Symposium organized by the International Academy of Philosophy of Science in the framework of the 14th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (Nancy: 19-26 July, 2011)]
Section B1 Methodology and Scientific Reasoning
Theme of the Symposium: SCIENCE AND RATIONALITY
Saturday, July 23, 2011: from 15:00 to 18:00
Organizer: Evandro Agazzi
President
Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences, Bruxelles
Short description
One fundamental claim of scientism is that science is the paradigm of rationality and that other forms of cognitive approaches are “irrational”. Therefore, those trends in our culture that reject scientism often reject rationality as an appropriate way of handling human problems. The aim of this symposium is that of analyzing a few different kinds of rationality adopted in science (mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences) and to explain why scientific rationality is not the exclusive form of rationality, though being an outstanding example of rationality. This analysis will indicate how scientific rationality could be harmonized with other forms of rationality.
General description of the topic
One of the most serious problems of our globalized civilization is the conflict existing between scientism and anti-science. If we consider scientism as an “absolutization” of science, we can find among its fundamental claims the thesis that science constitutes the paradigm of rationality and that other forms of cognitive approaches to reality and human problems are “irrational”. As a consequence, those rather widespread trends in our culture that, for different reasons, reject scientism often discard rationality as an appropriate way of handling human problems. Therefore, the paradoxical situation is that the undeniable growth of scientific investigations and results in many old and new specialized fields of research goes hand in hand with an attitude of skepticism, relativism and irrationalism at a more general level. The aim of this symposium is that of clarifying why scientific rationality is not the exclusive form of rationality, though being at the same time an outstanding example of rationality. To this end a few typical forms of rationality, such as it is codified in the methodology of certain fundamental sciences, will be analyzed: mathematics, empirical sciences, social sciences. This analysis will show that already in the domain of science rationality does not follow a unique pattern, that it is an “analogical” rather than a “univocal” concept. The fact that the concept of scientific rationality is “open” (that is, not univocal in the domain of science itself) suggests that the general concept of rationality be also open (that is, legitimately applicable also outside science). This suggestion, however, must be carefully tested, in order to see under what conditions the broadening of the concept of rationality would not turn it from “univocal” to “equivocal”, instead of “analogical” (that is, such that it applies to whatever kind of intellectual approach). The exploration of these conditions will be the task of the concluding contribution of this symposium, from which it should emerge how scientific rationality could be harmonized with other forms of rationality without being incommensurable with them. In such a way it will appear how the sciences have contributed to a deeper understanding and treatment of human rationality, rather than having pretended to monopolize it.
Structure of the Symposium
CHAIRMAN: Evandro Agazzi (President of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science)
PARTICIPANTS:
Christian Thiel (University of Erlangen), The mathematical paradigm of rationality
Anne Fagot-Largeault (Collège de France), The analytic vs synthetic approach in the experimental sciences
Jesus Zamora (National University for Education at Distance, Madrid), Realism and rationality in the natural and in the social sciences
Hervé Barreau (Archives H.Poincaré –UMR 7117 du CNRS-Nancy 2), Rationalité économique et rationalité éthique
Evandro Agazzi (University of Genoa and Autonomous Metropolitan University of Mexico), Non-scientific forms of rationality
Abstracts
The mathematical paradigm of rationality
Christian Thiel.
Mathematicians always had a good chance to be nominated as a paragon of rational attitude and behaviour. Clearly, this refers to their professional work which appears to be paradigmatic of rationality. But what is it that renders mathematics capable of playing this role? Already in classic antiquity, mathematics became a model for any methodical investigation because of the perspicuity of its notions, the certainty of its propositions, and the stringency of their attainment. When science in our modern sense developed since the late Renaissance, a movement of “rationalism” succeeded in imbuing the rising physical sciences with these features as guidelines. They were seen as constituting the essence of the sciences, of philosophy and of any serious intellectual activity generally. This view has been influential well into the twentieth and the beginnings of the twenty-first centuries.
