpretation, and it was this interpretation that Heidegger wanted to challenge. His concept of fundamental ontology was a call for a more fundament understating of reality: The possibility of a fundamental ontology interpretation of the beings we ourselves are, was retarded even more than earlier by this development of the interpretation of subjectivity by way of self-consciousness. (Heidegger 1982, p. 153) Heidegger argued that being was something pre-conceptual and hence pre-­ scientific. This implies a limitation to the ambitions of science, and the idea that instrumental reason can give us answers to all kinds of questions. Furthermore, Heidegger broke away from Husserl’s idea that we stand as sovereign individuals and can have an intentional relation to objects around us. Instead, to some extent, Heidegger returned to Hegel’s idea that we are ourselves nature. Our existence means that we are inside nature, not spectators of nature. It is from inside that we understand things and can come to a deeper understanding of things. While Husserl primarily leaned towards Kant, Heidegger primarily leaned towards Hegel. As Eilenberger writes, For Heidegger, then, that which is primarily given is not the reality but an environment. And that ‘worlding’ environment is already a significant totality of references that, if consistently pursued, ultimately point toward the whole world of meaning. This specific kind of givenness of the world is something to which we must, in Heidegger’s view, open our eyes. We need to reclaim a philosophical point of view that we have unlearned and forgotten, with fatal consequences both for ourselves and for our culture as a whole. (Eilenberger 2020, p. 86) Heidegger used the word Dasein (there-being) to describe the fact that we are inside the world.123 We are present, in the meaning of being part of and included in the world. Prior to Heidegger’s work, philosophy had been based on an illusion: the strict divide between a subject and an objective world. Heidegger completely rejected the kind of Cartesian rationalism that implies a sovereign subject. If we remove the divide between a thinking subject on the one hand and the objective world on the other hand, we will have to think again about philosophical issues, since our access to things is not due to our ability to observe and thereby describe the world; we exist and are part of the world we try to understand. Thus, our making sense of the world is a process of interpreting things in which we are inside, rather than explaining as though we are looking at things from the outside. Thus,

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investigating something starts by asking oneself the question about where things start; it starts by some sort of introspection. A key theme in Heidegger’s critique of Descartes and Kant was the divide between res cogitans (a thinking thing), such as thinking, and res extensa (an extended thing), such as the body. Furthermore, our thinking is prior to our extended presence, and thereby epistemology – our theory about thinking and how we cognitively come to have knowledge of things – has been seen as a fundamental issue for philosophy: Kant adopts this definition of the ego as res cognitans in the sense of cogito me cogitare except that he formulates it in a more fundamental ontological way. He says the ego is that whose determinations are representations in the full sense of representation. We know that ‘determination’ (Bestimmungs) is not an arbitrary concept or term for Kant but a translation of the term dereminatio or realitas. The ego is a res, whose realities are representations, cognitationes. (Heidegger 1982, p. 126) Epistemology was a key issue for Kantians, and is used when we discuss how we come to have scientific knowledge, against which Heidegger argued as follows: The method of ontology, that is, of philosophy in general, is distinguished by the fact that ontology has nothing in common with any method of any of the other sciences, all of which as positive science deal with beings. On the other hand, it is precisely the analysis of the truth-character of being which shows that being also is, as it were, based in a being, namely in the Dasein. (Heidegger 1982, p. 19) Thus, epistemology cannot help us understand ontology. Furthermore, phenomenology is not something we choose. It is a reality beyond our choice; it is something we simply need to accept as the foundation for everything else: [P]henomenological research can represent nothing less than the more explicit and more radical understanding of the idea of scientific philosophy which philosophers from ancient times to Hegel sought to realize time and again in a variety of internal coherent endeavours. . . . We shall maintain that phenomenology is not just one philosophical science among others, nor is it the science preparatory to the rest of them; rather, the expression ‘phenomenology’ is the name of the method of scientific philosophy in general. (Heidegger 1982, p. 3, original emphasis) If we were to try to translate the argument in the quotation into less philosophical and more common-sense language, it could be said that Heidegger challenged assumptions about a true understanding of reality. The British-based empiricism,

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French rationalism, and German-based idealism all fell short of truly and fundamentally addressing the issue of the existence of things, including our own being. The pursuit of this task goes beyond just clarifying some concepts or categories for the other sciences124; it starts by asking what thinking is: We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves try to think. If the attempt is to be successful, we must be ready to learn thinking. As soon as we allow ourselves to become involved in such learning, we have admitted that we are not yet capable of thinking. (Heidegger 2004, p. 5) When we start by asking the fundamental questions of what is it to think, what do we really know, and can we be sure that what we know is really reality, the next question should naturally be to ask how to proceed: Where should we start? What might give us insights into this question of fundament ontology? One element that Heidegger emphasised is the phenomenon of time and the fact that our understanding of reality is temporary. Heidegger explored the temporality of being in Being and Time (Heidegger 1995). Hans Georg Gadamer made the following observation: Heidegger’s temporal analytics of Dasein has, I think, shown convincingly that understanding is not just one of the various possible behaviours of the subject but the mode of being of Dasein itself. It is in this sense that the term ‘hermeneutics’ has been used here. It denotes the basic being-in-motion of Dasein that constitutes its finitude and historicity, and hence embraces the whole of its experience of the world. (Gadamer 2006, p. xxvii) Heidegger based his methodology on a correspondence theory of truth (Young 2001). This implies that he dismissed the objections to correspondence theory that came from logical empiricists. For Heidegger, the problem was not whether truth should mean correspondence with facts; rather, the problem was how to establish facts. Heidegger dismissed the logical empiricist idea that basic facts are simple sense impressions. Rather, it could be argued that Heidegger’s methodology was designed to establish facts through a process that included mankind’s thinking, experiences, logic, and historical insights. This methodology is strongly related to what things are, what they mean, and what their totality is. Heidegger’s discussion of the hammer in paragraph 23 in Being and Time (Heidegger 1995) may be illustrative. He argued that a hammer does not have meaning in itself. It has a meaning in its use. It is in the form of being ready-at-hand that the hammer represents something meaningful: Consider one of Heidegger’s favourite examples: a hammer. For Heidegger, what it is for something to be a hammer cannot be understood

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in terms of the properties (shape, weight, colour, molecular composition, etc.) of an object. To say what a hammer is, one must describe hammering; one must, that is, describe the ways in which a hammer is used. In doing so, one will inevitably mention other ‘things’ such as nails, saws, and lumber, and purposes such as holding two pieces of wood together, constructing a house or piece of furniture, and roles such as being a carpenter or craftsperson. (Cerbone 2000, p. 217) Heidegger did not completely dismiss Kant’s discussion of things in themselves or Husserl’s discussion of intentionality. His discussion had more of the character of adding an important dimension to how we relate to things. The ready-to-hand nature of objects in Heidegger’s Dasein is how we come to know the world. From the 1930s onwards, Heidegger increasingly started to discuss art and technology as areas in which we are confronted with reality.125 When approaching the question of technology, he used the term ‘enframing’ with reference to our relationship to technology: The essence of modern technology lies in enframing. Enframing belongs within the destining of revealing. These sentences express something different from the talk that we hear more frequently, to the effect that technology is the fate of our age, where ‘fate’ means the inevitableness of an unalterable cause. (Heidegger 2013, p. 25) The encompassing role of technology challenges humans in an integrated, circular way. At the current stage in technological transformation, it is the case that humans control machines less than ever before. It could be argued that recent developments in artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and biometrics have altered the playing field. Whether aware of it or not, human users are active participants in the collaborative development of digital solutions (Dusek 2006). This exemplifies Heidegger’s argument about ‘enframing’. The German philosopher Hans Jonas (1903–1993) made the following observation: Concerning technology itself, its actual role in modern life (as distinct from purely instrumental definition of technology as such) has made the relation of means and ends equivocal all the way up from everyday living to the vary vocation of man. There could be no question in former technology that its role was that of humble servant. (Jonas 2013, p. 215) Heidegger followed Hegel in arguing that art can tell us something truthful about reality.126 He also followed Hegel and Nietzsche in arguing that great works of art have received increasingly less attention in Western culture

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(Young 2001). Furthermore, Heidegger saw this from the perspective of the growing importance of science: For Heidegger, then, the ultimate ground of the triumph of the aesthetic view of art is the imperialism of reason, the triumph of the view that science (in broad, Germen sense), and science alone, has access to truth. Notice that, in the end, this more or less repeats Hegel’s analysis of the death of art. Great art died because for better or worse (better in Hegel’s view, worse in Heidegger’s) science took over the role that had made it great. (Young 2001, p. 14) Thus, common to Heidegger’s analysis of both technology and art is the criticism of the kind of rationalisation of society (and mind) that Hegel had described. This was a recurrent theme in the later period of Heidegger’s thinking, from the 1930s onwards, and is echoed by Hannah Arendt, who in her book The Human Condition, wrote: The immediate source of the artwork is the human capacity for thought, as man’s ‘propensity to truck and barter’ is the source of exchange objects, and as his ability to use is the source of use things. (Arendt 1998, p. 168) The argument Arendt developed was based on the distinction between thought and cognition. While thought is creative, cognition is calculative. Thus, art is often a result of thought, not cognition, even though the two are interlinked. A work of art is often not only a thought but also something material, something physical that requires skills, cognition, and the like. When art becomes aesthetics, the cognitive aspect overtakes thought. Art is the capacity to create something by using our capacity to think. Thus, common to Heidegger and Arendt was the question of how retain a truthful relation to reality beyond purely cognition, meaning the rationalisation and instrumentation of reason that modern society represents. The description of this complexity given by Gadamer may be illuminating: The picture is an event of being – in it being appears, meaningfully and visibly. The quality of being an original is thus not limited to the ‘copying’ function of the picture, and thus not to the ‘representational’ painting and sculpture in particular, architecture being completely excluded. The quality of being an original, rather, is an essential element founded in the fact that art is by nature presentational. The ‘ideality’ of the work of art does not consist in its imitation or reproducing an idea, but, as with Hegel, in the ‘appearing’ of the idea itself. (Gadamer 2006, p. 138) This leads to the intriguing question of whether there is truth in art. It might be argued that the whole point of art is its freedom of expression and thus the artist’s

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freedom to go beyond taken-for-granted assumptions about things, and instead to be free to make his or her own artistic interpretation. Heidegger discussed this possibility in his essay Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,127 which was written in the mid-1930s but not published until 1950. Heidegger took the example of Vincent van Gogh’s painting A Pair of Shoes painted in 1885, which he had seen in his younger years. The example played a marginal role in his book (Young 2001), but for some reason, it has received much attention: The deep puzzle here, then, is: How is van Gogh’s picture of ‘empty unused shoes’ standing there like objects supposed to help us uproot and transcend the subject/object dichotomy lying at the heart of modern aesthetics? To put the puzzle in Heidegger’s term: How is our experience of a painting of a pair of shoes standing there like objects supposed to lead us back to a preobjective encounter with ‘equipmentality’? How can a picture help us find way out of the age of the world picture? How, in other words, can aesthetics transcend itself from within? (Thompson 2011, p. 83) The attention that Van Gogh’s shoes have received is partly due to discussions that were initiated by Meyer Schapiro’s critical review (Schapiro 1968) and by the more sympathetic elaboration by Jacques Derrida in his book La vérité en peinture, published in 1978.128 Common to Heidegger and Derrida was their explanation of how many different angles, layers, and perspectives can be applied in the analysis of art129: Construction in philosophy is necessary destruction, that is to say, a de-­ construction of traditional concepts carried out in a historical recourse to the tradition. And this is not a negation of the tradition or a condemnation of it as worthless; quite the reverse, it signifies precisely the positive appropriation of tradition. Because destruction belongs to construction, philosophical cognition is essentially at the same time, in a certain sense, historical cognition. (Heidegger 1982, p. 23) It is not the case that Heidegger tried to present the truth of art in the sense of a statement, but it is more the case that he saw truth as a matter of understanding what the problem is, and that there actually is a problem (Thompson 2011). It could be said that Heidegger’s project was to clarify the human condition for the possibility to have a truthful understanding of art. This task also applies to science. 4.3.3  Communicative rationality It could be argued that Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s fundamental ontology never addressed, at least not systematically and comprehensively, the social, cultural, institutional, or political aspects of society. The America philosopher and pragmatist Richard Bernstein (1932–2022) argued that there was a clear

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line of thought going from Dilthey, via Gadamer to Habermas (Bernstein 1983). This line of thought also includes Heidegger and Arendt. The common denominator is how our understanding of the world is mediated in practice. However, there are nuances and disagreements. With the possible exception of Heidegger, all of the philosophers focused on communication. Arendt and Gadamer denounced rationalism and neo-positivism, as has Habermas. Gadamer denounced the life philosophy of Dilthey and was opposed to Husserl’s idealism, as has Habermas been. However, there is tension between Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Habermas’ critical theory, which I discuss as follows. Our current understanding of hermeneutics owes much to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) and his main work Wahrheit und Methode, which was published in 1960.130 He gave Dilthey credit for having renewed the concept of hermeneutics, and taking it from scholastic textual analyses to become a core concept in human science (Dilthey 1972). Dilthey thought that hermeneutics could lead to objective knowledge because he believed that humans share a common nature.131 Gadamer still criticised Dilthey for subjunctivising the scientific method and of reducing things, and while hermeneutics was about coming to a true interpretation of things, it was still not psychology. Furthermore, Gadamer saw Heidegger’s deconstruction as a basically hermeneutic process of acquiring a deeper understanding of things.132 However, Gadamer wrote: The concept of life-world is the antithesis of objectivism. It is an essential historical concept, which does not refer to a universe of being, to an ‘existent world’. (Gadamer 2006, p. 239) Gadamer’s own contribution was to connect hermeneutics with the communicative processes in society. He wrote: In revealing the verbal nature of the hermeneutical phenomenon, we see that it has a universal significance. (Gadamer 2006, p. 405) From a common-sense perspective, it could be argued that since hermeneutics is to undertake a verbal investigation by asking oneself what lies behind what we know, it also means that we apply a social medium (language) in the same process. Thus, the hermeneutical process is a social phenomenon.133 Hermeneutics implies interpreting meaning and can be expanded to cover a larger area of studies, not just texts. In this perspective, science is a hermeneutical process: The world of objects that science knows, and the from which it derives its own objectivity, is one of the relativities embraced by language’s relation to the world. (Gadamer 2006, p. 447)

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Science is also a communicative activity, which implies that it relates to how we use and understand language.134 Gadamer wrote the following, with reference to his own science: Our inquiry has been guided by the basic idea that language is a medium where I  and the world meet, or, rather, manifest their original belonging together. (Gadamer 2006, p. 449) Science presents us with a linguistic horizon that mirrors the perspectives of scientists or the scientific community. For example, one could compare biology based on ‘positivistic’ methods, in which the aim is to reduce the biological entity to its atomic forms, with biology seen from the romantic perspective as a larger ecological system.135 Both approaches are meaningful, yet they are still different ways of studying biology. In this respect, hermeneutics is about understanding meaning, and society is a meaning system. There is meaning to oneself and meaning to others. Thus, meaning is negotiated in a social context, which is referred to as the hermeneutic circle. This implies not only a critique of subjectivism (epistemology) but also a critique of conceptualisation – as concepts might be logical but still not correspond to reality, as a critique of methodological individualism, and as a critique of universalism. Hermeneutics portrays us as participants in a context of ‘local’ language games. We are reflexive participants in local contexts.136 These two arguments formed the background to the criticism of relativism, which was raised by, among others, Habermas, as I discuss as follows. Gadamer’s argument was somewhat different from that of Habermas and other philosophers. When he argued against method, he was not rejecting solid science, but arguing against any predefined, not-reflected-upon procedure to process data. Gadamer’s argument was that if we force our observations of the world into predefined structures, we ignore our own thinking and reflection. The responsibility of science and the scientist implies that if we behave mechanically and follow methods dogmatically, we will ignore the wider concerns of society. In Gadamer’s opinion, hermeneutics was the responsibility to reflect and understand things not only more deeply but also in a broader sense. This means that method and methodology can be tools, but not tools that replace thinking and reflection, and by applying tools or procedures, one should reflect on what that implies in terms of knowledge – what is included, what is ignored, how it directs one’s attention, and how it favours one concept or one angle of seeing things as opposed to another way. Thus, Gadamer concluded his analysis by arguing as follows: Thus there is undoubtedly no understanding that is free of all prejudices, however much the will of our knowledge must be directed toward escaping their thrall. Throughout our investigation it has emerged that the certainty achieved by using scientific methods does not suffice to guarantee truth. This especially applies to human sciences, but it does not mean that they are less

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scientific; on the contrary, it justifies the claim to special human significance that they have always made. The fact that in such knowledge the knower’s own being comes into play certainly shows the limits of method, but not of science. What the tool of method does not achieve must – and really can – be achieved by a discipline of questioning and inquiry, and discipline that guarantees truth. (Gadamer 2006, p. 484) It is relevant to present Jürgen Habermas’ communicative theory here, as it is strongly linked to the discussion of both phenomenology and hermeneutics. Habermas’ project was about defending critical theory on the one hand, and avoiding relativism (which he saw as a potential treat from a wrong understanding of critical theory) on the other hand.137 The core of the Gadamer-Habermas debate was that Habermas criticised the philosophy of hermeneutics for giving too little attention to the fact that the hermeneutical process happened within a social-­ political context (Mendelson 1979). Thus, there is a power structure and historical and cultural biases that distort the ability to develop what might called communicative rationality. To a large extent, Habermas’ project has aimed to explain how such rationality or universal reason can appear in social contexts, given that he has denounced both Husserl’s idealism and Kant’s synthetic a priori knowledge. The student protest movement in Germany in 1966 was partly inspired by the work of Habermas. In his book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit,138 published in 1962, he argues that science is part of society, influenced by the social context, and should not be an activity outside the democratic domain of society.139 According to Habermas, Hegel pioneered the understanding of modern society in the tension between instrumental rationality and subjective reflexivity (Habermas 1987). Modern society has made technological advances and instrumentalised life under the discipline of modern production systems,140 but it has thereby resulted in alienation, as subjective reflexivity is suppressed for the sake of instrumentality. Habermas writes: Positivism could forget that methodology of science was intertwined with the objective self-formative process (Bildungsprozess) of the human species and erect the absolutism of pure methodology on the basis of the forgotten and repressed. (Habermas 2007, p. 5) The quotation resonates with Husserl’s argument for the primacy of human nature, as well as the concept of lifeworld, Heidegger’s conceptualisation of therebeing (Dasein), and the French existentialist exposition of subjectivity. In this sense, antipositivism (or anti-positivism) is a position that challenges the pretence of objectivity in social sciences.141 The issue is how can we combine the two insights: the insight relating to the instrumental, natural world, and the insight

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into subjective and reflexive existence. Habermas argues that science is basically a social process, integrated into the social fabric of power relations and interests. Science is not outside, above, unaffected by, or independent of society. Science mirrors the structures of the society of which it is part. In other words, science is embedded in social interests. As Habermas argues, science has to become democratised, which is a concept that must be understood as an abstract description, not as a discussion of organisation. This does not imply a complete rejection of both positivists’ and conventional researchers’ call for truth and objectivity. Habermas writes about a subjective objectivity (Habermas 2007). His argument was inspired by the thinking of his colleague Karl-Otto Apel, who wrote: In my opinion, the meaning of the problem of physics, for example, cannot be made intelligible solely by recourse to ‘unifying’ (synthetic) functions of consciousness (‘categories’). This meaning also presupposes a ‘unifying interpretation’ on the basis of linguistic ‘agreement’ by the investigators of nature as well as the possibility of a realisation of the question by an instrumental intervention in nature. (Apel 1998, pp. 46–47) Apel’s argument was that independent of whether what we do is natural science or human science, meaning whether we refer to objects and physical things or to more socially constructed things such as opinions, our knowledge is always communicated in language, and the language is always a product of interpretation. Traditional epistemology, which focuses on categories of the mind, is insufficient if we want to understand how we make sense of the world. Language plays an important role in transferring meaning. The transcendental argument made by Kant and later by other philosophers can be reformulated with reference to language. This led Apel to adopt the argument of Transcendental-Pragmatics. Kuhlmann states the following about Transcendental-Pragmatics: Transcendental-Pragmatics starts with the assumption that radical fallibilism, historicism, and holism are right, i.e., that there is no knowledge in the strong sense available at all. But it notices that under these conditions meaningful philosophy does not seem to be impossible. (Kuhlmann 2017, p. 242) Apel continued to argue that philosophy was possible, but that it had to handle the fact that Transcendental-Pragmatics was also applicable to philosophy itself: To this extent, my attempt is conceived as a transformation of philosophy that is crucial for meaning, one which develops from the a priori fact of argumentation as an irreducible, quasi-Cartesian starting-point. (Apel 1998, p. 267)

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Thus, Kuhlmann draws the following conclusion: But that philosophers can, according to Apel’s principle of self-repudiation (Selbsteinholungsprinzip), understand their own activity as rational in the sense of explicitly and legitimately maintaining their own positions, is something one should expect from philosophers. (Kuhlmann 2017, p. 256) It is in light of the reflections discussed earlier, it is possible to have a better understanding of Habermas’ project. Habermas’ argues that science, philosophy, and theory cannot claim a role in their own right in a post-metaphysical society. They are part of societal processes. Furthermore, in a liberal, democratic society, theory and philosophy cannot claim authority over the individual and his or her pursuit of a good and meaning of life. However, science still searches for truth. Therefore, Habermas criticises Richard Rorty for his relativism, Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigms, Paul Feyerabend’s defence of anarchy in methods, and Imre Lakatos’ concept of a research programme142 (Habermas 2018). He sees all of them as attempting to defend relativism in science and discussing scientific progress as impossible. Habermas does not argue against general and universal knowledge or theory, but that theory must be understood in a particular way in social science, namely as a way of objectivising knowledge, not human beings. Habermas writes: [T]he only remaining source of normative orientation after Kant was reason’s critique if itself. The power of practical reason is now exhausted in rational law and rational morality. Whereas the classical teaching of the good life and the just society, ethics and politics, were still of a piece, postmetaphysical thinking no longer believes itself capable of singling out a model for common good as generally binding. (Habermas 2018, p. 76, original emphasis) This is a major challenge for society because we are dependent on a common reason. The way to avoid this challenge could be to reinvent Kant in a postmetaphysical context (Durand-Gasselin 2018). Thus, the challenge is to argue how the communicative process itself can account for validity and reason. Communicative rationality defines a social process of knowledge formation that leads not only to valid knowledge but also to rational, reasonable, and as-true-as-possible knowledge. Thus, it is a theory of social knowledge formation: ‘[R]ational discourse’ should include any attempt to reach an understanding over problematic validity claims insofar as this takes place under conditions of communication that enable the free processing of topics and contributions, information and reasons in the public space constituted by illocutionary

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obligations. The expression also refers indirectly to bargaining processes insofar as these are regulated by discursively grounded procedures. (Habermas 1998, p. 107) Habermas talks about the three worlds143: the individual world of subjective experiences, the physical world of objects, and the social world of meaning and symbols, including humans’ intellectual ‘products’. These worlds appear as states of affairs, as how we see structural differences in the world. To communicate is to speak within a social order and set of norms and rules. Habermas uses the concept of discourse to characterise different communicative situations according to their norms and rules and the content of the communicative process itself, and he subdivides them into moral, pragmatic, and ethical-procedural discourses. Habermas defines the three different discourses as follows: In moral discourse, the ethnocentric perspective of a particular collectivity expands into the comprehensive perspective of an unlimited communication community, all of whose members put themselves in each individual’s situation, worldview, and self-understanding, and together practice an ideal role taking. . . . In pragmatic discourses, we test the expediency of strategies under the presupposition that we do know what we want. In ethical-political discourses, we reassure ourselves of a configuration of values under the presupposition that we do not yet know what we really want. In this kind of discourse, we can justify programs insofar as they are expedient and, taken as a whole, good for us. (Habermas 1998, pp. 161–162) The ideal talk situation (Habermas 2018, p. 97) is an ideal, but at the same time, it can guide the practical organisation of discourses. For example, that all people can speak in an uncoercive manner, that they should be interpreted in a sympathetic way, that they should be able to explain what they mean, and that others should be able to challenge the arguments with better arguments, are universally applicable principles in a democratic discourse. Validity is central to meaningful communication.144 However, validity has to be seen in relation to a given issue: If we examine how speech acts can be negated as a whole (rather than their individual components or presuppositions), we arrive at precisely these three validity claims to truthfulness, rightness and truth, which are geared to intersubjective recognition, but are at the same time criticisable. (Habermas 2018, p. 85) Habermas assumes that there are facts in the world, and that any communicative situation should pay respect to such knowledge.145 Meaning, experience, and opinions may change, even if facts do not.146 Social theory involves not only

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analysis and observation of the content of social practice but also social meaning and social engagement. There is a reciprocal relation between theory and practice; they have a communicative relationship. Social theory must be able to explain communicative action: Theories that are to explain the phenomenon accessible through the understanding of meaning (Sinnverstehen) – that is, the utterance and expressions of subjects capable of speech and action – must take the form of a systematic explanation of the knowledge of rules based on which competent speakers and actors generate their expressions. (Habermas 2001, p. 9) The critical role of philosophy and theory implies answering questions such as (1) who is the subject of this generative process, or is there any subject, (2) how can this generative process be generalised (cognitive, linguistic, or labour), and (3) are the underlying systems of rules invariant with differing social systems or contextual? Habermas makes a distinction between the subjective sphere, the social sphere, and the cultural (institutional) sphere. The role of theory and the role of philosophical critique are different in these spheres. In the cultural/ institutional sphere, it is a fact that society becomes increasingly complex, and there is a related growing need for expert knowledge. Theory and philosophical discourses can have a role as critical expert knowledge. In the social sphere, philosophy will increasingly have a hermeneutic role, in trying to find meaning and to guide meaning. The incorrect way to perceive this would be to see theory as an authoritarian voice. The correct way to see it would be to see theory and philosophy as an autonomous part of a social discourse. In his book Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Studien, first published in 1978, Habermas states147: There is a systematic relationship between the logical structure of science and the pragmatic structure of the possible applications of the information generated within its framework. . . . Therefore, the technical and practical interests of knowledge are not regulators of cognition which have to be eliminated for the sake of the objectivity of knowledge; instead they themselves determine the aspects under which reality is objectified, and can thus be made accessible to the experience to begin with. They are the conditions which are necessary in order that subjects capable of speech and action may have experience which may lay a claim of objectivity. . . . The underlying ‘interests’ establish the unity between this constitutive context in which knowledge is rooted and the structure of the possible application which this knowledge can have. (Habermas 1974, pp. 8–9) Value-freedom or objectivity of science is defined by the institutional and social process within science. It is a negotiated truth. Habermas argues that the value

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question can be expressed as the relation between facts and decision, or the dualism of is and ought: The dualism of facts and decisions corresponds, in the logic of science, to the separation of cognition and evaluation and, in methodology, to the demand for a restriction of the realm of empirical-scientific analysis to the empirical uniformity of natural and social processes. (Habermas 1976, p. 145) This leads us to Habermas’ main point that science (including social science) is a social activity and performed within the framework of institutions, norms, and prior understandings. There is no such thing as pure theory. Even criteria of value freedom are socially constructed (a product of social processes). Habermas argues as follows: Within a life-reference fixed by everyday language and stamped out in social norms, we experience and judge things as human beings with regard to specific meaning, in which the un-separated, descriptive and normative content states just as much about the human subjects who live in it as it does about the objects experienced themselves. (Habermas 1976, p. 166) The general argument is that science is a social practice and has to comply with the same control, critique, and social questioning that holds for society as a whole. Still, Habermas does not take an extreme anti-positivist standpoint. That is, he recognises different ways of studying society and different types of theorising. No system can study itself, so all system approaches have to be regarded as some sort of social sense-making, or what Habermas calls an ordering schemata. However, he maintains that any such general perspective that the scientist has will influence the research that he or she does; it will have an indirect impact on the scientist’s perspectives. Habermas proclaims: For we know hardly anything about an ontological correspondence between scientific categories and the structure of reality. (Habermas 1976, p. 133) Furthermore, in comparing the functionalist systems theory with the dialectical systems theory, he argues that functionalist systems theory has an analyticalempirical basis, whereas dialectical system theory is experience-based. In contrast to the dialectical system, the functionalist system presupposes that society is a natural phenomenon that we can observe, where one element is a functional part of the whole, and where we get the same result independent of how we research it. This implies a direct relation between science and practice. Therefore, our explanatory competence must not only rest on skills to understand and comprehend ‘the

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other’, but must also be based on communicative competence to detect falseness. Following this, Habermas suggests a consensus theory of truth: [T]hose propositions prove to be true that continually withstand objections in discourses. (Habermas 2018, p. 96) Still, our discussion of truth and justification must be seen in the perspective of the discursive situation.148 Habermas basically agrees with Weber149 that the Western world has, over some centuries, been going through a process of rationalising social relations. In the last 100 years, they have become more and more based on rational, countable parameters (e.g. economics, values of production, and social statistics). This is, in short, a significant feature of modernity. Communicative rationality is about a valid way to handle this challenge in a postmetaphysical world.

Notes

1 2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9

10 11

See Hollis (1994), Delanty and Strydom (2003), and Sherratt (2006). See Prado (2003) and Gutting (2005). Translated as life philosophy This further development of phenomenology is one of the themes in Chapter 5. Descartes was born into a Roman Catholic family in La Haye en Touraine in the former province of Touraine. Today, his birthplace is a commune named Descartes, in the département Indre-et-Loire. John Searle (2004) argues that the reason for Descartes’ central position is that he made a clear distinction between humans and nature. This division, often referred to as Cartesian dualism, allowed for giving nature to science, but still kept the discussion on the human mind, morals, and ethics within the domain of the Catholic Church. A principle that Bertrand Russell, in an analytical interpretation, regarded as nonsense, as I have shown this in Chapter 3.2.1. Whitehead (1967) argued in a similar way: Descartes’ theory of the soul or mind was simply a move in order to make a distinction between metaphysical speculation on the one hand and science as a study of nature on the other. It has been argued that Descartes turned to the reflection on science and knowledge after he more or less postponed his own scientific work in 1633. At that time, he worked on the book Le Monde (The World) (Descartes 1998b) that was supposed to be a grand treatise of human knowledge. In July  1633, Galilei’s book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Galilie 2008) was banned by the Catholic Church, and Galilei was placed under house arrest. Some speculated that Descartes, even though he was living in Protestant Holland and thus outside Catholic jurisdiction, did not want to come into conflict with the Catholic Church and therefore turned to explaining his metaphysics (Grayling 2005). Several of his books that were published after his death were listed in the Catholic Church’s index of forbidden books in 1663. However, in 1720, his books became part of the curriculum at the Catholic University of Paris. Descartes even provided medical care to one of his admirers, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) (Ponsati-Murià 2022). See Chapter 1.2.1.

The idealist track towards phenomenology  169 12 Descartes’ thinking can be regarded as a philosophical system (Vuillemin 1986), and for this reason, he has been a key figure in the development of modern science. 13 Kant later called it pure reason, while phenomenologists, based on Husserl, returned to Descartes’ term first philosophy. 14 Translated as Discourse on Method (Descartes 1998a) 15 Translated as Meditation on First Philosophy (Descartes 1998a) 16 Heidegger addressed this issue in a lecture series that was later published as a book (Heidegger 2004). 17 Thus, it can be argued that Descartes was not a realist, but an idealist. 18 The split between the body and mind later became regarded as highly controversial. Furthermore, the divide between dualist and monist, and later interpretivist, became apparent. The controversy has continued up to the present-day’s discussions about artificial intelligence: if the mind is simply a physical entity, a kind of calculation machine, it should be possible to copy it artificially. This question is addressed in discussions by John Searle and Herbert A. Simon in the book Views into the Chinese Room (Preston & Bishop 2002). See discussion in Chapter 6.1.2. 19 See Chapter 3.2.1. 20 Some of the most predominant philosophers were Voltaire (1694–1778), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), and Denis Diderot (1713–1784). 21 In the early 18th century, the French movement referred to the term le Siècle des Lumières, or Enlightenment, implying that, with the new science, man had come out of darkness and into the light. 22 Rationalism is discussed in Chapter 3.1.1. 23 For discussions on rationality, see Nozick (1993) and Searle (2001). 24 The debate about what is rationality has continued to the present day. For example, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (b. 1947), in his book Critique of Cynical Reason (Sloterdijk 1987), which was first published in German in 1983, presents a critique of this calculative idea of rationality, as does Habermas, even if the two disagreed, as I show in Chapter 4.3.3. 25 For a discussion, see Steven Pinker (2021). To a large extent, Pinker identifies rationality with logical reasoning. 26 Rationalism is a more totalitarian claim, as it treats rationality as the superior form of perception. For a discussion, see Hayek (1967). 27 See Chapter 3.1.3. 28 Translated as Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 2007) 29 Translated as Critique of Practical Reason (Kant 2001a) 30 Translated as The Critique of Judgement (Kant 2001a) 31 The first edition was published in 1781, the second edition in 1787. 32 ‘The “togetherness” here is the necessary cognitive complementarity and semantic interdependence of intuitions and concepts, when placed against the backdrop of Kant’s cognitive dualism of the faculties of sensibility and understanding’ (Hanna 2017). See also Zöller (2004). 33 Translated as Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science (Kant 2004). 34 See the discussion in Chapter 3.2.1. 35 Assume that one sees something big and brown moving in a field. What brings one from sense impressions to identify a shape and further to assume it is a horse? Intuition can be thought of as the preconceptual process of identifying something, such as a shape, and judgement can be thought of as the conceptual process of finding out that the shape (in the assumed case) is an animal, and more likely a horse than a moose. 36 See the discussion on artificial intelligence (AI) in Chapter 6.1.2. 37 Cf. Kant’s togetherness principle discussed earlier.

