Epistemology & Philosophy of Science

The purpose of this paper is to offer a preliminary survey of one of the most widely discussed problems in Bacon’s studies: the problem of the interplay between the speculative (i.e., metaphysical) and operative (i.e., methodological) layers of Bacon’s works. I propose to classify the various answers in three categories. In the first category I place attempts claiming that Bacon’s inquiries display his appetitive metaphysics. In the second category are those seeing Bacon’s more “scientific” works as disclosing some of the inner metaphysical layers and presuppositions. The third category see Bacon’s experimental inquiries as attempts to “fix” metaphysics, by redefining concepts of metaphysical origins. In discussing these three categories of interpretative stances I show that we can gain further insights if we take into account recent and less recent trends in philosophy of science, and especially if we think in terms of background theory and bottom-up strategies of concept formation. I offer examples of such procedures in Bacon’s natural and experimental histories and show what we can gain if we apply the same interpretative strategy of focusing on concept-formation to the reading of the Novum organum.

The most important of Francis Bacon’s argument against Aristotelian syllogistic logic as a main method of investigation was his doctrine of Idols, closely connected to the contemporary Anglican theological views on imperfect human nature. In his criticism of the first notion of human mind, based on mistaken abstraction, Bacon separated “ars inveniendi”, “ars judicandi” and “ars tradendi” and argued for a new nonverbal form of communication, based on “real characters”. Bacon's conventional concept of the universal language, strongly influenced by Aristotle, was not realized by the philosopher himself, but it was of great popularity in both European rationalism and British empiricism in the middle – second half of the 17th century.

F. Bacon in his work New Organon proposes a project of a new science, which ensures the desire of human race “to recover its right over nature”. The article examines the work on the universal owner of “the right over nature” in two historical contexts. The first context determines the emergence of modern science. Here Bacon plays the role of an expert mediator who introduces the new scientific method in its broader social meaning. His work on the universal owner of “the right over nature” combines and intersects the cognitive and political aspects of scientific endeavor. The second context covers the present situation after the Scientific-Technical Revolution, when the use of the “right over nature” becomes actual, and not only possible. The contradictions revealed in the first context in the activities of the expert mediator serve as the basis for analyzing the present situation of interaction between science and society. The author describes the expert mediator, corresponding to the modern context of uncertainty and conflict of values, through the concept of “honest broker of policy alternatives” by R. Pielke, as well as through the palette of expert knowledge types presented by the STS researchers. She shows why the presented differentiation of expert knowledge types is not enough to organize the work of an expert mediator as an “honest broker”. In conclusion, she puts forward the hypothesis about distributed expertise, which can represent contemporary work on the owner of the “right over nature” and describes some aspects of this work. The author associates the significance of the hypothesis of distributed expertise with the preservation of the openness of the project of Bacon's new science.

The current predicament, marked by an unprecedented environmental crisis and novel debates on the anthropic-technological transformation of the earth-system, calls for a reassessment of the historical-epistemological question of the entanglement between power, knowledge, and nature. Francis Bacon is the classical reference point for this thematic cluster – a focal point for both historical reconstructions and epistemological reflections, for both those who extol the merits of scientific progress and those who criticize the risks posed by its abuse. I begin this essay by considering Merchant’s eco-feminist interpretation of Bacon. Additionally, I briefly recount how Bacon is envisaged as a symbol of science as domination within the critique of capitalism provided in another classic, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. I also consider the flipside of the reception of Bacon in assessments of our modern scientific world, namely the empowerment-and-emancipation discourse on technology, typical of much of Marxism. In this respect, I deem it expedient to mention the knowledge-power problem in relation to the Anthropocene debate, and in particular in relation to the theme of the transformation of the world in praxeological terms. These considerations, which deal with various assessments of techno-scientific capitalist modernity, are at the basis of my final remarks on the most urgent Anthropocene dilemma, namely, whether we need more or less technoscience. This concerns the historico-political question of whether the ecological limits of growth are an intrinsic limit of capitalism.

This essay examines the impact of Baconian utilitarianism on Lancelot Thomas Hogben (1895–1975), a biologist whose view of science was heavily intertwined with his support of socialist planning. Like Bacon and Marx, Hogben considered science to be a collective tool of utmost importance for empowering people and improving life conditions through a conscious and methodical intervention on our surroundings. Convinced by the fundamentally applied nature of science, Hogben successfully used the principles of the emerging Marxist historiography of science in his popular science books to teach abstract ideas through their origins in practical life. Furthermore, he extended the view of science as planning from biology and economics to linguistics by designing the international language Interglossa that would also serve to enhance scientific literacy in the lay public.

Bacon’s influence on Spinoza’s thought is controversial, since this latter seems to underestimate the role of experience in achieving true knowledge. In this paper, I will investigate Spinoza’s reference in Letter 37** to a historiola mentis (little history of mind) a la Bacon as an empirical-historical method to distinguish between different kinds of perceptions. My aim is to explain why Spinoza considers Bacon’s little history of mind a useful tool to proceed towards the knowledge of the excellent things [praestantissimae res]. I will suggest that Spinoza could have been inspired by Bacon’s theory of idols and his historical method, since they help distinguish between different kinds of ideas with no previous knowledge of the first causes. Moreover, Spinoza’s method for interpreting the Scripture in his Tractatus Theologicopoliticus seems to be partially indebted to Bacon’s account of natural and civil history and aims to clarify the practical meaning of the Scripture. According to Spinoza, a historical and empirical method might play a pivotal role by transforming human praxis and behavior according to the order of the intellect. This method has in a strictly practical function and cannot be compared to the true knowledge of things through their first causes. However, it is a fundamental part of the process directing human beings to the knowledge of the most fundamental things.