The paper will aim at the clarification of the following questions. (1) Are the above-mentioned features really characteristic of mathematical thinking? (2) Has the well-known foundational crisis of mathematics and logic changed our outlook on the reliability, and therefore on the paradigm character, of these disciplines? (3) Can the indicated development escape the danger of ending up in a fundamental “scientism” with a detrimental narrowing down of the reach of rationality? (4) Can the mathematical paradigm be useful also for a broader conception of rationality that understands science as one central pillar of cultural life among others, but extends into a “logic” of practical decisions, norms for a rational discussion of value judgments and relaited subjects, by liberating methodical thinking from the subordination to some particular discipline, without sacrificing the latter’s valuable contributions and stimuli.
The analytic vs. synthetic approach in the experimental sciences
Anne Fagot-Largeault
The analytic approach in chemistry was methodologically promoted by Antoine Lavoisier at the end of the 18th Century. The synthetic approach as a systematic research methodologwas used by Marcelin Berthelot to explore a variety of possible chemical constructions. Htheorized the synthetic methodology in his lessons taught at the College de France :« Chemistry creates its objects », that is, it does not merely analyse into simple substances the complex ones that exist in nature. Chemistry creates a multiplicity of complex organic molecules that nature itself has not produced ; it introduces into the real world new complex substances, the properties of which can be methodically studied and, to some extent, planned.
Most scientists, and philosophers of science, believed until the 20th Century that the artificial construction of living beings would in any case be impossible. Cournot, for example, thought that organic substances, such as urea, could indeed be synthesized by chemical methods, but that living beings could not. There was, according to him, a discontinuity between the world of matter and the world of life, that made the gradual development of a complex material substance into a living being inconceivable. The notion of a « synthetic biology » was, however, launched by the chemist Leduc as soon as 1912. Genetic engineering emerged in the 1970es, the first World Congress in Synthetic Biology met in 2004 in Boston (MIT), and in 2008 a group of researchers
announced the artificial construction of a complete genome (of a bacteria : mycoplasma genitalium). Although one should distinguish between the design and construction of new biological parts, devices and systems (and the re-design of existing, natural biological systems) for useful purposes (such as medical purposes), and the design and construction of a complete living organism (such as a bacteria), synthetic biology is now on the track of exploring new possible modalities of life, that nature on our planet has not actualized. It gives biology a new dimension, that deserves the attention of philosophers of science.
Realism and rationality in the natural and in the social sciences
Jesús Zamora Bonilla
The questions of realism and rationality have some important differences in the case of the social sciences as compared to the natural sciences. For example, in the former it is not possible to define “reality” as “things independent of the mind”, for social realities are obviously constituted in big part by what we think about them or about other things. Also, rationality plays a characteristic role in the social sciences as an assumption about the cognitive nature of human beings. Unfortunately, the philosophical discussions about the rationality of the sciences and about the rationality of the social agents have been very often mutually independent, in the sense that what was assumed as a definition of rationality for the individual agents social theories or models dealt about was rather different of what was considered the 'rational' way of performing scientific research by part of the social or the natural scientists themselves. Furthermore, when a coherent or comprehensive view of rationality in both sides of the research subject/object divide has been followed, the result has been detrimental from the point of view of the realism question. For example, a combination of rational choice theory as the fundamental paradigm of the social sciences, and Bayesianism as a theory about the rationality of sciences, is based on a coherent idea of rationality, but is certainly not very realistic, neither about social facts, nor about scientific practice. In this paper, a different view of rationality, based on pragmatic inferentialism (e.g., R. Brandom's Making it Explicit, 1994), is outlined, and it is shown how it can provide a comprehensive and coherente view of the rationality of the process of scientific research and of the rationality of social agents, as well as of the ontological constitution of social entities. The fundamental notion of pragmatic inferentialism is that the actions of each individual depend on her 'deontic status', i.e., the set of commitments and entitlements that the norms she accepts determine in the situation she is immersed. These norms are essentially inferential, in the sense that they determine the dynamics of that 'deontic status' (e.g., what commitments one has to have at moment n+1, depending on what commitments she had at moment n). Lastly, the scores are essentially perspectival, in the sense that each agent has a view not only about what are her own commitments, but also those of the other relevant agents. Institutional facts and collective entities (intentions, judgments, decisions, etc.) arise just as the result of this perspectival nature of the deontic statuses.