170  The idealist track towards phenomenology 38 For example, one’s a priori synthetic judgement ‘x’ will tell one that 5 + 7 = 12. If one has experience-based knowledge ‘y’ (synthetic a posteriori judgement) that there are (only) five apples on one table, and (only) seven on a second table, one can then have an imagination combining ‘x’ with ‘y’ and know that there are 12 apples in total on the two tables. 39 Translated as Metaphysics of Morals. The concept of categorical imperative had already been presented in Critique of Practical Reason (Kant (2001b, p. 252). 40 The categorical imperative is as follows: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’ (Guyer 1995, p. 354). However, the principle of the categorical imperative is not completely clear, and we cannot know for certain how to apply it in a situation (Rawls 1980; Kleingeld 2017). This is where judgement comes in. We never completely avoid the complexity and dilemmas of the world. 41 For a discussion, see Popper (1972). 42 A similar critique was made by Russell and Popper (Popper 1972). 43 Interestingly, he observed that it was the sovereign king of Prussia, Frederick II, later called Frederick the Great (1712–1786), who had introduced Prussia to individual liberty and the rule of law. 44 Some of this modernist criticism ended in totalitarian thoughts, as argued by Adorno and Horkheimer (1997). See the discussion in Chapter 5.2.2. 45 During the 19th century, humanism both referred to scientific knowledge and turned its back on it (Cavell 2018). 46 This criticism follows the more general criticism of synthetic a priori knowledge (see Chapter 3.2.3). 47 See the discussion in Chapter 4.3.3. 48 John Rawls developed at theory of justice based on deductive logic. Even though it resembles Kant’s argument, there is also a clear divide between the two ways of thinking. As a criticism of Kant, Rawls observed: Thus Kant proceeds from the particular, even personal, case of everyday life; he assumed that this process carried out correctly would eventually yield a coherent and sufficiently complete system of principles, including principles of social justice. Justice as fairness moves in quite the reverse fashion: its construction starts from a unanimous collective agreement regulating the basic structure of society within which all personal and associational decisions are to be made in conformity with this prior undertaking. (Rawls 1980, p. 553) 49 It includes thinkers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Johann von Herder (1744–1803, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), and the Humboldt brothers: Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). 50 Fichte’s book was translated as The science of knowing (Fichte 2012). 51 Interestingly, the word romanticism probably originates from Romance languages such as Italian and French, seen as everyday language as opposed to Latin. Thus, romanticism indicates a closeness to everyday and human life and reality. 52 Alexander von Humboldt’s travels and observations of geography and culture have been celebrated from the perspective of modern studies of ecological (Grove 1992). He also had a profound influence on Charles Darwin and Darwin built on Humboldt’s work when he travelled to South America on HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836. 53 The initiative came from the Prussian king Frederick William III (nephew of Frederick the Great), who wanted to make Berlin a major capital in Europe. Part of his idea was

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54 55

56 57 58

59

60

61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69

to place a new university at the centre of the city. He called on Wilhelm von Humboldt to undertake the task. Wilhelm was an Enlightenment scholar who had been arguing for education reforms. In 1809, he was appointed Minister of Education and founded the University of Berlin in 1811. The university was to become one of the most important universities in Europe. In 1949, it was renamed the Humboldt University of Berlin. An indication of present-day status of Humboldtian ideas is the fact that part of the rebuilt Berliner Schloss (Berlin Palace) that opened in 2021, on one the largest and most expensive constructions in Germany, was named Humboldt Forum. Students should do things in practice and in reflecting on practice and reality as they lived in it, they should gain insights into a greater universe of reality. Thus, students should, through the integration of teaching and research, learn to reflect on practice, and therefore they need to study a wide range of subjects, including science, cultural knowledge, and art, in order to support their individual education and development. For a discussion of holism, see Duarte (2015). As I have shown in Chapter 4.1.1, rationalists believed in the constructive capacity of thinking. Hegel was appointed as a professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1818, and from 1829 onwards, he was the university’s president. He was a very complex thinker, and was behind many of the debates referred to in this book. He was often the antagonist whom those involved in the debates were up against, such as Popper in his Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper 1966b). There was a curious episode when Hegel witnessed Napoleon as he rode through the city of Jena on 13 October  1806, before Napoleon more or less destroyed the city. Nevertheless, shortly after seeing Napoleon, Hegel wrote: ‘I saw Napoleon, the soul of the world, riding through the town. . . . It is a wonderful sight to see, concentrated in a point, sitting on a horse, an individual who overruns the world and masters it’ (Arthur 1989, p. 18). In Chapter 5, I emphasise that the concept of knowing is a more comprehensive concept of perception than knowledge. This is partly due to the Hungarian-British philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), who elaborated the concept of knowing as a denoting phenomenological and existential processes, even though he did not refer to Hegel (Polanyi 1961). Translated as either Phenomenology of the Mind or Phenomenology of the Spirit (Hegel 1997). Thus, geist has been translated as both ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’. See Chapter 5.2.2 for a discussion of the relation between Hegel and the critical theory tradition. With regard to the differences, it could be said that as Hegel argued that the mind formed the world, Marx argued that the word formed the mind (Popper 1979). The concept of social evolution was exposed in Hegel’s work on societal development, in particular his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts published in 1820 and later translated as (Elements of the Philosophy of Right), in which he presented his understanding of how we as individuals are embedded in a social and historical system of rules, customs, and traditions (Hegel 1991). This was a core idea in Roman republicanism and the theory of the free state (Pettit 2002). It inspired generations of German thinkers (e.g. the German Historical school), who focused on how we can understand ourselves and the world as an integrated, historical, and cultural reality. I refer to the expression in Chapter 5.2. Published in 1946, and later translated as The German Ideology (Marx & Engels 2007) Teleology is the study of things that have purpose. This also plays into utilitarianism: things are evaluated by their result, effect, and outcome.

172  The idealist track towards phenomenology 70 Popper criticised Hegel and Marx for their historicism (Popper 1966b). By historicism, he meant some kind of metaphysical absolutism. However, the term is complex: So there seems to be a terminological difficulty, to say the least. It would be useful, therefore, if we could make a clear distinction between two concepts of historicism: one implying a kind of metaphysical absolutism, the other an anti-metaphysical relativism. Matters may not be quite so easy to disentangle. (Rée 1991, p. 967) 71 Translated as The Science of Logic (Hegel 2010) 72 This is a very rough simplification, as the topic is much more complicated. In Chapter 4.3.1, I show that phenomenology was defined differently by Husserl. For Husserl, phenomenology included the intentionality of the mind. Even though for the most part Husserl ignored Hegel’s concept of phenomenology, there might have been some commonalities: Hegel and Husserl are alike, it is true, in their contention that no sphere of reality is closed to rational investigation, but they are utterly unlike in that Hegel actually endeavors to come to terms with the totality of reality, while Husserl limits himself to establishing the method which will enable others to achieve a scientific knowledge to which no limits can be assigned. (Lauer 1974, p. 175) 73 See Hacking, who argues that this self-reflection is the development of the mind so that it can ‘grasp itself in reality’ (Hacking 1984, p. 221). 74 As I have shown in Chapter 4.1.1. 75 Nietzsche’s criticism of the rationalism of enlightenment has parallels in the later critical theory (see Chapter 5.2.2). 76 Translated as The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (Nietzsche 1999) 77 Heidegger made similar claims, as I show in Chapter 4.3.2. 78 Michel Foucault’s methodology, which he called archaeology, is close to Nietzsche’s genealogy (see Chapter 5.2.3). 79 See Chapter 4.3.1. 80 Hegel and Nietzsche had in common a shared understanding that reality is a totality (Löwith 1991). 81 See Jean-Paul Sartre’s book L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Sartre 1946). 82 For example, Georg Lukács wrote: ‘The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God’ (Lukács 1971, p. 88), which echoed Nietzsche’s thinking. 83 Translated as The Theory of Economic Development (Schumpeter 2008) 84 The way of thinking, which was even developed as a theory in a management philosophy by Frederick Taylor that was subsequently referred to as Taylorism (F.W. Taylor 1911) was applied by Henry Ford in the development of mass production of the automobile, and portrayed by the actor Charlie Chaplin in the film Modern Times. 85 In this sense, the concept of entrepreneur may be paralleled in Nietzsche’s discussion about Übermensch (literally, ‘overhuman’). For a discussion, see Reinert and Reinert (2015). 86 The term was more directly discussed by Schumpeter in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Chapter 4, page 84. See: Schumpeter (2003). 87 For a discussion, see: Reinert & Reinert (2006). 88 The debate occurred during the Second Davos Hochschulkurs, the opening session of which was held in the Hotel Belvédère in Davos on 17 March 1929. I have shown that Michael Friedman, in his book A Parting of Ways (Friedman 2000) emphasised this meeting because Rudolf Carnap was present too. Hence, in a sense, the meeting was the last time that a logical positivist directly encountered Heidegger’s phenomenology.

The idealist track towards phenomenology  173 89 Dilthey was a professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin from 1882 onwards. 90 The dispute over method was mainly related to the study of the economy and society, and it was personalised by the Austrian economist Carl Menger (1840–1921), and the German historian Gustav von Schmoller (1838–1917). Economic theory had developed in Germany, based not so much on theoretical considerations as on the study and generalisation of historical experience. 91 Economists such as Johan Heinrich von Thünen (1783–1850) and, to a greater extent, Friedrich List (1789–1846) developed theories of particular German problems. Friedrich List is renowned for having proposed that the state should protect German industry, contrary to the classical principles of free trade. It is also worth mentioning Adolph Wagner (1835–1917), who was the architect of the new social policy in Germany. The ‘Younger German Historical School’, represented by Gustav von Smoller, made a strong attack on classical economic theory from a historical and institutionalist point of view. 92 Carl Menger had argued that although historical development was contextually specific, it was still possible to identify a priori principles for guiding, for example, economic development. Menger’s claim that the logic of the economic system can be understood independent of a specific historical situation was strongly objected to by von Schmoller. 93 The book was translated as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 2013). 94 It is important to bear in mind that Weber’s analysis related to a particular context (Weber 2013). The issue of capitalism was highly debated in the German Historical school. Weber’s argument was contested by many, among them Sombart (Sombart 2001). Sombart wanted to trace the sources of capitalism in the mentality and culture of different nationalities (not in religion). Furthermore, he argued that any nationality could adopt the spirit of capitalism. The different interpretations of Weber’s work are discussed in Chapter 4.3.3. 95 It is interesting to observe that Weber took a very different approach to sociology of religion than that of, for instance, Emile Durkheim. Durkheim saw religion as a symbolic system that to some extent mirrored material conditions (Durkheim 2016). Durkheim observed and tried to explain why there were parallels between the hierarchical structures of religion and the characters in the godly universe on the one hand, and the structure of the secular society on the other. He also tried to examine this relation across cultures. 96 I discuss this further in Chapter 5. 97 Published in 1900 as Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Teil: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik and 1901 as Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Teil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Translated as Logical Investigations (Husserl 2008) 98 Translated as Philosophy of Arithmetic (Husserl & Willard 2003) 99 Translated as Cartesian Meditations (Husserl 1999) 100 Translated as Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (Dilthey 1977) 101 Cf. his book Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, which was published in 1911, and later translated as Philosophy as Rigorous Science (Husserl 2002). 102 Theodor W. Adorno wrote a reply to Husserl that was not only an attack on Husserl but also a fundamental criticism of Heidegger (Adorno 2013). Adorno’s main argument was that Husserl was not able to prove that he could move beyond the Kantian and Hegelian dialectics between subject and object, and thus there was no ground for an epistemology understood as a first philosophy. Hence, Husserl was not able to avoid the contradictions related to existence or to arrive at pure concepts of truth.

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103 104 105 106 107 108

109

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

121 122 123 124 125

126 127

Adorno saw this situation as a dangerous path from the perspective of the totalitarian tendencies in society in the mid-1930s. See Chapter 4.1.3. Franz Brentano (1838–1917) came from a German-Italian family and had done some groundbreaking work in psychology. He taught at the University of Vienna between 1874 and 1895, and he became a full professor there in 1880. See Chapter 3.1.1. See Chapter 3.1.2. For a discussion, see Jacquette (2004). In Chapter  6.1.2, I  discuss how Husserl’s discussion about the mind has inspired recent research on both cognitive science and artificial intelligence. See Dreyfus and Hall (1984) for a discussion of phenomenology, artificial intelligence (AI), and human cognition. Published as part of his posthumous book Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, published in 1938 and later translated as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl 1970). The essay has become significant, not least because of Jacques Derrida’s essay (Derrida 1989). See Barnouw (1979). See Chapter 3.2.1. I discuss Derrida further in Chapter 5.2.3. I discuss this in Chapters 4.3.2 and in Chapter 5.2.2. See Chapter 3.2.1. See Chapter 3.1.2. See Chapter 3.1.1. It is also close to Husserl’s argument (Gurwitsch 1984). Husserl instead argued that this gives one more insight into the object. It links to post-structuralism: our seeing of the world is only temporal, and seeing is seeing a perspective. Heidegger became rector of University of Freiburg in 1933, at the same time as he joined the Nazi party, NSDAP. Under Nazi laws, Husserl could no longer publish his work in Germany because he was a Jew (D.W. Smith 2013). Subsequently, Husserl was expelled from the University of Freiburg. The relation between Heidegger and Husserl in the Nazi period has been the subject of much attention, discussion, and resentment. Translated as Being and Time (Heidegger 1995) Die Grundprobleme der Phenomenologie, later translated as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Heidegger 1982). There is a parallel between Heidegger’s thinking and Wittgenstein’s thinking in their emphasis on the ‘everydayness’ or ordinariness as a point of departure for philosophy (i.e. ordinary language philosophy) (Cavell 2018). See the book What Is Called Thinking (Heidegger 2004), which is based on lectures Heidegger gave in 1951 and 1952. It could be argued that the challenge is beyond language itself. Scharff & Dusek point out that the positivistic/phenomenological split runs deeply into what they call the technological condition (Scharff & Dusek 2013). Technological focus, and not least technological determinism, is balanced by reflection from a human perspective. For example, the classical Greek dramas, such as the tragedy Antigone by Sophocles, from c. 441 BC, tells us more about ethical dilemmas, the complexity of loyalty, and the meaning of family than do any dissertations on the same subjects. Translated as The Origin of the Work of Art (Heidegger 2008)

The idealist track towards phenomenology  175 128 Translated as The Truth in Painting (Derrida (1987) 129 Cf. all the layers that stand between references to Derrida, which in turn refer to Heidegger, and in turn refer to van Gogh, and so forth. Derrida had a polyphonic writing style, which represented parallel voices. 130 Translated as Truth and Method (Gadamer 2006) 131 For a discussion of invariance, see Nozick (2001). 132 For a discussion of deconstruction, see Sheehan (1985). 133 The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931) argues that all meaning is developed in a local meaning system. The way we see the world is communicated and ‘negotiated’ in local contexts of meaning (C. Taylor 1971). 134 The problem of how to attain objectivity and reason through social communicative processes should also increasingly be the topic of post-phenomenological discussion. The French philosopher Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) was a pioneer in reconciling phenomenology and hermeneutics, and he defined the critical hermeneutic position. When idealism is moderated in phenomenology, the phenomenological process has much in common with hermeneutics. One of Ricœur’s concerns was with how our self-understanding is interrelated with the metaphors and language that we use (Ricoeur 1975). 135 See the discussion in Chapter 4.2.1. 136 A relatively recent example of the interpretive position was given by Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), who argued that the way to understand context-sensitive phenomenon was through thick descriptions (Geertz 1973). The American sociologist Erving Goffman (1922–1982) developed his framework analysis as a methodology for analysing situation-specific events (Goffman 1974). 137 Habermas became Adorno’s assistant in 1956 and took over Horkheimer’s position as a professor at the University of Frankfurt in 1964. 138 The book is translated as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas 1991). 139 Students interpreted the argument as legitimising a revolt against the existing university order in Germany and demanded democratisation of science (universities) and open public dialogue. 140 There were discussions within the German Historical School about this issue. When writing on the distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Tönnies exemplified a broader discussion on modernisation and differentiation of different spheres of society (Tönnies (1979). For a German Historical school discussion of the development of the capitalist society, see Sombart (2001). 141 For example, in Objectivity and the Study of Man (Skjervheim 1959), the Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim argued that the study of man was a question of understanding humans in society and, furthermore, by objectivising the human being, one will end up dehumanising man. 142 For a discussion, see: Cohen et al. (2012). 143 Surprisingly, he refers this to Popper (1979), who talked about three ontologies, as discussed in Chapter 3.2.3. As I show in Chapter 5.2.2, Popper and Habermas were antagonists in the positivist dispute. 144 Different discourses have different validity claims. If, for example, one presents a meaning, a validity criterion would be if one really means it – that is, that what one says is authentic. In a discussion about findings in research, a major validity claim is truthfulness about facts. By contrast, in a social discourse, validity claims may refer to common experiences or meanings. 145 The relation between fact and opinion or meaning may be illustrated the example of the Viking longships. Since none of us lived 1200  years ago, we might have a situation where people in an argument present opinions that are hard to test.

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146

147 148 149

However, some longships have been excavated and have been measured, and therefore we know much about how long and wide they were, how many people they could carry, and so forth. Hence, there are facts about Viking longships. Even if somebody were to say that the unit of measurement known as a metre was invented much later, it would not be correct to say that Viking longships were a maximum of 50 metres in length. Part of the reason is that the Vikings themselves were not familiar with metres as a unit of measurement. Nevertheless, the length represented by 1 metre is the same today now as it was 1200  years ago. The excavated longships might have shrunk slightly in the ground, but not so much that we are completely in the dark about what they looked like when they were sailing at sea. To answer the questions of what is meant by a Viking longship, whether it is a big boat, and what would be experienced if an armada comprising longships was to approach the shores, we would simply have to guess what people felt 1200  years ago. They might have thought a longship was a warship, that it was huge, and that an armada meant an invitation to engage in war. Today, we do not think of Viking longships as big ships, and if an armada of such boats were to approach, we would think of it as a tourist attraction. Translated as Theory and Practice (Habermas 1974) It parallels Max Weber’s interpretive sociology (Weber 1978). I  have discussed Weber and his relation to Durkheim in Chapter 3.1.3. Habermas (1997) uses Weber as an important reference and source for his own social (and critical) theory, the theory of communicative action. The common structure in his and Weber’s theorising is the interaction between three formal-pragmatic relations: the subjective/expressive, the social/conformity, and the institutional/objectifying.

Chapter 5

The scepticism track towards the sociology of science The problem with the concept of knowing

5.0  The line of argument in the chapter In this chapter, I follow the development of scepticism towards the sociology of science. Scepticism was expressed in discussions that took place during the history of science. The theme of this chapter is the sociology of science.1 However, there are also philosophical issues involved. The sociology of science emerged from the post-positivist and anti-positivist movement, as well as the communicative turn after World War II. Furthermore, it was inspired by pragmatism. The sociology of science sees science as an integrated part of society, a part that is influenced by social interests, and its activity and focus are a result of how it is organised. There are various internal argument related to science as a social system, such as epistemic communities, or research programmes, and even as anarchy. It could be argued that discussions about paradigms have primarily had this internal focus. There are also more externally oriented perspectives that see science from a discursive perspective, as part of social development. For example, one line of thinking has led to contemporary research policy and another to the discussion about relativism. In the first part of this chapter, The practical turn, I discuss how sociological perspectives have influenced the modern conception of science. The sociological perspectives have developed both from realism and from idealism, and have formed part of two main discussions: one on epistemology about what we can know for certain, and one on social evolution that concerns the implications of the fact that social and historical changes influence how we see the world. In the second part of this chapter, Inside the whale, I trace the roots of modern relativism in Hegelian philosophy. I discuss in depth two positions: critical theory and post-structuralism. In the third part of the chapter, Sociology of science, I discuss two conceptions of science that have been primarily inspired by a materialist perspective, the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and science, technology, and society studies (STS). I ask whether science is characterised by incommensurable paradigms. Scepticism portrays science as a complex and even contradictory social practice. Can this pluralism exist in a peaceful exchange of opinions or will there be DOI: 10.4324/9781003326878-5

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endless conflict? More seriously, will the internal divides in science be used in society to undermine scientific thinking? The latter question is the centre of the current post-truth debate.2 I argue that the main philosophical issue in sociology of science relates to the concept of knowing.

5.1  The practical turn 5.1.1  Beyond realism and idealism Richard Bernstein argued that divides such as the one between idealist and realists have haunted philosophical and scientific debates for centuries, and numerous attempts to give both a fresh start have not settled those debates (Bernstein 1983). In the preceding two chapters,3 I have shown that realism and idealism have been understood in several different ways, which do not denote unitary and strictly practised positions. Still, it might be asked whether scepticism goes beyond this divide or whether it is just another conflicting tradition in philosophy and science. Bernstein was of the latter opinion, and called for going beyond even scepticism.4 In this chapter, I first try to identify more precisely what the discussed scepticism has involved. In Chapter 1, I refer to Rudolf Carnap and the story of the two geographers, one an idealist and one a realist, which Carnap used to argue that metaphysical positions are irrelevant to the scientific arguments in general or at least independent of them (Carnap 2003). Carnap himself was not a sceptic. Ludwig Wittgenstein made a similar claim in his book Logical Investigations, which was published posthumously (Wittgenstein 2009). When one expresses something, the ‘language game’ itself is independent of the underlying metaphysical positions actor might have. Wittgenstein wrote: For this is what disputes between idealists, solipsists and realists look like. The one party attacks the normal form of expressions as if they were attacking an assertion: the other defends it, as if they were saying facts recognized by every reasonable human being. (Wittgenstein 2009, p. 129) We can analyse language games independent of philosophical traditions, even if those traditions are inherent in the kind of utterances that people make within ‘the language game’. Thus, both Carnap and Wittgenstein might have agreed that the use of grammar in itself was beyond realism, idealism, or scepticism. A similar kind of argument was made by the American pragmatist and philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007). However, contrary to Carnap, Rorty presented a critique of the linguistic turn and argued that philosophy itself had difficulties in defining common truths, and even a common understanding of philosophy (Rorty 1979). Our perspective of the world is defined by the practical reality of which we are a part. If we accept phenomenalism (the divide between the mind and nature),

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would it not be reasonable to assume that what we understand as nature is our interpretation of nature and not a mirror of nature? There are good reasons to stop believing that philosophising can help us to understand things beyond that: If we see knowledge as a matter of conversation, and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature, we will not be likely to envisage a metapractice which will be a critique of all possible forms of social practice. (Rorty 1979, p. 171) Rorty argued that there was nothing outside the discourse itself, so science could not refer to a higher truth in Kantian sense (such as synthetic a priori judgement). Thus, the role of philosophy is no longer to try to tell the truth, but to participate in the social conversation. Rorty described this role as edification, which is a combination of education and development. What, then, is left for the philosopher to do? Rorty illustrated this question with the following dialogue (Rorty 1979, p. 403): CRITIC (SOULFULLY):   Why

aren’t you philosophers concerned with really important things? PHILOSOPHER:   How does one know what is important? CRITIC:   But if you don’t even know what’s important, how can you ever decide anything? PHILOSOPHER:   That’s just the problem we’re trying to solve. Surely, you’d grant that that’s important, wouldn’t you? Discourses are linguistic practices within a set of rules, norms, customs, and traditions.5 A discourse will achieve legitimacy in the intersubjective practice. Discourses are not cultures or unified thinking; they are subject to plurality. Thus, it might seem that Rorty aligned with arguments presented also by Habermas.6 However, whereas Rorty looked at linguistic practices as relativistic, Habermas argues for how the structures of communicative action can give us objective, rational knowledge.7 Rorty could be considered a modern exponent of scepticism and relativism (Bernstein 1983). In the mid-1980s, Bernstein argued that the most important scientific divide was that between objectivism8 and relativism.9 Objectivism was covered by both idealists and realists, while relativism was seen as being a consequence of scepticism. Scepticists argue that we cannot have true knowledge about the world (epistemology), as the world is independent of how we perceive it (ontology). This argument stands in contrast to the argument by realists who agree with scepticists that the world is independent of how we perceive it, yet still argue that we can we have true knowledge about it. Scepticists also stand in contrast to idealists, who argue that the world is not independent of how we see it, but still argue that we can have correct knowledge about the world. Thus, scepticists argue on two fronts: against realism and against idealism.

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Scepticism has deep roots. Francis Bacon observed how Plato’s Academy (in Athens) turned towards scepticism after Plato’s death. In antiquity, scepticists scrutinised the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, in relation to both their internal logic and their assertions. Scepticism became incorporated into the scientific discourse during the Renaissance, and thereby became an inherent part of modern science. Scepticism, understood in practice as being questioning, reflecting, and open to alternative understanding of things, is essential for human curiosity and creativity. To use a concept dating from the Middle Ages, a scepticist can be seen as a kind of devil’s advocate.10 In antiquity, scepticism was constantly practised to question what philosophers claimed. This was a challenge for Plato, since while Socrates’ method related to questioning, Plato believed in developing true knowledge in the form of justified true beliefs. Socrates’ method of questioning was intended to sort out relativism,11 which he did in the dialogue Theaetetus. In the dialogue, Socrates confronted one of the Protagoras’ followers. Protagoras (490–420 BC) was regarded by Plato as a sophist. He is known to have argued that man is the measure of all things.12 Socrates saw this as a subjectification of knowledge, and in his dialogue, he tried to show the inconsistency of Protagoras’ argument (Blackburn 2005, p. 26)13: SOCRATES:   Well,

in that case are we to say that the wind in itself is cold or not cold? Or, shall we agree with Protagoras that it is cold to the one who feels chilly, and not to the other? THEAETETUS:   That seems reasonable. SOCRATES:   And further that it so ‘appears’ to each of us? THEAETETUS:   True. SOCRATES:   ‘Appearing’, then, is the same thing as ‘perceiving’, in the case that what is hot or anything of that kind. They are to each man such as he perceives them. THEAETETUS:   So, it seems. SOCRATES:   Perception, then, is always of something that is, and, as being knowledge, it is infallible. THEAETETUS:   That is clear. SOCRATES:   Can it be, then, that Protagoras was a very ingenious person who threw out this dark saying for the benefit of the common herd like ourselves, and reserved the truth as a secret doctrine to be revealed to his disciples? (Plato 1996, p. 857) In the quotation, Socrates indicates that Protagoras’ relativism is only a rhetorical strategy, and is a way of deceiving people. He wanted to show that this did not work, since relativism contradicted itself. Even though Socrates’ method was about questioning things, it was not a perspective. The same can be said about René Descartes’ doubting: he used doubt as a method for establishing the foundation for his thinking. Since it is widely known that some of our thoughts are dreams, some are memories, and some are based on sense impressions, it is

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easy to ask oneself whether we are sure about what is what. Due to the fact that Descartes could doubt almost everything, his reflection and conclusion were that one can doubt, but one cannot doubt the fact that one doubts14: What about thinking? Here I make my discovery: thoughts exist; it alone cannot be separated from me. I am, I exist – this is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking; perhaps it could also come to pass that if I were to cease all thinking I would utterly cease to exist. At this time, I admit nothing that is not necessarily true. (Descartes 1998a, p. 65) For Descartes, this meant that thinking was prior to experience and fundamental to existence. This led him to develop his rationalist philosophy, in which he emphasised our minds’ capacity to construct the ways we see the world, and thereby what the world is. The argument relies on thinking and implies the idea that we can know things beyond observation. Thus, rationalism bypasses the argument that our observations might be biased, simply by arguing that our true understanding of the world does not rely on empirical engagement. However, Descartes was searching for the foundation of thinking,15 and Bernstein saw this foundationalism as something that we needed to move beyond (Bernstein 1983). Bernstein referred to foundationalism as Cartesian anxiety.16 The element ‘anxiety’ implied that either we would find a foundation for our thinking or we would end up in relativism. Instead, Bernstein argued for a non-foundationalism that would avoid this anxiety (Bernstein 1983). Non-foundationalism17 has been both an ambition and a source of controversy in philosophy (Blackburn 2005). In the modern debate, reference could be made to Nietzsche and the concept of nihilism.18 Nihilism describes emptiness and illusions regarding belief in rationality and modern concepts of happiness or the good life. Furthermore, modern scepticism has been built on the new insights into language that developed in the early 20th century. The insight that Wittgenstein presented in his Logical Investigations was that the meaning of language is acquired through use. Language is inherently linked to practice. Thus, the sentence ‘I had to click on the mouse to open this document’ would have been meaningless 50 years ago or even more recently than that in some cases. The sentence could be interpreted as meaning that one is facing a PC and typing, and that a mouse (i.e. a handheld device) is being used to move a cursor on the computer screen. As such devices were relatively rare 50 years ago, the sentence is unlikely to have been understood by the majority of people then.19 Thus, language acquires its meaning through use, and the reason we understand each other is that we share practices. However, since we do not have the same practices or experiences, language can never be completely accurate. Often, when we refer to something that is said or written by somebody with a different practice, we convert meaning from one practice to another through what Wittgenstein called family resemblances (Wittgenstein 2009, p.  36). Those who take part in

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dialogue within a shared practice participate in a language game (Wittgenstein 2009, p. 15). Within a language game there may be processes for making the language more precise or better fitted to the practice. Language games imply a social process of creating common understanding. According to hermeneutics (Gadamer 2006), the way we understand things through language is through our ‘pre-understanding’ (prior understanding). The concept was not used by Wittgenstein, but he reflected on the same phenomenon that the concept describes. Pre-understanding relates to issues not only of a technical kind but also of an emotional kind. If someone tells someone else that he or she feels pain, it is likely that the recipient of the information will imagine a similar pain, but not the same pain. One cannot feel the pain of others (Wittgenstein 2009, p. 126). This example helps us understand how language is a mutual enterprise of constructing meaning: the quality of language acquires its value from the horizon of experience of those engaged in the language game and is therefore linked to specific social practices, which Wittgenstein described as forms of life (Wittgenstein 2009, p. 11).20 If language is linked to practice, meaning a social practice, it must have a social foundation. Could we have a private language? According to Wittgenstein, we could not: how can one have a private language, if one is a member of a linguistic community in which the meaning and use of language is constituted?21 This in turn challenges Descartes’ original thinking: how can there be a starting point for thinking if thinking presupposes a language, and no private language can have meaning, as language is a rule-followed activity that acquires meaning and is verified through social use (Grayling 2001). It should be mentioned that even though Wittgenstein’s philosophy is often used in references to sceptical positions, which hold that our language is a game that acquires meaning in practice and use, thereby supporting the idea that knowledge is situational and local, he himself rejected scepticism.22 His argument against scepticism differed slightly from Descartes’ argument. It is not that one’s doubting confirms that one is thinking as Descartes argued, but rather that the thinking about doubting requires a language (Hamilton 2014). Wittgenstein gave attention to language games and argued about the limits to knowledge through language, but he was also concerned with the issue of certainty.23 It could even be argued, as does the South African philosopher John Henry McDowell (b. 1942), that in Logical Investigations there is emphasis on Wittgenstein’s discussion about the relation between the mind and language.24 What happens to our thinking when we express it in language, and what happens to such expressions when they are interpreted by others? McDowell defends a type of pragmatic realism, as follows: Fellow speakers of language normally understand on another’s utterances; that is to say, they know what the utterances mean. We cannot, then, be content with a conception of meaning that makes it a mystery how those states

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can be knowledge, and consequently how there can be such a thing as understanding of language. (McDowell 1998a, p. 314) Thus, the reality of the fact that we do understand each other leads us backwards in the line of reasoning, to ask what kind of mental or psychological processes might explain the fact, irrespective of our individual/subjective differences. This in turn led McDowell to dwell on what is meant by meaning. There is a difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘seeing as’, which is illustrated by the ‘duck-rabbit’ drawing that can be interpreted both as a duck and as a rabbit (Wittgenstein 2009, p.  204). Similarly, ambiguous figures such as the ‘Necker cube’ and ‘Schroeder stairs’ (Schröder’s stairs), both of which create optical illusions, exemplify how we can see something but interpret it in different ways.25 Barnes et al. (1996) use this insight to argue how astronomers in the Renaissance were able to disagree about the solar system; their disagreement was not about facts, but how to interpret the facts. The question is whether this insight undermines the ambition of a particular science to be based on true, objective, empirical observation? Whereas realists, such as McDowell, argue that it does not undermine, sceptics argue that it does (Barnes et al. (1996). Scepticism is part of a group of concepts,26 all of which have some sort of questioning or doubting inherent in them. Scepticism is close to the stoic tendency to doubt the foundation of knowledge and even common sense. Also, cynicism is part of this group of concepts, and it describes a sceptical and partly rejecting attitude to whatever is taken for granted. Cynics, such as Diogenes (412–325 BC), demonstrated their indifference to progress and ways of life, and they regarded the idea that material wealth could lead to more happiness as an illusion. Irony is a rhetorical strategy by which dual meaning is exposed, and therefore it undermines a certain meaning of things. Relativism was inherent in the ancient discourse, and sophists are often seen as holding this position. Basically, relativism holds that all knowledge is either subjective or contextual, and no knowledge has priority over other knowledge. Thus, no truths commit us to ignore alternative knowledge. Arguing for the social construction of knowledge or the contingency of knowledge implies a relativisation of knowledge. Richard Rorty (1989) contrasted irony with contingency and solidarity. While irony is a natural attitude, it is also, according to Rorty, something that belongs to the private sphere. The public sphere requires some common agreements and norms, what in general we can call solidarity. While contingency implies that our knowledge might not be universal, solidarity implies that even in a doubtful world, we need to rely on and relate to certain values and relations, even if those values and relations are uncertain27: When we unmask or decode Rorty’s quasi-positivist and quasi-existentialist rhetoric and explore his neopragmatism, we find further support for a vision of

184  The scepticism track towards the sociology of science Table 5.1 Different forms of scepticism

Mild version Strong version

Speculative scepticism (Chapter 3.2)

Materialist scepticism (Chapter 3.3)

Critical theory (Chapter 5.2.2) Post-structuralism (Chapter 5.2.3)

Pragmatism (Chapter 5.3.1) Relativism (STS) (Chapter 5.3.2)

community life in which there is genuine participation. Habermas may be too ‘fundamental’ for Rorty, and Gadamer too wedded to traditional philosophy. (Bernstein 1983, p. 224) Thus, Bernstein’s response was that Rorty’s philosophy was not so different from the communicative turn of Habermas, Gadamer, and himself (Bernstein), even if Rorty did not admit it. The difference might be more related to the rhetorical level than to the underlying ideas. However, scepticism comes in different forms and degrees. Barnes et al. argue for a sociology of knowledge from a materialistic perspective, yet they observe a divide due to an increasing body of literature coming from more idealist perspectives (Barnes et al. 1996, p. 201). Four categories of sceptical arguments discussed in different part of this chapter are shown in Table 5.1. Scepticism occurs as a reaction to idealism that denounces the idea of epistemology, and I label this speculative scepticism. There is also scepticism that denounces the realist ambition of developing true knowledge about the world (ontology); I call this materialist scepticism. In addition, there are mild and strong versions of scepticism. The mild versions of scepticism can be shared by both realists and idealists. For example, some pragmatists, even if they reject realism, are close to materialism, but some are also close to idealists (Hacking 1983). It could be argued that critical theory links to Hegel and Hegelianism, and thus indirectly to idealism. Stronger versions of scepticism are normally unacceptable for both realists and idealists. Before I discuss these arguments in more depth, I present two arguments that are related to the sociology of knowledge: the evolution of knowledge, and the knowledge society. 5.1.2  Scepticism, rationalism, and evolution When commenting on scepticism in the first of his three dialogues, George Berkeley staged in Platonic manner a discussion between Philonous and Hylas (Berkeley 2009, p. 109): PHILONOUS:   Pray, Hylas, what do you mean by a sceptic? HYLAS:   I mean what all men mean, one that doubts of everything.

