Scientific Though Forming Essay, Research Paper

The arguments about these rival ontological and epistemological

views cannot be safely left or judged without first looking more closely at the

complex relationship between the general analytical interests of philosophers

and the more specific intellectual concerns of working scientists themselves.

For the degree to which each view about the reality of scientific entities and

facts can carry conviction depends substantially on what branches of science are

at issue. As the focus of philosophical attention has shifted historically from

one scientific terrain to another, so, too, have the relative degrees of

plausibility of these rival positions varied. The formal structures of science:

Scientific enterprise will be considered that which has dominated recent debate

in the philosophy of science, viz., the formal structures of scientific theory

and the processes of conceptual change. It will soon be clear that the

philosophical problems to which these two aspects, respectively, give rise are

correlative and complementary–the one being static, the other being dynamic.

Since 1920, most analytical philosophers of science have explicitly based their

program on a presupposition inherited from Descartes and Plato, viz., that the

intellectual content of any natural science can be expressed in a formal

propositional system, having a definite, essential logical structure–what a

leading American philosopher of science, Ernest Nagel, concisely called

"the structure of science" in his book of that title (1961). One

immediate inspiration of this program was the work of David Hilbert, a late

19th-century mathematician. To make the methods of mathematical proof more

explicit and more perspicuous and thus more rigorous, Hilbert employed the

techniques of formalization, a reduction to relations while disregarding the

nature of the relata, and axiomatization, a tracing of entailments back to

accepted axioms. The same techniques were taken over into the philosophy of

mathematics by a pioneer German logician, Gottlob Frege, and into symbolic logic

by Bertrand Russell and his collaborator Alfred North Whitehead; and, from 1920

on, the Viennese Positivists and their successors attempted to employ them in

the philosophy of science also, hoping to demonstrate the validity of formal

patterns of scientific inference by the straightforward extension of methods

already familiar in deductive logic. According to the resulting program, the

primary task for the philosophy of science was to repeat in quite general terms

the kind of analysis by which, in the science of mechanics, Heinrich Hertz, the

formulator of electromagnetic wave theory, had already sorted out the formal

aspects of science from its empirical aspects. The program was founded on the

expectation that it would be possible, first, to demonstrate the existence of

formal structures that were essential to any science, properly so-called, and

second, to identify the nature of scientific laws, principles, hypotheses, and

observations by their characteristic logical functions. Once this had been done,

rigorous formal definitions could then be given of validity, probability, degree

of confirmation, and all of the other evidential relations involved in the

judgment of scientific arguments. Looking beyond the internal structure of

inductive logic, the dubious equation of scientific laws with empirical

generalizations has also been criticized on the ground that it treats the

content of those laws as matters of happenstance, far more accidental or

contingent than those expressed in any genuine law of nature. In the opposing

view, the explanatory force of, say, the physicist’s law of inertia is totally

different from that of such a generalizing statement as "All swans are

white"; and one can learn nothing about the validity of actual physical

arguments unless his philosophical analysis respects that crucial difference. It

has not proved easy, however, to analyze the formal structure of the sciences in

any less abstract manner than that of the Viennese Positivists or to give a true

representation of the working language and arguments of science. In his Essay on

Metaphysics (1940), R.G. Collingwood, a British philosopher and historian, made

one striking attempt, in which the formal structure of intellectual systems was

explained in terms not of direct entailments between more or less universal

propositions but rather of mutual presuppositions between more or less general

concepts. In this account, the principle of inertia was not the most universally

true assertion in dynamics but was, rather, the most generally applicable

presupposition, or principle of interpretation. Such an account has the merit of

explaining why, within a particular science, certain formal patterns of argument

carry the apparent necessity that they do; but at the same time it lays itself

open to the charge of yielding too much to relativism and so of destroying the

objectivity of scientific knowledge by giving the impression that the conceptual

structures of science are imposed on phenomena by the arbitrary choice of the

scientific theorist himself. Processes of intellectual and conceptual change.