Rationalité économique et rationalité éthique
Hervé Barreau
La rationalité scientifique moderne a tardé à s’appliquer aux choses humaines. Cette application a connu quelques essais au XVIIIème siècle, mais c’est au début du XIXème siècle, quand les statistiques et le calcul des probabilités qui leur est conjoint se sont imposés dans l’administration et les assurances, que le problème s’est posé dans toute son ampleur. En proposant le terme de sociologie, Auguste Comte an avait le projet, mais en concevant cette dernière sur le modèle de la biologie, où la considération du tout l’emporte sur celle des parties, !l se privait des outils analytiques qui avaient remporté tant de succès en physique. C’est Augustin Cournot qui eut l’idée d’une mécanique sociale, plus proche de la mécanique physique que de la biologie, car les institutions humaines, régies par des forces, tendent à la stabilité. En particulier Cournot conçut une « théorie des richesses » où l’établissement de la valeur d’échange s’opère à l’aide d’outils mathématiques. De cette façon il est le père de la science économique moderne, beaucoup plus qu’Adam Smith, Ricardo et Marx, qui voulaient fonder sur le travail, non sur l’utilité, la valeur d’échange. Mais l’économie classique qui en est résultée, avec Walras et Pareto, bute sur l’impossibilité de réaliser l’équilibre général. La dynamique du marché est constamment en déséquilibre, non seulement en raison des innovations techniques, mais aussi en raison de la loi du profit. Les crises du capitalisme ont posé la question de sa moralisation. Cournot lui-même avait prévu une « économie sociale », où la politique devait jouer un rôle modérateur. Au XXème siècle, Keynes a posé les principes d’une politique économique. Aujourd’hui les problèmes éthiques dominent les questions économiques, non seulement en raison du partage nécessaire du profit au sein de l’entreprise, grâce auquel le travail retrouve sa valeur sociale, mais au niveau de l’Etat, à qui revient la tâche de protéger par des lois tous les acteurs de la vie économique et sociale, et également au niveau mondial, où il s’agit de régler la parité des monnaies, le coût des matières premières, la défense de l’environnement, et généralement tous les problèmes qui mettent en péril la paix entre les nations.
Non-scientific forms of rationality
Evandro Agazzi
The philosophers of ancient Greece tried to characterize knowledge in its full and proper sense. The solution already proposed by Plato was that knowledge is different from and superior to opinion (even true opinion) because it supports truth by arguments capable of showing its reasons. Since the Greek term for knowledge is episteme (that was translated by scientia and science in the subsequent centuries of Western culture) we must conclude that rationality (that is the fact of defending truth by means of arguments) was the constitutive characteristic of science. Indeed in Western culture the system of the sciences included mathematics, physics, metaphysics, ethics, etc., at least until the Renaissance.
Today we consider science as a large collection of disciplines in which mathematics and physics play a paradigmatic role but are surrounded by a great display of cognitive enterprises. Now the question: “the many human discourses that remain outside of the perimeter of science and yet aim at ‘telling the truth’ are deprived of rationality?”
A symptom that a too narrow closure of the circle of rationality is not advisable comes from history. The strict apodictic model of a deductive construction starting from intellectually evident first principles found a fruitful application in mathematics in ancient Greece, but sterilized for two millennia the efforts of creating a natural science. This could start when Galileo furnished in the experimental method the additional form of rationality in which the deductive moment is integrated with the contribution of the empirical evidence. This “new science” was characterized by certain general criteria of intelligibility of the world that had to be relaxed or integrated when other attributes of physical reality became the object of investigation and this expansion became much more significant in the field of the human sciences. What justifies these broadening is the fact that, for every “regional ontology”, precise criteria are offered for collecting empirical evidence for the determination of facts, while typical patterns of argument are elaborated for making correct inferences from the facts or for including them into suitable explanatory theoretical frameworks. In short, this great domain ideally embraces the whole of the empirically grounded factual judgments.