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David Hume is often seen as someone who doubted everything, although I have contested this.28 Hume argued that if all our knowledge about the external world comes to us through sensation, which was the claim made by John Locke,29 and if sensation is such an unreliable source of knowledge, given that everyone sees things their way (and blends what they see with emotions, feelings, dreams, and memory), there is no way that we can know how the world really is: [A]ll knowledge generates into probability, and this probability is greater or less, according to our experience of the veracity or deceitfulness of our understanding, and according to the simplicity or intricacy of the question. (Hume 1985, p. 231) This general scepticism towards our epistemological capacity is illustrated by Thomas Nagel, who, in his book The View from Nowhere,30 gives the belief in the human epistemology the ironic label heroic theories: Heroic theories acknowledge the great gap between the grounds of our beliefs under a realist interpretation, and they try to leap across the gap without narrowing it. The chasm below is littered with epistemological corpses. Examples of the heroic theories are Plato’s theory of Forms together with the theory of recollection, and Descartes’ defence of the general reliability of human knowledge through an a priori proof of the existence of a nondeceiving God. (Nagel 1986, p. 69) What can replace epistemology? How is it that despite the fact that we cannot know anything for certain, we still have lots of opinions about the world, many of which are correct or at least seem to be correct? Hume’s answer was that they are due in part of our upbringing and our everyday experiences. Knowledge from earlier generations has withstood the test of time. This kind of argument can be found even among the work of logical positivists, such as Hans Reichenhach: Every theory of knowledge must start from knowledge as a given sociological fact. The system of knowledge as it has been built up by generations of thinkers, the methods of acquiring knowledge used in former times or used in our day, the aims of knowledge as they are expressed by the procedure of scientific inquiry, the language in which knowledge is expressed – all are given to us in the same way as any other sociological fact, such as social customs or religious habits or political institutions. (Reichenbach 1938, p. 3) This conception of knowledge as a social and evolutionary process makes it possible to understand the need for democracy and social debate, and to understand

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the importance of a high level of knowledge in society. It also makes it possible to discuss the institutionalisation of the knowledge development processes and the best ways of organising knowledge development processes. Hume argued against an exaggerated belief in reason and rationality.31 As I have shown,32 F.A. Hayek pointed to Descartes as the source of this rationality and the constructivism33 that followed it. It was Descartes’ constructivism and that of his followers that David Hume wanted to question. As Hayek wrote: [H]uman intelligence is quite insufficient to comprehend all the details of the complex human society, and that it is this inadequacy of our reason to arrange such an order in detail which forces us to be content with abstract rules; and further, that no single human intelligence is capable of inventing the most appropriate abstract rules because those which have evolved in the process of growth of society embody the experience of many more trials and errors than any individual mind could acquire. (Hayek 1967, p. 88) The problem is not our immediate observations, but how we build arguments based on those observations. Thus, it is in the construction of arguments that the speculative aspects of knowledge are introduced. Hume made a distinction between private scepticism and academic (philosophical) scepticism. In our private life, we do not have a problem with identifying the real content and nature of most things. If one rises from one’s bed in the morning, it will not be a surprise that the bed is still there when one returns in the evening. This knowledge development is basically a social phenomenon. More significantly, much of this knowledge is in the form of norms and rules that have developed over time in an evolutionary process. For example, when one travels and books a hotel room, one can expect that there will be a bed in the room when one arrives in the evening. One does not need to specify the need for a bed when making the reservation. More generally, we assume that basic truths that we learn are valid for all; thus, we generalise from our experiences.34 Hume’s argument is captured in the following quotation from Hayek: Since our whole life consists in facing ever new and unforeseeable circumstances, we cannot make it orderly by deciding in advance all the particular actions we shall take. The only manner in which we can in fact give our lives some order is to adopt certain abstract rules or principles for guidance, and then strictly adhere to the rules we have adopted in our dealing with the new situations as they arise. Our actions form a coherent and rational pattern, not because they have been decided upon as part of a single plan thought-out beforehand, but because in each successive decision we limit our range of choice by the same abstract rules. (Hayek 1967, p. 90)

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Thus, Hume had ignited the idea that was later extensively expanded, namely that the source of our knowledge about the world is social. In practical life, historical knowledge transmits customs, norms, and habits. We do not have to experience everything ourselves; we can more or less enter the world as a ready-made configuration of knowledge in the sense that society already consisted of lots of knowledge, which we learn. Not surprisingly, this argument that we do not need to suppose that the human mind is born with knowledge, did not put an end to all philosophical speculation. Rather, it inspired new perspectives on philosophical issues.35 Social evolutionary ideas were not uncommon in the intellectual debates in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ideas of social and intellectual development had been an inherent part of the Enlightenment.36 The French philosopher Voltaire (1694– 1778) had argued that the British constitution was more advanced than that of the French, and that church and state should be separated in order for society to develop. Thereby, he had contributed to the discussion of historiography, the methods by which we study history. In practice, the question of how to make sense of social evolution became an important scientific topic.37 There are two main versions of the evolutionary argument. On the one hand, there was the naturalist version, which developed into what is today called structuralism – the idea that certain social and institutional structures form the way the world is and thereby the conditions within which we form knowledge. Structuralism is naturalist and materialist because these are real forces (naturalist) and we can know something about these structures and have deliberate (materialist) relation to them. On the other hand, there is the speculative version, which acknowledges how structural development affects our mind and ideas. It was in this form that Hegel adapted the idea of evolution. The French sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857) argued that science and society had passed two stages, religious and metaphysical, and were about to enter a third stage, the positive stage. During Comte’s time, both science and society were on the way into the positive stage, in which science would play a central role as a reference for society. Comte believed in a non-normative foundation for social reform, since by definition positivism was beyond normative assumptions. He had observed how this insight had helped mankind to tame the forces of nature and use it for social purposes. Similarly, advances in botany, biology, and chemistry had led to tremendous progress in society. Comte engaged in social and political activism, and argued for social reform. He held rather radical thoughts on how a society built on science, rather than on religion, could modernise the life of mankind. Thus, positivism came to be identified with political radicalism (Mackintosh 2005).38 The combination of evolution and speculation also inspired spiritual ideas.39 A reaction to this misuse of the social/evolutionary argument is represented by the work of the French sociologist Emil Durkheim and later the German sociologist Max Weber. Despite their antagonism, they both supported the development of

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structuralism – the idea that we can identify some material forces that influence social development. Durkheim wanted to remove Comte’s metaphysics from the discussion of the transition from traditional to modern society. He also wanted to defend and improve positivism, and he argued for an empirically and fact-based historical analysis. In his work on the transition from traditional to modern society, De la division du travail social (translated as The Division of Labour [Labor] in Society), first published in 1893, Durkheim used a method of abstraction from observed development (Durkheim 1997).40 The core of Durkheim’s analysis was the structural force that runs parallel to modernisation. This structuralism is inherent in the transition from a segmented society to a division of labour, from collectivism to individualism, and in the emergence of bureaucracy, money, and markets. The division of labour forces differentiation and specialisation in society.41 Still, there was an element of Hegelianism in Durkheim’s thinking: Individual personalities are formed and become conscious of themselves. Yet, this growth of psychological life of the individual does not weaken that of society, but merely transforms it. (Durkheim 1997, p. 285) Durkheim believed that changes in collective consciousness and solidarity counterbalanced some of the structural changes. He identified them with the concept of symbolic systems, and stated: Thus everything goes to prove that the evolution of the common consciousness proceeds along the lines we have indicated. (Durkheim 1997, p. 121) Thus, Durkheim pioneered what later named the sociology of knowledge.42 Importantly, he argued that the division of labour also affected science. Still, Durkheim argued, as did Comte, that science should have a formative role in society, supporting social progress. The analysis of modernisation in society is also apparent in the work of Max Weber. I  have already presented his interpretive approach to historical analysis in this book,43 and shown how he rejected the idea that human sciences could duplicate the methodology of natural science. Still, Weber argued that a modern conception of science would emerge from the differentiation of society that would follow modernisation. Modern society has specialised its functions in differentiated areas that allow for specialisation, such as science, art, health services, public administration, and business. Weber came to see the differentiation and bureaucratisation of different societal domains as a main characteristic modern society. As mass production was made possible by the division of labour, so too was modern social development made possible by the division of social activities. What increasingly characterised the modern society was the institutionalisation of science.44

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At the core of the evolution-discussion was the relation between development of knowledge and historical development. The relation implied that our thinking and hence our scientific results are socially and historically bound. This in turn undermined the universality of knowledge and science that Kant wanted to preserve. Durkheim and Weber tried to make this into a scientific discussion, avoiding metaphysics and building arguments on fact-based observations and historical statistics. What they and others of their generation did not do was to reflect on their own role and to what extent their theorising was a product of their own theory. The self-reflective aspect of modernism was not an inherent part of their theories, but it became a focal point for both post-structuralists and their critics. 5.1.3  The knowledge society: who killed the parrot? Science, as an instrument for social development, became an increasingly addressed topic after World War II. The development was fuelled by the use of the concept of the knowledge society. In this regard, Austrian-born philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) can be taken as a point of departure. He was an exponent of the sociology of scientific knowledge. He was appointed as a professor of philosophy at University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) in 1958, and he remarked that universities in general were still a mainly white, male enterprise, which had strongly influenced scientific discourses. At that time, the Beat culture flourished in San Francisco and the Bay area surrounding the city, and it became an element in a larger social movement that included civil rights activists, and later people (mainly young people) who styled themselves as hippies. The cultures and movement influenced the universities in the USA and they contributed to the changes in 1965 when the new education law led to the introduction of whole new groups of students to the campuses.45 Feyerabend saw the change as an opportunity for a new enlightenment. He criticised what he thought was a form of self-centredness in Western scientific thought. With the experience of all the new students with different backgrounds attending university, he envisioned the university as a place that could ‘live’ on the basis of the rich reservoir of experiences that were gathered (Feyerabend 1987). However, that would require a university to step down from dry theorising and to come closer to practice.46 Feyerabend asked the question how do we know whether scientific knowledge is good? If the question of what makes scientific knowledge good or great could be answered within science itself, it would be handled by the discussions within science. To some extent, it is handled in that way. However, Feyerabend’s question may also be interpreted from outside science, as referring to the effect on society or how science contributes to the development of society. Still, Feyerabend warned against letting science become a dominant ideology in society. There are some very interesting parallels in the arguments of Feyerabend and Gadamer, even though both men presented their arguments from different angles.

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There are two dimensions to Feyerabend’s critique. The first is internal to science itself, namely the belief in one method or one definition that describes the correct way of doing science. This is both false and a totalitarian idea. The second dimension is the idea of science as a specific kind of knowledge that is clearly distinguished from superstitions or myths. This is wrong. Such a clear demarcation simply does not exist. Thus, Feyerabend denounced the demarcation problem, as such. For him, science was a thing in society, and part of a knowledge development process in society. The two ambitions of positivism concerning internal consistency and external boundaries are in themselves myths, but at the same time, they are a threat to a free society (Feyerabend 1987). According to Feyerabend, also the positivistic idea of one unified definition of science was a threat to the role science should play in society, and it was wrong because the history of science did not support the idea that there is one right way to do or define science. With regard to the new breed of philosophers of science that were populating universities, he wrote: They received their philosophy readymade; they did not invent it. Nor do they have much time or inclination to examine its foundations. Instead of bold thinkers who are prepared to defend implausible ideas against a majority of opponents we have now anxious conformists who try to conceal their fear . . . behind a stern defence of status quo. (Feyerabend 1987, p. 205) Feyerabend attacked his colleagues for being conformist and ignoring the new democratic reality of science. Both he and Gadamer warned against the wrong use of science, either because of scientists’ lack of critical reflection and inner debates in science or because of how science was used and misused in society in terms of neglecting or being ignorant about the conditions under which scientists’ knowledge is produced. However, while Feyerabend wanted to see science opening up to society, Gadamer was sceptical about the social and political influence on science. Gadamer wanted to maintain the Enlightenment tradition in Europe, while Feyerabend wanted to see a new enlightenment. Both Gadamer and Feyerabend argued that dogmatism about methods meant that one was not thinking or reflecting on how scientific methods can conceal truth. In his book Wider den Methodenzwang,47 first published in 1975, Feyerabend defended anarchy in science; he argued that no method could ensure that we do not make the same mistake as was done against Galileo Galilei that we reject theories we believe are wrong, but in fact are correct. Methods should not be a matter of policing in science. Moreover, the focus on method misses the main point of science, which is its quest for truth. Gadamer saw dogmatism as a threat to science, but his remedy was hermeneutical in the sense that the way forward was to acknowledge the values of cultural/historical tradition that science represented. At the risk of exaggeration, Feyerabend could be regarded as forward-looking, while Gadamer was backward-looking. Even Habermas, who could be considered has holding a position between that of

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Feyerabend and Gadama, has argued that we should not confuse that debate on method with the discussion of the foundation of science (Habermas 2018). There might be a plurality of methods, without implying that we cannot discuss the overall truth and objectivity of science. The observation that science increasingly plays a role in the rationalisation of modern society is shared by critical theory, as I show in the following discussion. Science has been a tool for modernisation, exceeding the visions of Auguste Comte in the mid-19th century. Thus, science has become integrated into the process of developing knowledge in society, and Western societies have become knowledge societies. They have gone through a modernisation process that has implied rationalising the social. From World War II and onwards, science was put on the political agenda as a policy tool.48 Daniel Bell identified this development in the 1970s (Bell 1973), and since the 1990s, the EU has been quite explicit about the role science should have in social development.49 As a consequence, science has changed, and one aspect of the change is the question of whether there is or should be a distinction between scientific and non-scientific knowledge.50 For example, French sociologist Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) wrote the following in his book La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir51: When we examine the current status of scientific knowledge at a time when science seems more completely subordinated to the prevailing powers than ever before and, along with the new technologies, is in danger of becoming a major stake in their conflicts – the question of double legitimation, far from receding into the background, necessarily comes to the fore. For it appears in its most complete form, that of reversion, revealing that knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided? In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government. (Lyotard 1984, p. 5) Similarly, as the modern homes of science, universities have increasingly been asked to take a more active role in engaging in and developing knowledge in society and in business (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff 2000). From a sociological perspective, it is relevant to address how academia is organised, including how closer relations to practice and the increased degree to which academia is interdisciplinary, influences the production of knowledge. In this respect, science and research are today social and institutionalised activities in society and are characterised by certain tacit or explicitly formulated procedures, norms, and institutional rules.52 Included in these procedures, norms, and rules are certain ideas about knowledge and how it should be developed. In turn, underlying these ideas, there are assumptions about what science can find, invent, or produce in terms of knowledge. Insights into these issues are essential for any discussion about science in society. In talking about a knowledge society and about a knowledge economy, the focus is on innovation and skills development in society, and universities and

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science can play a central role in this process.53 Investment in research and higher education is part of the development of the knowledge society. Social and scientific knowledge are becoming integrated. As an example, in the book The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World, the Nobel Prize winner in economics William Dawbney Nordhaus (b. 1941) enters into current discussions on how to deal with the climate change problem (Nordhaus 2013). A poll conducted in the USA revealed that just over 50% of the population believed that man-made global warming was real.54 One of the problems relating to the climate change discourse is that there is no certainty about its causes. The United Nations’ body for assessing the science related to climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), states the following in its report Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis: Human influence is very likely the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s and the decrease in Arctic Sea ice area between 1979–1988 and 2010–2019 (about 40% in September and about 10% in March). (IPCC 2021, p. 6) There is deliberate use of the words very likely in the report. One issue is whether there is global warming, a second issue is whether, if it is a fact, it is man-made, and a third issue concerns the social role of scientists in the debate. How should we decide on things that are uncertain? Is it the role of science to make decisions? Wagner and Weitzman argue that even under the uncertainty related to such an issue as climate change, scientists have to act on the basis of the most reasonable interpretations at hand (Wagner & Weitzman 2016). There may be an economic and institutional answer to that challenge.55 A parallel example may serve to illustrate how knowledge is embedded in culture, institutions, and history. During an interview, Noam Chomsky harshly criticised contemporary American society in relation to racism (Yancy & Chomsky 2015). However, when asked about what to do in order to avoid racism, Chomsky replied as follows: It’s easy to rattle off the usual answers: education, exploring and addressing the sources of the malady, joining together in common enterprises – labor struggles have been an important case – and so on. The answers are right, and have achieved a lot. Racism is far from eradicated, but it is not what it was not very long ago, thanks to such efforts. It’s a long, hard road. No magic wand, as far as I know. (Yancy & Chomsky 2015) Thus, solutions to major societal challenges require an interplay between science and society. Knowledge societies are inherently collaborative, as knowledge is something that is shared, that develops in a social field, and is transmitted by dialogue. A social conception of knowledge makes it possible to discuss the economics of knowledge. The example of climate change illustrates this more general

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point: both those who claim that climate change is man-made and those who reject it believe that their opinion is true. Therefore, we can invest in obtaining more facts and hence better knowledge. We will not necessarily have certainty, but it might be the case that, with more facts, there will be less disagreement about the knowledge of climate change.56 Thus, from a sociological perspective, the validity of knowledge includes issues of how much we invest in acquiring good knowledge. Science may see itself as confined to providing only the facts that enter into public discourse. However, in the case of climate change, which might serve to illustrate similar cases, the engagement goes beyond that.

5.2  Inside the whale 5.2.1  The historical embeddedness of thought In this section, reference is made mainly to the work of Fredrich Hegel.57 Even though Hegel’s ideas were criticised and amended, there was still a Hegelianism that influenced thinking throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century. The German sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) made the following observation in the late 1920s: The meaning of history and life is constrained in their becoming and in their flux. These insights were first stumbled upon by the Romantics and by Hegel, but since then have had to be rediscovered again and again. (Mannheim 2013, p. 24) Non-foundationalism had a strong position in 20th-century scientific debate. In art, similar ideas led to the formation of modernism in the late 19th century.58 Modernism was inspired by, among others, Nietzsche, and one of those who transferred his argument into the modernist discussion was the German author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Thomas Mann (1875–1955).59 Mann identified the modern concept of democracy with utilitarianism, positivism in science, the French concept of rationalism, and the British concept of liberty, to which he presented German culture as an antithesis: [A]s has been perceived and said a hundred times, the German idea of the state and the freedom it bears in it the mark of its essential intellectual and cultural origin just as clearly as the English idea contains the Puritan origin and the French idea its revolutionary one. (Mann 2021, p. 208) Culture cannot be reduced to science. Culture strives because of individuals: freedom can take subjective forms that society might easily want to reject. Mann was a strong supporter of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake).60 He referred to Immanuel Kant and his ideas of the rule of law and the limitation of the state. The aim of

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positivism (e.g. in the form presented by Auguste Comte) is to align culture with an overall idea of progress in society. Furthermore, the British idea of utilitarianism, and that we can have criteria for liberty and even laws to specify liberty, not least supported by the work of John S. Mill.61 This, according to Mann, was fundamentally against the idea of freedom that literally meant to be free, meaning beyond any criteria. This might seem a paradox, given that Mill’s argument was for liberty and limitation of the state. Mann’s point was that Mill or British utilitarianism defined liberty in such a way that it undermined itself. The problem was that the French and the British had either an incorrect understanding or a non-existent understanding of freedom and culture. They had made both types of understanding into something instrumental (positivistic). However, when correctly understood, neither culture nor freedom can become part of policies.62 In Mann’s view, the organic aspect of social development was correctly understood within the German culture. From scepticism came the argument that no truths are fixed; they are related to points of views, and to the cultural and situational conditions in which knowledge is developed. What we choose to regard as true at one point in time might change over time. This links to the idea of evolution: that society is in change, that new things replace old things, and that what at one time was regarded as important can later be seen as obsolete. Hegel outlined, in several of his works, how mankind is a product of its history, and that the knowledge that we form about the world reflects the time and place in the world in which we live. These thoughts inspired, among others, Karl Marx, who argued that above the material structure of production in society, society develops an ideological superstructure. This was still Hegelianism (Löwith 1991), even though it was a materialistic perspective on the sociology of knowledge, which often has been referred to as historical materialism. The argument is that our mind, and hence how we see things and what we believe in, is formed by the material conditions under which we live. Marx’s analysis was historical. He could identify how society had moved from a primitive society to a feudal/peasant society, and to a capitalist society with owners of capital and a large labour class (Marx 2001). Along these historical lines, he could identify how mentality had changed. Marx and Engels wrote: [T]he production of ideas, of concepts, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. of people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to the furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, the existence of men is their actual life. (Marx & Engels 2007, p. 40)

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Thus, Hegel had been entirely mistaken, in a way that could be likened to a camera obscura, in which viewed objects appear upside-down: it is not through ideas that we form our material world, it is the material world that forms our ideas. For Hegel, possibly the main point in making the historical argument was to show how individual freedom could never be something absolute and subjective. We are always embedded in a context, and this context means that there will always be a contradiction between context-independent concepts such as rationality, freedom, will, and existence, and ‘the reality’ in which we are actively interested at any point of time. Thus, our existence is inherently contradictory or dialectical. Marx was fascinated by industrial development and the advances in the modern industrial age. At the same time, he argued that the modern age had come into conflict with human beings; the machine (meaning industrialisation) had become a competitor to human labour, not its helper. Marx was impressed by the enormous power of modernism and at the same time critical of it. His argument was that our ability to see beyond the present structure of production implies our ability to ignore the socially learned structure of our thinking. Our everyday thinking is embedded in normative inherited structures that are based on the present powers and interests in society. This embeddedness becomes a threat to human liberation. However, there was a dualism in Marx’s thinking. By building on Hegel’s idea of pure concepts such as freedom and existence, Marx further developed the argument that the structures of production represent a power that alienates people. Thus, given that there are some context-free concepts of freedom and human flourishment, social structure will always represent a constraint to the subject. How, then, can there be pure concepts under historical materialism? The phenomenologist Max Ferdinand Scheler (1874–1928) tried to solve this problem and coined the concept sociology of knowledge. His intention was to develop an argument that would balance an essentialist/a priori position on the one hand, and a social construction of knowledge on the other hand (Scheler 1973). By developing such an argument, he anticipated that he would be able to distinguish between variance and invariance in knowledge formation in society. Scheler, as a phenomenologist, believed in truth and in a fundamental and transcendent order in society. He developed what has since been called philosophical anthropology,63 arguing that the a priori knowledge was limited not only to abstract categories, as argued by Kant, but also to the material ones. By combining sociological perspectives with phenomenology, Scheler tried to retain a structure of reasoning in which he combined a social construction process of knowledge at one level and an essential development of knowledge at another level. Scheler’s approach was heavily criticised by Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) in his book Ideologie und Utopie, published in 1929.64 He made the argument that ideology (the basic belief system in society) is socially constructed. There is no truth beyond what is socially constructed. Mannheim traced the roots and sources of the sociology of knowledge back to Marx and Nietzsche. His argument was that those authors discussed the social and material preconditions and

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determinations of ideology. Long before ‘social constructivism’ became a popular term, Mannheim had identified the difficulties that follow from the fact that a sociology of knowledge has to deal with the questions of what knowledge is constructed in a particular situation and how to define validity (and truth) over and above the situational knowledge construction. He regarded the anthropology of knowledge formation as utterly speculative. When writing amid the ideological tensions in Europe in the period between the two world wars, he identified himself with ancient scepticisms: Where not Sophists of the Greek Enlightenment the expression of an attitude of doubt which arose essentially out of the fact that in their thinking about every object, two modes of explanation collided. On the one hand was the mythology which was the way of thinking of a dominant nobility already doomed to decline. On the other hand, was the more analytical habit of thought of an urban artisan lower stratum, which was in progress of moving upward. Insomuch as these two forms of interpreting the world converge in the thought of the Sophists, and since for every moral decision there were available two standards, and for every cosmic and social happening are at least two explanations, it is no wonder that they had a sceptical notion of the value of human thought. (Mannheim 2013, p. 8) Thus, Mannheim rejected the idea of a unitary world view. In his analysis, he tried to show how social knowledge was self-referential, as shown in the quotation given here: the fact that analytical and mythological views live side by side in itself supports scepticism. This argument preceded the later discussion of relativism (Turner 1995). In building on the work of Max Weber and including insights into the existentialist discussions, notably those by Heidegger, Mannheim developed a theory of the social embeddedness of thought to try to explain how knowledge developed as part of a meaning structure in society. The social embeddedness of thought also implies the historical embeddedness of thought. Inherent in this is a rejection of epistemology. As Mannheim wrote, Epistemology sought to eliminate this uncertainty (the fact that there are several competing world views) by taking its point of departure not from dogmatically thought theory of existence, nor from a world-order which was validated by a higher type of knowledge, but from the analysing of the knowing subject. (Mannheim 2013, p. 12) However, his criticism of this approach was both philosophical and methodological: All these attempts presuppose the more or less explicit consideration that the subject is more immediately accessible to us than the object which has

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become too ambiguous as a result of the many divergent interpretations to which it has been subjected. (Mannheim 2013, p. 13) The essence of sociology of knowledge is that instead of asking how we come to know things, we take the knowledge that we have as a point of departure and try to reconstruct its implicit meaning system or ideology. Thus, Mannheim asked what external factors could explain the prevailing world view or ideologies. What is interesting in his approach, in which he deviated from the strict materialism of Marxism, was the willingness to consider a large repertoire of factors, including methodology, historical awareness, and existential factors. Our immediate understanding of social order, with its rules, norms, routines, and structures, is objectivised through social practice and language, among other ways. Furthermore, some of these structures are institutionalised and legitimised, and society invests considerably in maintaining some of these structures, such as religious rituals. These structures have a socialising effect and are internalised in people’s self-understanding and identity.65 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann described a social mechanism by which societies internalise beliefs and through that create structures, and they explained how these beliefs become interlocked and self-concealing, and are challenged when immediate everyday practice and experience contradict the structures and norms (Berger & Luckmann 1991). Subsequently, their theory was able to explain how traditional and religious societies are challenged by modernism and plural ways of life. 5.2.2  The critical theory tradition: against epistemology The idea that society has to be the object of continued criticism was at the core of the Frankfurter school of critical theory.66 The ambition of both Adorno and Horkheimer was to try to save the Hegelian dialectical project by acknowledging the criticism from both neo-positivists and phenomenologists, as is evident in their co-authored book Dialektik der Aufklärung, which they wrote while in exile in the USA during World War II, and was published in 1944.67 The German discussion could be seen as following Hegel’s questioning of the foundation of our knowledge, and this was reflected upon by Adorno and Horkheimer. Taking Nazism as their main target, they tried to explain how mass deception and delusion were possible. They saw it as a result of a wrong interpretation of the Enlightenment, and as an argument for critical theory. Why do we develop false consciousness, and how do we know that what we believe in and take as true is actually true? Rationality has dialectics, which leads to conflicts that have to be handled. Rationalism does not give us immediate access to the right answers to questions and challenges. Furthermore, there is not a direct link that leads from the rationality of a person to the rationality of society. Rather, the answer to the question of what is a rational and sane society is different from the answer to the question of what is a sane and rational person.

