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

250 Pages·1983·7.77 MB·English
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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, including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner 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

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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 philosop
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