Humans, however, also express factual judgments with non-empirical reference (e.g. “God exists”, “there is a life after death”), as well as several kinds of value judgments. These judgments cannot be treated by any science, but when they are transformed into questions they reveal an intense existential interest, since the answer given to such questions may determine a totally different orientation to one’s life. Therefore ascribing such questions to irrationality would amount to discard reason (i.e. one of the most powerful tools humans have for attaining knowledge) from what is more significant for human existence. Moreover, science and technology are being increasingly submitted to value judgments today, owing to their impacts on human life, and a positive result of this confrontation can be expected only if the respective “forms of rationality” are perceived as complementary rather than incommensurable.
CURRICULA
Christian Thiel. Born in 1937 in Neusalz/Oder, Christian Thiel entered school in Vienna in 1943 and graduated from a gymnasium (then “Oberrealschule”) in Nuremberg in 1956. With the exception of a year in art education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, he studied at the Universities of Erlangen and Munich; among his teachers were Rudolf Zocher and Paul Lorenzen in philosophy, Wilhelm Specht and Georg Nöbeling in mathematics, and Georg Weippert in sociology. Having obtained his Dr. phil. at Erlangen in 1965, he became a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also was appointed assistant professor of philosophy in 1967. After his return to Erlangen as assistant to Paul Lorenzen in the same year, he obtained the venia legendi for philosophy in 1970. Having substituted on chairs for philosophy at Konstanz and at Kiel, Thiel accepted a call to the newly created chair of philosophy and theory of science at the RWTH Aachen in 1972. Ten years later, he succeeded Paul Lorenzen at Erlangen, and was appointed acting director of the Erlangen Interdisciplinary Institute for Philosophy and History of Science, holding both positions until his retirement as professor emeritus in 2005. He has been a corresponding member of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences since 1993, and full member since 1997, and a member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina since 2000.
Thiel’s publications include Sinn und Bedeutung in der Logik Gottlob Freges (1965, English trans. 1968, Spanish trans. 1972), Grundlagenkrise und Grundlagenstreit (1972), Elementare Logik (1983), Philosophie und Mathematik (1995), and more than 200 papers and contributions to collections and encyclopedias as well as over 500 entries to the Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie (1980–1996, 2nd ed. 2005ff.). He is also editor of the centenary edition of Frege’s Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1986).
Jesús P. Zamora-Bonilla (1963) is full professor (“catedrático”) at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED, Madrid, Spain). He has a PhD in Philosophy and a PhD in Economics, and has been Vice-President of the UNED.
His main research areas are:
- Economics of scientific knowledge, in particular the application of formal modelling to the analysis of the collective construction of scientific knowledge.
- Philosophy of social science
- Epistemology and philosophy of science, in particular, scientific realism and the rationality of science
Some recent and forthcoming publications:
- The SAGE Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science (co-editor), London, 2011.
- “The economics of scientific knowledge”, in Handbook of Philosophy of Science. Vol. 13: Philosophy of Economics, (ed. U. Mäki), Elsevier, 2011.
- “Science: the rules of the game”, The Logic Journal of IGPAL, (2010) 18(2): 294-307.
- “What games do scientists play?”, EPSA Methodology and Philosophy of Science, 2010, 323-332.
- “Credibility, idealization, and model building”, Erkenntnis, (2009) 70:101–118.
- “Optimal judgment aggregation”, Philosophy of Science (2007) 74: 813–824.
- “Science studies and the theory of games”, Perspectives on Science (2006), 14. 525-557.
- “Rhetoric, induction, and the free speech dilemma”, Philosophy of Science (2006), 73. 175–193.