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Critical theory takes as its point of departure that our existence happens within a flow of time, which influences how we see the world. The theory rejects the idea of teleology, and thus it rejects materialism in the sense of determinism. Consequently, it has been used in attempts to overcome Marx’s contradiction between materialism and emancipation. Critical theory accepts dialectics, but not the type that automatically leads to a better society. Two world wars in the first half of the 20th century, together with the ideological struggle and dominance of fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism in Europe, did not give support for the idea of overall progress and rationality in society. Critical dialectics requires that individuals and their critical engagement in society are able to correct the wrongs in society. Positivism sees everything as abstract theory and numbers, and nature as the measure of all things has removed meaning and reflection from our understanding of the world: To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion; modern positivism writes it off as literature. (Adorno & Horkheimer 1997, p. 7) According to Adorno and Horkheimer, Enlightenment in this form was a Platonic myth, one that was portrayed by Francis Bacon and his positivist followers as liberating us from myths. However, an uncritical belief in progress, in technical advances, and in the instrumentalisation of society has itself become a myth in the sense that, rather than bringing society forward, it has made it more primitive. Critical theory argues that the one-sided belief in progress has overlooked the dialectics of Enlightenment, namely that, within that progress, there was the seed of its own destruction: Today, when Bacon’s utopian vision that we should ‘command nature by action’ – that is, in practice – has been realized on a tellurian scale, the nature of the thralldom that he ascribed to unsubjected nature is clear. It was domination itself. And knowledge, in which Bacon was certain the ‘sovereignty of man lieth hid’, can now become the dissolution of domination. But in face of such a possibility, and in the service of the present age, Enlightenment becomes wholesale deception of the masses. (Adorno & Horkheimer 1997, p. 42) The myth of Enlightenment can be illustrated with reference to Homer’s Odyssey, specifically in his journey, his challenges in life, and his combating of obstacles, as well as his ignorance of dilemmas that transformed him as a person to become an instrumental, egoistic, and effective survivor, who left the shadows of life behind (Adorno & Horkheimer 1997). The myth of getting rid of the dilemmas and primitive forces in order to overcome the forces that had enslaved him, gave him the illusion of getting rid of the past and

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reinstating a rational order. It is this illusion that critical theorists have aimed to address. What is the remedy for rationality and reason in a world that is in flux, and where we cannot cling to some illusionary belief in nature? Adorno and Horkheimer were not asking for the ultimate forces of things: they declined foundationalism. Thus, criticism has to happen in the concrete reality in which we live, as an immanent critique. Emancipation comes from the right to criticise, and the ability to be reflective in relation to structural changes in society. Adorno rejected epistemology (Adorno 2013), meaning the Kantian and phenomenological idea that all knowledge can be reduced to personal knowledge in the form of sensing and reflection. Both he and Horkheimer regarded knowledge as something social, something that existed in the interrelation between people. They also addressed policy as a way of moderating structural development. Through critical theory, the relation between science, knowledge development, and policy become closer. Max Horkheimer criticised the tendency in the social sciences, particularly in sociology, to duplicate the scientific approaches of natural science. He went on to criticise classical sociology in general: Distinctions like those of community and society (Tönnies), mechanical and organic solidarity (Durkheim), or culture and civilisation (A. Weber) as basic forms of human solidarity prove to be of questionable value as soon as one attempts to apply them to concrete problems. The way that sociology must take in the present state of research is (it is argued) the laborious ascent from the description of social phenomenon to detailed comparisons and only then to the formation of general concepts. (Horkheimer 2002, p. 192)68 Against epistemology and the Kantian system of thought, he wrote: The false consciousness of the bourgeois servant in the liberal area comes to light in very diverse philosophical systems. It found an especially significant expression at the turn of the century in the Neo-Kantianism of the Marburg school. Particular traits in the theoretical activity of the specialist are here elevated to the rank of universal categories, of instances of the world mind, the eternal ‘Logos’. (Horkheimer 2002, p. 198) Horkehimer’s criticism of epistemology resonated with the argument made by Mannheim and Adorno. Horkheimer rejected the individualism of Kant and his belief in the human mind and consciousness. He also criticised the positivist idea of establishing undisputable concepts, as well as the pragmatist idea that knowledge could be evaluated according to its usefulness and utility. Critical theory has

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an understanding of knowledge beyond these other attempts, and this understanding is found in the relation between theory and practice: Critical thinking, on the contrary, is motivated today by the effort really to transcend the tension and to abolish the opposition between the individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those of work-process relationships on which society is built. (Horkheimer 2002, p. 210) Thus, critical theory is intended to reduced knowledge development to the everyday, practical experience level. This is a critique of philosophical systems and what is seen as exaggerated theory-building in science. The theory (i.e. critical theory) is critical of claims of objectivity and validity in science, in the way they were discussed within logical empiricism. Jürgen Habermas has been one of the strongest exponents of this way of thinking. As a German, he felt a particular responsibility for contributing to building a democratic, open, and civilised society. For Habermas, the communicative turn, which was based on insights from linguistic philosophy, was an opportunity to position the public deliberation, including the role of science, at the centre of the democratic process. I have already shown that way that Habermas has argued in order to define communicative rationality and avoid relativism.69 He returned to Kant, but reinterpreted him in a postmetaphysical context. In an early part of his career, Habermas was engaged in the Positivismusstreit (positivism dispute).70 His contribution to the debate was to emphasise the difference between critical theory and logical positivism, and thereby demonstrate how critical theory could be regarded as a scientific position in its own right. In doing so, he identified Popper with logical positivism.71 As a point of departure, Habermas declared72: System and individual entity are reciprocal and can only be apprehended in their reciprocity. (Habermas 1976, p. 313) He added: [T]he research process instigated by human subjects belongs, through the act of cognition itself, to the objective context which should be apprehended. (Habermas 1976, p. 132) The positivistic ambition of trying to be objective in the sense of standing outside society, or to be able to carve out factors that can be analytically investigated as if unaffected by the human mind that has gathered these facts, is a myth. According to Habermas, the right way to achieve objectivity is to be aware of the contextual and material reality that research is conducted within. The core of this criticism

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is the lack of self-reflection in science.73 What about the social system? Can we develop social laws in the same way as we have discovered laws of nature? In this respect, dialectical theory diverges from positivism, in arguing that social science can never replicate the aims and methods of natural science. With regard to the dialectical approach, Habermas writes: It doubts whether science, with regard to the world produced by men, may proceed just as indifferently as it does with such success in the exact natural sciences. (Habermas 1976, p. 133) Furthermore, Habermas argues that the hypothetical deductive system of statements found in natural science should in social science be replaced by the hermeneutic explication of meaning. This has implications for the relation between theory and experience. The hypothetical deductive method is used by researchers to argue that any observation can be checked by repeated experiments and objectified by confirmative testing, Thus, through this process, the subjectivity of experiences and sense impressions are more or less erased, which as I  have shown, was one of Francis Bacon’s major ambitions.74 In social science, theories will be based on our experiences and will never be able to be tested in ways that resemble those in the natural sciences. However, objectivity is possible. It does not follow from formal logic; rather, it follows from insights and understandings of society and history. Thus, we cannot escape the fact that pre-scientific experience and pre-understanding in society shapes our assumptions about society. Still, the argument is that by communicating between experience and theory, we can have more insightful understandings of society. Theories will be confronted with reality, but not tested in the way that the analytical/empirical framework implies. Habermas refers to the analytical/empirical distinction between facts and decisions. Positivists have argued for a clear divide between the two, where facts are value-free, whereas decisions and the use of facts in argumentation are valueladen. Habermas questions this distinction, with the argument that facts have been selected in some way and it is hard to see how what are presented as facts will not impact decisions. In dialectical thinking, value freedom or objectivity comes from action of the researcher, through their impartiality and serious investigation, not by eliminating the researcher. Based on Wittgenstein’s early philosophy, logical positivists argued that our reasoning can begin from some basic sentences – ‘protocol sentences’ – that are assumed to be absolutely true. Their argument was that logical deductions based on protocol sentences are also true. In contrast to logical positivists on this point, Karl Popper argued that fundamental hypotheses cannot be decided in advance in this way (Popper 1972). A hypothesis or a basic assumption that has been evaluated in relation to existing knowledge, will also, according to Popper’s philosophy, be tested and possibly falsified. Habermas’ objection is that the kind of process Popper suggested would not rule out basic assumptions that might turn

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out to be unacceptable. Over time, science might accumulate assumptions that lead knowledge in the wrong direction. Therefore, Habermas argues as follows: The so-called basic problem simply does not appear if we regard the research process as part of a comprehensive process of socially institutionalised actions, through which social groups sustain their natural precarious life. For the basic statement no longer draws empirical validity solely from the motives of an individual observation, but also from the previous integration of individual perception into the realm of convictions which are unproblematic. (Habermas 1976, p. 154) Habermas’ strategy has been to take the issue of the basic problem or foundationalism out of the scientific realm and into the social realm. Value neutrality is a myth. A clear distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ is not possible. What is (facts) will influence decision. We live in a social reality in which values are already inherent in our way of thinking. The concept of value neutrality implies that neutral things, in the sense of things (e.g. nature and technology) that can be identified physically as facts, are given priority over things that cannot be identified in that way (e.g. culture and social patterns). Thus, the analytical/empirical insistence on value freedom has supported the instrumentalisation of life. Habermas’ arguments are summarised in Table 5.2. It should be mentioned that in a response to Habermas, the critical rationalist Hans Albert (b. 1921), argues that Habermas’ critique of Popper does not really hit the target (Albert 1976). The main reason is that even Popper was critical of some of the assumptions of logical positivists, and in particular he distanced himself from some sort of absolutism related to the discussion of truth. In practice, critical testing of arguments might not be that different in critical theory and critical rationalism.75 One of the main issues and problems addressed by the critical position is how we can avoid false consciousness. At the core of the solution to this problem is, in Habermas’ conception, the need to develop communicative rationality. It is unrealistic to assume that all scientific knowledge is true. Rather, scientists make huge mistakes. Therefore, the focus should be on how science and society correct such mistakes. Some types of knowledge are beyond our reach, regardless of skilful we are. Not all speech can be understood within the speech itself. Consequently, distorted speeches (false consciousness) cannot always be detected ‘from within’. Even though critical theory is rooted in scepticism and even though Habermas engaged in the dispute against positivism, he also argued strongly against relativism. Blackburn states: The relativists, though minded as ever, mock the ideology, what the Germans call Begriffshimmel, or ‘concept heaven’, in which the immutable relations between rights, duties, justice and truth hold their eternal sway. (Blackburn 2005, p. 42)

The scepticism track towards the sociology of science  203 Table 5.2  Comparison of logical empiricism and critical theory Theme

Subtheme

The analytical/ empirical position (positivism)

1. Social Social system totality

The critical position

Unity of science Dialectics argues that implies that laws studying social systems in the social sphere will always imply resemble laws in the understanding of natural science the social processes and can explain creating the system. social development The relation Subjectivity can be Subjectivity is an between theory disregarded, and inherent aspect of and experience objective and social reasoning and testable theories cannot be erased. can be developed. Still, both objectivity and theory-building is possible. The theory of Theories of history Dialectical hermeneutics history should comply imply sensitivity to the with the same historical context and criteria for the relation between scientific laws as the general and the for natural science. unique. Science and Instrumental A dialectical science is practice theorising affects sensitive to the social instrumental and historical context recommendations and policies. 2. Value freedom Facts can be divided Questions whether from decisions facts and decisions are clearly separate 3. The basic problem Science has to be The basic assumption based on some problem cannot be fundamental solved but it can be assumptions that removed by founding are regarded science in the social (undisputed) as and historical reality. true. 4. Value neutrality As with value Achieving value neutrality freedom, science is a myth. When can achieve value science points to neutrality by knowledge, it also distinguishing influences what is between ‘is’ regarded as acceptable (facts) and ‘ought’ and not, and thus has (decisions). an impact on decisions.

Source: Based on Habe rmas (1976)

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Habermas does not subscribe to a ‘concept heaven’; he still criticises relativism.76 The target of Habermas’ critique of relativism was French postmodernism or post-structuralism. 5.2.3 Post-structuralism: the social construction of thought A French reading of phenomenology, particularly the Heideggerian phenomenology, had tremendous impact on what became French postmodernism (Alcoff 2005). It was a position that questioned the rationalism of the Western world. This is illustrated by the following quotation concerning one of the predecessors of post-structuralism, the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice MerleauPonty (1908–1961): Merleau-Ponty develops in detail his claim of phenomenology’s superiority to scientific explanation. The basic problem with a scientific approach is, he maintains, that the development of its rigorous empirical and quantitative methodology requires regarding the contents of our lived experience as fully determined and totally objective (that is, in no way dependent on our experience of them). . . . As a result, even the human body becomes pure exteriority, a mere collection of parts outside of parts, interacting with one another according to scientific laws. In this view, genuine subjectivity is eliminated – an obvious travesty of our experience. This is the motivation behind ­Merleau-Ponty’s dramatic statement that phenomenology’s ‘return to the things themselves’ is from the start a rejection of science. (Gutting 2005, p. 9) ‘Return to the things themselves’ is an existentialist concept. Thus, Merleau-Ponty identifies the need to go beyond our common beliefs and ‘scientific’ approaches. Prior to French post-structuralism and thus postmodernism, there was structuralism, which was represented by the work of Emil Durkheim, among others. What was added to Durkheim’s structuralism in the first half of the 20th century was a certain version of the linguistic turn.77 The influence of that linguistic argument came mainly from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). A core insight from his linguistic theory was that language rather than reality has a fixed structure.78 As Roy Harris observed in his introduction to the English translation of de Saussure’s book Course in General Linguistics, The revolution Saussure ushered in has rightly been described as ‘Copernican’. For instead of men’s words being seen as peripheral to men’s understanding of reality, men’s understanding of reality came to be seen as revolving about their social use of verbal signs. . . . Words are not vocal labels which have come to be attached to things and qualities already given in advance by Nature, or ideas already grasped independently by the human mind. On the contrary, languages themselves, collective products of social interaction,

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supply the essential conceptual frameworks for men’s analysis of reality and, simultaneously, the verbal equipment for their description of it. The concepts we use are creations of the language we speak. (Harris 1983, p. ix) Based on the work of de Saussure, the Belgian/French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) studied the structuration of social relations as a critique of the structural-functional approach developed by Talcott Parsons (1902–1979), and he found parallel structures in the developing and developed world.79 Similarly, the literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915–1980) argued that his contemporary French society, or what might be call modernism in general, was actually a tribal society (Barthes1997, 2012). As a perspective, structuralism sees our thinking in terms of frames of reference and symbolism.80 Language is structuring of the way we think. One can see the world as a multitude of language games (different types of grammar) that are not automatically transcendent and not linked to ‘facts’. Foucault argued for a constructivist perspective, in the sense that we can understand some functional structures of development, but only at a very abstract level (Foucault 1994). The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) claimed that the structuration of society creates dominance and power relations, which allows for hierarchies and social differentiation. His work was positioned between structuralism and post-structuralism, in that it identified how social recognition forms social structures, social capital (habitus), and structuration. Bourdieu studied how science was organised and its implication for the scientific focus (Bourdieu 2001; Hess 2011). Practice is seen as mediating structure and individuality, and therefore as modifying dialectical theory and the distinction between idealist dialectics (Hegel 1997) in terms of the spirit in historical development, and materialist dialectics (Marx 2007) in terms of ownership of the means of production as a determinant of development. In his book Ce que parler veut dire: l’économie des échanges linguistiques,81 Bourdieu identified how symbolic/linguistic structures influenced social practice and social forms (Bourdieu 1991). Post-structuralism, even if it builds on structuralist discussions, represents a reaction to structuralism. Post-structuralism was aimed at transcending the dichotomy between agent and structure (Glendinning 2011). Alcoff states: Foucault’s oeuvre is almost exclusively focused on particular knowledges in the human sciences, especially those aspects which pertain to psychological theories of human behaviour, capacity, and normative functioning. His historical approach to these, and his emphasis of the role of discourse, is readily reminiscent of Thomas Kuhn’s similar historical approach to scientific method with its emphasis on the role of paradigms and the untranslatability of paradigm-dependent objects. (Alcoff 2005, p. 212)

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Foucault described his methodology in his book Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, published in 1966.82 He tried to ‘excavate’ layers that cover our ways of understanding the world, in order to reveal some of the deeper lying structures. This method was applied in Naissance de la Biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France,83 in which Foucault identified the underlying forces that led to the breakthrough of neoliberalism in society (Foucault et al. 2008). He traced these roots from the early liberal period in the 18th century and onward. Furthermore, he argued that there was an increasing rationalisation of the human world, which was lying at the bottom of this ideological shift. Post-­s tructuralism was not only a French reading of German philosophy but also an American reading of French philosophy (Cusset 2008). Postmodernism represents the meeting between the French interpretation of the Hegelian tradition on the one hand and the U.S. society of the 1960s with student revolts, minority rights, and women’s movements on the other hand. The aim of post-structuralism was to decompose the taken-for-given, and to go beyond appearances. Moreover, it turns out that beyond appearances, there is nothing: [A]s of now, there is no longer a discourse of truth; there are only appearances (disposotifs) of truth – transient, tactical and political. (Cusset 2008, p. 131) Decomposing can be likened to removing the layers of an onion: at the end of the process there is nothing. Life is like a theatre where things assumed to be real are mere scenery. We are a player in this theatre, and we choose a role. Thus, even our life is a play: our identity is a construction, we make ourselves. The kind of problems post-structuralists addressed related to the consequence of the fact that in order to discuss the foundation of things we need a foundation. This may be clarified by following detailed quotation: There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of onto-theology – in other words, through the history of all of his history – has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game. The second interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzsche showed us the way, does not seek in ethnography, as Lévi-Strauss wished, the ‘inspiration of a new humanism’. . . . There are more than enough indications today to suggest we might perceive that these two interpretations of interpretation which are absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously and reconcile

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them in an obscure economy – together share the field which we call, in such a problematic fashion, the human sciences. (Derrida 2007, p. 12) Thus, the aim of post-structuralism (the second interpretation of interpretation) is to go beyond how we problematise the world through language. We have to address the structure of our argument before we can start to argue. Was Derrida’s thinking firmly within the tradition of analytical philosophy? Glendinning (2011) argues that many things point in that direction: He claims that a work of reading ‘cannot legitimately transgress the text towards something other than it’, (and more notoriously) that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ is deeply suggestive of the idea that his work takes the linguistic turn, even outline a form of linguistic idealism. . . . [H]e insists that this ‘real life’ is something ‘inscribed in a determined textual system’. (Glendinning 2011, p. 44) However, this is not the whole story, and not even the right story: For Derrida, language, and all that we think of as belonging to language – words, sentences, signs, speech, writing (in the usual sense), rules, meaning, references, and so on – are made possible by, are ‘opened by’, and must ultimately be understood in terms of the structure of writing (in his new sense): ‘writing thus comprehends language’. (Glendinning 2011, p. 44) Before we start constructing meaning, there is no meaning, thus everything might be questioned. However, this questioning presupposes a language and our ability to question. In turn, this implies that language is confronted with a general selfreference problem that cannot be overcome.84 At the same time, as this way of thinking represents a criticism of the established social order and meaning structure in society, it also represents a possibility for creativity and innovation. Thus, post-structuralism, as it gained momentum in the USA as a reference to thinking, inspired cultural studies and went hand in hand with the development of the emerging media society. As part of postmodernism, post-structuralism was used to characterise dominate French thinkers in the period from c. 1960 to c. 1990.85 The post-structuralist position can be understood against the background of the classical discourses on the evolution of society. Although, broadly speaking, both critical theory and poststructuralism argued within the Hegelian universe of thought, it could be argued that post-structuralists took Friedrich Nietzsche as their point of departure. What they referred to in Nietzsche’s work was his radical rejection of the illusion that he thought Western civilisation had become. As I have shown,86 Nietzsche called for a return of pre-modern, pre-Plato ideas, in which humans and nature were

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regarded as existing in a more real relationship, unaffected by the abstract kind of rationalism that Plato had initiated. Thus, Nietzsche’s main contribution was to deconstruct and question the concept of knowledge, as such. As Foucault writes, It is for this reason that in Nietzsche we find the constantly recurring idea that knowledge is at the same time the most generalized and most particular things. Knowledge simplifies, possesses over differences, lumps things together, without any justification in regard to truth. It follows that knowledge is always a misconstruction (méconnaissance). Moreover, it is always something that is aimed, maliciously, insidiously, and aggressively, at something like a single combat, a tête-à-tête, a dual is set up, contrived, between man and what he knows. There is always something in knowledge that is analogous to the dual and accounts for the fact that it is always singular. That is the contradictory character of knowledge, as it is defined in the Nietzsche texts that seem to contradict one another – generalizing and always singular. (Foucault 1973, p. 14) The Nietzschean nihilism implied questioning the foundation of our thinking and the things we take for granted: do we really know what is right, what is good, what is progress, and what is a meaningful life? In the context of political discussions, these kinds of questions were relevant for those who questioned, for example, white dominance in society or male dominance in politics and science. Michel Foucault’s work on sexuality and punishment had demonstrated the historical embeddedness of thinking, had questioned the rationality of modernisation, and had emphasised how power, dominance, and rationalisation of society, rather than rationality, had been a historical driver in social development, and it has even unconsciously changed science: What I  would like to do, however, is to reveal a positive unconscious of knowledge: a level that eludes the consciousness of the scientist and yet is part of the scientific discourse, instead of disputing its validity and seeking to diminish its scientific nature. . . . It is these rules of formation, which were never formulated in their own right, but are to be found only in widely different theories, concepts, and objects of study, that I have tried to reveal, by isolating, as their specific locus, a level that I have called, somehow arbitrarily perhaps, archaeological. (Foucault 1994, p. xi) Postmodernism has become a trend in art87 but is also inspired by modernist art.88 Foucault (1983) describes two main features that characterised art prior to the 20th century, and that refer to the relationship between art and objects in the world: the desire to represent the object, and the desire that art should play back to the object, meaning that it should say something about it. In both cases, the subject and the object are in a hierarchical relationship with art. Avant-garde art had challenged

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this relationship through seeing a work of art as something separate, not as a representative of something outside itself, but as aesthetic, something floating, something unique in itself, and as its own language. In his essay Le Doute de Cézanne, published in 1945,89 Merleau-Ponty had argued that politics and philosophy could learn from what had been developed within art (Merleau-Ponty 1964; Johnson 1991). Derrida later developed his philosophy to a large degree based on either literary criticism or art criticism (Derrida 1987; Thomassen 1988). Subsequently, in postmodernist thinking, art was separated from society, but society copied what had been revealed by art, and art then became at the centre of understanding of the conditions for social life. The almost endless series of manifestos that were prepared – futuristic, Dadaist, vorticist, and surrealist (Breton 2010), to name a few – contained references to the original manifesto idea, as exemplified by the Communist Manifesto of 1848 (Marx & Engels 2005),90 that they should be liberating and rejuvenating. According to Marjorie Perloff, the futurists were responsible for the following: [A] short-lived but remarkable rapprochement between Avant-Garde aesthetic, radical politics, and popular culture. (Perloff 2003, p. xxxv) Derrida’s concept of deconstruction can be used to question how society has come to believe in certain ‘truths’, which under closer scrutiny turn out to have a less solid foundation than might have been assumed. Structures are ‘layers of beliefs’ that we think are true. Jean Baudrillard argues in Nietzschean way in his book Simulations (Baudrillard 1983) that the reality we live in is hyperreality, a constructed reality that conceals the ‘real’ reality.91 Post-structuralists have questioned the disciplinary boundaries in science and opened up for new combinations of disciplines. This is not least evident in the area of humanism and technology: following the recognition that humans and technology are interrelated to a larger extent than has previously been assumed, post-humanism and transhumanism are transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries.92 There is an emancipating potential in the kind of criticism that post-structuralism represents. Since modern society in general is seen as oppressive and deluding, many of those opposing their society today could find support in these theories. Post-colonial thinking and gender studies were new fields of attention that drew support from the post-structural philosophy. As the historian Francois Cusset argues, Yet Foucault’s works nonetheless had an impact on the profound evolution that was taking place in the area of American feminism, shifting from essential humanism to radical constructivism; his influence is confirmed with the omnipresence of his work in the research of Joan Scott, Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler. (Cusset 2008, p. 151)

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Both post-colonialism and feminism had influenced our conception of science. Is science gendered? Is it a white European project, a form of domination that suppresses other cultures? Undoubtedly, these questions have become central in the current scientific debate. However, post-structuralism could also be seen as a ­double-edged sword: on the one hand, it could be used to fight the existing social order, but on the other hand, it could also be used against any contenders to the existing social order.93 Thus, even if those with a clear normative and political project could use post-structuralist arguments in their criticism of the established order, they would hardly be able to refer to them when promoting their own agenda. A sociology of knowledge perspective existed in French structuralism, and even in the post-structuralism version. The tradition explored how underlying structural propensities, such as those found in language, shape some of the forms we find in society. Post-structuralists criticised the idea that there are fixed structures that form society, and that they give input to understanding and deconstruct how we form ideas in society. Post-structuralists have argued that we can pretend to be rational about things, without being able to perceive the fact that we are a historical and cultural product.94 The scientific ambition of establishing universal, unbiased, and absolute truth is rejected.

5.3  Sociology of science 5.3.1 Pragmatism Reference to American pragmatism relates to different thinkers, such as William James (1842–1910) and his objection to a priori knowledge (James 1978), John Dewey (1859–1952) and his emphasis on learning, Richard Rorty (1931–2007) and his rejection of knowledge as a mirror of nature (Rorty 1979), Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and his study of semiotics and symbolic forms, and Hilary Putnam (1926–2016), whose roots were in analytical philosophy and criticism of radical scepticism. It has been argued that there was a divide between these thinkers, as there was a Hegelian influence on the thinking of James, Dewey, and Rorty and a Nietzschean influence on Peirce and Putnam (Hacking 1983, p. 62). However, some argued that pragmatism is anti-­ philosophical, as it puts aside classical philosophical discussion of questions such as what is reality, what is existence, and how do I know that I know, and replaced them with the ideas that reality is the reality we experience, there is no hyperreality, our existence is how we live our lives in praxis, and one’s knowledge is not complete, but at least one knows some things, things that work and that make one live one’s life. Max Horkheimer criticised pragmatism for being a narrow-minded line of thought: The fact the science contributes to the social life-process as a productive power and a means of production is not what legitimates a pragmatist theory

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of knowledge. The fruitfulness of knowledge indeed plays a role in its claim to truth, but the fruitfulness in question is to be understood as intrinsic to the science and not as a usefulness to ulterior purposes. (Horkheimer 2002, p. 3) For Horkheimer, pragmatist reference to practice was philosophically empty. Pragmatism links our knowledge to practice, and to how we go about solving practical problems. The practical things we deal with in everyday life have a strong bearing on our perceptions. What seems to work or what seems to offer a solution to a problem are regarded as more important than what does not work. Pragmatism is sceptical about idealism and metaphysics. However, Horkheimer’s observation misses the fact that the founders of pragmatism had strong philosophical opinions. It could even be argued that there is a clear philosophical programme at the roots of pragmatism: that of overcoming the distinction between analytical and synthetic knowledge (Misak 2017). According to Bertrand Russell, the founders of pragmatism were clearly inspired by the sophist Protagoras and his idea of man as the measure of all things (Russell 2004).95 Pragmatists had a common distaste of foundationalism (science should not seek the foundation of things), as well as of metaphysics. They wanted to replace metaphysical speculations with a science that has focus on the usefulness and practical applicability of scientific insights. Furthermore, they were in search of ‘what works’ rather than ‘what is true’ (Ryle 1990).96 In taking a criticism of Descartes’ dualism of the mind as a point of departure, Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) wrote the following in his book The Concept of Mind: Its object has been to show that the (Cartesian) two-worlds story is a philosophers’ myth, though not a fable, and, by showing this, to begin to repair the damage that this myth has for some time been doing inside philosophy. (Ryle 1990, p. 310) Ryle’s intention was to show that thinking and doing constitute a single integrated process: To put it quite generally, the absurd assumption made by the intellectualist legend is this, that a performance of any sort inherits all its title to intelligence from some anterior internal operation of planning what to do. . . . The regress is infinite, and this reduces to absurdity the theory that for an operation to be intelligent it must be steered by a prior intellectual operation. . . . When I do something intelligently, i.e. thinking what I am doing, I am doing one thing and not two. (Ryle 1990, p. 32)

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Interestingly, the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger had also made arguments in the same direction. For example, he wrote: Being-in, on the other hand, is a state of Dasein’s Being; it is an existential. So one cannot think of it as the Being-present-at-hand of some corporeal Thing (such as a human body) ‘in’ an entity which is present-at-hand. (Heidegger 1995, p. 79) Thus, despite the differences between pragmatism and phenomenology, there is also an interesting link between them. A common denominator is a particular reading of Aristotle, not least his discussion of praxis. As Barry Smith has argued, Practical knowledge has been brought to the attention of philosophers in recent times, on the one hand by Ryle, with his distinction between knowing how and knowing that, and on the other hand by Heidegger, whose philosophy rests centrally on a view of the structure of our ordinary experience as determined primarily by the hierarchies of interdependent objects of use (tools, equipment) with which we are continually bound up in our everyday activities. (B. Smith 1986, p. 22) The Aristotelian term praxis is often used to identify the actions and activities in which we engage in the real world. As I have shown,97 praxis and phronesis were defined by Aristotle as a particular knowledge forms. Praxis is an aspect of human life in which we apply knowledge and we do and make things. Praxis denotes our presence in the world as actively making, building, exchanging, learning, and executing our abilities. We do things within material structures. Thus, praxis is different from some idealised world or from the world of ideas. Praxis overcome ideas and links us to the world. Hence, when we refer to praxis, we turn towards this aspect of human life. It could be said that idealism continued to have Plato as a reference in the sense of discussing what is the nature of things, what is truth, and how can we deal with epistemological challenges. To some extent, pragmatism returned to Aristotle, although it was a certain reading of Aristotle. Aristotle had written about different knowledge forms, and to some extent he had identified more practical knowledge and more theoretical or technical forms of knowledge as parallel forms of knowledge, and thus somewhat equal forms of knowledge. Also implicit in Aristotle’s argumentation was the fact that we learn these different kinds of knowledge in different ways. However, Bernstein made the argument that Aristotle himself contributed to undermine praxis as a knowledge form by making it subordinate to theoria (Bernstein 1983, p. 47). Pragmatism builds on a theory of sensation: our whole sense apparatus is relevant, including feelings, and sensing in terms of sound, smell, experiences, and interpretation. The psychologist William James (1842–1910) argued that a good

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method is one that works. He tried to draw psychology away from its focus on the cause of things and instead direct its focus on the cure. James was a polemic and did a lot to promote pragmatism publicly. In his book, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to ‘Pragmatism’, published in 1909, he argued that truth related to beliefs and supported the claim that one can use arguments such as ‘this is true for me’ (James 1978). Thus, James made truthfulness a matter of subjectivity. The development of pragmatism owes much to the philosopher Charles S. Peirce (de Waal 2003). Peirce rejected Descartes’ dualism and emphasised sense order, as well as abduction as a method for studying the foundation of science (Hacking 1983; de Caro & Macarthur 2012). Peirce wrote the following about pragmatism, in which he denounced idealism and empiricism, and characterised pragmatism: But in truth, there is but one state of mind from which you can ‘set out’ – a state in which you are laden with an immense mass of cognition already formed, of which you cannot divest yourself if you would and who knows whether, if you could, you would have made all knowledge impossible for yourself. (Peirce 1998, p. 268) Pierce’s philosophy is sometimes referred to as either evolutionary idealism or objective idealism (Hacking 1983; Buchler 2022). We understand the world in multiple ways and make sense of things through a combination of methods and strategies. Thus, abduction and retroduction are ways to combine several inputs, and bring them together in a meaningful way. However, pragmatism is not a totalitarian ideology in the sense that it pretends to present a theory that explains ‘everything’. Rather, pragmatism allows for different aspects of reality to exist side by side, without trying to capture them in a single explanation. John Dewey’s pragmatism was less an objective philosophy and more about seeing society as a learning arena. How we organise and how we interact in the social sphere have impacts on our mentality. Dewey argues in his book The Public and its Problems that if we want to address issues such as social inequality and gender inequality, the right place to start is in everyday life – in the home, in the school, or at the workplace (Dewey 1927). Our primary socialisation has an enormous impact on how we are formed as persons. It could be said that Dewey had a reformist perspective on social change. He contributed to the multivolume International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science, which was initiated by the Vienna Circle in 1938 (Stadler 2007). In that contribution, he argued for a science that is close to practice, and that has the problems of everyday reality as its point of departure. Furthermore, Dewey called for removal of the boundary between pure and applied science. Dewey developed a link between ‘impressionism’, learning, and democracy. For him, pragmatism was about practical improvements in society. Thus, pragmatism was a normative programme for social development. As Dewey assumed that in a liberal, democratic society, improvement had to mean that all people

