Mario Bunge - Doing Science: In the Light of Philosophy

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bunge, Mario, 1919

Title: Doing science : in the light of philosophy / by Mario Augusto Bunge (McGill University, Canada).

Description: New Jersey : World Scientific, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016040513 | ISBN 9789813202764 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Science--Philosophy. | Science--Methodology.

Classification: LCC Q175 .B82228 2016 | DDC 501--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040513

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PREFACE

The contemporary science studies investigate most of the facets of science, but they tend to focus on answers at the expense of questions. They also neglect the influence of philosophy on the problematics, methodics, and evaluation of scientific research. The present investigation seeks to overcome both limitations, by focusing on the research project nurtured or thwarted by the philosophical matrix that hosts it.

Another goal of the present investigation is to restore the classical view of scientific research as the search for original truths. This view was seriously challenged in the 1960s by the opinions of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, that scientists do not seek truth because there is no such thing; of Bruno Latour and his fellow constructivist-relativists, that scientists make up facts instead of studying them objectively; and of Michel Foucault, that science is politics by other means.

However, I am not out to revive the traditional view of science as a repository of reliable data, and even less to defend Poppers extravagant opinion that scientists are masochists bent on falsifying their own pet hypotheses. Although this book abounds in criticisms of the most popular opinions of science, its central thrust is to proceed with the constructive task of proposing the new theory of scientific research that I started in my two-volume work Scientific Research (1967b).

The present theory includes and refines, among others, the concept of indicator or marker, absent from the empiricist accounts of measurement; it also includes and refines the concept of reference, absent from the best-known semantical theories, such as Carnaps, which confuse meaning with testability. In addition, the new theory avoids the confusion of measurement an empirical operation with the set-theoretic concept of measure; it also avoids the confusion of the dimension of a magnitude, such as LT1 in the case of velocity, with that of size; last, but not least, the present view, contrary to the structuralist one, adopts the cutlet model of a scientific theory as a mathematical formalism endowed with a factual content or set of semantical hypotheses.

In short, the main thrust of the present work is to propose a view of scientific research as it is actually conducted by active scientists. Interestingly, this effort to get closer to science in the making also gets us closer to philosophy than the standard views. I will argue that this philosophical matrix of scientific research performs both heuristic and regulative roles, and that it constitutes a whole worldview that is hoped to fit in with contemporary science.

To the extent that it satisfies this realism condition, that rather tacit worldview deserves being called scientific. Far from being an intellectual game, this particular mode of looking at science is expected to help us flag down the beliefs and practices that, like the alternative medicines and the sectoral and opportunistic social policies, contradict the so-called spirit of science and ignore the relevant scientific evidence, whence they constitute public perils. Up to a point, this trait vindicates the ancient view of philosophy as a guide to life, as well as Aristotles view of science as a single body of perfectible knowledge.

The main body of this book is followed by two appendices about the science and philosophy of mind. view it, and they examine a pile of fascinating recent neuroscientific findings relevant to the subject. (See also Burge 1980.)

The author of of mind. He also shows that the confusions that plague this important chapter of metaphysics or ontology have hindered the advancement of the sciences of mind. Mahner also suggests that the prevailing philosophies of mind lag behind the corresponding science, whereas my own contributions to the field have accompanied and helped psychological research.

Mario Bunge
Department of Philosophy
McGill University
Montral, Canada

CONTENTS

Chapter 1In the Beginning was
the Problem

Agustn Ibez, Eugenia Hesse, Facundo Manes and Adolfo M. Garca

Martin Mahner

INTRODUCTION

This book focuses on science in the making as well as on its philosophical presuppositions, such as those of rationality and realism. Although these presuppositions are mostly tacit and thus easily overlooked, actually they are supremely important, since some of them favor research whereas others hamper it. For instance, whereas subjectivism leads to navel gazing and uncontrolled fantasy, realism encourages us to explore the world and check our conjectures.

The bits of science we learn in schools and textbooks are finished products, whereas the results of recent scientific projects are published in journals accessible only to specialists. Thus, the American Institute of Physics alone publishes 19 peer-reviewed journals. On the occasion of his visit to that institute, the famous professor of philosophy of science at Princeton University was amazed to learn that there was more than one physics journal in the world. Obviously, he did not consult science journals.

Scientific journals publish original reports, review articles, and short notices. The rank of scientists is roughly gauged by the number of papers published in high-impact journals a debatable metric for, as John Garcias (1981) sensational experiment showed, it conflates research quality with the prestige of the authors academic home. Some of those journals have such high standards, that they publish just one in 10 or more submissions. The popular press spreads only rumors about a few outstanding papers.

Evidently, reading recent papers in prestigious science journals is not enough to train productive investigators. Science in the making is learned only by doing or replicating some original scientific research, and even so provided one succeeds in piercing the thick layers of myths about science, such as its confusion with technology or even with the search for power (see Numbers & Kampourakis 2015 for a representative sample).