Abstract
Every human society possesses an extra-genetic means of transmitting knowledge from generation to generation. Accordingly, every society, or at least every society characterized by division of labor, must include groups of people and institutions whose task it is to cultivate—to gather and transmit—knowledge. Of course, this circumstance does not in itself determine either the character of these groups and institutions or the types of knowledge which they cultivate; but if the knowledge provided by such a group were not valued for one reason or another by at least a part of the society, the group or institution would be unable to maintain a status allowing it to exist and act.1
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Chapter I. The Development of Knowledge and the Ideals of Science
Florian Znaniecki, The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940).
Krzysztof Pomian, “Filosofia-Filosofie,” in Enciclopedia Einaudi, vol. 6 (Torino: Einaudi, 1979).
In my book Between Experience and Metaphysics (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975), while basically supporting the view expressed here, I as not sufficiently consistent. I claimed that science begins where there appears a demand that practical and cosmological knowledge—techne and episteme—be combined into a rational, logically coherent whole. I suggested at the same time that this formulation is something more than a terminological convention, and I did not notice its evaluative character. Today I think that the critics who have noted this inconsistency are right, and that my formulation was also dictated by the acceptance of a certain ideal of science. Regardless of whether or not one accepts this ideal, it is an illusion to treat a definition which is based on it as axiologically neutral.
Leszek Kołakowski, Kultura i fetysze (Warsaw: PWN, 1967), 191–192.
Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (London: Bell & Hyman, 1949), 180.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); see also Postscript to the 2nd edition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
Paul K. Feyerabend, “Consolations for the Specialist,” in his Problems of Empiricism. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Amsterdamski, Between Experience and Metaphysics.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: NLB, 1975).
Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) and “Normal Science and Its Dangers,” in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Imre Lakatos, “History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions,” in The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1, Eds., John Worrall and Gregory Currie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
Stanislaw Ossowski, “Nauka o nauce,” in O Nauce, Dzieła, vol. 4, (Warsaw: PWN, 1967), 102.
It is often said of Greek science, from the perspective of the modern ideal of science, that it did not separate itself from philosophy and did not achieve maturity and independence. But from the point of view od the ideal of cognition accepted at that time, such a distinction would be nonsensical: the knowledge thus separating itself would cease to be episteme and become either techne or doxa. This view assumes additionally that such a separation was a “necessity of reason.”
Alexandre Koyré, Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Colin, 1961), 312–313.
Krzysztof Pomian, “La rationalité, irrationalité et la science,” Annales: Economie, Société, Civilisations 30 (5), 1132.
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 52–53.
Ibid., 55.
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Amsterdamski, S. (1992). The Development of Knowledge and the Ideals of Science. In: Between History and Method. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 145. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2706-6_2
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