Issues and Images in the Philosophy of Science: Scientific and Philosophical Essays in Honour of Azarya Polikarov

417 Pages·1997·12.777 MB·English

by  Joseph Agassi (auth.), Dimitri Ginev, Robert S. Cohen (eds.)

ISSUES AND IMAGES
IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Editor
ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University
MARX W. WARTOFSKyt (Editor from 1960-1997)
Editorial Advisory Board
THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University
ADOLF GRUNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh
SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University
JOHN 1. STACHEL, Boston University
VOLUME 192
AZARYA POLIKAROV
Issues and Images
in the Philosophy of Science
Scientific and Philosophical Essays
in Honour of Azarya Polikarov
Edited hy
DIMITRI GINEV
University of Sofia, Bulgaria
and
ROBERT S. COHEN
Boston University
Springer Science+Business Media, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-94-010-6443-9 ISBN 978-94-011-5788-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-5788-9
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1997
Softcover reprint of the hardcover lst edition 1997
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
inc1uding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE / Robert S. Cohen IX
INTRODUCTION / Dimitri Ginev Xlll
JOSEPH AGASSI / Who Needs Aristotle?
EVANDRO AGAZZI / Naive Realism and Naive Antirealism 13
BABETTE E. BABICH / Against Postmodernism and the "New"
Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche's Image of Science in the Light of
Art 27
EFTICHIOS BITSAKIS / On the Validity of von Neumann's Theorem 47
RONALD N. GIERE / Explaining Scientific Revolutions 63
DIMITRI GINEV / Micro- and Macro-Hermeneutics of Science 87
ROM HARRE / The Redundancy of Spacetime: Special Relativity
as a Grammar and the Strangeness of 'c' 95
PATRICK A. HEELAN / Context, Hermeneutics, and Ontology in
the Experimental Sciences 107
WILLIAM. E. HERFEL AND CLIFFORD A. HOOKER / Cognitive
Dynamics and the Development of Science 127
PETER JANICH / Methodical Constructivism 173
JOSEPH J. KOCKELMANS / Hermeneutic vs. Empiricist Philosophy
of Science 191
WLADYSLAW KRAJEWSKI/Must the Explanans be True') 217
DAVID LAMB / Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence:
SETI and Scientific Methodology 223
RAM6N QUERALT6 / Since Indeterminacy: The New Picture of
the Physical World at the End of Modernity 253
FRIEDRICH RAPP / The Dynamics of Science 263
NICHOLAS RESCHER / The Law of Logarithmic Returns and Its
Implications 275
Vll
viii TABLE OF CONTENTS
HANS JORG SANDKUHLER / The Human Right to Know and the
Reality of Knowledge 289
HOWARD SANKEY / Kuhn's Ontological Relativism 305
ERHARD SCHEIBE / The Problem of Reduction in the Theory of
Special Relativity 321
MANFRED STOECKLER / Symmetries and Explanations: The
Lessons of Elementary Particle Physics 343
LADISLAV TONDL / Cognition as a System 357
A. I. UYEMOV / System Approach to the Problem of the
Classification of Sciences and Scientific Researches 377
APPENDIX / Azarya Polikarov: Selected Books and Articles 391
NAME INDEX 397
PREFACE
Azarya Polikarov was born in Sofia on October 9, 1921. Through the many
stages of politics, economy, and culture in Bulgaria, he maintained his rational
humanity and scientific curiosity. He has been a splendid teacher and an
accomplished critical philosopher exploring the conceptual and historical vicis
situdes of physics in modern times and also the science policies that favor
or threaten human life in these decades. Equally and easily at home both within
the Eastern and Central European countries and within the Western world.
Polikarov is known as a collaborating genial colleague, a working scholar.
not at all a visiting academic tourist. He understands the philosophy of science
from within, in all its developments, from the classical beginnings through
the great ages of Galilean, Newtonian. Maxwellian science. to the times of
the stunning discoveries and imaginative theories of his beloved Einstein and
Bohr of the twentieth century. Moreover, his understanding has come along
with a deep knowledge of the scientific topics in themselves.
Looking at our Appendix listing his principal publications, we see that
Polikarov's public research career, after years of science teaching and popular
science writing, began in the fifties in Bulgarian, Russian and German journals.
developed a dozen books. and became internationally distinguished with 30
papers and essays in English, 24 in Russian. 28 in German. along with 32 in
Bulgarian, among our 'selected' list. We see also that Polikarov examines
all the central issues of philosophical understanding of science and of nature
causality and determinism, perception and observation, ontological prerequi
sites and ontological entailments of our changing scientific theories. historical
contexts and systematic contents of the sciences, and, above all. the methods
followed, explicitly or implicitly. He is the master methodologist.
In his first book in English, Science and Philosophy (Sofia, 1973). Polikarov
