Abstract
The opposition between the theoretical and empirical levels of knowledge or simply between theoretical and empirical knowledge can be construed in different ways. In particular it can be conceived as the opposition of scientific-theoretical knowledge as a whole — on any of its levels — to pre-scientific, objective-practical knowledge.
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References
“We find the first significant sketch of the contemporary hypothetical-constructive or hypothetical-deductive method in natural science in Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Newton provides a systematic exposition of the deduction of the special empirical laws of celestial and terrestrial mechanics. From the point of view of content, Newton’s book contains many errors, but the general objective of providing the form and method of the formation of theory is the same today” [7; 8–13].
The classical examples of deductive construction meeting these requirements are the axiomatizations of various mathematical theories such as Euclidean geometry, the early forms of non-Euclidean geometry, the theory of groups and other branches of abstract algebra: today there are efforts at deductive construction of certain theories in empirical science such as some branches of classical and relativity mechanics, sections of biology, and some theoretical systems in psychology, especially in the domain of education.
There are now some reactions against the unconditional interpretation of axioms as implicit definitions of the terms contained in them. Hempel, for instance, stresses that a conjunction of the postulates of an uninterpreted axiomatic theory (e.g., Euclidean geometry in the form of mathematical geometry) can be construed as a propositional function, in which the primitive concepts play the role of variables. But it cannot be said of a propositional function that it ‘defines’ the partial meaning of variables which it contains unless there is proof that there is only one series of meanings for the variables, satisfying the given propositional function. Postulates, says Hempel, can only impose certain restrictions on the possible interpretations of primitive concepts, which have to be satisfied by the objects expressed in these concepts. Hempel is right in the sense that one can talk about the definition of concepts through a system of axioms in hypothetical-deductive theory only in the context of the interpretation of the system.
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© 1970 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Švyrev, V.S. (1970). Problems of the Logical-Methodological Analysis of Relations Between the Theoretical and Empirical Planes of Scientific Knowledge. In: Tavanec, P.V. (eds) Problems of the Logic of Scientific Knowledge. Synthese Library, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3393-0_3
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