Conceptual change and the development of science The problem of conceptual

change has recently come back to the fore. The crucial question it poses is:

"What is a concept?" In the heyday of Logical Empiricism, that

question had largely been disregarded. Following the example of Frege, the

Viennese Positivists had condemned any tendency to regard the philosophy of

science as concerned with scientific thinking–which was in their view a matter

for psychologists–and had restricted themselves to the formal analysis of

scientific arguments. This preoccupation with logic was also reflected in their

view of concepts. To interpret a concept such as force as referring either to a

feeling of effort or to a mental image could lead, they argued, only to

confusion. Instead, the philosopher must equate concepts with the terms and

variables appearing in the propositional systems of science and define them, in

part by reference to their roles in the formal structures of those propositional

systems–thus fixing their systematic import–and in part by reference to the

specific events and phenomena they are used to explain–thus fixing their

empirical import. In the 1920s and 1930s, accordingly, all substantive

philosophical questions about the concepts of science were dealt with summarily:

they were simply translated into logical or linguistic questions about the

formal roles and empirical references of technical terms and mathematical

variables. Viewed from this alternative standpoint, the philosophy of science

will begin by identifying the different styles of explanation characteristic of

different sciences or of different stages in a given science and will recognize

how those differences in explanatory style reflect the characteristic problems

of different scientific fields and periods. So considered, empirical

generalizations and descriptive classifications will serve to organize the

empirical data of science in a preliminary way; but serious theoretical

interpretation can begin only after that point. The central philosophical task

now is to analyze, clearly and explicitly, (1) the standards by appeal to which

scientists have to decide whether or not some interpretation is legitimate,

justified, and conclusively established and (2) the considerations that justify

giving up one currently accepted interpretation in favour of an alternative,

novel one. The first of these questions is one that the Logical Empiricists set

out to answer in their own manner. They treated the empirical data and the

theoretical principles of science as being connected by purely logical relations

and attempted to define the required standards in terms of a formal theory of

confirmation, corroboration, or falsification. The second question is one that

they never seriously tackled. Instead, they assumed that one could, first, work

out a quantitative index of acceptability for individual theories taken

separately and, afterward, use this as a scale for measuring and comparing the

merits of rival theoretical interpretations. By now, however, it is evident

that, when biophysicists, say, abandon one theoretical approach in favour of

another–as being more fruitful from the standpoint of biophysics–the

considerations that lead them to do so are by no means analyzable in formal

terms alone. On the contrary, the ability of a biochemist, say, to judge whether

or not such a change in approach will effectively help to solve his theoretical

problems is one of the most severe assessments of his substantive grasp of what

biochemistry is about. In this way, the shift of attention from the propositions

of science to its concepts is making philosophers more aware of the extent to

which theoretical understanding involves the reinterpretation of empirical

results, not merely their formal transformation. Similarly, the problem of

conceptual change is raising questions about the processes by which theoretical

interpretations succeed one another and about the procedures of conceptual

judgment that are applied in the rational development of a science. These

questions are currently under active discussion, and several lines of attack are

being considered, none of which has finally established itself. At one extreme,

there are some who still regard theoretical concepts and principles as organized

into compact, logical systems and who attempt to define the alternative

standpoints of different sciences as the consequences of different basic

premises or presuppositions. Having adopted this systematic approach, the

investigator then discovers that conceptual change at a fundamental level finds

adequate scope only through the replacement of one complete formal system by

another, distinct and separate successor system. As a result, fundamental

theoretical change is, in this view, intelligible only as the outcome of

thoroughgoing intellectual revolutions, in which one entire theoretical

system–axioms, principles, criteria of relevance, standards of judgment, and

all–is swept aside in favour of another. Whichever alternative is adopted, one

point must be kept in mind: the moment that problems about the changing

theoretical organization of science begin to be treated in an authentically

developmental manner, philosophical inquiries are given a quite new direction.

This step compels one to view all questions about the logical structure and

propositional systems of science against a broader historical background. In

this new context the natural sciences are seen not as static formal structures

but as rational enterprises characterized by certain typical intellectual

procedures or movements.

1) Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (1961). 2) M.W. Wartofsky,

Conceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought (1968). 3) Arthur Danto and Sidney

Morgenbesser (eds.), Philosophy of Science (1962). 4) Samuel B. Rapport and

Helen Wright (eds.), Science: Method and Meaning (1964). 5) W.H. Newton-Smith,

The Rationality of Science (1981).