set his path with a summary of his earlier works and program for what was
to come. A revised version of the first essay in this book was published in
the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Vol. 14, 1974) under a title
which may serve as his research motto, 'The Divergent-Convergent Method
- A Heuristic Approach to Problem-Solving.'
His second volume, again in English, appeared a decade later under a further
clarifying full title: Methodological Problems of Science - The Iteration Cycle:
Science - Methodology of Science (Sofia, 1983). His scope was now encom
passing every variant of philosophy of science, and the book presented his
major exposition of what he termed 'the historical perspective', following
critical analysis of heuristics, hypothetico-deductive classifications, and then
in detail the case of the transition to relativistic physics.
Recently, after another decade, a third volume appeared, as yet only in
IX
D. Ginev and R. S. Cohen (eds.), Issues and Images in the Philosophy of Science. ix-xi.
© 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
x PREFACE
Bulgarian, under the title Revolutions in Physics (Sofia, 1995), with a thorough
examination of Kuhn's view of the 'structure' of these revolutions, of the
subsequent literature concerning Kuhn's views, and of Polikarov's system
atic classification of alternative understandings of historical changes and
evolution in science (including those of Hanson, Toulmin, Kedrov, Lakatos,
Feyerabend). A succinct and fascinating section appeared in English in a recent
volume, Physics, Philosophy and the Scientific Community (Boston Studies,
Vol. 163, 1995) under the title 'Some Questions Concerning Limitations of
the Range of Validity of Kuhn's Model of the History of Science'.
Meanwhile, Polikarov contributed to many congresses, symposia and insti
tutions. A valuable essay, written with Dr. Ginev in 1989, was prepared for
The Philosophy of A. 1. Ayer (LaSalle, 1992), entitled 'Remarks on Logical
Empiricism and Some of A. J. Ayer's Achievements Some Fifty Years Later'.
Ayer's friendly response notably accepted Polikarov's suggestion concerning
heuristic elements in what might be seen as 'metaphysical' statements within
scientific theory.
Professor Polikarov has been a member of scientific centers in many places.
His original and continuing work in Moscow (Ph.D., Institute of Philosophy,
1964); his visiting professorships in German universities, East and West; his
three years during the later 60s as philosophy program specialist at Unesco
in Paris; his appointments as Senior Research Associate in our Center for
Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and at the Center
for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 70s;
his collaborative work in the USSR and then in the new Russia, and in many
other European academic centers. Indeed, Polikarov was always an indepen
dent channel of international philosophical communication, accurate, complete,
sympathetic. I recall his helpful survey of 'Philosophie und Physik in den
Ost-Europaischen Landern' written for the 1968 issue of Professor Klibansky'
Contemporary Philosophy (Firenze, 1958). It was a small essay of 17 pages,
concise, thorough, admirable, and typical of his quality of mind and purpose.
Another fine paper by Polikarov was soon delivered at the International
Congress for the History of Science of 1971 in Moscow: 'From Successive
to Parallel Conceptions: An Attempt to Generalize Kuhn's Paradigms
Conception'. There he devoted a complex analysis, among other topics, to
the creation of Hertz's theoretical system of a force-free kinematics as alter
native to Newtonian dynamics, and to the 19th century development of the two
competing systems of phenomenological and statistical thermodynamics.
* * *
In this volume, following Dimitri Ginev's lucid introductory essay on
Polikarov's philosophical methodology of science, 24 scholars from a dozen
countries honor Professor Polikarov by dedicating to him their research papers
on theoretical practices of the science, with particular attention to physics. The
'issues and images' will be familiar to Polikarov himself for they parallel or
PREFACE Xl
reflect or refract his own concerns: realism and anti-realism, hermeneutics
and the ontology of science, determinism and indeterminism, symmetries and
alternatives among explanations, cognitive dynamics, the 'new' philosophy
of science (with Nietzsche) and the ancient classical philosophy of science
(with Aristotle), constructivism and systems and classifications, even putative
communication with extra-terrestrial intelligence. Throughout. these authors
attend to his great theme: clarity about the dialectic of method and heuristic.
Two favorite citations from Polikarov's beautifully documented publications
seem to resonate throughout his thought:
With accurate experiment and observation to work upon, imagination becomes the architect
of physical theory
(Tyndall)
The development of scientific method ... is the skeleton which carries the development of
the entire body of science.
(Boltzmann)
Boston University, Robert S. Cohen
November 1997