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would be engaged in and part of the improvement process, he saw it as a main objective of his philosophy to encourage learning and development in the whole of society. This required an understanding of learning and of the formation of the self in a social process. Dewey was early on influenced by Hegel and he retained a Hegelian relation in his work. In an essay titled ‘The philosophy of John Dewey’, by the American psychologist George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), Mead made the following point: The Hegelian solution of the seeming disjunction of mind and the world that it knows consisted in the transfer of the world to mind. The object of knowledge is itself a structure of thought, and there can be no problem in the connection of thought and its own construct. . . . The universe as object is the thought construct of the absolute self, of which ourselves are finite but organic phases. It was the logic rather than the metaphysics of this system that fascinated Dewey, the function of thought in the structure of the object, the evidence in thinking that thought and its object lie within the same experience. (Mead 1935, p. 69) Thus, Dewey accepted Hegel’s solution but not Hegelianism. There are overlaps between critical theory and pragmatism, not least in their attention to practice and to the reality of the ‘lifeworld’.98 In this regard, the issue is not the lack of philosophical argument, but a certain reading of Hegel that is at the core of the disagreement between pragmatism and critical theory. As John Rawls observed, We tend to think of him [John Dewey] as the founder of a characteristically American and instrumental naturalism and, thus, to lose sight of the fact that Dewey started his philosophical life, as many did in the late nineteenth century, greatly influenced by Hegel; and his genius was to adapt much that is valuable in Hegel’s idealism to a form of naturalism congenial to our culture. It was one of Hegel’s aims to overcome the many dualisms which he thought disfigured Kant’s transcendental idealism, and Dewey shared this emphasis throughout his work, often stressing the continuity between things that Kant had sharply separated. (Rawls 1980, p. 516) Pragmatists have had a tendency to draw attention away from philosophical speculation, in order to increase attention to sociological, pedagogical, and psychological issues. George Herbert Mead developed his psychology based on ideas taken from Hegel. Mead developed a theory of the discursive self. In his book Mind, Self, and Society, which was published posthumously in 1934, Mead wrote: While minds and selves are essentially social products, products or phenomena of the social side of human experience, the psychological mechanism

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underlying experience is far from irrelevant – indeed is indispensable – to their genesis and existence; for individual experience and behaviour is, of course, psychologically basic to social experience and behaviour: the processes and mechanisms of the latter (including those which are essential to the origin and existence of minds and selves) are dependent physiologically upon the processes and mechanisms of the former, and upon the social functioning of these. (Mead 1962, p. 1) This points in the direction of a weaker perspective on the sociology of knowledge, in which the subject and the self-play an important part: We are not, in social psychology, building up the behaviour of the social group in terms of the behaviour of the separate individuals composing it; rather, we are starting out with a given social whole of complex group activity, into which we analyse (as elements) the behaviour of each of the separate individuals composing it. (Mead 1962, p. 7) To some extent, it could be said that language liberates the whole discourse on science from its foundational relations. Possibly the most radical interpretation in this respect was made by Richard Rorty: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey are in agreement that the notion of knowledge as accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, needs to be abandoned. For all three, the notion of ‘foundations of knowledge’ and of philosophy as revolving around the Cartesian attempt to answer the epistemological sceptic are set aside. Further, they set aside the notion of ‘the mind’ common to Descartes, Locke, and Kant – as a special subject of study, located in inner space, containing elements or processes which make knowledge possible. This is not to say that they have alternative ‘theories of knowledge’ or ‘philosophies of mind’. They set aside epistemology and metaphysics as possible disciplines. I say ‘set aside’ rather than argue against, because their attitude toward that traditional problematic is like the attitude of seventeenth century philosophers towards the scholastic problematics. (Rorty 1979, p. 6) Rorty linked phenomenology, in the version of Martin Heidegger, Wittgenstein’s linguistic theory, to pragmatism represented by John Dewey. The point was that all of them should have started thinking from practice, not from some theoretical construction. Rorty argued that we could more or less forget the whole scheme of the Enlightenment because it was simply a language game that ‘they’ (Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and the others) were engaged in, and one that no

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longer needed to be considered as relevant. He also argued that there was no need to consider the early linguistic arguments of analytical philosophy. Pragmatists suggested that normal language was sufficient, and that it was enough to argue that one theory was better than the other in the sense of being more useful or relevant. The following quotation from Quine’s book From a Logical Point of View may illustrate the naturalistic turn in pragmatism, as in the essay ‘On what there is’, Quine took, as a point of departure, the old philosophical riddle of how do we know that there is something we don’t know: I remain free to maintain that the fact that a give linguistic utterance is meaningful . . . is an ultimate and irreducible matter of fact; or, I may undertake to analyse it in terms directly of what people do in the presence of linguistic utterance in question and other utterances similar to it. (Quine 1980, p. 11) He continued: Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics: we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged. Our ontology is determined once we have fixed upon the over-all conceptual scheme which is to accommodate science in the broadest sense; and considerations which determine a reasonable construction of any part of the conceptual scheme, for example the biological or physical part, are not different in kind from the considerations which determine a reasonable construction of the whole. To whatever extent the adoption of any system of scientific theory may be said to be a matter of language, the same – but no more – may be said of the adoption of and ontology. (Quine 1980, p. 17) However, this logical turn in pragmatism met with objections and not least the arguments of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989). Sellars profoundly influenced pragmatism. While Quine took pragmatism in a naturalistic direction, Sellers took it in a realistic direction (Curd & Psillos 2014; deVries 2014). His scientific realism implies that whatever we theorise or assume in science is strongly interlinked with what we actually perceive.99 However, Sellars objected to the idea that philosophy and science are ultimately the same, that they were logical inquiry. Rather, he maintained the independent role of philosophy. As deVries argues, For Sellers, philosophy is neither a pure a priori enquiry to be conducted without regard to or empirical knowledge of the world, nor just another special science or discipline ultimately to be replaced by the sciences. Rather,

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Sellers viewed philosophy as an ongoing enterprise of understanding how we fit into the world of which we are part. Philosophy is essentially dialectic: it presupposes that we live in a world in which we act and of which we have some knowledge, so it always engages in medias res, and yet it is reflective and critical, so no element of our current conceptual framework is absolute beyond question – we must remain open to new experiences and new ways of organising experience. (deVries 2014, p. 8) As Quine had more or less removed epistemology as an issue in science (and philosophy), Hillary Putnam, in his later period,100 argued that there was still room for philosophy in science. Put very simply, while Quine ridiculed the illogical notion ‘what we don’t know’, Putman maintained that there was an area to be explored in between ‘what we know and what we don’t know’, and that was a role for philosophy. In coming from an analytical tradition, with Hans Reichenbach as his supervisor and Quine as his colleague, Hilary Putnam and his work marked a renewal of pragmatism. de Caro and Macarthur (2012) argue that there were two phases in Putnam’s thinking: a first phase in which he engaged in the discussion based on analytical philosophy, and a second phase in which he abandoned that discussion, adopted a Deweyan epistemology, and saw science more from the perspective of a social activity ruled by virtues (de Caro & Macarthur 2012, p. 2). Following the work of C. S. Pierce, Putnam argued for a neo-Kantian pragmatism: reason is universal (not things in themselves) and it follows that what we perceive and how we reason have universal bearings. Thus, Putnam re-established Kantian ‘pure reason’. ‘Lifeworld’ not only represents idiosyncrasy but is also a link to universal reason. As humans, we have a natural moral sense and a natural understanding of truth, reason, and reality. We seek this in our inner speculation (consciousness) and in our dialogue with others (social engagement). Putnam argued that value claims towards is and value claims towards ought were basically the same. Hence, the processes of finding out what is true and finding out what is right rest on a critical examination process inherent in value claims. This perspective can be linked to the ideas of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, even though Habermas has criticised Putnam’s work. In Habermas’ view, Putnam argued that ethics could develop in a reciprocal community of discourse (communicative community). However, there was no reciprocity in the case of individuals outside such a community (communicative rationality). 5.3.2  A naked emperor: science as a social practice The argument that knowledge is somehow influenced by social organisation is not new. Arguments in that direction can be found in English empiricism (Locke), in the Scottish Enlightenment (Smith, Hume), in German idealism (Hegel), and in German materialism (Marx). With the development of a sociological science

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(Spencer, Durkheim, and Weber), this perspective became more empirically founded. A classical piece of research is Durkheim and Mauss’ study of primitive cultures (Durkheim & Mauss 2009), in which they discovered that religious claims paralleled social organisation in the tribe – religion mirrored society, rather than the opposite.101 E. Doyle McCarthy argues that there have been stages in the development of the sociology of knowledge (MacCarthy 1996). There have also been different positions within this line of thought: Marx founded his ideas on materialism; Scheler (1973) and Berger and Luckmann (1991) made reference to phenomenology; Mannheim tried to develop a concept of ideology; and DeGré (1943) saw sociology of knowledge in the context of stratification – how social groups use knowledge in the sense of ideology to oppress, create resentments, and aggression. DeGré argued for both a German contribution (Marx, Nietzsche, and Scheler) and a non-German contribution (Durkheim, Mead, and Pareto) to the discourse. If the aforementioned perspectives could be summarised collectively, it would be that individuals have to be understood as part of a larger whole. Bourdieu’s work on social structuration and not least his concept of social field and social capital (Bourdieu 1993), is illustrative in this respect. Individual knowledge and individual language refer to a larger system that defines some of the frames for individual understanding. Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms in science can be seen as an example of such structural processes. Lévi-Strauss’ work in anthropology had links to concepts of meaning that could be interpreted as parallel to the concept of hermeneutics.102 A weaker interpretation of sociology of knowledge would involve treating the work of the American sociologist Robert Merton (1910–2003) as a key reference. Merton’s project was that of a sociologist who studied the sociological aspects of knowledge development, not as a total theory of knowledge. As such, sociology focuses on mechanisms in the social sphere that influence how we think and act, but it does not necessarily argue that it defines thinking itself. What Merton (1951) tried to do was to limit the scope of the sociological approach to practical knowledge construction, thereby ignoring the ideological/epistemological part of the discussion. Max Scheler (1973), with his phenomenological point of departure, had tried to retain a structure of reasoning by combining a social construction process of knowledge at one level and an essential development of knowledge at another level. He developed, as we have seen,103 what has been called a philosophical anthropology, arguing that a priori knowledge not only limited itself to abstract categories, as argued by Kant, but also include material ones. Against this, Merton wrote: Knowledge has often come to be assimilated to the term ‘culture’ so that not only the exact sciences but ethical convictions, epistemological postulates, material predications, synthetic judgements, political beliefs, the categories of thought, eschatological doxies, moral norms, ontological assumptions, and

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observations of empirical facts are more or less indiscriminately held to be ‘existential conditioned’. (Merton 2005, p. 45) In line with this, Merton defined the sociology of knowledge as follows: Systematic consideration of the social factors in the acquisition, diffusion and growth of knowledge. (Merton 1951, p. 247) Mannheim had argued, in line with Merton, that the sociology of knowledge does not pretend to explain everything about knowledge or even to argue that social processes are the only sources of knowledge. However, Merton, in his treatment of the subject, was rather critical of some interpretations that Mannheim’s analysis might be compatible with, notably some sort of historicist, determinist, and relativist argument (Merton 1951). Merton preferred to interpret Mannheim in a more pragmatic way. He proposed the following questions/challenges that a theory of sociology of knowledge must answer: Where is the existential basis of mental productions located, for example in the social structure or in the culture? What mental productions are being sociologically analysed? Which spheres, at what level of abstraction, and how are mental productions related to the existential basis such as causal, functional, or symbolic factors or conditions in society? Furthermore, a sociology of knowledge needs to answer the following questions: What is the purpose or rationale for the knowledge-formation process? What does it lead to or contribute to? When and where does the process happen? For example, does it happen on occasions when personal, existential issues are integrated with historical events? In short, how is it that our individual construction of meaning is linked to collective social events? What Merton (1951) tried to do was to limit the scope of the sociological approach to practical knowledge construction, thereby ignoring the ideological/epistemological part of the discussion: [T]hought is seen as but one among many types of activity, as inevitably linked with experience, as understandable only in its relations to noncognitive experience, as stimulated by obstacles and temporary frustrating situations, as involving abstract concepts which must be constantly re-examined in the light of their implications for concrete particulars, as valid only so long as it rests upon an experimental foundation. (Merton 1951, p. 264) In his empirically and historically based analysis, Merton argued how modern science was moulded by influences from other fields, not least ethical impulses. Thus, there is an ethics of science that initially took its impulse from the Catholic Church, but later took it from Protestantism. Merton further argues that the

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purity of scientific thinking was strongly affected by the Puritan thinking in Protestantism. In an often referred-to article, ‘The ethos of science’, first published in 1942, Merton argued that four sets of institutional imperatives comprised the ethos of modern science: universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organised scepticism (Merton 1996). Universalism refers to the idea that science does not serve groups or classes in society. It is knowledge for all, for the totality of society. It should therefore withstand pressure to serve any master. Communism implies that scientific knowledge is not private property. Scientific knowledge is something to be shared, it is a common good. Disinterestedness is, as the concept indicates, a distancing of private interests from the process of developing scientific knowledge. It implies that we do not change our search because we do not like the result. Organised scepticism is a core driver in science, which should always be willing to put issues, even things taken for granted, under scrutiny. As indicated earlier, we can talk about a weaker and a stronger version of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and argue that the inspiration for the weaker form comes from the sociology of Robert Merton. The inspiration for the stronger form comes from Wittgenstein and later post-structuralism. A weaker interpretation of sociology of knowledge implies that we can understand knowledge formation as a social process, and at the same time have a conception of truth, subjective perception, and individualism. Knowledge is formed collectively and publicly, as what is regarded as the most valid and acceptable interpretation of things. However, individual perception and knowledge formation play an important part in the development of social knowledge. How can we explain subjective knowledge formation as part of a theory of knowledge? The answer is that we form knowledge in a social context. Holzner and Marx (1979) used the framework of SSK to discuss two structural features of modern society: expert systems and ideologies. Expert systems, also known as professional work group systems, exist very much on the basis of controlling information. Their logic of working and prevailing follows the general system of control and reinforcement. Society allows expert systems to develop because they are regarded as essential to certain areas of knowledge and wealth. Similar to expert systems, ideologies are general norm systems aimed at legitimising a certain power structure in society. They are systems of defining who ‘we’ are and who ‘they’ are, who is inside and who is outside. Hence, world views and ideologies will always exist as long as there are social groups. By their nature, such groups have to define some consistent formulations that give them group identity. Another representative of the weaker form of SSK is the Austrian sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina (b. 1944), who has studied scientific activity as epistemic cultures. She defines epistemic cultures as follows: [C]ultures that create warrant knowledge, and the premier knowledge institution throughout the world is, still, science. (Knorr Cetina 1999, p. 1)

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Knorr Cetina argues that science does not describe or discover facts, but rather it produces knowledge.104 Hence, science is a particular branch of knowledge production, and one that establishes its own internal system of validity (which might not be the same as objective validity). The system of validation is exemplified by the system of peer review. Furthermore, it is an institutionalised system that judges innovation and selects areas for further investigation. In her book, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Knorr Cetina argues that epistemic cultures have a specific and contradictory impact on the knowledge society, parallel to the confusing role of expert systems in a modern knowledge society (Knorr Cetina 1999). Thus, Knorr Cetina’s model for science resembles Niklas Luhmann’s self-­ referential system theory (Luhmann 1995). The internal process within a scientific group (epistemic community) is self-referential, even if that group has to relate to other groups and has to interpret external pressures in order to produce and develop knowledge. Luhmann wrote the following about this system perspective on science: Recent investigations of scientific laboratories amply demonstrate that firstorder observation plays a role in science and that the behaviour of scientists can hardly be explained in terms of a ‘striving for Truth’. Contrary to what such research suggests, however, scientific practice does not preclude second-order observation. The instrument that mediates between first- and second-order observations and ensures their structural coupling is the publication of articles. From first-order perspective, these are produced and read as texts, but they acquire genuine scientific significance by providing a window onto the observational mode of other scientists. (Luhmann 2000, p. 63) It is communication that makes knowledge significant. However, this is to some extent a self-referential social system. Niklas Luhmann tried to avoid the rigidity and determinism of a functional theory, and argued that the system is dynamic (open), but self-referential (autopoetic) in the sense that a system constitutes and reproduces itself. A system exists as a result of ability to identify the we and the others. Furthermore, like a firm or an organisation, or a group of scientists, a system frames and interprets external factors and changes in order to sustain itself as a system. Major processes for reproduction are communication, integration, interpretation, and reformulation of identity. This might point in the direction of a stronger version of SSK. I could be argued that Knorr Cetina shifted her perspective, as have Bruno Latour (Latour 1987) and John Law (Law 2004), from a Bourdieuian emphasis on material (economic) causes of knowledge creation, to a more Foucaultian perspective (symbolic power, politics). Science increasingly involves politics (Pels 2005). A compromise between these positions can be identified in the community of practice theory (Lave & Wenger 1991; Amin & Roberts 2008). A community of practice can be seen as social process, one that is linked to solving real problems

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and challenges. The community in question engages in common effort to use the best available knowledge to solve a problem that is commonly recognised. It is not a construction process, but still has elements of one. The step to a stronger version of SSK is often termed science, technology, and society studies (STS), and the main philosophers and sociologists within this position are David Bloor (the Edinburgh school), Bruno Latour (post-structuralist), and Steve Fuller (pragmatist). As I  have been argued earlier in this chapter,105 there are two main historical trends in the discussions of sociology of knowledge: the materialist and the speculative. To date, these two trends have formed different discourses. Thus, they have been apparent even within STS (Segerstråle 2000). David Bloor and a group at Edinburgh University developed an STS position with strong reference to the later works of Wittgenstein (Barnes at al. 1996). In his book Knowledge and Social Imaginary, first published in 1976, Bloor launches what he calls the strong programme in the sociology of knowledge (Bloor 1991). Bloor’s perspective on the social character of knowledge is clearly stated in the following quotation: The sociologist is concerned with knowledge, including scientific knowledge, purely as a natural phenomenon. The appropriate definition of knowledge will therefore be rather different from that of either the layman or the philosopher. Instead of defining it as true beliefs – or perhaps, justified true belief – knowledge for the sociologist is whatever people take to be knowledge. It consists of those beliefs which people confidently hold to and live by. In particular the sociologist will be concerned with beliefs which are taken for granted or institutionalised, or invested with authority by a group of people. Of course, knowledge must be distinguished from mere beliefs. This can be done by reserving the word ‘knowledge’ for what is collectively endorsed, leaving the individual and idiosyncratic to count as mere beliefs. (Bloor 1991, p. 5) Based on this understanding of knowledge, Bloor discusses the principles of what counts as scientific knowledge. He proposes the following four principles, which collectively he calls the ‘strong programme’ (Bloor 1991, p. 7): 1. It should be causal: That is, one should be able to identify those conditions which bring about the beliefs. 2. It should be impartial: Both to interests and to the questions of rationality, truth, and impact. 3. It should be symmetrical: This means that it has a logical style of explanation, and the same principles should be used whether one discusses true or false beliefs. 4. It should be reflexive: Like symmetry, this is a requirement to see that scientific knowledge meets some general requirements and responds to general explanations, including reflecting on sociology itself.

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It could be argued that there is a resemblance between these principles and some of the content of discussions by David Hume, who argued that causality is the basis of the logic of the natural world. He, like Bloom, wanted to define principles that were not circular, and that left ‘the observer’ out of the equation. He also wanted to avoid teleology, and he criticised his fellow empiricists for making knowledge into something idiosyncratic and for relying too much on sensation. Bloor argues that his four principles in the ‘strong programme’ address the objections raised by Hume. The ‘strong programme’ principles do not argue for the growth of scientific knowledge in a teleological sense. In that respect, the programme is in line with Thomas Kuhn. The ‘strong programme’ does not rely on the scientist as an individual. The ‘strong programme’ is therefore a criticism of Karl Popper’s thinking, and it has not come into circularity because it is as relevant to the sociology of science itself, as it is for science in general. However, what the ‘strong programme’ do is to propose some demarcating principles for scientific knowledge. Therefore, although it takes knowledge to be what people believe in (which, it could be argued, is the same as relativism), it does present some criteria that constrain the area of scientific beliefs. The ‘strong programme’ defines science as a sort of metadiscourse or metalanguage game. The French sociologist Bruno Latour (b. 1947) has taken a slightly different approach. Latour’s project has been to examine in more depth the reality of science as it is happening. Latour asks what is the reality of the scientist in their daily life when they make decisions and manoeuvre strategically to promote their ideas? As a context for this discussion, Latour looks at knowledge as a social process, and he assumes that knowledge is something that is socially mediated. He has developed his thoughts based on case studies of science laboratories in the 1970s.106 Latour chooses a way of studying science inspired by post-structuralist language theory. He investigates texts and how they relate to other texts in order to give meaning. Furthermore, Latour looks at the interrelation between the work in the laboratory and the social world, both within and outside science. He has discovered how scientists are dependent on knowledge from other scientists, and how their beliefs interact with the social beliefs in general. When looking at development in data technology and genetic science, Latour discovered how a problem in one area was dependent on development in another area.107 The core of his analysis has become the ‘interactedness’ and interdependence of partly conflicting forces in which scientists manoeuvre.108 Based on his analyses, he has formulated seven rules of method109 and six principles.110 Latour’s seven methodological rules state how to observe science in action, without entering into a circularity of explanations. For example, one should avoid using the social and material consequences of science as an argument for its cause. Furthermore, which actor is chosen, their relations and impact, and how they manoeuvre strategically are unimportant. Finally, instead of looking at intentions of actors, one should look at how those actors present, formulate, and communicate their science. Latour’s study of laboratories (Latour 1987, p. 259) included observations about the undecidedness of the relation between technology and

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human factors, how different professions within the scientific community interacted, and how that interaction was mediated by forces in society, as well as how the forces played into the network in which scientific knowledge was developed. Latour later became a proponent of the actor-network theory (ANT), which is the theory of the interaction between things and humans, and how relations and structures are defined by such interaction. He also argued against the idea of a linear progress of science, and that society develops in stages.111 Consequently, Latour has been criticised for being a relativist. Steve Fuller is a third exponent of a strong position within the sociology of knowledge. His argument can be illustrated with reference to a report in the New York Times following the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA and protests related to the lockdown: ‘One of the things that we’re finding is that the rhetoric is pretty similar between the anti-vaxxers and those demanding to reopen,’ said Dr. Rupali J. Limaye, who studies behaviour around vaccines at Johns Hopkins University. ‘What we hear a lot of is “individual self-management” – this idea that they should be in control of making decisions, that they can decide what science is correct and incorrect, and that they know what’s best for their child.’ (Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs 2020) The quotation exemplifies why some have talked about the post-truth society or alternative truths and have referred to the dystopic society portrayed in George Orwell’s book 1984 as an ultimate threat to our society (Orwell 2008). The individual’s right to question science is a natural consequence of an open democratic society. The problem is when science is no longer seen as committed to truth but instead seen as part of a power play. In the COVID-19 pandemic, the latter situation posed a challenge, since helping to reduce the spread of the virus required commitment from people. Fuller has been directly engaged in the current debate on relativism and posttruth. He has even taken a rather explicit position in supporting and defending both relativism and post-truth. He starts his book Post Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game (Fuller 2018) by portraying two archetypes: the lion and the fox. While the lion wants to preserve things, the fox wants to change. The negative portrayal of post-truth comes from the lions. According to Fuller, post-truth is much closer to the reality of science than are its opponents. Even Plato, despite his belief in absolute truth, acknowledged that knowledge at any time might be insufficient and incomplete. Thus, when Plato and Socrates (the lions) fought with the Sophists in their time (the foxes), they played a power game. Not surprisingly, Fuller parts with sophists (Fuller 2018, p. 7, p. 29), and then states: I take post-truth to be a deep feature of at least Western intellectual life, bringing together issues of politics, science and judgements in ways which established authorities have wished to be kept apart. (Fuller 2018, p. 6)

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There are two sides to Fuller’s statement. On the first side, post-truth is a sort of critical correction, similar to that of the small boy in the fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. When the emperor entered a room wearing what he believed were his finest new clothes, the small boy said what the others did not dare to say, namely that the emperor was not wearing any clothes at all. The new clothes were an illusion. The ‘lions’ of science have played a similar game of illusion in arguing for ‘their fine cloths’ in order to keep society at a distance. Fuller writes: The post-truth condition is not simply a product of our times but endemic to the history of Western thought, as originally expressed in the Platonic Dialogues. Moreover, post-truth is not a condition limited to politics but extends to society as well. Indeed, the post-truth condition enables us to see more clearly the complementarity of politics and science as spheres of thought and action. Each in its own way is involved in a struggle for ‘modal power’, namely, contrive over what is possible. (Fuller 2018, p. 181) Disclosing the fact that science is ‘naked’ or at least should consider how it is dressed, opens up the possibility of a more fruitful scientific discourse. The second side to Fuller’s quoted statement given here is that, as also science in the posttruth world is acknowledged as a power game, there is a need to look into how this power game plays out within science (Fuller 2018, p. 6). If we are concerned with fair rules in politics, we can at least assume that what comes out of political processes and who is in power will have a certain level of legitimacy, and we should look at the rules and procedures within the various scientific communities. Thus, the sociology of science does not become less important in a post-truth world; rather, it becomes increasingly important.112 In line with this latter point, Fuller himself has engaged in addressing the issue of what he calls the right to be wrong. He argues that it is essential for progress of science that the pluralism is played out, and that ideas that happen to be wrong should be tested within the scientific discourse. It is in line with this argument that Fuller (the fox) defended the right to propose a theory of ‘intelligent design’ (a modern version of creationism) in a trial against supporters of neo-Darwinism (the lions) (Fuller 2018, p. 60). His argument was that ‘intelligent design’ theorists should have a chance to argue their case. 5.3.3  Incommensurable paradigms? It might be possible to see how the former arguments of the communicative turn and pragmatism are brought together in Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1970): Both Kuhn and Foucault are important figures in the development of postpositivist philosophies of science; neither trusted progressive accounts of

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scientific development or saw the development of science as primarily a story about improved reference; both emphasised the social context of science but rejected an account of science as ideological; and both insisted that the guiding organisation of scientific knowledge – discourse or paradigm – are not simply constraints of what scientists can see, but more significantly, constitutive and enabling for the production and solving of problems, the construction of data and thus the production of new knowledge. (Alcoff 2005, p. 212) Thus, post-positivism in the form of the challenges posed by the linguistic turn and pragmatism, and supported by the criticism of Popper’s work, gradually in the post-war period shifted attention from the sources and foundation of science to the practice of science. In doing so, the road was opened up for a more plural view of science, as science is many things. Inspired by the work of both Merton and Kuhn, the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) emerged as a research field. SSK sees knowledge as a social phenomenon, in line with the sociology of knowledge. Kuhn argued that sciences developed through paradigms, and that historically that had been the case both for natural sciences and social sciences. The concept of paradigms has become a keyword in the discussion of science, despite the fact that the concept has not been clearly defined. Still, Kuhn argued that there was a difference between the two kinds of sciences, as the constant development of new paradigms was more apparent in the social sciences than in the natural sciences: Particularly, I was stuck by the number and extent of the overt disagreements between social scientists about the nature of legitimate scientific problems and methods. Both history and acquaintance made me doubt that practitioners of the natural sciences possess firmer or more permanent answers to such questions than their colleagues in social science. Yet, somehow the practices of astronomy, physics, chemistry, or biology naturally fail to evoke controversies over fundamentals that today often seem endemic among us, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognise the role in scientific research of what I have since called ‘paradigms’. (Kuhn 1970, p. viii) Kuhn’s post-positivism has challenged the way we understand science. Science is now increasingly seen as a practice in society, as part of society, as a more or less collaborative and discursive activity. Thus, too, even if ambiguous, paradigms have become a key concept in science.113 The concept has defined the pluralism in scientific positions that have merged in recent generations. We speak of scientific explanations of the terms discipline, paradigm, discourse, model, theory, and hypotheses, all of which may be seen as different levels of argument. A discipline is often thematically and administratively determined. A paradigm can be defined as a research tradition with consensus on method, empiricism, epistemology, or

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theory. Paradigms, or research traditions, limit the methodological, thematic, and epistemological perspectives. Within paradigms, there is a ‘normal’ scientific discourse. Thomas Kuhn talked about scientific revolutions when a shift in a paradigm occurred. However, no principle or theory defines how and where one paradigm is replaced by another. Consequently, no theory or principle can explain progress in science. Therefore, we cannot claim that science make progress.114 There are alternatives to Kuhn’s concept of paradigms. In Habermas’ terms, a tradition/line of thought is a discourse, not a paradigm. Furthermore, a research programme is not a paradigm (Lakatos 1980). The Hungarian philosopher Imre Lakatos (1922–1974) argued that his concept of research programme was less relative and more structured than Kuhn’s paradigm. He saw research programmes in science as moving between observation and reflection within frameworks (Lakatos & Musgrave 1970; Motterlini 1999). An even stronger objection to Kuhn’s relativism was raised by the American philosopher of science Larry Laudan (1941–2022). He argued that science can been seen from the perspective of research traditions (Laudan 1978, 1984), and that there is much empirical evidence to show that science has progressed. Kuhn’s work has been interpreted as supporting a sociology of science, even though there are good reasons to question this (Hacking 1983). It could be argued that Kuhn’s theory related to methodological issues within science rather than to a sociological description of science seen from the perspective of society. Science as a discourse might imply that we focus on how different scientific positions have challenged each other, such as logical positivism as a reaction to historicism, critical theory, and pragmatism as a reaction to logical positivism, post-structuralism as a reaction to rational functionalism, and the linguistic turn as replaced by the practical turn. Based in the concept of paradigms, Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan attempted to define various sociological paradigms in relation to their basic theoretical position (Burrell & Morgan 1979, p. 22). They distinguished between different epistemological and ontological positions in sociology, and argued that four main positions can be observed: • • • •

Functionalist Paradigm (objective regulation) Interpretive Paradigm (subjective regulation) Radical Humanist Paradigm (subjective radical change) Radical Structuralist Paradigm (objective radical change)

The functionalist paradigm resembles what has been called positivism. The radical structuralist paradigm is in line with structuralism,115 and the interpretive paradigm is close to critical theory,116 whereas the radical humanist paradigm is close to existentialism.117 These and similar classifications are attempts to summarise the complexity in the philosophical discussions. There are two main points to make in relation to the contemporary pluralism in science. First, even though we can map in a reasonable way the diversity of scientific positions, those positions have not developed peacefully. Second, the fact that scientists understand

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different things with science and hence produce conflicting results is a challenge for society, and the challenge has fuelled not only the post-truth debate but also a general mistrust in science.118 The concept of science war has been used to describe the partly hostile situation in science (Segerstråle 2000; Rehg 2009). There have been disagreements and disputes as long as there has been science. However, escalation in the form of direct provocation and confrontation between different positions has been rare. In 1996, the American professor of physics, Alan Sokal, had an article published in Duke University’s post-structuralist journal Social Text. The title of the article is ‘Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’ (Sokal 1996). Shortly after the article was published, Sokal revealed that the article in fact was a hoax, contained a lot of nonsense, and was intended to show that post-structuralist lacked criteria for sorting out science from nonsense (Sokal & Bricmont 1999). Later, he tried to explain his disagreement with post-modernists in more detail (Sokal 2010). A recent provocation, which was similar to the kind that Sokal was responsible for, is known as the grievance studies affair. Among others, Peter Boghossian (b. 1966) played a central role in that provocation.119 In the dystopian science fiction novel War with the Newts, published in 1936, the Czech author Karel Čapek (1890–1938) described how humans discovered some intelligent salamanders that at first could help in the pearl industry but gradually took over more advanced tasks (Čapek 1996). At one point, the salamanders changed from being helpers and became commanders. The story can be generalised as follows. When there is pluralism in nature, it is because no species has superiority. Some balance is required; leopards can run faster than antelopes, but if they were to ‘win’ every time, they would undermine their own existence. This metaphor can be related to science in society. The fact that different disciplines and paradigms within disciplines are competing but still kept separate, to some extent supports pluralism, but at the same time, it undermines the possibility of having an overall scientific discourse. This dilemma is at the heart of the current post-truth debate. Is it possible to reconcile the different positions in philosophy of science without ending in some totalitarian position of the kind that Čapek (1996) implicitly warned about in his book? An early attempt by Egon G. Guba (1924–2008) to reconcile sociological paradigms was to create a dialogue between them (Guba 1990). He was not the only one who thought of the possibility to bridge opposing positions through dialogue. Different points of view should not be abandoned, but people from different positions would gain better insights into each other’s arguments and whether their differences were as important as they thought. Another strategy to reconcile at least some part of the disagreement and thus reduce the space for disagreement has been to find a metaposition. The strategy was proposed by William Rehg in his book Cogent Science in Context: The Science Wars, Argumentative Theory, and Habermas (Rehg 2009). Rehg’s point of departure is what he calls Kuhn’s Gap. The gap was created when Kuhn turned his

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back on the formal-logical perspective on science and instead proposed a socialinstitutional perspective. The fact that there was nothing bridging the two perspectives partly created the hostile situation that led to the science wars. William Rehg (2009) wants to offer a bridge and argues for a cogent theory. By ‘cogent’, he refers to the convincing quality of the argumentation: Both in the sciences and in the various contexts in which the sciences meet society, one must examine scientific claims from their strength: is the finding conclusive, probable, or mere possibility based on a limited amount of research? (Rehg 2009, p. 5) The cogent theory is supposed to be more flexible than, for example, the concept of validity, which often refers more specifically to a certain scientific procedure. It is an argument that acknowledges the discursive nature of scientific development but tries to transcend some of the differences that develop. I close this chapter by briefly explaining why Habermas’ argumentation theory might be able to play the role of bridging paradigms or transcend paradigmatic differences through argumentation theory. Rehg writes: Habermas’ argumentation theory implies a social conception of the cogency of scientific arguments. As such, his model of cogency goes a long way towards bridging Kuhn’s Gap. Conceptually, the model integrates logical, dialogical, and social-institutional perspectives on scientific argumentation. Thus the merits that constitute cogency include the dialogical adequacy of the social process from which logically strong argumentation emerge as products. To evaluate scientific arguments, then, one must examine not only their content but also the social-institutional process. The later task calls for an interdisciplinary approach that draws on sociological analysis. To that extent, Habermas’ conceptual integration offers a framework within which one might overcome the disciplinary opposition that arose in the wake of Kuhn’s Gap. (Rehg 2009, p. 195) For Habermas, society consists of a multitude of talks (language games). However, this diversity is not primarily unsystematic or chaotic. The talks are part of patterns and structures. The structures help to give ‘speak-actions’ meaning and legitimacy. Habermas distinguishes between three major structures: ‘lifeworld’, social world, and system world.120 This simple threefold division represents an analytical framework that allows us to interpret a number of challenges in our speech acts. One challenge is to establish the set of logical rules for the speech act. In Habermas’ analysis, these vary according to the specific system. In the ‘lifeworld’, we seek the authentic. In the social world, we deal with a set of social

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norms, whereas in the system world we address reality and facts in a stricter sense. It could be said that science, or at least exact science, relates to the system world, whereas some human science to a larger extent intervenes and communicates within a social world. We can distinguish between something that is meaningful or meaningless (lifeworld), that is ethically acceptable or unethical (social world), and that right or wrong (system world). We can say that science is an institutionalised system for systematic investigation and knowledge. It is a system that relies on legitimacy. Legitimacy is achieved through, for example, the conduct and ethics of the researcher: the researcher must define their role in relation to the research question, there must be the possibility for criticism, and the possibility for falsification. The formal logic of logical empiricism can be used here. Thus, we can consider the rules of discourse (constitution) based on criteria such as openness, fairness, representativeness, and plurality. Different discourses are different validity claims. For example, a moral discourse is intended to contribute to greater mutual understanding, ethical discourse is intended to address social norms and rules for discourse, and pragmatic discourse relates to power, interest, and the allocation of resources. Discourses interplay in larger legitimacy systems that provide the criteria for logical content and validity. Research can be seen as a distinct social practice with formal logical rules for argumentation, and hence as a possibility to transcend individual research projects and avoid relativity in the scientific discourse. Still, the discursive position means that we cannot necessarily decide on one argument over another across paradigms; some arguments are simply too different. This calls for pluralism in science.

