The Structure and Growth of Scientific Knowledge: A Study in the Methodology of Epistemic Appraisal

250 Pages·1983·7.77 MB·English

by  G. L. Pandit (auth.)

THE STRUCTURE AND GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
EDITED BY ROBERTS. COHEN AND MARX W. WARTOFSKY
VOLUME 73
G. L. PANDIT
Department ofP hilosophy, University of Delhi
THE STRUCTURE
AND GROWTH
OF SCIENTIFIC
KNOWLEDGE
A Study in the Methodology of Epistemic Appraisal
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Pandit, G. L., 1945-
The structure and growth of scientific knowledge.
(Boston studies in the philosophy of sciences ; v. 73)
Bibliography: p.
Inc1udes indexes.
1. Science-Philosophy. 2. Science-Methodology.
3. Knowledge, Theory of. 1. Title. II. Series.
Q174.B67 voI. 73 [Q175) 501s [501) 82-12250
ISBN 978-90-481-8375-3 ISBN 978-94-015-7680-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-7680-2 .
AU Righ ts Reserved
Copyright © 1983 by Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
OriginaIly published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland in 1983
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1983
No part of the material protectcd by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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EDITORIAL PREFACE
Professor Pandit, working among the admirable group of philosophers at the
University of Delhi, has written a fundamental criticism and a constructive
re-interpretation of all that has been preserved as serious epistemological and
methodological reflections on the sciences in modern Western philosophy -
from the times of Galileo, Newton, Descartes and Leibniz to those of Russell
and Wittgenstein, Carnap and Popper, and, we need hardly add, onward to
the troubling relativisms and reconstructions of historical epistemologies in
the works of Hanson, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend. His themes are intrigu
ing, set forth as they are with masterly case studies of physics and the life
sciences, and within an original conceptual framework for philosophical
analysis of the processes, functions, and structures of scientific knowing.
Pandit's contributions deserve thoughtful examination. For our part, we
wish to point to some among them:
(1) an interactive articulation of subjective and objective factors of both
problems and theories in the course of scientific development;
(2) a striking contrast between the explanatory power of a scientific
theory and its 'resolving power', i.e. its power to develop, formulate, and
radically re-formulate problems;
(3) rejection, on argued grounds, of any construal of observation state
ments as a basis for the 'development' or 'generation' of empirical generali
zations;
(4) a provocative notion of type-distinct episternic structures, with its
concomitant interpretation of the nature of critical judgments of theories
within a newly expanded C} bernetic feedback-control description;
(5) an equally provocative analysis of traditional epistemologies as 'pre
Darwinian', from Plato to Descartes, and to the Vienna Circle as well, each
in Pandit's view presupposing a doctrine of the special creation of the human
knower as subjective knower, by a supernatural source, or failing that, each
collapsing into utter scepticism, being without the desired and required
foundation;
(6) use of an extended Darwinian explanation of humankind as one type
of problem-solving animal, going beyond Dewey to a novel network of con
cepts: hierarchies, negative feedback, interactive growth, self-regulation -
v
vi EDITORIAL PREFACE
each thoroughly explained, and all taken together on the way to comprehend
objective human knowledge within our species life;
(7) identification of the great question of epistemology, that of the growth
of scientific knowledge, with the dynamics of knowledge-change and theory
replacement, and here we see Pandit stress both the inadequacy of a merely
descriptive 'kinematics', and the strong desirability of an apparently causal
dynamics as his goal in understanding cognitive development;
(8) hence, clearly, Pandit sets himself the task of identifying the unit of
such a causal evolution, the 'epistemic unit' which is the subject of historical
and logical investigation;
(9) and so, with Pandit, we ask, what grows? or what, in the personal and
social cognitive experience, may be explicated as a 'growing system'?
(10) 'interaction' is his central idea here, the key to all systems, and we
understand Pandit to offer a sophisticated general systems critique of scien
tific progress, what might be termed a new theory of the 'emergent' in the old
and hitherto mostly programmatic theory of emergent levels;
(11) adaptation of Pattee's twin biological hierarchies-control and struc
ture - receives a fine-tuned epistemological elaboration, extended to a plau
sible recognition of a rule-governed problem-solving language-character within
control hierarchies;
(12) however (and how crucial this is to Pandit's achievement) system
growth depends upon the empirical possibility of what he succinctly calls
'rule entanglement', as of 'a spider caught in its own web' he writes, and,
further, such growth demands the existence of systems which can survive
such internal entanglements;
(13) Pandit's growing systems must either be deviant or be inherently
imperfect, as systems of a natural order or as cognitive systems about the
