Relation to truth· Truth, language and science
Epistemic pluralism
Axis: Place of science — Is science the only valid path to knowledge?
There is no single method that guarantees knowledge: science itself advances by breaking its own rules. Art, myth, and traditional knowledge offer ways of grasping reality that nothing entitles us to dismiss in advance.
Movements 2
Show inferred positions (2)
Romanticisminferable
Science has no monopoly on the true: by reducing everything to measure and calculation, it misses the living, the singular and the meaningful, which poetry, myth and intuition grasp better than it does. Romanticism contests the 's claim to set scientific knowledge as the model of all knowing, and rehabilitates ways of reaching the real that calculating reason had disqualified.
Novalis, The Novices of Sais · Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature
Pragmatisminferable
Pragmatism erects the sciences' experimental method as the model of all rational inquiry, moral and social included, yet without reducing all value to the measurable: James defends the rights of religious and moral experience, and Dewey refuses to treat science as the only form of meaning. The stance is therefore favorable to science while remaining pluralist, keeping its distance from scientism.
Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929) · James, The Will to Believe (1897)
Philosophers 5
Schopenhauerexplicit
Etiology, the science of causes, explains the ordered relations between phenomena but leaves whole the riddle of their inner essence: it always says how, never what. Science is thus sovereign in its own order and, in principle, insufficient, with metaphysics, art, and mysticism taking over where it stops.
The World as Will and Representation, §17
Wittgensteinexplicit
Wittgenstein is not against science, but against scientism: the idolatry of method, of "progress" and of generality, projected onto philosophy. The philosopher who "craves generality" and despises the particular case apes science; but philosophy, ethics and religion are distinct language-games, not deficient sciences. He even doubts that "the age of science and technology" is where the human finds its meaning.
The Blue Book (opening, the "craving for generality"); Tractatus, 6.371-6.372 · Culture and Value
Husserlexplicit
Husserl does not contest the fruitfulness of the exact sciences, but their claim to state the real on their own. Since Galileo, nature has been treated as a pure mathematical fabric, and we forget that this garment of idealities covers over the (Lebenswelt), the sensed, perceived, lived world that is the ground and source of meaning of every theory. The objectivism that takes the measure for the thing itself is an abstraction mistaking itself for the whole: science always presupposes a pre-scientific experience it cannot itself ground. Hence a derived, second place for science, which must be led back to its lived origin rather than set up as the sole measure of truth.
The Crisis of the European Sciences, §9 and §33-34
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Leibnizinferable
A leading mathematician, physicist and logician, Leibniz holds mechanistic science to be fully valid in its order, that of efficient causes. But it cannot suffice: physics requires a metaphysical foundation (force, substances), and the order of ends escapes mechanical explanation alone. He therefore refuses reductive scientism in favor of a plurality of mutually harmonized levels of explanation.
Discourse on Metaphysics, §17-18 (force, beyond Cartesian extension) · Monadology, §79 (the two realms of efficient and final causes)
Rousseauinferable
If science increases knowledge, it is for Rousseau neither the model of good living nor the path of virtue: erudition and the arts often spring from idleness and vanity, and flatter more than they elevate the soul. The knowledge of the heart and of conscience matters more than that of the academies, hence a clear challenge to the authority the century grants to science.
Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts
Argument
- No set of rules has been followed by all good science and by it alone: the great advances, Copernicus, Galileo, were made precisely by breaking the canons of their day.
- If even science does not owe its success to a fixed method, no method can be crowned as the sole gateway to truth: rationality is plural and historical, not a single algorithm.
- Moreover, whole swaths of the real, the felt quality of an experience, the meaning of a life, what a tragedy or a rite discloses about the human, are grasped by art, narrative, tradition, and slip through the net of third-person measurement.
Therefore So science is one powerful form of knowledge among others, not the measure of all: to disqualify art, lived experience, or traditional knowledge in advance is a dogmatism, not a result.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the position
- Pluralism refuses to grant any method the privilege of telling the truth: all accesses to the real would be equal in principle.
- But then what distinguishes knowledge from a shared illusion? Astrology, conspiracy thinking, quackery also claim their 'other way of knowing'.
- Without a criterion that exposes a claim to the verdict of the facts, one can no longer correct an error or decide between rival theses: 'all are equal' comes down to 'nothing is known'.
Therefore So refusing any privilege to the method that exposes itself to the facts threatens to dissolve the very difference between knowledge and belief: one needs at least a criterion that distinguishes what exposes itself to the real from what shields itself from it.
See the page- DescriptiveThe remainder, after science
Science tells the how, never the why or what is worth doing: it could answer all its possible questions without having even touched what gives a life its meaning. Are there truths, about meaning or the good, beyond its reach?
the questions of life - DescriptiveExplaining, or understanding?
To study man, history, a society, is it to seek causes as in physics, or to understand a meaning and intentions from within? One method for all objects, or other kinds of knowledge for what does not reduce to a mechanism?
human affairs - Descriptive Thought experimentWhat only lived experience gives
Does objective, third-person knowledge grasp what it is to see red, to suffer, to love? Science presupposes a lifeworld it does not itself describe, and intuition reaches a duration that measurement lets slip.
what is lived - DescriptiveDoes art tell the truth?
Do tragedy, the novel, the poem disclose truths about the human condition that no scientific statement could formulate, or do they offer only an enjoyment with no knowledge-value?
the work of art - DescriptiveWhat makes something a science?
What separates a science from a belief that puts on its appearances, astrology or a doctrine that nothing could disprove? Its capacity to expose itself to the verdict of the facts, or is another criterion needed, if a sharp boundary exists at all?
a theory - DescriptiveFaith and reason
Do religious faith and mystical experience give access to the real that science could not judge, or do they belong to a belief that is nothing like knowledge?
faith, mystical experience