Notes 1 See Bloor (1991), Barnes et  al. (1996), Fuller (2003), and Grundmann and Stehr (2012). 2 An article in The Guardian argued that post-truth was the most important concept discussed in 2016 (Stenmark et al. 2018). 3 Chapters 3 and 4 4 I will return to this argument in the concluding chapter, Chapter 6. 5 Furthermore, in the social world, we collectively develop knowledge on how to do things, how to organise things, and so forth. In this perspective, science is a practical tool to improve life. Also, seeing science as a discourse among other discourses in society is used as an argument for democratising science and research (Habermas 1974; Feyerabend 1987; Bourdieu 1990). 6 See the discussion about Habermas’ communicative theory in Chapter 4.3.3. See also the discussion about critical theory in Chapter 5.2.2. 7 In Chapter 5.3.3, I show that this position is similar to that argued for by Bernstein. 8 Bernstein defined objectivism as ‘a basic conviction that there is or must be some permanent, ahistorical matrix or framework to which we can ultimately appeal’ (Bernstein 1983, p. 8). 9 Bernstein defined relativism as meaning that ‘concepts must be understood as relative to a specific conceptual scheme’ (Bernstein 1983, p. 8) 10 The devil’s advocate was a method used by the Catholic Church to see whether there were reasons to doubt canonisation.

The scepticism track towards the sociology of science  231 11 For a historical discussion of relativism, see for example, Wiener (1914), Strauss (1961), and Rockmore (1999). 12 For a presentation of Protagoras, see Bertrand Russell (Russell 2004). 13 The argument follows the same structure as in the case of ‘the paradox of the liar’ (see Chapter 3.2.1). 14 Descartes is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4.1.1. 15 Barnes et al. call Descartes’ method ‘methodological idealism’, and they argue strongly against it: ‘Methodological idealism does not give us a genuine technique for exposing the social elements in knowledge: it only provides a means of expressing our prior assumptions on the matter’ (Barnes at al. 1996, p. 15). 16 For a discussion, see Bineham (1990). 17 For a general discussion, see Sosa (1980). For a more personal reflection, see Grobstein (2007). 18 The etymology of nihilism is not completely clear. It has been used throughout history to denounce versions of nothingness. Nietzsche used the term in several of his works, and often related it to existence, and whether there is a meaning or purpose in existence. For a discussion, see Houlgate (2004). 19 According to SRI International (formerly named Stanford Research Institute), the first computer mouse was invented in 1963 by Douglas Engelbart and Bill English at the Stanford Research Institute (Bardini 2000). 20 Thus, it could be argued that this is a phenomenological or hermeneutic dimension in Wittgenstein’s perspective. I  discussed this issue in Chapter  4.3.1. Wittgenstein’s ‘Forms of life’ was one of the concepts the English sociologist Peter Winch (1926– 1997) used for rethinking social science in his book The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (Winch 1985). Winch argued here against positivism and for a social science take peoples meaning system and lifeform as a point of departure. 21 Kripke has emphasised that natural (ordinary) language can handle many of the philosophical challenges in analytical philosophy (Kripke 1980). 22 According to Blackburn (2005), Wittgenstein’s thinking can be interpreted in several ways, including that he was a realist. 23 This is discussed in Chapter 3, on realism. Wittgenstein’s successor as a professor of philosophy at Cambridge, the Finnish philosopher Georg von Wright (1916–2003), collected Wittgenstein’s notes on the paradox in the book On Certainty, which was published posthumously (Wittgenstein 1969). 24 See McDowell (1998b). 25 This kind of paradox is also evident in the work of Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí, for example in Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire produced in 1940. 26 These are concepts with ‘family resemblance’, to use Wittgenstein’s term (Wittgenstein 2009, p. 36) 27 For a discussion, see T. McCarthy (1990) and Conway (1991). 28 See Chapter 4.1.2. 29 See Chapter 4.1.1. 30 Nagel represents a position could be called naturalism, holders of which include recent philosophers such as Ken Binmore (Binmore 2005). 31 For a discussion of rationality, see Nozick (1993) and Pinker (2021). 32 See Chapter 4.1.1. 33 By constructivism, Hayek referred to the human ambition that ‘we can shape the future’ (Hayek 1978, p. 6). For a discussion, see Diamond (1980). 34 I discussed this in more detail in Chapter 4.2.3. It is likely that few would argue against people being rational. It could be argued that science is about rationality. However, rationality is a complex concept (Searle 2001). Being rational would normally mean that one is making logical and reasonable decisions, and a more structured way of being rational is sometimes referred to as instrumental rationality (Nozick 1993),

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35 36 37

38 39

40

41

42 43

meaning that one makes choices that serve a purpose. For example, if one wants to make money, one sells one’s goods at the highest price possible. Instrumental rationality can be seen as a means-end form of rationality: given a certain end, one chooses the most efficient means. However, as I showed in Chapter 4.2.1, the discussion about rationality, and not least what is called rationalism, meaning an exaggerated form of rationality, is not that their alternative is a rejection of logical reasoning. Rather, the debate is about what ways we form opinions about the world, including how we come to give priority to certain ends. See Chapter 4.1.2 on how Kant was inspired by the work of Hume and still developed his thinking in an idealist direction. Voltaire is renowned for having observed in 1733, in his series of essays Letters on England, that the English had a very different way of thinking compared with the French (Voltaire 2005). Similarly, the discussion between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke almost 100 years later, on revolution or evolution in relation to the French Revolution, compared the British Revolution in 1688 and the French revolution in 1789 in terms of the causes, ideas, and content of the revolutions. For a discussion, see Johnsen 2016. Even neo-positivism and the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s had strong social and political ambitions. Possibly the foremost example of this combination is the book Social Evolution by the British sociologist Benjamin Kidd (1858–1916), published 1895 (Kidd 1895). Kidd used ideas from the works on social development by the British-American sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and works on biological evolution by Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and the British biologist Thomas Huxley (1825–1895) to develop his social evolutionary theory that would prove the superiority of the white Christian society, although Darwin and Huxley had denounced creationism. Kidd argued against Comte and denied that science represented progress in society, but at the same time he (Kidd) exposed some of the difficulties inherent in the type of reasoning that had a functional perspective on development and evolution. Thus, the ideas inspired by Comte were perceived in different ways. Durkheim’s structural analysis is paralleled by, among others, the thinking of Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) in his Trattato di Sociologia Generale, which was first published in 1916 and later translated as The Mind and Society (Pareto 1935). The main constructs in this reasoning are logical and non-logical behaviour, and residuals and derivations. Pareto established a theory or model of development that held that non-logical behaviour produces residues (structures) and derivations (values) that ‘lock-in’ a social group. The group therefore reproduces the arguments for its own existence (e.g. the labour class, farming class). Pareto used the model to explain the social division in society and not least the reproduction of elites. Also, the work of Talcott Parsons (1902–1979), such as The Structure of Social Action, published in 1937 (Parsons 1937), further developed the functionalist/structuralist analysis of transformation of society. Parsons’ AGIL system built on the idea that society contains invariant structures that emerged through a process involving the following: Adaptation, Goal attainment, Integration, and Latency. The latter two establish power structures and values in society. This is more apparent in Durkehim’s later work Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, published 1912, later translated as The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim 2016), in which he argued that even some of the things that Immanuel Kant had argued were synthetic a priori knowledge, such as perceptions of time and space, were socially constructed. This is argued by Barnes et al. (1996). See my discussion in Chapter 1.2.2 and Chapter 4.2.3.

The scepticism track towards the sociology of science  233 44 Later, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) posed a critique of this structuralism, arguing that social relations are shaped by exchange, and that structure is not progress, See: Hénaff (1998). Roland Barthes (1915–1980) argued that our society is a tribal society (Barthes 1997, 2012). Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) argued for social recognition forming social structures, and for social capital (habitus) forming structuration. He saw practice as mediating structure and individuality. Furthermore, he argued that language is part of structuring the way we see the world, and that this structuring process is a social process. For a recent discussion, see Bourdieu (2022). For further discussion, see Chapter 5.2.3. 45 The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 in the USA meant the end of all racial discrimination in higher education. It also provided financial support for those who needed it in order to study. The number of university students in the USA more or less doubled from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, and the modern mass-education university was born. 46 The academic year 1964–1965 also marked the beginning of the Free Speech Movement protest at UC Berkeley. It contributed to a student movement that would change the university as an institution worldwide. It inspired student strikes and uprisings in the USA, in Germany, and, in the spring of 1968, in France. The core of the protests was a critique of the university as a hierarchical organisation, and a call for both freedom of speech (also for students) and the democratisation of governance of universities (Rorabaugh 1989; Cohen & Zelnik 2002). 47 Translated as Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge (Feyerabend 2010) 48 A classic example is Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report Science, the Endless Frontier, referred to by Kevles (1977). 49 For a discussion, see Ryan 2015. 50 For a discussion, see Gibbons et al. (1994) and Nowotny et al. (2001). 51 Translated as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Lyotard 1984) 52 For a discussion about neo-institutionalism, see Powell and DiMaggio (2012) and Scott (2013). 53 For a discussion on the interrelation between science and public reason, see Jasanoff (2012). 54 In the same poll, c. 80% believed that continental drift existed, but only c. 50% believed in evolution as a process of natural selection (Nordhaus 2013). 55 William D. Nordhaus’ remedy is a market-based approach, where the price mechanism is used for resource allocation and choices of technological solutions. He is a pragmatist who argues that when we cannot decide on the truth, we should instead look for the best institutional set-up to deal with the uncertainty. 56 The argument presented earlier can be illustrated as follows, with reference a sketch named the ‘Dead Parrot’, which was performed by the British Comedy group Monty Python. (In Monty Python’s s ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch, the discussion is whether or not the parrot really is dead, Chapman et al. 1989). Assume that one has a quarrel about who killed the parrot. One might have personal knowledge in the sense that one saw that one’s cat did not eat the parrot. In fact, it was the neighbours’ cat that did that. However, knowledge at a subjective level might be contested. ‘Society’ may conclude that it was one’s own cat that had eaten the parrot. Societies’ knowledge is the accepted knowledge, even if it is not true. Accordingly, if one tells people that one’s neighbours’ cat had eaten the parrot, they will say that is not true, as the accepted truth is that it was one’s own cat that did that. In such a case it might be questioned on what ground people in general acquired such knowledge: how thoroughly did they investigate the case and who influenced their opinion? Often, we rely on authorities, custom, or general opinion when we form knowledge. Assume that society wants to improve the quality of

234  The scepticism track towards the sociology of science its knowledge. In order to have an entirely correct answer to the question of whose cat had eaten the parrot, they could, for example, invest in CCTV or request DNA testing of traces of the cats on the dead parrot. 57 In his essay Inside the Wale, first published in 1940, Orwell dealt with Henry Miller’s controversial book Tropic of Cancer (Orwell (1962). George Orwell used this metaphor in a polemic against Arthur Miller in an essay written in 1940 (Miller 2015). Orwell wrote: As a rule, writers who do not wish to identify themselves with the historical process at the moment either ignore it or fight against it. If they ignore it, they are probably fools. If they can understand it well enough to want to fight against it, they probably have enough vision to realize that they cannot win. (Orwell 1962, p. 41) 58 Art does not refer to something outside itself, it is not a representation of something else, it is not subordinate to something else, art is something in itself. 59 Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen was written in 1916 and published in 1918. Later, it was translated as Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (Mann 2021). 60 The movement l’art pour l’art had its most direct expression in abstract art. The meaning of abstract art is found in the experience of the art. Wittgenstein (2009) developed a similar argument for language when he abandoned the picture theory. Language does not refer to something but gets its meaning in use. It does not have a meaning outside its use; the meaning is created in the context of use. 61 However, Mill was not mentioned by name. 62 It should be mentioned that Mann, after having witnessed the rise of Nazism, completely altered his view and became a great defender of democracy. 63 Philosophical anthropology is concerned with how the human mind forms its environment and its thoughts as a single integrated process. 64 Thus, the book, which was later translated as Ideology and Utopia, is often referred to as the core, founding text in the field of sociology of knowledge (Mannheim 2013). 65 In their book The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, first published in 1966, Berger and Luckmann built on Mannheim’s broader perspective and discussed how the main belief systems in society (notably religion) were constructed (Berger & Luckmann 1991). However, they added other sociological insights, including structural-functionalism and social psychology. They took as the starting point of their analysis the phenomenology of the social world, and drew inspiration from Alfred Schütz (1899–1959). 66 The Frankfurter school started in the 1930s, with the two German sociologists Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and included the political scientist Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), the literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), the psychologist Erich Fromm (1900–1980), and others. 67 Translated as Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno & Horkheimer 1997) 68 In Chapter  4.2.3, I  refer to the Marburg school of thinking as one the neo-Kantian interpretations in Germany. The school included the philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945). 69 See Chapter 4.3.3. 70 The theme was discussed during a conference held in Tübringen in 1961. The following debate led to the co-authored book Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, an extended version of which was published in English as The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (Adorno et al. 1976). The positivism dispute in Germany was primarily a confrontation between Theodor Adorno (critical theory) and Karl Popper (critical rationalism). 71 Popper’s argument is presented in Chapter 4.3.1.

The scepticism track towards the sociology of science  235 72 Habermas compares Adorno and Popper in his chapter ‘The analytical theory of science and dialectics’ (Habermas 1976). 73 This resonates with the work of Bourdieu (2001). 74 See Chapter 3.1.1. 75 See Habermas’ book The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1997), in which he argues that Popper’s ‘three words’ is a meaningful way of structuring the communicative process. It might turn out that Habermas and Popper mainly differed on the issue of the ontology status of the structuring. 76 This is explained in Chapter 4.3.3. 77 The ‘linguistic turn’ is a label given to the thinking of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein on the structure of language and its relation to thinking at the turn of the 19th century. This is elaborated in Chapter 3.2.1. 78 de Saussure outlined this insight in his book Cours de linguistique Générale, published in 1916 (de Saussure 1983). The insight contrasted with Talcott Parsons’ structuralistfunctionalism approach. Interestingly, in his early works, Parsons was inspired by phenomenology, but he developed his social theories in more functionalist directions. For a discussion, see Jules-Rosette (1980) and Barber (1994). 79 One of his main works was La Pensée sauvage, published in 1962, which was later translated as The Savage Mind (Lévi-Strauss 1966). 80 Exponents of this were, among others, Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, Vilfredo Pareto, Peter L. Berger, and Thomas Luckmann. For a criticism of the approach, see The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Habermas 1989). See also the discussion in Chapter 5.3.3. 81 Translated as Language and Symbolic Power (Bourdieu 1991) 82 Translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Foucault 1994) 83 A lecture series at Collège de France between 1978 and 1979 and published posthumously based on audio recordings. The collection was later translated as The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (Foucault et al. 2008). 84 For further discussion of the self-reference problem in philosophy, see discussion by Bertrand Russell and the liar paradox presented in Chapter 4.2.1. 85 Cusset (2008) argues that a key event was a seminar organised by the John Hopkins University in Baltimore in October 1966, themed ‘The language of criticism and the science of man’, in which several French philosophers participated. In particular, Jacque Derrida’s lecture, ‘Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences’ (Derrida 2007) made an impact. 86 See Chapter 4.2.2. 87 The discussion about art can be instructive in this respect because it resolved around the issue of how things are, how we perceive them, and how they represent reality. The postmodern position (Lyotard 1984; Jameson 1991) was inspired by modernist art. According to Adamson and Pavitt (2011), both Gay (2009) and Bradbury and McFarlane (1991) argue that postmodernism is the social science and political parallel to modernist art. 88 Rancière (2011) argues that postmodernism represents the surrender of modernist art. By adopting ideas from the aesthetics of art, postmodernism destroys the conditions for the independence of art. 89 Translated as Cézanne’s Doubt (Merleau-Ponty 1964) 90 See Danchev’s book 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists (Danchev 2011). 91 It has been argued that Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s film The Matrix, released in 1999, is based on Jean Baudrillard’s theory, although Baudrillard himself denied the connection (Cusset 2008).

236  The scepticism track towards the sociology of science 92 There is an interesting relation between Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, published in 1985 (Haraway 1991) and post-structuralism (Cusset 2008). 93 Thus, Marxists, such as Frederic Jameson, tried to make postmodernism into a positive programme of social change. However, his literary reconstruction of Marxist arguments in his book Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson 1991) comes a long way from traditional Marxism, as do Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze & Guattari 1984), in which they attempt to deconstruct the process of modern capitalism that forces upon us fascist ways of thinking. Underlying their analysis is a Nietzschean critique of modernism and attempts to remove that layer of influence that forces wrong ways of thinking onto us. 94 Derrida discussed differences in the sense of multilevels of meaning, while Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, and Baudrillard all combined Freudianism and post-structuralism in an analysis of how we are seduced by what we believe is right as a modern critique of the capitalist economy (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005). 95 The idea was one that Socrates directed his argument against (see Chapter 5.1.1). 96 Gilbert Ryle’s discussion of the distinction between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’ may serve to illustrate the point. 97 See Chapter 2.1.3. 98 Cf. the discussion about transcendental pragmatism with reference to Apel and Habermas in Chapter 5.3.3. See also Cheryl Misak (2017) on C.S. Pierce’s relation to Kant. 99 A reaction to Sellers comes from Van Fraassen (b. 1941) who argues for constructive empiricism. Constructive empiricism is an anti-realist position that makes the following claim: “Science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate; and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate.” (Van Fraassen 1980, p. 12) 100 See his book Philosophy in an Age of Science (Putnam 2012). 101 See Durkheim and Mauss (2009) on the analysis of religion and primitive societies. For a discussion, see Bloor (2005). 102 See Lévi-Strauss’ book The Savage Mind (Lévi-Strauss 1966). See also Charles Taylor’s article ‘Interpretation and the sciences of man’ (C. Taylor 1971). 103 See Chapter 5.2.1. 104 In her chapter ‘The fabrication of facts’ (Knorr Cetina 1984) 105 See Chapter 5.1.2. 106 Latour’s thoughts are published in the book Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Latour & Woolgar 1979) and in Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Latour 1987). 107 The speed and success with which COVID-19 vaccines were developed, as well as the coincidences and personal relations involved in development of the vaccines, may prove relevant in discussions of how science is done. In an article headed ‘Halting progress and Happy accidents: How mRNA vaccines were made’, published in the New York Times on 15 January 2022, Gina Kolata and Benjamin Mueller state: Dr. Drew Weissman, a physician and virologist so taciturn that his family liked to joke he had a daily word limit, was desperate for new approaches to an H.I.V. vaccine. Earlier in his career, he had spent years in Dr. Fauci’s lab at the N.I.H. testing a treatment for AIDS that turned out to be toxic. One day in 1998, he was at the copy machine in Penn’s department of medicine when a woman approached him. Katalin Karikó, a 44-year-old scientist from Hungary, was as exuberant as Dr. Weissman was withdrawn. She had come to the United States two decades earlier when her research program at the University of Szeged ran out of money. But she’d been marginalised in American research labs, with no permanent position, no grants and

The scepticism track towards the sociology of science  237 no publications. She was searching for a foothold at Penn, knowing that she would be allowed to stay only if another scientist took her in. 108 For a discussion, see Austrin and Farnsworth (2005). 109 Latour’s rules of methods are as follows: We study science in action; to determine objectivity, we look at later transformations in the hands of others; nature is not used as a cause but as a consequence; both human and non-human resources are considered as causes; we are undecided on what actors we are following; irrationality is considered in relation to the observed displacement; Examining a network of relations goes prior to any cognitive reflection (Latour 1987, p. 258). 110 Latour’s principles are: The fate of facts or mechanisms is a consequence, not a cause; scientists are representatives among representatives and influence the field in their favour; we are never confronted with science as such, but with how it is associated and thus we need to know the people involved; the more exoteric content science and technology have, the more it is extended; there is no great divide between minds, but only longer or shorter networks; history of technoscience is about resources scattered about networks to accelerate mobility that make action at a distance possible (Latour 1987, p. 259). 111 Latour makes this point in his book Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essai d’anthropologie symétrique, which was published in 1991 and later translated as We Have Never Been Modern (Latour 1993). 112 Fuller has been seen as promoter of the concept social epistemology (Goldman & Whitcomb 2011). Social epistemology means that not only is knowledge development social, but also its origin is social. Thus, it is a theory about the origin of knowledge. 113 The concept of paradigms was used by Merton in the 1940s, but with a different meaning from Kuhn’s meaning (Brad Wray 2011). However, Merton did not give a precise definition but wrote ‘conceptual language that fixes one’s perception and thought’ or ‘organize the distinctive approaches and conclusions in this field’ (Brad Wray 2011, p. 385). 114 I have shown in Chapter 5.1.1 how Feyerabend interpreted this argument as relativism and supported it. 115 See Chapter 5.2.3. 116 See Chapter 5.2.2. 117 See Chapter 4.2.2. 118 For example, in his book Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, Paul Artin Boghossian (b. 1957) argues quite strongly against relativism and tried to show why we should believe in objective truth (Boghossian 2007). 119 In the case of ‘grievance studies affair’, several articles that had been written intentionally as normatively correct but without being based on any serious research were submitted to grievance studies journals. Several of the articles were accepted for publication. In 2018, the affair led to headlines in the Wall Street Journal. See, for example, ‘Fake news comes to academia: How three scholars gulled academic journals to publish hoax papers on “grievance studies” ’ by the Opinion columnist Jillian Kay Melchior in the Wall Street Journal (Melchior 2018). 120 See the discussion in Chapter 4.3.3.

Chapter 6

Still a role for philosophy?

6.0  The line of argument in this chapter The focus of this book is the important role played by science in society and how we live in a time of scientific pluralism in which science is entering into more fields and involving more researchers, who are using a larger repertoire of methodologies and methods than ever before, yet there are big divides and disagreements among scientific positions. We live in a knowledge society, in which there are conflicting interests and conflicting knowledge, but in which also we are dependent on common reason. How can science be diverse, contribute to pluralism in society, and be significant? Three questions are at the core of general philosophy and sociology of science: What is scientific knowledge? What makes scientific knowledge different from other kinds of knowledge? How we know that scientific knowledge is good? Through the chapters in this book, I have tried to contribute to answering the first and the second of these questions. In this concluding chapter, I primarily address the third question: How we know that scientific knowledge is good? My take on scientific knowledge presented here is about having a reasonable perspective on what scientific knowledge is, what it can achieve, and how it should be perceived by society. In the first chapter (Chapter 1), I asked how diversity is a strength for science at the same time as science provides true, valid, and sustainable knowledge? In this book as a whole I  have presented three main traditions of philosophy and argued how they have served as references for three parallel tracks in the sense of discussions over time that have encompassed a wide range of scientific positions. For simplification, I have emphasised that the current philosophy and sociology of science debate is characterised by three main positions: logical empiricism, phenomenology, and sociology of science. Dilemmas resulting from interactions between these three positions are an inherent part of the discourse of science. In the first part of this chapter, A view from the moon, I  argue that there are obstacles to overcoming the divides between the three main positions in the philosophy and sociology of science debate. However, I also argue for cases in which there might be possibilities to break new scientific ground based on the divides. In DOI: 10.4324/9781003326878-6

Still a role for philosophy?  239

this respect, a key concept is pluralism in science, but what does it mean and what does it imply? At the same time, there has been a call to abolish the philosophical divides and to for science to focus on its practical ability to solve problems in society. In the second part of this chapter, Sustainable scientific knowledge, I address more directly the question of the goodness of science. I argue that suitability can be used as a term for how science can make a constructive contribution to society. I  present some preliminary ideas of how to conceptualise sustainable scientific knowledge. In addressing the question of how sustainable scientific knowledge should be conceptualised, I argue that there is a need for interaction between science and philosophy.

6.1  A view from the moon 6.1.1  Scientific pluralism My discussion in this book has moved through the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. I  have shown that science started in ancient times (classical history), when efforts were made to understand the world. Gradually, it became possible to explain at least part of the world and to show how man can use the resources and forces of the world. By the mid-20th century, science had demonstrated that its knowledge could also be used to destroy the world.1 This has had tremendous impact on our conception of science.2 Science has evolved along different lines of thought, which has led to a plurality of scientific positions related to how science generates knowledge. The three traditions discussed in this book – realism, idealism, and scepticism – have to some extent developed separately. Consequently, they have created different discourses within science and, to a large extent, together they have shaped the nature of what we perceive as science today. There have been attempts to throw out one or two of the traditions, as Francis Bacon did in his book Novum Organum (Bacon 2017), as well as attempts to reconcile the traditions, as the French philosopher René Descartes did with his dualism,3 and as logical positivists did with their unity of science. Some have simply thrown cold water on the optimism of science, as British philosopher David Hume did with his scepticism and pragmatism,4 and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did with his nihilism.5 Nevertheless, the internal disagreement has also been productive. For example, Immanuel Kant, a ‘father’ of modern idealism, wrote that Hume’s scepticism had awoken him from his intellectual slumber.6 The linguistic turn around the year 1900 led to the convergence of idealism and realism (even though the positions later parted), and recent discussions in philosophy of science have tried to reconcile phenomenology and analytical philosophy.7 von Wright (1971) argues that the divide between idealism and realism can be interpreted as a divide between understanding and explaining.8 Furthermore, he argues that the main focus in science over the last 200 years has constantly shifted between

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two aspects: conflict and reconciliation. Still, there have been several crossovers between the traditions, and many philosophers have explored the boundaries between them. Within each tradition there is a stronger version and a weaker version. The three traditions could be depicted in a circle or a triangle in which they all have connections to each other. The realist Karl Popper argues as follows: I think that I was always a Cartesian dualist (although I never thought that we should talk about ‘substances’), and if not a dualist, I was certainly more inclined to pluralism than to monism. I think it is silly, or at least high-handed, to deny the existence of mental experiences or mental states, or states of consciousness; or to deny that mental states are as a rule, closely related to states of the body, especially physiological states. (Popper 1977, p. 187) Thus, there is a complexity of opinions across the divides discussed in this book. Still, there are competing positions in science that can be explained by disagreements about fundamental philosophical issues related to epistemology and ontology. As I have argued, general philosophy and sociology of science is concerned with three main questions: 1. What is scientific knowledge? 2. What makes scientific knowledge different from other kinds of knowledge? 3. How we know that scientific knowledge is good? The answers to all three questions depend in turn on the answers to more fundamental questions: • • •

What is knowledge? How do we come to know things? How do we verify that our knowledge is true?

This in turn leads to the question of what are facts, truth, meaning, and certainty? Furthermore, my argument has been that the three traditions have different emphasis on the following questions: 1. How can we know that the way we conceptualise reality really corresponds with reality? This is the main philosophical problem addressed by realists. 2. How can a mind-dependent reality be regarded as objective? This is the general problem addressed by idealists. 3. What is knowing? This is the main philosophical issue that runs through the scepticism track. The pluralist view of science9 that is promoted in this book implies that I acknowledge many positions and arguments. I have presented a framework and structure that can be used to make sense of the different arguments. The main idea is that if

Still a role for philosophy?  241 Table 6.1  A very simplified overview of lines of thought Time

Realism

Idealism

Scepticisms

Science before Aristotle/Plato (1) Plato (2) Sophists science Roger Bacon: Aquinas: rationalism, Ockham: scientific methods natural law questioning rationalism 17th century Francis Bacon: Descartes (1): Descartes (2): induction rationalism scepticism John Locke: Leibnitz: idealism phenomenalism/ empiricism 18th century David Hume (2): Berkeley: David Hume (1): empiricism sensationalism scepticism Bentham: utilitarianism Kant (1): Kant (2): critical transcendental thinking idealism 19th century Comte: positivism Hegel (1): Hegel (2): Phenomenology Hegelianism Marx: Historical materialism Mill (1): Nietzsche: utilitarianism/ existentialism verificationism Pierce (1): Mill (2): Pierce (2): Pragmatism/ sensationalism pragmatism objective idealism Dilthey: Russell/Frege: interpretivism analytical philosophy 20th century Wittgenstein (1): Husserl: Manheim: sociology logic of language phenomenology (1) of knowledge Carnap: logical Heidegger: Wittgenstein (2): structure of the phenomenology (2) sociology of world language Vienna Circle: Dewey (1): social Dewey (2): logical empiricism learning pragmatism Quine: naturalism Sartre: existentialism Adorno: critical theory Popper: critical Gadamer: Kuhn: sociology of rationalism hermeneutics science Quine: Naturalism Hempel: critical Habermas: Foucault/ realism communicative Derrida: postrationality structuralism

different arguments cannot be reconciled, they can at least be in a fruitful dialogue with each other, and it should be possible to do this without concealing the fact that there are deep and undecided conflicts between them. I share the belief that

242  Still a role for philosophy?

through insight there is a better foundation for future dialogue. While some realists have argued that they have been able to eliminate philosophy and separating science both from philosophy and metaphysics, idealists have argued that we are not yet there. Scepticism questions the arguments of both realists and idealists. If seen from the moon, our discussion might appear as shown in Table 6.1. Modern science is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back c. 400 years, even if it has roots in the antiquity. The account ends with the discussion following post-positivism, which was c. 50 years ago. At that time, the main positions presented in this book were established, the mutual criticism had played out, and the boundary lines between them were more or less as they are today. Since then, little has happened in moving the positions forward or trying to reconcile them. Rather, the development has gone in a different direction (Curd & Psillos 2014). Thus, pluralism might be used as the headline for how science has evolved over the last 50  years. Science has become a worldwide enterprise. There is hardly any country that does not have a university, does not have research policy, and does not regard scientific knowledge as important. Furthermore, science has moved into new areas. Hardly any main social activity does not have a research activity associated with it. Thus, science seems to monitor all aspects of our life, such as our nutrition, our excise, and our mental health, as well as our work, our communal life, our use of technology, our sexual life, and our drinking habits. There is a social and political dimension interlinked with the scientific discourse. This dimension was already evident in the work of Francis Bacon, who highlighted how scientific knowledge meant power in society. John Locke saw scientific development and the development of a modern democratic society as two interrelated processes. Immanuel Kant saw enlightenment, the rule of law, and science as interlinked. Auguste Comte thought science could be used to modernise society. Johann Gottlieb Fichte argued that science presupposed human freedom. John Stuart Mill saw liberty as a key element both in society and in the scientific process. Moritz Schlick saw the modernisation of science from the perspective of modernisation of society. Karl Popper argued for pluralism in science and in society. These are only a few of the links between science and society that I have commented upon in this book, but they demonstrate the importance of the relation. Furthermore, it could be said that science is not alone in being discussed as a separate activity, yet still integrated with development of society. I have made a number of references to the parallels between science and art, for example in relation to positivism, logical positivists, critical theory, and postmodernism, to mention some. Observing this parallel development can be useful. Art and science are facing some of the same issues: professional freedom, authenticity, developing internal standards, forming barriers against intruders, and defending an independent role in society. Seeing the parallel development might also help us see what is at stake when science comes under attack.

