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Objective Foundations of the Scientific Method
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Extract
Contemporary scientific research has reached such fundamental layers of laws to be discovered that questions of scientific methodology, of means and procedures of analysis, of creating (or of perfecting) a method of research can no longer be answered “along the line” in the course of a strictly scientific progression. It is necessary to consider them as a particular branch of research, to separate them as independent stages, although absolutely indispensable within the structure of contemporary science.
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- Copyright © 1968 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 Ross Ashby, Design for a Brain, London 1962, Chapman and Hall.
2 The term "metaphysics" has multiple meanings. It is used to designate theories including empirically verificable propositions, and theories deducing the universal essence of the being from theological principles. We will use the term as a synonym of "anti-dialectical".
3 This is how, for example, Zenon formulated the antinomy of the "Grain of Wheat": if we throw a grain of wheat on the ground we are not conscious of the noise of its fall; if we throw a sac of grains on the ground, we hear a noise. Reason tells us, however, that either the fall of one grain makes a noise, or else that of a sac of grains does not make any. If it were otherwise, the sum of several zeros would be equal to a positive quantity.
4 Let us cite, for example, the aphorism of the "Dichotomy": no one can move from the spot he occupies, that is to say, begin and end a movement, nor change from rest to movement, because an object, to move towards a goal, must first cover half of the distance which separates him from it. To do this he must cover half of this half, etc; Finally, it is by vertue of this "principle" that Achilles can not overtake the turtle, and "the arrow stops in its flight."
5 V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks.
6 Hippolytus, Refut., IX, 9.
7 Origen, Contra Celsum, VI, 2.
8 Dialectic materialism demands a dialectic attitude in view of the dialectic method itself, as much as in view of metaphysics. It is thus, to give an example, that dialectic materialism, contrary to Hegelian idealism, never ridicules the metaphysical method. Likewise, it does not absolutely refuse the dialectics of Hegel which was entirely rejected by the metaphysical philosophers.
9 Wittgenstein wrote, for example, in the preface of his Tractatus logico philosophicus: "… it makes no difference to me to know whether or not someone before me has thought the same things as I." (Paris, Gallimard, 1961, p. 27).
10 These sophisms-paradoxes represented the most absurd formulation, and perhaps the most unjust also, of the antinomies of which Zenon had spoken.
11 A. Tarski, "The Semantic Conception of Truth," Readings in Philosophical Analysis, 1949, p. 59.
12 Cf. Memórias del XIII Congreso Internacional de Filosofia, México, 1963, vol. IV, p. 103.
13 J. Lundberg, Can Science Save Us?, New York, 1961, p. 134.
14 T. Parsons, "The Prospects of Sociological Theory," Essays in Sociological Theory, Glencoe, 1954, p. 305.
15 R. Merton, "Sociological Theory," The American Journal of Sociology, 1945, Vol. 50, No. 6, p. 462.
16 P. Lazarsfeld, "Methodological Problems in Empirical Social Research", Transcription of the 4th World Congress of Sociology, Vol. 2, London, 1959, pp. 225-243.
17 F. Znaniecki, "The Proximate Future of Sociology", The American Journal of Sociology, 1945, vol. 50, No. 6, p. 514.
18 Ibid.
19 F. Znaniecki, The Method of Sociology, New York, 1934, p. 217.
20 Ibid., p. 220.