order of nature or society;
(14) but how a healthy scientific theory functions in its sinewy systems
theoretic pattern of growth requires that the explanatory and resolving
powers attributed to theories play their quite essential roles; Pandit sharply
labels these roles for us (as philosophic analysts, and for scientific workers
too), as 'working backwards' and 'working forward';
(15) in his analysis, then, science explains backwards, from problems to
theories (and we need no inductive method), and science resolves forward,
from theories to problems;
(16) Professor Pandit's conceptual strength may be seen in his impressive
discussion of the resolving power of physical field theories, in their pre-history
from Aristotle to Kepler and Newton, and in their maturation in the classical
EDITORIAL PREFACE vii
age of Maxwell and the new physics of space-time and gravitation of Einstein;
(17) in the end, Pandit believes he has a sound appreciation of the growth
of knowledge, and perhaps his is unique in our time for he has given persua
sive arguments that for the others, for Kuhn and Lakatos and Feyerabend
and Wittgenstein, such growth is a 'great myth' ("except in the historical
sense of paradigm change"), that for them neither paradigm appraisal nor
much of paradigm elucidation rests on any tenable basis whatsoever;
(18) we conclude with his whirlwind historical-critical examination of
strategies, models and methodological variations in the sciences, wherein
models are construed as reduction-strategies, even as strategies for one or
another way to satisfying 'persceptibility requirements' for scientific ex
planation.
(19) To do without some sort of 'perceptibility' is, in Pandit's language,
to do without the pragmatic constraints of a given scientific community,
without his 'pragmatical imperatives'; but at the same time to see the implac
ably analogous equality of all model-thinking in science as allowing problem
solving to take place in-process while also allowing for the recurrent trend
toward theoretical monism;
(20) Indeed no model except in its proper (theoretical and natural) level.
(21) Professor Pandit has articulated a subtle dialectic of variance and
invariance within scientific knowledge, in its development and within its
structure.
* * *
Pandit says that philosophical analysis should go beyond critical analysis of
the received frameworks of the empirical sciences, beyond the available
methodologies, to explore "the possibility of better alternatives to these
frameworks". This book is a stage in such philosophical exploration.
Boston University ROBERT S. COHEN
Center for the Philosophy and
MARX W. WARTOFSKY
History of Science
July 1982
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EDITORIAL PREFACE v
PREFACE XV
ABSTRACT xix
NOT A TION AND ABBREVIATIONS xxi
CHAPTER 1 I INTRODUCTION: METHODOLOGY, IDE-
OLOGY, AND SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS
CHAPTER 2 I EPISTEMIC STRUCTURALISM: THE
LIMIT TO RADICAL ALTERNATIVES TO TRADI-
TIONAL EPISTEMOLOGY 16
2.1. INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM 16
2.2. EPISTEMIC STRUCTURALISM 17
2.3. THE TRADITIONAL PROBLEM OF EPISTEMIC STRUC
TURE: WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE? 19
2.4. PSYCHOLOGISM: THE IDEOLOGY OF SUBJECTIVISM
IN TRADITIONAL EPISTEMOLOGY 24
2.5. FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE: THE TRA-
DITIONAL PROBLEM OF RATIONALITY 27
2.6. POST-DARWINIAN EPISTEMOLOGY: THE RADICAL-
ISM OF POPPER AND QUINE 29
2.7. EPISTEMIC STRUCTURALISM IN RETROSPECT 38
CHAPTER 3 I PROBLEMS OF STRUCTURE AND
GROWTH: TOWARDS AN INTERACTIVE MODEL
OF THE GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE 40
3.1. THE FRAME OF REFERENCE FOR AN OBJECTIVISTIC
EPISTEMOLOGY 40
3.1.1. On the Method of Evaluating an Epistemological
Th~ ~
3.1.2. The Problem of the Growth of Scientific Knowledge 42
X TABLE OF CONTENTS
3.2. METHODOLOGIES OF EPISTEMIC APPRAISAL AS
EMBEDDED IN THE MODELS OF EPISTEMIC STRUC·
TURE 44
3.2.1. The Unit of Epistemic Appraisal as a Unit of Dia-
chronic Analysis 44
3.2.2. From a Unicellular Model of Epistemic Structure to
a Cumulative Model of the Growth of Knowledge:
Another Look at Inductivism 46
3.3. THE CONCEPT OF A GROWING SYSTEM: TOWARDS
A GENERAL INTERACTION THEORY 48
3.3.1. The Problem-Situatipn 48
3.3.2. The Conditions ofS ignificant Interaction 54
3.4. INDUCTIVISM AND BEYOND 75
3.4.1. The Inherent Inadequacy of the Inductivist Models
ofE pistemic Structure and Growth ofK nowledge 75
3.4.2. Empirical Science as a Negative-Feedback Controlled
Problem-Solving System 77
3.5. THEORY-PROBLEM INTERACTION: THE RESOLVING
POWER OF SCIENTIFIC THEORY 81
3.5.1. Explanatory Power of Scientific Theory as a Basis
ofE pistemic Appraisal 81
3.5 .2. The Resolving Power of Scientific Theory as a Basis
ofE pistemic Appraisal 85
3.5 .3. Ideal-Type Generalizations: Their Unique Resolving
Power 98
3.5.4. The Resolving Power ofP hysical Theory: A Dynam-
ical Case Study 102
3.6. THE STRUCTURE AND THE INTERACTIVE MODEL
OF THE GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE 108
3.6.1. The Epistemic Structures as Type-Distinct Develop-
mental Structures 108
3.6.2. The Interactive Pattern of the Growth of Scientific
Knowledge 109
CHAPTER 4 / CONSEQUENCES AND ALTERNATIVE
METHODOLOGIES 111
4.1. DUHEM, POPPER AND THE METHODOLOGY OF THE
ORY-PROBLEM INTERACTIVE SYSTEMS 111