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The metaphors used in this book are intended to illustrate some of the complexity that exists in the current scientific landscape. I  have identified some dimensions and made a broad classification of the different strands of thinking within each of the discussed three philosophy and sociology of science positions. What are the divides about? First and foremost, they concern different philosophical views. They differ in terms of the idea of science: What is the objective of science? Why do we do science? In this regard, the arguments vary between those mainly concerned with true description and those mainly searching for meaning or solving problems. Furthermore, if we ask what theory is, we can find that theories that might be understood as anything ranging from not yet falsified hypotheses, to objective assumptions, and to descriptive frameworks. This partly links to the issue of output or why we do science; What are we supposed to achieve? Again, positions vary from finding truth to disclosing false meaning or solving problems. The question of why we do science impacts how we see the role of the scientist; is he or she an observer or a participant? This in turn relates to what the scientist actually studies, namely whether it is things and objects in the world, or whether it is structures, paradigms, practical and social problems, or meaning? There is probably some logical link between what the scientist does, what is perceived as the role of science, and the philosophical foundation to which the scientist subscribes. In this regard, the big issue is positions on ontology and epistemology. The way we define this dimension is to characterise what the main concern is: Is the scientist concerned with the epistemological issue at hand, or does he or she concentrate their attention on ontological issues? This might have implications for how they think about the unity of science. Is there one science (i.e. a common framework) meaning one right way to do sciences that is applicable to all or many sciences, each with their own standards? Realists believe that there is an objective reality, and that with good methods, science can make a true description of that reality uncontaminated by human subjective knowledge. However, even among realists there are deviating opinions. What idealists have in common is that they believe that the way we see the world is a product of how we see it. We can never take the human mind out of the equation. Even if idealists believe that reality is humanly defined, there are many different and partly competing strands of thought within that position. Scepticists have in common that they do not believe that there is an objective reality independent of how we perceive the world. Also, many scepticists reject the idea that everything can be reduced to individual epistemology. Instead, they are concerned with social processes within which science is produced. 6.1.2  Science in a post-metaphysical society This book is about the general philosophy and sociology of science. I have portrayed the development of science as an ongoing discussion with three main

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philosophical traditions as the main denominators. Additionally, I  have argued that this discussion (or discussions) has evolved and that arguments have crossed the main discussions. However, I  have not sided with any of the positions or arguments, and I have not made judgements concerning their solidity. Rather, my purpose has been to show the plurality of the debates. Some may argue that there is less need today to discuss general philosophy and sociology of science issues. Pluralism in science has led to an increased number of branches, disciplines, and subdisciplines, each with their own internal discussions about fundamental issues. For example, problems facing physicists might not have much in common with problems facing psychologists or sociologist, or media scientists. Still Willard Quine writes, The totality of so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profound laws of atomic physics or even pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only among the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. (Quine 1980, p. 42) Furthermore, it could be argued that the focus on fundamental issues has shifted over the last 50 years, from predominantly issues about epistemology and ontology, to issues of methodology and methods. One reason for this methodological turn10 might be a general opinion about the possibility to succeed with some of the philosophical discussions that previously defined science. Also, and related to this, it might be that scientists have not considered it fruitful to prolong some of the philosophical confrontations that characterised science when it was merely an internal European enterprise. Some may argue that some of these philosophical issues are without any final conclusion. For example, it seems that the effort to eliminate metaphysical propositions in science has not succeeded. Metaphysical assumptions are inherent in much research, without being problematised. Also, today, phenomenologists and logical empiricists can conduct their research side by side, without confronting each other. There have been different ways of dealing with the complexity in science. One approach has been to divide science into different forms of science, based on the argument that they operate on different logics. Some common distinctions between natural science and human science on the one hand, and pure and applied research on the other hand, are identified in Table 6.2. Some may argue that not all the positions listed in Table 6.2 cover science.11 However, as I argue in the following, one can see all of the positions from the perspective of what is called the knowledge society.12 In this perspective, science is seen as part of a larger knowledge development process in society. Different parts of science play into this overall process. There are three main ideas on how this works in practical social reality.

Still a role for philosophy?  245 Table 6.2  Perspectives on sciences

Pure science

Applied sciences

Natural sciences

Human sciences

Ontological focus: Hypothesis in science can be developed analytically and tested. Thus, science is primarily about methodology. Pragmatic focus: Science is a useful, pragmatic adjustment of knowledge.

Epistemological focus: Science is based on human beliefs and interpretations. Truth is a state of mind and an interpretation of social reality. Normative focus: Science is meaningful and helpful, adjusted to human needs and opinions. It is interaction with society.

First, there is the linear idea: the argument is that science is a basic producer of knowledge that is used in other areas of society. The empiricists, and later the positivists, perceived science as an empirically based search for facts. When social science developed in the 19th century, it was with the aim of copying natural science. The systematic growth of scientific knowledge that had made engineering and industrial development possible, and thereby had contributed to the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, was to be copied in social sciences. The linear idea is that in a knowledge society science can play a role in developing new basic knowledge that, through aligning science with industrial processing can then become products and services in society. An example of this is how the U.S. federal government after World War II developed a political strategy to invest in basic science and build a value chain from basic science to applied science and commercialisation, which was later adopted by elsewhere, such as by the European Union.13 Second, the systemic idea acknowledges some of the interactions described earlier, as well as the fact that science and research is far more than physics and natural science, and far more that basic science. Still, it calls for a differentiation of functions in society, and it acknowledges that there is a field of activity that is science and research. Science and research constitute a differentiated system in society that, even though it consists of many subsystems, has many internal processes ongoing that differ from its external relations. Thus, there are certain autonomous processes in science that stand in communicative relation to other areas of society. Science consists of many paradigms that constitute science and research. These are, in addition to the dialogue between sciences and with other social entities, also partly autonomous processes. The call for a sustainable society might represent a new development. Certain things point in that direction: environmental threats, green economy, and new technology, including artificial intelligence. In a sustainable society, we might see

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new forms of relations between science and society. Thus, it might have an impact on what new philosophical problems science will need to address. Third, the interrelated idea that can be found innovation literature today argues that knowledge is developed in an interrelated process that is based on a dialogue between business and research, and is often founded by public money as part of a public research strategy: In transdisciplinary contexts . . . institutional differences between, say, universities and industry, seem to be less and less relevant. . . . [P]erformance and excellence [is therefore] judged by the ability of individuals to make a sustained contribution in open, flexible types of organisation in which they may only work temporarily. (Gibbons et al. 1994, p. 30) All three ideas (linear, systemic, and interrelated) have a rather instrumental perspective on science. Without being explicitly stated, they seem not to be concerned with philosophical issues. As I  have argued,14 they can be seen as part of what has been called the practical turn.15 This is not an attack on philosophy, but is an argument that science is primarily a tool for solving societal problems. Thus, without having the ambition to give a comprehensive characterisation of the current state of science, some relatively common non-philosophical research strategies may be identified. Among these strategies, conventionalism16 is perhaps the most common. Conventionalism holds that something is scientific knowledge if it has been developed within an acceptable convention. Different sciences have developed different conventions. As long as scientists adhere to the convention within a certain strand of research, or within a discipline, they can be confident about claiming that what they do is science. Conventionalism has much in common with instrumentalism.17 Instrumentalists are pragmatic regarding what methods or procedures they use, even if they refer to certain conventions. Their approach is more problem-driven, and therefore they will choose whatever means necessary to solve the problem, rather than adhering to fixed procedures. In doing so, instrumentalists will often be indifferent to what metaphysical assumptions they make. This can be illustrated by the following quotations from the American Nobel Prize winner in economics Milton Friedman (1912–2006). He wrote the following about the context of discovery: The ultimate goal of a positive science is the development of a ‘theory’ or ‘hypothesis’ that yields valid and meaningful (i.e., not truistic) predictions about phenomena not yet observed. Such a theory is, in general, a complex intermixture of two elements. In part, it is a ‘language’ designed to promote ‘systematic and organized methods of reasoning.’ In part, it is a body of substantive hypotheses designed to abstract essential features of complex reality. (Friedman 1953, p. 7)

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Related to the context of justification, Milton Friedman adopted a Popperian perspective: Viewed as a body of substantive hypotheses, theory is to be judged by its predictive power for the class of phenomena which it is intended to ‘explain.’ Only factual evidence can show whether it is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or, better, tentatively ‘accepted’ as valid or ‘rejected.’ . . . [T]he only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of its predictions with experience. The hypothesis is rejected if its predictions are contradicted . . . it is accepted if its predictions are not contradicted. . . . Factual evidence can never ‘prove’ a hypothesis; it can only fail to disprove it, which is what we generally mean when we say, somewhat inexactly, that the hypothesis has been ‘confirmed’ by experience. (Friedman 1953, p. 8) Friedman’s argument was that as long as we generate research results in the form of hypotheses or theories that fit the data we have or give correct prediction, they will be seen as true. The term After Theory, also known as post-theory, was introduced by Thomas Docherty (Docherty 1990). It is closely linked to the postmodernist argument and its criticism of individual epistemology (O’Hara 1993).18 The argument, at least by postmodernists, is that our thinking is so trapped within social structures that metaphysical speculations do not make any sense. Thus, understood in this way, post-theory represents a ‘farewell’ to the ambition of developing analytical, true knowledge about the world. Another non-theoretical approach to science is machine learning. In recent years, we have seen that artificial intelligence has emerged as a contender to conventional ways of doing research. We know now, for example, that AI can be better than humans in detecting cancer. Furthermore, AI has the potential for scanning enormous amounts of data and detecting patterns or correlations that were previously unknown. In this respect, the main point is that there are hardly any theories attached to the potential of AI. A machine does not start out with a theory, nor does it end up with one. The American Nobel Prize winner of economics and political scientist Herbert Simon (1916–2001) is renowned for stating that ‘The moment of truth is a running program’ (Simon 1995, p. 96). The strategies described earlier and similar ones challenge a more traditional view of science, as well as the classical discussions about theory and method. Assume that AI detects a relation between two factors, such as the high value of X if Y is present and low value if Y is not present. If this is related to, for example, medicine or neurology or an environmental issue, we might choose to act on it without there being any theoretical explanation of why it is the case. One might speculate whether this signals the end of philosophy in science.19

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I end this discussion with a reference to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have all been witness to a real-life example of the way science can work. The history is as follows:   1. The starting point was a problem facing societies worldwide: a server problem.   2. The immediate reaction was a call for an explanation: Why was the virus so much more threatening than other viruses?   3. Thereafter, there came the call for a remedy: a vaccine.   4. One call addressed virologists who had prior and comparable experiences (e.g. from SARS or AIDS).   5. Suddenly, virologists were in demand.   6. Competing theories on how to handle and combat the virus played out in parallel.   7. Different groups of scientists in collaboration with industry developed vaccines based on theories.   8. The vaccines were tested and, when approved, put into production.   9. After they had started to be used, new insights were gained into how they worked and how they affected the patients, and recommendations were modified on the basis of those experiences. 10. Throughout the process, there were always sceptics and resistance. 11. Even conspiracy theories were presented. 12. In parallel, there was a political economy and the development of institutional arrangements, which were concerned with such matters as how fast the vaccine could be produced, how vaccination programmes should be organised, who would receive the vaccine first, and what other restrictions should be imposed on people. 13. Together, all efforts seem to have rolled back the threat of COVID-19 (at least, at the time of writing this book). 14. Part of the larger picture related to, for example, relations between rich and poor countries, and how to support industry and employment in the interim period. The following may be identified in the pandemic: the context of discovery (points 1–4), the context of justification (5–9), the pragmatic context (11–13), and the demarcation problem (7–11). Furthermore, part of the process was problemdriven (1–3 and 10–14), but parts of it were also theory-driven (4–5). There were issues of realism (4, 5, and 7) and of idealism (1, 2, and 9–11), and sceptics played a role (9–11). The case of the COVID-19 pandemic may serve to show both how complex and integrated science still is in society, and how many of the issues discussed in this book are at play in such events.

6.2  Sustainable scientific knowledge 6.2.1  Pending questions in the philosophy of science In the first main part of this chapter (Chapter 6.1), I have presented arguments in line with the practical turn, which more or less erased philosophical issues from

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the discussion of science. In this last part, I argue that there is still a role for philosophy. I start by asking whether there are pending philosophical questions in science? The immediate answer is a resounding yes. It is not the case that all the issues discussed in this book have been solved.20 My discussion does not qualify as representing a comprehensive list. I have addressed some questions, and in a rather superficial way, as is necessary in a short book such as this one. Furthermore, I have tried to avoid the use of highly technical language, which implies that some of the discussions have been translated onto common sense language. In turn, this implies that some of the nuances in the discussions have been overlooked. However, I reflect on these nuances in the following discussion. First, in taking a historical perspective, it is implicit that discussions reappear. Logical positivists thought that Kant was not to be involved in the discussion of science, even though Kant reappeared in the context of communicative theory. Pragmatists thought the Descartes and his dualism were a thing of the past, yet his dualism is very much alive in discussions of language and cognitive theory. Second, it is not the case that discussion repeats themselves; rather, they are reframed and reinterpreted to address new questions or fit new contexts. Thus, the meeting between science and philosophy can be seen as an ongoing process in which history represents a repertoire of insights that can be used in different ways. What, then, might be the pending philosophical issues for science in general? Given that it has been acknowledged that science has evolved in different philosophical traditions, it is not unreasonable to reflect on the possibility to make progress by addressing some of the insights from competing traditions. Following this argument, one might challenge scepticists to consider some of the arguments by idealists or realists. It is not easy to see how that could be done, but both the concept of objectivity in realism and the concept of meaning in idealism might be reconciled with the scepticism perspective. The point I wish to make here is not that an attempt to do this has not been made, but to argue that by pursuing this kind of discussion, new perspectives might appear. As I  see it, Habermas’ concept of communicative rationality21 is to date the most comprehensive attempt to reconcile objectivity, meaning, and social development. However, there might be further possibilities along this line. Realists may be more willing to reflect on how science is integrated into the social structures, and what that implies for how science generates knowledge. They may also be willing to reconsider the concept of objectivity in light of this relation between science and society, without compromising the exactness of science. This could reopen the phenomenological discussion, which concerns reflecting on how our mind influences what we see and how we see it. Logical positivists and in particular the Vienna Circle came a long way in addressing the discussion. However, with their abrupt closure, the debate ended, and the two traditions parted ways.22 Idealists may address both sceptics and realists. For example, phenomenology has had much in common with logical empiricism, even though phenomenologists have disagreed about some of their fundamental assumptions. By reopening their

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discussions, some new insights might emerge. It could be argued that postmodernism is a merged form of scepticism and phenomenology.23 The way positivism and post-structuralism approached each other in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in science wars.24 It is possible that a new take on this discussion could lead to some interesting thoughts. Post-structuralism has made us aware of how linguistic structures have influenced our perception and meaning. Could science develop objective, true knowledge beyond that? The listed issues between science and philosophy in the future should not be regarded as complete or even as containing the most relevant issues. They are more a way of demonstrating the possibilities in the further dialogue. It is also an indication of how such a discussion could be approached. Some more specific areas of research that cross boundaries that I  have discussed may be worth mentioning. There is an ongoing field of research related to cognitive science and the mind and reality in which Husserl’s phenomenology still plays an important role (D.W. Smith & Thomasson 2005). New technology has opened the discussions related to the existentialism of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (Dusek 2006). The discussion about the logical positivists’ atomist concept of truth versus a Hegelian holistic concept of truth has not been reconciled (F. G. Weiss 1974). Also, there is still a large field of research related to Frege and Wittgenstein and to their discussion of mind, meaning, and language (McDowell 1998b). Furthermore, Derrida’s insight into the origin (foundation) and antinomy of language is pending issue (Norris 1987). The aforementioned issues are topic for future books. However, I  briefly refer to one area of research that is crossing boundaries and where there have been and still are confronting positions, yet the study area in itself is still progressing. The area is artificial intelligence (AI). The history behind AI is the confrontation between Alan Turing (1912–1954) and Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge in the late 1930s (Monk 1991). Turing attended Wittgenstein’s lectures in mathematics, and at the same time gave lectures in mathematics at Cambridge University. Turing was inspired by logical positivism and the mathematical formalism of David Hilbert, which led to the publication of his paper ‘On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem’ (Turing 1936). In the paper, Turing describes what has been called a Turing machine, which is the principle for computation and thus the precursor of a computer. Wittgenstein argued in his posthumously published book Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 2009) whether language and reading were about following rules, and this was probably also part of his dispute with Turing. A computer has to follow rules and this fact became central to the discussion of whether what a computing machine does is parallel to that of what the human being does. Wittgenstein discussed this as a question of how we read and how a reading machine might read: The machine read only after such and such had happened to it – after such and such parts had been connected. . . . But in the case of the live

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reading machine, ‘reading’ meant: reacting to written signs in such and such ways. (Wittgenstein 2009, p. 69) Turing’s paper ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’ was published in 1950, and in it, he discussed the imitation game (Turing 1950). In principle, the computer can imitate the mind. Turing’s paper ignited research on AI, and one of the main proponents of AI was Herbert Simon (Frantz 2003). Prior to that, Simon had conducted research on organisation theory and leadership and had studied decisionmaking processes. He saw that Touring’s arguments fitted the kind of procedures that is found in formal problem-solving in organisations (Simon 1995). By the mid-1970s, several philosophers had engaged in the discussion of whether what the computer could do was in fact the same as what the human mind does. Among those philosophers, John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus became particularly well known. Dreyfus used arguments from both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology in his claims about what the computer could not do. Searle has used Wittgenstein’s arguments and claimed that the computer does not have a mind (Searle 2004).25 Searle’s example is called the Chinese Room (Preston & Bishop 2002). His idea is that he is sitting in a room with no connection to the outside except for a small crack for letters, through which he receives questions written in Chinese. Searle does not have any knowledge of the Chinese language, but the room is filled with instruction books, and therefore he can know how to respond to a certain group of letters or signs. He duly posts out his replies, and everyone on the outside believes that the person sitting in the room can read Chinese, despite Searle maintaining that he does not have any knowledge of the Chinese language. The discussion about the Chinese Room has taken two directions: on the one hand, the question is whether computers are intelligent; on the other hand, the question concerns what we mean by mind. Furthermore, as computers have evolved from being rule-following to simulating neural networks, this discussion has also opened up interesting links to cognitive science (D.W. Smith & Thomasson 2005). Neural networks find patterns; they are not instructed by some overall rules: But neural networks raise deep philosophical questions. It seems that they undermine the fundamental rationalistic assumptions that one must have abstracted a theory of a domain in order to behave intelligently in the domain. (Dreyfus 1992, p. xxxiii) My argument is not to go deep into these discussions, but rather to point to the fact that AI has reopened philosophical discussion related to mind, rationality, and cognition (Dreyfus & Hall 1984; Müller 2012). At the same time, the philosophical input to the discussion has challenged the development of computers (Preston & Bishop 2002). We have hardly seen the end of these discussions.

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6.2.2  To reach out into the unknown To some extent, science has been beyond good and evil. It has been assumed that science should provide us with stubborn facts, which is why Carnap argued for the separation of ethics and science26: we should be able to acknowledge what is independent of what should be. Thus, one strategy for science is to distance itself from the more normative, social discourse. What seems to be a bad position is the combination of science being integrated into society and insisting on being independent of society. Thus, as science is integrated into society, it is reasonable to expect its ethical position to be clarified. Thus, too, the question is whether we should increasingly address the issue of the goodness of science? We live in a time when the world is facing some new challenges, at least challenges that have not previously been perceived in the way we do today. At the time of writing this book, we have just come through a pandemic that paralysed the whole world. Furthermore, there is a widespread acknowledgement that the way we live our lives today is not sustainable,27 that the world is facing a potential environmental crisis, and at the same time, there is less agreement on political organisation, humanitarian issues are occurring on scale not seen before, and the global scene is characterised by increased conformations. Each problem is not new in itself, but the level and speed of integration trough communication that the human world is now facing is new. What happened to science after World War II might be instructive in this respect. Before and during World War II, science was used in the ideological battle with terrible consequences, both through its experiments on human beings and through the development of new weapons. As society became aware about what scientists had been doing during the war, there was pressure to have more democratic influence on and control of science, and to lay down ethical guidelines. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights28 was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948. It did not address science directly, but made clear remarks about unethical behaviour and assaults against all human beings. As there were increasing reports on scientific human experiments during the Nazi period, work was started in 1953 by the World Medical Association to lay down ethical guidelines for research on humans, in what became the Declaration of Helsinki in 1964.29 Also, philosophers engaged in trying to learn from what had happened before and during World War II. Among them was the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017), who later wrote the book Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman 1989). Given how interrelated science is with society, it is a concern for science how society develops. After World War II, the Western world and gradually larger parts of the world experienced political regimes that respected certain basic rules and respect for the development of knowledge. A democracy lives with the contradiction that on the one hand it allows for disagreement, conflict, and differences in

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beliefs, but on the other hand, it takes for granted that democracy itself is something one agrees with. However, recently, it has become clear to many people that matters that we take for granted, such as democracy, are not things we can any longer take for granted.30 Furthermore, the prospects for liberal democracy as a global role model are bleaker today than they were just some years ago.31 There are two sides to this situation. On the one hand, the common and constructive development between science and society that we have seen in the Western world, which is part of a long-term trend despite its setbacks, is not necessarily the trend we will continue to see. Thus, it remains to be seen whether science will become even more integrated into society, or whether we will gradually experience that the scientific community isolates itself from society. Since World War II, scientific and social developments have gone hand in hand. Science is seen in positive terms as a precondition for a liberal and prosperous society. In liberal democracies the freedom and autonomy of the scientist has been acknowledged and even protected by law. Still, beneath this acceptance of science has been the taken-for-granted assumption that what science deliver will, on the whole, be good for society. Can we continue to take this for granted? Paul Feyerabend asked the question how do we know that science is good?32 We may ask, what do we mean by good? There is no universal agreement about what is good (Grayling 2011). Some may even argue that the term ‘goodness’ is useless because it is empty of real content and therefore should be abandoned. Interestingly, it is easier to identify what is bad or evil than to identify what is good (Geach 1956). For example, if someone is hurt, it is indeed bad, but if someone feels pleasure, for instance, from eating a lot of sweets, we cannot necessarily say it is good. Although there is little agreement about what is good, there is no agreement at all on the nature of ethics (Kincaid 2014). Thus, it could be concluded that there is a need for science to explain and argue what it does and why it does it. Such a clarification would have to be an ongoing debate, as there is probably, and hopefully, no simple answer to questions such as what is good, what is virtue, and what should we do? If anything, what a dive into the history of philosophy of science can teach us is that there might be simple questions, but there are no simple answers. Still, the good is a common reference, and is an important dimension in the development of society. Reference to the good has been a key denominator in social development (Grayling 2011). A way forward in this discussion about ethics and the good of science is through the use of the concept of sustainability: the question of how we know that scientific knowledge is good can be reformulated to ask how sustainable scientific knowledge is. Goodness might be a border concept, than the concept of sustainability. However, sustainability has become a relatively common and accepted term for desirable social, economic, and environmental development, as formulated by the UN’s sustainability goals.33 Referring to the goodness of

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science is not to argue that science should be ‘politically correct’ or comply with certain political opinions. Rather, by addressing the sustainability of scientific knowledge, our focus should be on how science contributes to a good society in the long run. Goodness of science, and thus the sustainability of scientific knowledge, has been the inherent ambition of most of the philosophy and sociology of science positions presented in this book. It is reasonable to assume that most scientists would agree that the main goodness of science, and thus the sustainability criteria for science, is that science aims at truth and certainty. Still, my discussion in this book has shown some of the diversity in the discussions about what this means. In the natural sciences, it is expected that scientific claims will correspond to facts about the world. However, there is a philosophical disagreement about the status of these facts: are they phenomenon or are they real? In the social sciences and humanities, the concept of facts has to be interpreted as referring either to social facts or to how the world is perceived by individuals. Scientific claims about the social and human world are better judged according to their validity than according to their certainty. In this respect, the validity of an assertion will imply that it is a reasonable representation of the social reality. Still, sustainability might work as a common concept for science. It has some common features with Kantian concepts of universal reason.34 It is a universal and abstract concept. Sustainability should be in everyone’s interest. It does not exclude anyone, but at the same time, it indicates a common interest: the maintenance and survival of human life. Even though it is a concept that needs to be interpreted and to acquire meaning in a specific scientific language game, as well as need to be reconfirmed through our communicative processes, it is still a concept that will comply with our expectations of a transcendental reason. I have discussed the emperor without clothes,35 and the critical role of science that is still needed. Furthermore, I  am not arguing for removing disagreements or debates. The point about confronting the different traditions in a constructive way is not to reconcile all positions, but to move things forward. This, as I see it, is how science can support development in society. It is therefore important to emphasise that our discussions of a sustainable society, and the fact that we as a society are confronted with comprehensive and partly global challenges, should not imply that we abandon pluralism in science. The fact that we do not know might be seen as a weakness, but for science it has always been a strength. What we do not know is actually the source of future knowledge. It’s a King’s art. As Hilary Putnam argues, We do not need to erect firm boundaries around philosophy to keep the aliens out. We need their contribution. (Putnam 2012, p. 71)

Still a role for philosophy?  255

By keeping the philosophical discussions alive, science will be forced to dig deeper, to pursue surprising new ideas, and to try to reach out into the unknown.

Notes 1 Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), a professor of physics at the University of California in Berkeley, became the ‘father of the atomic bomb’. During World War II he became leader of the Manhattan Project, which was implemented with the intention to develop nuclear weapons. The first atomic bomb was detonated on 16 July 1945, in the Trinity test in New Mexico. The same types of bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945, respectively. Oppenheimer later said that the world would not be the same after the atomic bomb, and that he knew that what had been invented could destroy the world. For a biography, see Cassidy (2019). 2 See Chapter 6.2.2. 3 This is discussed in depth in Chapter 4.1.1. 4 David Hume is discussed in Chapter 3.1.2. 5 Friedrich Nietzsche is discussed in Chapter 4.2.2. 6 See Chapter 3.1.2. 7 See Prado (2003) on the divide between analytical and continental philosophy. See also Rehg (2009) on science wars. 8 For further discussion, see Chapter 5.2.3 in this book and see Skjervheim (1959) 9 Pluralism, including Carnap’s principles of tolerance, is discussed in Chapter 3.3.2. 10 For a discussion, see Putnam (2012) and Chao et al. (2013). 11 For a discussion of the demarcation problem, see Chapters 3.2.3 and 3.3.2. 12 See Chapter 5.1.3. 13 See Chapter 5.1.3. For a discussion, see Valéry Cholakov (2000), cited in Segerstråle (2000). 14 See Chapter 5.1.3. 15 It might also have been a reaction to what was seen as unproductive science wars (discussed in Chapter 5.3.3). 16 The development of conventionalism is often attributed to Poincaré. See Ben-­ Menahem (2006). 17 For a discussion, see Giedymin (1976). 18 The postmodernist argument and its criticism are referred to as inside the whale in Chapter 5.2. 19 I address this in Chapter 6.1.1. 20 In example Van Fraassen (1980) argues that the logical positivists discussions about metaphysics in relation to science are thing of the past. 21 See the discussion in Chapter 5.3.3. 22 See Chapter 4.3.2. 23 See Chapter 5.2.3. 24 See Chapter 5.3.3. 25 For a discussion of the relation between Wittgenstein and Searle, see Proudfoot 2002. 26 See the discussion in Chapter 4.2.3. Refer also to the value issues in table 5.2. 27 For a discussion, see Johnsen et al. (2015). 28 www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

256  Still a role for philosophy? 29 www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medi cal-research-involving-human-subjects/ 30 For a discussion, see Johnsen et al. (2018). 31 According to The Economist’s Democracy Index 2021, the number of democracies in the world is declining, www.eiu.com/n/democracy-index-2021-less-than-half-theworld-lives-in-a-democracy/ 32 See Chapter 1.2.1. 33 https://sdgs.un.org/goals 34 See Chapter 4.1.3. 35 See Chapter 5.3.2.

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SmP References  279 Habermas 1962 (p. 9) = Habermas, J. (1991). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hacking 1984 = Hacking, Ian (1983). Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl The Origin of Geometry (p. 102) = Husserl, Edmund (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated with an Introduction by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (Original work published 1938). Johnsen 2014 (footnote 413) = Johnsen 2016. Mackintosh 2005 (p. 197) = Mackintosh, Robert (2005). From Comte to Benjamin Kidd (First published 1899). London: Elibron Classics. Mann 1983 (p. 205) = Mann, T. (2021). Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. Translated by Cosima Mattner & Mark Lilla. New York: Frederick Ungar (Original work published 1918). Morros 2005 (p. 160) = Morris, D. (2005). Bergsonian Intuition, Husserlian Variation, Peirceian Abduction: Toward a relation between method, sense, and nature 1. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 43(2), 267–298. Parsons 1937 (footnote 416)  =  Parsons, T. (1937). The Structure of Social Action. New York: McGraw Hill. Popper 1945 (p. 114) = Popper, Karl (1966a). The Open Society and Its Enemies. Vol. 1: Plato. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, and Popper, Karl (1966b). The Open Society and Its Enemies. Vol. 1: Plato. Vol. 2: Hegel & Marx. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Shapere 1963 (pp. 36 and 128) = Shapere, D. (1963). Descartes and Plato. Journal of the History of Ideas 24(4), 572–576. Sherratt 2006 (pp. 151 and 151, and footnote 238) = Sherratt, Yvonne (2006). Continental Philosophy of Social Science: Hermeneutics, Genealogy, Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sigmund 2017 (footnote 173) = Sigmund, K. (2018). Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science. New York, NY.: Hachette. Stadler 2019 (footnote 180)  =  Stadler, Friedrich (ed.) (2019). Ernst Mach – Life, Work, Influence. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Steward 2003 (p 151) = Stewart, J. (2008). Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead (1925) = Whitehead, Alfred North (1967). Science in the Modern World. New York: Free Press (Original work published 1925).