Anne Fagot-Largeault, PhD (Stanford 1971), MD (Paris 1978), Docteur ès lettres et sciences humaines (Doctorat d’Etat, Paris 1986). Currently professor of the College de France (philosophy of life science). Member of the French Academy of Sciences, of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science; associate member of the Royal Academy of Belgium (humanities section). Honorary president of the International
Institute of Philosophy. Member of the College of experts of the French Biomedicine Agency for the research on human embryos and embryonic stem cells. Member (2007-2011) of the Executive Committee of the DLMPS (Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science). Has been (and still is) a member of Data and Safety Monitoring Committees for international clinical trials in aids, cancer, cellular therapy. Carrier: she worked as a full time professor in philosophy in high school (1961-1966), then as an assistant professor at the university of Paris-12 (1971-87), and full professor in philosophy of science at the universities of Paris-10 (1987-95) and Paris-1 (1995-2001); she did
her inaugural lesson at the College de France in 2001. Her medical practice at the Henri Mondor hospital (Assistance publique de Paris, one full day a week, 1978-2003) was mostly as a psychiatrist in the emergency room; her ongoing cooperation with the hospital psychiatry wards is now directed towards the methodological and ethical problems in psychiatric investigations.
Her research, centered on the philosophy of life sciences, developed along three lines: (1) diagnostic reasoning, inductive logic, statistical and probabilistic methods, heuristic procedures; (2) investigation of causal links, validation of causal hypotheses, causal explanation, evolution and the ontology of becoming; (3) ethics of medical practice and investigation, methodology of clinical & of epidemiological research, epistemology of bio-medical sciences, bio-medical anthropology.
Her list of publications counts around 250 titles, including a dozen of books, among which: Médecine et probabilités, Paris: Didier-érudition, 1982; L'homme bio-éthique. Pour une déontologie de la recherche sur le vivant, Paris: Maloine, 1985; Les causes de la mort. Histoire naturelle et facteurs de risque, Paris: Vrin, 1989; with D. Andler et B. Saint-Sernin, Philosophie des sciences, 2 vols., Paris: Gallimard, 2002; with S. Rahman and J.M. Torres, The Influence of Genetics on Contemporary Thinking, Dordrecht: Springer, 2007 ; and Médecine et philosophie, Paris : PUF, 2010. See list of publications, www.college-de-france.fr.
Hervé Barreau. Né le 27 avril 1929
1959 : Professeur agrégé de philosophie
1962 : Assistant de logique à la Faculté des Lettres (Philosophie) de l’Université de Strasbourg
1966 Maître-Assistant des universités. Détaché au CNRS comme Attaché de recherche
1971 Création à Strasbourg du Séminaire sur les Fondements des Sciencxes (avec J.Leité Lopes et M.Paty)
1972 : Chargé de Recherche au CNRS
1973-75 : Chargé d’enseignement d’Epistémologie Economique à la faculté des Sciences Economiques de l’Université de Strasbourg
1976-1981 : Secrétaire scientifique de la section 41 (Philosophie) du Comité National du CNRS
1982 : Docteur d’Etat en philosophie avec une thèse sur « la construction de la notion de temps »
1989 : Professeur conventionné de l’Université de Strasbourg
1991 : Directeur de Recherche de 1ère classe au CNRS
1994 : Membre titulaire de l’Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences
Ouvrages :
Aristote et l’analyse du savoir, Paris, Seghers, 1972
Aristote pour aujourd’hui et pour demain, Edit.Dianoia (diff.PUF), 2007
L’épistémologie, coll. Que sais-je ? PUF, 7ème édition , 2009
Le temps, coll. Que sais-je ?, PUF, 4ème édition, 2009
Séparer et rassembler, quand la philosophie dialogue avec les sciences, Edit.Dianoia, 2004
Evandro Agazzi completed his studies in Philosophy at the Catholic University of Milan and in Physics at the State University of the same city. He then did postgraduate study and resesarch stays at the Universities of Oxford, Marburg University of Genoa
He is President of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science (Brussels
His publications include more than 70 books, of which he is the author and/or the editor, and more than 800 papers and articles, including contributions to books, anthologies, encyclopaedias, and journals, apart from many book reviews and newspaper articles. He is the editor of Epistemologia, an Italian journal for the Philosophy of Science, and of Nuova Secondaria, an Italian journal for high school teachers, and is a consulting editor of the international journals Erkenntnis, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie, Medicina e Morale, Modern Logic, Physis, Kos , Sandhan, Anthopos & Iatria, A&P. Anthropology and Philosophy. He has been and is a member of the editorial board of learned dictionaries and encyclopaedias.
