Abstract
Together with other social developments (such as the rationalization of the economics of money and commodities; and the resistance to mysticism and fanaticism), modern science has led to the absolutizing of objective research. This promoted, on the one hand, a view of the cosmos as independent of man, a cosmos with its own immanent characteristics and laws, and on the other hand, the empire of subjective feelings, opinions, and convictions. In the entire classical period, the scientific ideal was the discovery of the true laws or the ever more precise description of properties of the ‘given’ world. In this sense, research is reduced, in final analysis, to ‘factography’ — stating the facts, or, at least, presenting models which correspond to real processes. Hardly anyone suspected that this was not a self-evident approach, but rather only one particular human orientation.
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References
Genealogy of Science and Theory of Knowledge’, in R E. Butt and J. Hintikka. eds., Historical and Phiknophtcal Dimensions of Logic. Methodology and Philosophy of Science: Part 4 of I he Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Logic. Methodology and Philosophy of Science. London. Ontano. Canada. 1975. D. Reidel. Dordrecht 1977. pp 173–183.
According to the receited view theories are to be construed as axiomatic calculi in which theoretical terms are given a partial observational interpretation by means of correspondence rules, cf. Frederick Suppe. ‘What’s Wrong with the Received View of the Structure of Scientific Theories?’, Philosophy of Science 39 (1972), 1–19. There are two nonlogical vocabularies, first, V o consisting of directly observable attributes and entities and, second, of not directly observable terms. The theory consists of theoretical laws formulated in a language whose all nonlogical terms belong to Vtn. Correspondence rules contain terms from V o and Ktn and are intended to embody various experimental procedures for applying the laws of theory to directly observable phonomena. My concluding remark: the entire scheme breaks down on the impossibility to make a sharp and absolute distinction between observational and theoretical language.
K. Gödel has been led by the positivistic interpretation of empirical sciences to a platonic position: “But, despite their remoteness from sense experience, we do have something like a perception of the objects of set theory, as is seen from the fact that the axioms force themselves upon us as being true. I do not see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, i.e., in mathematical intuition, that in sense perception, which induces us to build up physical theories and to expect that future sense perception will agree with them and, moreover, to believe that a question not decidable now has meaning and may be decided in future.… It by no means follows that… because [the data of mathematical intuition] cannot be associated with actions of certain things upon our sense organs, (they) arc something purely subjective, as Kant asserted. Rather they, too, may represent an aspect of objective reality, but as opposed to the sensations, their presence in us may be due to another kind of relationship between oureelvs and reality”. K. Gödel, ‘What is Cantor’s Continuum problem?’, American Mathematical Monthly 54 (1947) 515–525.
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The conflict among communists concerning the mirror-theory and the autonomy of science and art broke out in Yugoslavia particularly in years 1939 and 1940. leaving more than hundred articles and books about this subject. A reminiscence of this conflict between so-called revisionists and orthodox followers of dialectical materialism (and Stalin’s line) has been shaped in my novel published in Forum Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, 3, 4–5 and 6, 1976, certainly not complete. This struggle around socialist realism and dialectical materialism has been connected with the basic political question in 1938: whether communists have to go together with democratic opposition. The ‘hardliners’ opposed any alliance with democratic parties while we pre-war ‘revisionists’ were in favor for such a popular front, like Eurocommunism today.
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© 1980 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Supek, I. (1980). Science and Humanism. In: Hilpinen, R. (eds) Rationality in Science. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9032-6_11
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