Index

Page numbers that appear in bold indicate an item in table. abduction 213 Adorno, Theodor W. 50n56, 173n102, 197 – 9 After Theory 247 Albert, Hans 202 Alcibiades 21 Alcoff, L.M. 205 alternative truth 224 Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (Schlick) 80 altruism 65 – 6 analytical philosophy 52, 69 – 71, 109n71 analytical statements 39 anarchy 190 antinomies, 130, 250 Apel, Karl-Otto 63, 163, 217 a priori 46 – 7, 46, 60 – 3, 70, 73 – 75, 82, 91 – 2, 123 –30, 137 Aquinas, Thomas 36 – 9 Arendt, Hannah 4, 7, 33, 158, 160 argumentative theory, 228 Aristotle: astronomy and 41; categorisation of things and 27 – 31, 49n25; critique of position on truth and knowledge 31 – 5, 35; Descartes and 116 – 7; ideas of in Middle Ages and Renaissance 19; inductive methodology 19; Middle Ages and ideas of 36 – 42; modern science and 19; praxis and 212; representation in The School of Athens 21; separation into physics and metaphysics and 42 art 157 – 9, 208, 234n60, 235n87, 242 artificial intelligence (AI) 247, 250 – 1; See also technology atomic facts, 77 Aufbau See Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (Carnap) Auguste Comte and Positivism (Mill) 67

Austin, John 97, 113n134 Averroes (Ibn Rushed) 21 Bacon, Francis 6, 12, 24, 35 – 6, 52 – 4, 239 Bacon, Roger 37, 49n43 Baden school of neo-Kantianism idealism 141 – 2 Banach-Tarski paradox 108n63 Barthes, Roland 205 Bauman, Zygmunt 252 Being and Time (Heidegger) 156 Bell, Daniel 191 Bentham, Jeremy 67, 107n50 Berger, Peter L. 197, 218 Bergson, Henri 120, 146 – 7 Berkeley, George 11, 39, 59 – 60, 68, 137, 184 – 5 Berlin Circle 87, 112n131 Bernstein, Richard 159 – 60, 178 – 9, 181, 184, 212 Bildung concept 132 – 3 Blackburn, Simon 202 black swan argument 61, 69, 107n53, 121 Bloor, David 222 – 3 Boghossian, Paul A. 237n118 Boghossian, Peter 228, 237n118 Bourdieu, Pierre 205 Brentano, Franz 147 Brouwer, Luitzen E.J. 96 Brower, Jeffrey E. 37 – 8 Burrell, Gibson 227 Čapek, Karel 228 Carnap, Rudolf: constructivist theory and 88 – 92; demarcation problem and 92 – 3; ethics and 252; language theory and 84 – 5; logical positivism and 82 – 3;

Index 281 on metaphysics and science 43, 178; objective language thesis of 81 – 2; physicalism and 83; Popper and 100 – 1, 112n126; on realist-idealist divide 4 – 5, 7; Vienna Circle and 81; within Kantian framework 47 Cartesian anxiety 181 Cartesianische Meditationen (Husserl) 151 Cassirer, Ernst 130 – 1, 142 categorical imperative 129 Categories (Aristotle) 27, 127 categories (Kant), 125 – 8 Catholic Church 19, 36 – 40, 168n9 Ce que parler veut dire (Bourdieu) 205 certainty, 182, 240 Chinese Room (Searle) 251 Chomsky, Noam 192 Climate Casino, The (Nordhaus) 192 climate change 3, 192 – 3 Climate Change 2021 (IPCC) 192 Cogent Science in Context (Rehg) 228 – 9 coherence, 86, 94, 99 communicative rationality 113n134, 164 – 5, 168, 200, 202, 249 complex concept 87 Comte, Auguste 52, 64 – 7, 65, 187 – 8, 242 La condition postmoderne (Lyotard) 191 Conjunctures and Refutations (Popper) 93 construction, 87 – 9, 91 constructional theory, 84 constructive empiricism (van Fraassen) 236n99 constructivism: Descartes and 115 – 21, 186; Hayek on 231n33; Kant and 121 – 30 context of discovery 102, 112n127, 246, 248 context of justification 101 – 2, 112n127, 247 – 8 continental divide 142 continental philosophy 90, 115, 142 continental thinking, 120 – 1 conventionalism 246 Copenhagen interpretation 79 – 80 correspondence theory 85 Cours de philosophie positive (Comte) 64 – 7 COVID-19 pandemic 224, 236n107, 248 creative destruction 141 critical dialectics 198 critical rationalism 63 – 4, 92 – 4, 98 – 101 critical theory 184, 197 – 202, 203, 204, 214 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 122 – 3, 125

Cusset, Francois 209 cynicism 183 Dali, Salvador 231n25 Dasein 47, 140, 154 – 7, 162, 212 Davis, Paul 80 de Caro, M. 217 Declaration of Helsinki (1964) 252 decomposing 149, 206 deconstruction 160, 209 deductive-nomological model (DN model) 87 deductive reasoning 24 – 7, 31 – 5 DeGré, Gerard 218 degrees of confirmation 85 dehumanising 175n142 De La Division Du Travail Social (Durkheim) 66, 188 demarcation, problem of 49n35, 81, 92, 100, 102, 190, 248 Derrida, Jacques 149, 206 – 7, 209 Descartes, René: Francis Bacon and 54 – 5; Catholic Church and 168n9; dualism and 55, 116 – 20, 239, 249; identification of science as natural philosophy 6; individual and 139; Kant and 121; knowledge and 124; mathematics and 41; modern idealism and 115 – 21; Plato’s forms and 28; Russell on 72; scepticism and 180 – 1; on truth 33 deVries, W. 216 – 7 Dewey, John 210, 213 – 5 Dialektik der Aufklärung (Adorno and Horkheimer) 197 Dilthey, Wilhelm 143, 146, 160 Diogenes 21, 183 directedness 147 direct realism 56 Discours de la méthode (Descartes) 118 doubting, Descartes’ 180 – 1 Le Doute de Cézanne (Merleau-Ponty) 209 Dreyfus, Hubert 251 dualism 55, 116 – 20, 122 – 3, 125, 239, 249 Duhem, Pierre 78, 91 Duhem-Quine thesis 91, 100 Dummett, Michael 73, 109n71, 150 Durkheim, Émile: ideas of social evolution and 187 – 9; on religion 173n95, 218; role of science in society and 188; science and 65; sociology of knowledge and 188; structuralism and 204 echo chamber 105n8 Eikeland, Olav 30, 32

282 Index Eilenberger, Wolfram 154 Einstein, Albert 52, 78 – 80 empiricism: Hume’s science of man and 60 – 4; language theory and 84 – 6; natural law and 39; perspective on science of 245; phenomenalism and 53 – 9; positivism 64 – 9; Vienna circle and 78 – 84 encyclopaedists 121 Engels, Friedrich 136 Engler, O. 79 Enlightenment 5, 41, 121, 130, 187, 198 – 9, 215 – 6 Epicurus 117 Epinomis (Plato) 31 Epistemic Cultures (Knorr Cetina) 221 epistemology: Adorno on 50n56; author’s use of 44; critical theory and 199; interpretation and 44; Kant and 43, 123; Mannheim on 196 – 7; metaphysics and 42 – 4, 43; as portion of approach to science 10 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke) 55 essentialism 140 ‘ethos of science, The’ (Merton) 220 Euclid 21, 70 evolution: Aristotle and 136; Hegel and 136, 171n64, 187; Hume on 61, 186; of knowledge 184 – 6; Kuhn on 102 – 3; Popper and 93; social 171n64, 186 – 9, 194, 207 existentialism: critics of Hegel and 135 – 41; discussion of 197; German idealism and 130; Hegel and 133 – 9; new technology and 250 explanans 88, 112n117 explanandum 88 false consciousness 197, 202 feminism 209 – 10 Feyerabend, Paul 10, 189 – 91, 253 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 131 – 2, 242 first philosophy 119, 173n102 formation of the self 214 formative role 188 forms, theory of, 24, 48n3 Foucault, Michel 14, 131, 205 – 6, 208, 225 – 6 foundationalism 103, 136, 181, 193, 199, 202, 211 Frankfurter school of critical theory 197 Frege, Gottlob 52, 70 – 4, 148 Friedman, Michael 18n29, 82, 88 – 9 Friedman, Milton 246 – 7

From a Logical Point of View (Quine) 216 Fuller, Steve 4, 90, 92, 224 – 5, 237n112 fundamental ontology 154, 159 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 5, 133, 156, 158, 160 – 2, 184, 189 – 91 Galileo Galilei 25 Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (Nietzsche) 140 German Historical School 143 German idealism 130, 142 Gettier, Edmund Lee 32 Glendinning, Simon 207 Glock, Hans-Johan 91 Gödel, Kurt 109n72 Google 1 Gordon, Peter 142 Grayling, Anthony Clifford 59, 76 Greater Hippas 26 grievance studies affair 228 Guba, Egon G. 228 Habermas, Jürgen: argumentation theory and 229 – 30; common knowledge and 63; communicative rationality and 113n134, 164 – 5, 168, 200, 202, 249; communicative theory of 162 – 4, 184; consensus theory of truth and 168; discourses and 227; foundationalism and 201 – 2; Gadamer vs. 161; on Hegel 134, 139; hermeneutic explication of meaning and 201; ideal talk situation 165; on Kant 131; logical empiricism vs. critical theory 203; methodology vs. foundation of science and 190 – 1; Putnam and 217; social theory and 165 – 7 Hacking, Ian 87, 101 Hamilton, Andy 24 Harris, Roy 204 – 5 Hayek, Fredrich August von 50n46, 113n136, 120, 186 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich: absolute idealism and 133; Aristotle’s formative principles and 28; critical theory and 177; Dewey and 214; existentialism and 131; foundationalism and 136; Heidegger and 153; humanism of 135; Kant and 134; on knowing 32; Marx on 194 – 5; modernity and 134 – 5; phenomenology and 137; post-structuralism and 177; science of logic 138 – 9, 138; spirit concept and 135 – 8; theory of history of 135, 194 – 5; Zeitgeist and 4

Index 283 Heidegger, Martin, 5; Aristotle’s formative principles and 28; Cassirer - Heidegger debate 142; correspondence theory of truth and 156 – 7; Dasein (there-being) and 140, 154, 156 – 8, 212; fundamental ontology of 154 – 6, 159; Hegel and 152; Husserl and 152; on Kant and Descartes 155; on knowing 33; phenomenology and 153 – 9; Rorty and 215 Heisenberg, Werner 79 – 80 Hempel, Carl Gustav 86 – 8, 112n112 Hempel’s raven 87 Heraclid 21 hermeneutics 160 – 1, 182 hermeneutic circle 161 heroic theories 185 historical spirit 134 historicism 172n70, 227 historiography 187 History of the Inductive Sciences (Whewell) 6 Hobbes, Thomas 39, 105n9 holism 90, 132 Holzner, B. 220 Horkheimer, Max 197 – 9, 210 – 1 How to Do Things With Words (Austin) 97 Human Condition (Arendt) 4, 158 humanism Kant and 131 Humboldt, Alexander von 132 – 3 Humbold, Wilhelm von 132 – 3 Hume, David, 27; Bloor and 223; categories of logic 62; Einstein and 79; empiricism and 52; on mathematics 70; private vs. academic scepticism and 186; scepticism and 239; science of man and 60 – 4, 106n26; social learning theory of knowledge 27, 185 – 7; synthetic vs. analytical statements and 39; truth and 33; within Kantian knowledge framework 47 Husserl, Edmund 7, 17n26; bracketing vs. epoché 151; Cartesian mind and 140; ideal meanings and 149 – 50; on the mind 174n108; phenomenology and 145 – 52, 172n72; transcendental subjectivity and 148 hypothetico-deductive method 93 ideal forms 125, 150 idealism: absolute 11, 132 – 3, 135 – 6; Carnap on 4 – 5, 7; Descartes and 115 – 21; epistemology and ontology and 44; epistemology of science and

11, 11; Kant and 121 – 6; meaning of 12 – 3; overview of 241; as philosophical system 1, 12; representation of in The School of Athens 21 ideal matter 150 ideal meanings 149 – 50 ideal talk situation 165 Ideen über eine bechreibende undzerg liedernde Psychologie (Dilthey) 146 ideographic knowledge 142 Ideologie und Utopie (Mannheim) 195 idols (Bacon) 54, 105n7 imagination 95, 127 – 9, 136, 170n38 immanent critique 3, 199 incommensurability 103 incompleteness theorem 109n72 inductive reasoning, skepticism about 61 inductive science: Francis Bacon and 53; critique of Aristotle’s position on knowledge and truth and 31 – 5; history of 6; Hume and 61; Popper and 100 inductive system (Aristotle) 30 Industrial Revolution 41 inside the whale concept 135, 193 – 7, 234n57 institutionalised activities 191, 197, 202, 221 – 2, 230 instrumentalization 133, 198 instrumentalisation of life 202 instrumentalism 93, 112n125, 246 – 7 instrumental rationality 162 – 3, 231n34 intentionality 109n73, 147 – 8, 150, 157, 172n72 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 192 interpretive method 143 International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science, The (Carnap) 90, 213 interpretivism, 143 – 5; German idealism and 130 Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, An (Carnap) 84 – 5, 89 introspection 155 irony 183 intuition 48n10, 73, 79, 118, 122, 127 – 9, 141, 146 – 7, 169n35 See also pure intuition Jalbert, John E. 146 James, William 210, 212 – 3 Jonas, Hans 157 judgement 8 – 9, 22, 46, 73, 123, 125, 127 – 9, 132 – 3, 136, 146, 170n38, 170n40

284 Index Kant, Immanuel: Berkeley’s criticism of Locke and 121 – 2; categorical imperative of 129; communicative theory and 249; constructivism and 131; Copernican revolution of 121 – 6; critical theory and 199 – 200; dualism 122 – 3, 125; enlightenment and 130 – 1, 242; epistemology and 43; ethics and 129 – 30; freedom and 139; Hegel and 134; Horkheimer on 199 – 200; on Hume 60, 63, 121 – 2, 239; imagination and 129; judgement and 127; knowledge framework of 45 – 8, 46, 62, 124 – 30; mathematics and 70 – 1; phenomenalism and 131; pure vs. practical reason and 123, 124 – 6; rationalism and 131; reason and 41; representative realism and 56; romanticism and 131 – 3; synthetic a priori knowledge and 126 – 30; synthetic vs. analytical statements and 39; togetherness principle and 127; transcendental categories of understanding 128 – 9, 128; transcendental character of knowledge and 27, 125; truth and 33; universal reason and 254 Kierkegaard, Søren 139 Knorr Cetina, Karin 220 – 1 knowing 133, 137, 152, 171n60, 196, 212, 240 knowledge: analytical statements 29; a posteriori knowledge 46, 47; a priori knowledge 46 – 7, 46; Aristotle on 27 – 31; as art form 8 – 9; as both possession and process 8; counting and 20; critical theory and 200; Descartes and 118 – 21; framework of Locke and 57; as general term 22, 44 – 5; Kantian framework and 45 – 8, 46; nominalism and 38 – 9; nomothetic vs. ideographic 142; Plato on 24 – 7; rationalism and 37 – 8; synthetic 47; synthetic statements and 39; truth/certainty and 22 – 4 Knowledge and Social Imaginary (Bloor) 222 knowledge society 189 – 93, 244 – 5 Kripke, Saul 74, 108n64 Kuhlmann, W. 163 – 4 Kuhn, Thomas: Bloor’s strong programme and 222 – 3; communicative turn and pragmatism and 225 – 7; critiques of paradigm theory and 227; Kuhn’s Gap and 228 – 9; paradigms in science and

52 – 3, 102 – 5, 226 – 7; Popper and 101; sociology of knowledge and 218; sociology of science and 227; on unity of science 103; Vienna Circle and 90 laboratories 223 – 4 Lakatos, Imre 227 language 161, 182, 205 language theory: analytical philosophy and 52, 71 – 3; analytical vs. synthetic statements 90 – 1; Austin and 97; constructivist theory and 88 – 90; language games of Wittgenstein and 23, 94 – 7, 178, 181 – 2; Quine and 90 – 2; reference vs. sense and 73 – 4; Vienna Circle and 84 – 6 Latour, Bruno: actor-network theory (ANT) and 224; rules of method and principles of 223, 237n109 – 110; science, technology, and society studies (STS) and 222; sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and 221 Laudan, Larry 227 Law, John 221 Lebensphilosophie 115, 143 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von 42, 123 – 4 Leroi, Armand Marie 31 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 205, 218, 233n44 life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) 115, 143 lines of thought, as term 16 linguistic theory 69 – 70 linguistic turn, 69, 72 – 3, 95, 178, 204, 226 – 7, 239 lion and fox archetypes 224 Locke, John: Brentano and 147; British empiricism and 52; democracy and 242; knowledge framework of 57, 60; phenomenalism and 55 – 8, 56 Locke’s dilemma 59 – 60, 105n14, 106n20 logic 62, 69 – 71 logical empiricism: conflicts within 86, 88 – 90; critical theory vs. 203; Hempel and 86 – 8; methodology and 12; position of on science-philosophy relation 7; Quine and 90 – 2; tradition of 1, 52; Vienna Circle and 52, 81 – 7 Logical Investigations (Logische Untersuchungen, Husserl) 145 – 6 Logical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 178, 181 logical positivism: demarcation problem 92 – 3; value-free facts and 201; Vienna circle and 81 – 4, 111n97 logical turn 216

Index 285 Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (Carnap) 4 – 5, 81, 88 – 9 Logische Syntax der Sprache (Carnap) 89 Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations, Husserl) 145 – 6 Löwith, Karl 134 – 5 Luckmann, Thomas 197, 218 Luhmann, Niklas 221 Lyotard, Jean-François 191 Macarthur, D. 217 Mach, Ernst 52, 78 – 80, 110n95 machine learning 247 Mannheim, Karl 193, 195 – 7, 219 Mann, Thomas,193 – 4 Marburg school of neo-Kantian idealism 141 – 2 Marx, J.H. 220 Marx, Karl 83, 135 – 6, 194 – 5, 218 mathematics: analytical philosophy and 52, 70; Roger Bacon and 37; as describing abstract reality 24; Enlightenment and 41 – 2; Frege and 148; Husserl and 148 – 9; Kant on 47; Newton and 41; positivism and 65 – 6; Russell paradox and 75 Mauss, M. 218 Maxwell, Nicholas 100 McCarthy, E. Doyle 218 McDowell, John Henry 182 – 3 Mead, George Herbert 214 – 5 Meaning of Truth, The (James) 213 Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditation on First Philosophy, Descartes) 118 – 9 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 204, 209 Merton, Robert 218 – 20 metaphysical stage 65 metaphysics 7, 10 – 1, 42 – 4, 43 Metaphysik der Sitten (Kant) 129 methodology 13 – 6, 17n20 Metodenstreit 143 Middle Ages 35 – 42 Mill, John Stuart 33 – 4, 52, 67 – 9, 107n52, 194, 242 mind-dependent reality 60, 80, 116, 126, 148, 240 mind-dependent world 59 – 60 Mind, Self, and Society (Mead) 214 – 5 Der moderne Kapitalismus (Weber) 144 modernist criticism 170n44 Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman) 252 monism 55

Monk, Ray 14, 96 Morgan, Gareth 227 ‘Motive der Forshung’ (Einstein) 79 Munz, Peter 95 myth of the cave (Plato) 27 Nagel, Thomas 185 Naissance de la Biopolitique (Foucault) 206 naïve realism 56 Naming and Necessity (Kripke) 109n70 naturalism 12, 91, 105, 107n36, 214, 231n30 naturalistic turn 216 Nazism 197 – 8 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 21 neo-Kantianism 141 – 5 neoliberalism 206 neo-positivism 7 – 8, 8, 52, 69, 81 – 2, 84, 95, 148, 160; See also Vienna Circle Neurath, (1959) 83 New Atlantis (Bacon) 54 Newton, Isaac 4, 41, 60, 62, 126 Nietzsche, Friedrich 139 – 41, 181, 193, 195, 207 – 8, 239 nihilism 140 – 1, 181, 231n18, 239 nominalism 38 – 40, 57 – 8, 140 nomothetic approach, 142 noumenon (Kant) 125, 137 Nordhaus, William Dawbney 192, 233n55 Novum Organum Scientiarum (Bacon) 6, 12, 24, 52, 239 objectivism 179 Objectivism and the Study of Man (Skjervheim) 73 Ockham, William of 38 – 9 ‘On denoting’ (Russell) 71 ontology 42 – 4, 43 Oppenheim, Paul 87 Organon (Aristotle) 15, 27, 70 Owens, Joseph 28 Papineau, David 10 – 2 paradigms 52 – 3, 102 – 5, 226 – 7, 237n113 paradox of the liar 108n64, 113n140 Pascal, Blaise 70 Peirce, Charles Sanders 11, 35, 210, 213, 217 performative utterances 97 Perloff, Marjorie 209 Phaedo (Plato) 25 – 7 Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hegel) 134 phenomenalism 11, 53 – 4, 55 – 9, 56, 57, 105n13

286 Index phenomenology: Brentano and 147 – 8; communicative rationality 164 – 5; Gadamer and 160 – 2; Habermas and 162 – 5; Hegel and 137; Heidegger and 153 – 9; Husserl and 145 – 52, 172n72; idealism and 11; methodology and 12; neo-Kantianism and 141 – 5; open questions and 249; position of on science-philosophy relation 6, 7; postmodernism and 204; pragmatism and 212, 215; relations between subject and object and 146; tradition of 1; transcendental self and 152; Whitehead and 152 – 3 Phenomenology of the Spirit, The (Hegel) 32 philosophical anthropology 195, 218, 234n63 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 96 – 7, 250 Philosophie der Arithmetik (Husserl and Willard) 148 Philosophiœ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Newton) 41 Philosophische Untersuchungen (Wittgenstein) 94 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty) 6 Philosophy in an Age of Science (Putnam) 5 philosophy of science 104 – 5 Philosophy of Science, The (Toulmin) 96 philosophy of social science 115 phronesis 212 physicalism 83 Plato: in context of ancient world 15; critique of position on truth and knowledge 31 – 5, 35; deductive methodology and 19; Descartes and 116 – 7; dialogical reasoning and 19; idealism-realism and 11; ideas of in Middle Ages and Renaissance 19; Kantian knowledge framework and 47 – 8; on knowledge and truth 24 – 7; methodology and 15; modern science and 19; relation between knowledge and art and 9; representation in The School of Athens 21; roots of scepticism and 180; science as king model 2 – 3; theory of forms and 24, 48n3 Plato/Aristotle controversy 19 – 22, 116 – 7 Polanyi, Michael on knowing 32, 40 Popper, Karl: Carnap and, 100 – 1 112n126; critical rationalism and 52, 92 – 4, 98 – 101, 105, 111n107; dualism and 240; on first-hand impressions 33 – 4;

on Plato/Aristotle controversy 20, 30; pluralism and 242; theory of falsification 99 – 100, 201; Wittgenstein and 97 – 8 position, as term 16 positive stage 65 – 6, 187 positivism 43, 198, 200 – 1, 245 positivist dispute (positivism dispute) 174n144, 200, 234n70 post-colonialism 209 – 10 postmodernism 204, 250 post positivism 52, 90 – 2, 98 – 101 post-structuralism: Bourdieu and 205; decomposition and 206; Derrida on 206 – 7; disagreements in science and 250; Habermas on 204; Nietzsche 207 – 8; scepticism and 204 – 10; social movements and 209 – 10; sociology of knowledge and 210; Sokal and 228; structuralism and 205 post-theory 247 post-truth 224 – 5 post-truth society 3 Post Truth (Fuller) 224 pragmatism: Aristotle and 212; critical theory and 214; foundationalism and 211; logical turn in 216; metaphysics and 211; naturalistic turn in 216; neoKantian 217; phenomenology and 212, 215; practice and 211; scepticism and 210 – 7; Vienna Circle and 90 praxis 212 predicate 29 pre-understanding 182, 201 Principia Mathematica (Whitehead and Russell) 152 Principle of Tolerance (Carnap) 89 probabilistic strategy 64 Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik (Kant) 127 Protagoras 33, 211 Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Weber) 144 pseudo-problems in science 93 psychologism 109n68, 148 Public and its Problems, The (Dewey) 213 pure intuition 141 – 2 Putnam, Hilary 5, 74, 210, 217, 254 Pythagoras 21, 24, 70 Quine, Willard Van Orman 52, 90 – 2, 105, 152, 216 – 7, 244 racism 192 Ramsey, Frank 95 – 6

Index 287 Raphael 21 rationalisation 131, 158, 191, 206, 208 rationalism 37 – 8, 38, 50n46, 54, 121 – 2 Rawls, John 131, 170n48, 214 realism: Carnap on 4 – 5, 7; Descartes and 117; developments within track of 52 – 3; epistemology and ontology and 44; epistemology of science and 11, 11; Kuhn and 104; meaning of 12; overview of 241; as philosophical system 1, 12, 239; representation of in The School of Athens 21; types of 56 Rehg, William 228 – 9 Reichenbach, Hans 185, 217 relativism 164, 179, 183, 230n9 religion 173n95, 197, 219 – 20 Renn, J. 79 representative realism 55, 56 res cogitans 118 – 9, 155 research 230, 252 res extensa 118 – 9, 155 research programme 227 research traditions 227 retroduction 213 Road since Structure, The (Kuhn) 102 – 3 romanticism 115, 131 – 3 Rorty, Richard 5 – 6, 7, 102, 178 – 9, 183 – 4, 210, 215 Russell, Bertrand 11, 47, 52, 62, 70 – 2, 74 – 6, 211 Russell-Meinung debate 108n60 Ryle, Gilbert 29, 32, 116, 211 Il Saggiatore (Galileo) 25 Saint-Simon, Henri de 64 sane society 10, 17n24 Sartre, Jean-Paul 139 – 40 Sartwell, Crispin 34 Saussure, Ferdinand de 204 – 5 saving the phenomena (Duhem) 78 sceptical realism 56 scepticism: Berkeley on 184 – 5; Bernstein 179; critical theory and 197 – 202, 203, 204; Descartes and 117; epistemology of science and 11, 11; forms of 184, 184; idealismrealism and 11 – 2; knowledge as an evolutionary process and 184 – 7; knowledge society and 189 – 93; Kuhn and 225 – 7; meaning and 183; naturalist version of the evolutionary argument 187 non-foundationalism and 181; overview of 241; paradigm theory and 225 – 8; as philosophical system

1, 12; post-structuralism and 204 – 10; pragmatism and 210 – 7; representation of in The School of Athens 21; roots of 180 – 4; Rorty and 178 – 9; sociology of knowledge and 195 – 7, 217 – 25; speculative version of the evolutionary argument and 187; Wittgenstein 182 Schapiro, Meyer 159 Scheler, Max Ferdinand 195, 218 Schlick, Moritz 3 – 4, 22, 79 – 81, 83, 89, 127, 242 scholasticism 40, 118 School of Athens, The (Raphael) 21 Schrödinger, Erwin 79 Schumpeter, Joseph 141 science: as a discourse 227; anarchy in 190; Roger Bacon and 37; Comte’s positivist method and 65 – 6; Descartes’s identification of science as natural philosophy 6; disagreement in 227 – 30, 250; Duhem-Quine thesis 91, 100; ethics and 5, 219 – 20, 252 – 5; European philosophy and 9; Feyerabend’s critiques and 190; fundamental questions regarding 240; as general term 1 – 2; Hume’s science of man and 60 – 4; idealist view of 243; inductive reasoning and 53; interpretive method and 143; interrelated idea of 246; as knowledge production 220 – 1; Kuhn’s historical philosophy of 102 – 5; legitimacy and 230; linear idea of 245 – 6; Merton’s institutional imperatives and 220; methodological turn and 244; open questions for the future of 248 – 51; paradigms in 52 – 3, 102 – 5, 226 – 7, 237n113; perspectives on 244 – 5, 245; as pluralistic 8, 12, 16, 238 – 42; as policy tool 191; Popper on 92 – 4; positivism and 64 – 7; possibilities for science-philosophy relationships 3 – 6, 6; in post-truth society 3, 16; realist view of 243; relationship with society and 8; representation vs. intervention 101; role of in society 188 – 90; scepticalist view of 243; self-referential system theory and 221; social and political dimension to 242; as social enterprise 217 – 8; sustainability and 17n1, 245 – 6, 253 – 4; systemic idea of 245 – 6; Vienna circle and 84 – 5 Science in a Free Society (Feyerabend) 10 Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik, Hegel) 137

288 Index science, technology, and society studies (STS) 222 – 3 science war 228 scientific realism 101, 216 – 7 Scientific Revolution 41, 78, 102 scientism 7, 17n18, 44 Scotus, Duns 39 – 40 Seamon, David 132 Searle, John 251 Sein und Zeit (Heidegger) 153 self-reference problem 106n21, 207 Sellars, Wilfrid 216 – 7 sensationalism 11 – 2, 11, 117, 152 – 3 sensationalists 11, 107n52, 117, 137 set theory 72 shared practice, language as 95, 182 Sherratt, Yvonne 140 Siedentop, L. 39 Simon, Herbert 247, 251 Simulations (Derrida) 209 Skinner, Quentin 18n30 Smith, Barry 212 Smith, David Woodruff 42, 145 – 6, 149 – 50 sociology 199, 217 – 8, 227 – 8 sociology of knowledge: Durkheim and 188; interpretivism and 145; Locke and 58; Mannheim and 195 – 7; Mead on 215; Merton’s formulation of 218 – 20; poststructuralism and 210; post-truth and 224 – 5; Scheler and 195; stages of 218 sociology of science 1, 177 sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK): community of practice theory and 221 – 2; expert systems and 220; ideologies and 220; Knorr Cetina and 220 – 1; Locke and 58; Merton and 220; methodology and 12; as research field 226; scepticism and 11 – 2 Socrates 9, 21, 26, 180 Sokal, Alan 228 Speusippus 20 Stadler, Friedrich 80 – 1 Statesman (Plato) 9 Stewart, Jon 139 stoicism 183 strong programme 222 structuralism 187 – 8, 204 – 5 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn) 90, 225 subjective objectivity 163 subjectivity 161 – 2 suitability 239

sustainability 3, 17n1, 245 – 6, 253 – 4 syntax 71, 89 synthetic statements 39 System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, A (Mill) 67 – 8 tabula rasa 124 tacit knowing 40 Tarski, Alfred 98, 108n64, 113n140 technology 157, 157 – 8, 223 – 4, 250; See also artificial intelligence (AI) tekhnê 30, 49n29 Textor, Mark 73, 127 Theaetetus (Plato) 31 theological stage 65 theoresis 30, 49n29 theoria 30, 49n29, 212 Theorie und Praxis (Habermas) 166 togetherness principle 127 Toulmin, Stephen 96 track, as term 16 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein) 70, 72, 75, 77 – 8, 83, 85 tradition, as term 16 trail, as term 16 transcendental categories 125, 127 – 9, 128 transcendental deduction 47 transcendental idealism 27, 145, 214, 241 transcendental reason 129, 254 transcendental subjectivity 146, 148 transcendental understanding 151 – 2 Transcendental-Pragmatics 163 – 4 ‘Transgressing the boundaries’ (Sokal) 228 Treatise of Human Nature, A (Hume) 60 truth: Aristotle and 28 – 31; concept of within knowledge 22 – 4; correspondence theory of 85, 103, 156; critiques of approaches to 31 – 5; empirical vs. metaphysical 24; Plato on 24 – 7 Turing, Alan 250 – 1 Über Sinn und Bedeutung (Frege) 72 – 3 Ueber Begriff und Gegenstand (Frege) 72 – 3 Unity of Science, The (Carnap) 83, 213 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 252 universals, 28, 37 – 9, 58, 74 – 5 Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Heidegger) 159 Uses of Argument, The (Toulmin) 96 utilitarianism 67, 107n50, 171n69, 194

Index 289 validity 165 Van Fraassen, B. C. 236n99, 255n20 van Gogh, Vincent 159 verification 53, 64, 67 – 8, 100, 151 La vérité en peinture (Derrida), 159 Vienna Circle 7, 14, 18n31, 69 – 71, 78 – 86, 90 View from Nowhere, The (Nagel) 185 vindicationists 64 Voegelin, Eric 17n18 Voltaire 187 von Wright, Georg Henrik 40 – 1, 239 – 40 Vuillemin, Jules 12 Wagner, Gernot 192 Wahrheit und Methode (Gagamer) 160 War with the Newts (Čapek) 228 Watkins, John on Hume 63 – 4 Weber, Max 83, 144, 173n95, 187 – 9 Weitzman, Martin L. 192 Weltanschauung, as term 16 Die Wende der Philosophie (Schlick) 83 Whewell, William 6, 67 Whitehead, Alfred North: on abstract notion of numbers 20; on Berkeley 152 – 3; definition of science of 8 – 9; German idealism and 130; on Hume 62; mathematics and 70;

Middle Age science and 35 – 6, 40; on phenomenology 145 Wider den Methodenzwang (Feyerabend) 190 will 133, 140 – 1 Windelband, Wilhelm 142 Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic, Hegel) 137 Wissenschaftliches Weltanschauung (Vienna Circle) 80 – 1 Die Wissenschaftslehre (Fichte) 132 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: analytical philosophy and 52, 70; artificial intelligence (AI) and 250 – 1; atomic facts of 77; Bloor and 222; on conflict between science and philosophy 5; evolution of ideas and 14, 94 – 7; language games and 94 – 7, 178, 181 – 2; Rorty and 215; scepticism and 182; sociology of language and 52; theory of language and 75 – 8; on truth and knowledge 23 – 4; truth function of 109n75 Wolff, Christian 123 world view, as term 16 World War II 5, 90, 252 Zajonc, Arthur 132 zeitgeist 4 Zöller, Günter 45, 127, 129