Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The historian and philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) wrote in
the preface of his influential book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, published
in 1962 [38], that Fleck had anticipated many of Kuhn's own ideas on the sociolog-
ical and epistemological aspects of the development of a science. We will shortly
present this Kuhnian philosophy of science but before that we want to character-
ize philosophy of science in general and we want to introduce the work of the the
Austrian-British philosopher Karl R. Popper (1902-1994) in a field that appeared
historically between Fleck's and Kuhn's topics.
Philosophy of science concerns scientific explanations of real systems and phe-
nomena. Scientists observe these real systems and phenomena in natural environ-
ments and laboratories. They determine functions that represent the real system's
properties and variables that characterize these systems. Scientists measure the val-
ues of the observed variables (observables) and therefore they collect a lot of data.
Finally, scientists connect these real systems and phenomena with theoretical struc-
tures. They create these structures to have a “mapping” from the real world to the
world of logics and mathematics. In this theoretical “paradise” they can define math-
ematical constants and variables and formulate axioms and laws that represent the
real systems and phenomena. Scientists suppose that there is a connection between
the real world and the logical-mathematical world - otherwise it doesn't make sense
to speak about empirical science.
However, nobody can be sure that a scientific theory is true. In the 1930s, Karl
R. Popper established the Critical Rationalism rejecting this classical empiricism.
In principle, scientific theories are always tentative, and subject to corrections or
inclusion in a yet wider theory [57].
Popper's
Logic of Scientific Discovery
was published already in 1934 in German
but it became not influential before the English edition appeared in 1959. This work
heralded a shift in differentiating between science and non-science, metaphysics or
pseudo-science. In the “pre-Popper-times” philosophers tried to fix this demarcation
in scientific language but in Popper's metatheory, named “Critical Rationalism”,
the decision of what is science and what is not science is related to theories and
methods in these fields and not in the precision of the terms of language. Popper
created such alternative concept in opposition to that of the Vienna Circle and the
other Logical Empiricists who tried to analyze the constitution or the structure of
scientific theories by using modern logic.
One of the main subjects of the Vienna Circle was the search for the greatest
possible rapprochement between philosophy and science, by which they meant nat-
ural, social and psychological sciences. The “public” debut of the Vienna Circle
was staged on November 23, 1928 in the ballroom of Vienna's Old Town Hall. The
founding of the “Ernst Mach Society”
1
and the publication of the manifesto
Wis-
senschaftliche Weltauffassung — Der Wiener Kreis
provided the opportunity. Also
these philosophers used the word “Weltauffassung” to describe their world view -
and they emphasized it as scientific:
Scientific World View — The Vienna Circle
.
1
The society's name even had an explanatory addition: Society to Spread Awareness of the
Exact Sciences.