In this review I analyse new trends in Bacon-scholarship over the last decade. Bacon’s role in the history and philosophy of science has been the topic of debate since the second half of the seventeenth century. Scholars took him to be either a key figure in the emergence of experimental sciences, or the opposite of what science is supposed to be. However, most of these bold claims were based on distortions and misunderstandings of Bacon’s programme. Starting in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, several studies offered a more nuanced account of Bacon’s philosophy and tried to refute some of the ‘unsound criticisms’. Moreover, over the last decade, we can notice a tendency to focus on Bacon’s more practical works, and not only on the more theoretical ones. In the context of these practical works, I identified several new trends: the role of the natural and experimental histories in the overall project of the Great Instauration, and their relation with natural philosophy; the function of mathematics and quantification; the employment of instruments and other devices to overcome the shortcomings of both the senses and the minds; the scientific methodology with an emphasis on the relation between theory and experiments, and the use of exploratory experiments; and finally Bacon’s use of sources and his influence on later early modern authors. As opposed to the idea that Bacon was interested either in collecting random facts or in inventing experimental reports to present his speculative ideas, Bacon is lately portrayed as a careful experimenter, meticulous in writing reports, ingenious in designing instruments and new experiments, and critical towards his own conceptions.

The interpretation of the abstraction process and the use of various abstractions are consistent with the trends associated with the naturalistic turn in modern cognitive and neural studies. Logic of dealing with abstractions presupposes not only acts of digress from the insignificant details of the object, but also the replenishment of the image due to idealization, endowing the object with properties that are absent from it. Thus, abstraction expresses not only the activity of the subject but the fact of “locking” this activity on a certain kind of ontology as well. The latter, in the spirit of I. Kant’s apriorism, is a function of epistemological attitudes and the nature of the subject's activity. Therefore, in the context of modern neuroscience, we can mean the transcendentalism of activity type. An effective tool for comprehension of abstractions making and development is a metaphor, which, on the one hand, allows submerge the object of analysis into a more or less familiar context, and on the other hand, it may produce new abstractions. Naturalistic tendencies manifested in the fact that empirically established abstractions activate certain neural brain networks, and abstract and concrete concepts are "processed" by various parts of the brain. If we keep in mind the presence of different levels abstractions then not only neural networks but even individual neurons (called “conceptual”) can be excited. The excitation of neural networks is associated with understanding the meaning of some concepts, but at the same time, the activity of these networks presupposes the "dissection" of reality due to a certain angle, determined in the general case by goals, attitudes and concrete practices of the subject.

The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the methodological effectiveness of one of the directions in developing the philosophy of science – cultural and historical epistemology. Cultural-historical epistemology does not pretend at all to be any radical epistemological originality but offers a general view of science as a part of intellectual culture, where both individual historical cases and broad sociological generalizations find their methodologically significant place. The authors believe that it is the development of methodological norms capable of determining the fundamental parameters and strategies of scientific research that is now the central task of the philosophy of science. One of the characteristic forms of organization of modern advanced science is interdisciplinary research programs that involve the joint activities of large research teams. This fact raises a critical question about the mutual understanding of specialists from different disciplines and, accordingly, about the development of methodological norms that can determine the generally accepted parameters of the reproducibility of cognition results. Thus, in the center of attention of the philosophy of science, epistemological plots are put forward, one way or another connected with a specific understanding of the phenomenon of communication in science. Moreover, according to the authors, in these philosophical and methodological searches, it is essential to overcome, on the one hand, the inclination to conceptual design that leads away from the real methodological needs of science and, on the other hand, straightforward sociologization and equally direct historicization of science. These approaches are fraught with relativization of the very idea of scientific knowledge as a rational phenomenon of culture. The authors of the article believe that in modern conceptual trends in the philosophy of science, it is necessary to accentuate quite traditional epistemological principles, which in their updated edition make it possible to activate, or, as it were, to revive the methodological functions of the philosophy of science that are partially lost today. Justifying this approach, the authors turn to the epistemological trend, which for two decades has been developed based on the traditions of Russian philosophy of the first half of the 20th century.

The article shows that cultural-historical epistemology erroneously puts forward the thesis of a global crisis in the sphere of modern epistemology and philosophy of science. The key error of such a diagnosis is rooted in the confusion of basic concepts. In the development of epistemological studies, the period of the last decades of the twentieth century, which was called the “descriptive turn”, is very important. In the philosophy of science, the task was set to reflect the real practice of scientific research. This has been successfully carried out in a number of works by Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Latour and others. The task of building universal norms of scientific research has faded into the background. In this regard, the subjects of "methodology of science", on the one hand, and "epistemology" and "philosophy of science", on the other hand, were distinguished. The formulation of norms and standards for scientific research has become the task of methodology. Describing scientific practice, including scientific revolutions, has become the task of the professional history of science. The philosophical understanding of the processes of historical evolution, the identification of the laws of the development of science has become the subject of the philosophy of science. Epistemology, in turn, is called upon to consider the phenomenon of knowledge not only in science, but also more broadly – in a variety of historical and cultural contexts. In modern studies in the field of epistemology and philosophy of science, case studies are important, as they provide invaluable empirical material for philosophical generalizations. As for the construction of universal standards for scientific work, such a task, as Feyerabend showed, seems to be impossible. Moreover, the universal methodological standard does not allow discovering the uniqueness of scientific research situations.

Cultural and historical epistemology is not only a special branch of philosophical researches of science, but also the base of reform of a system of the epistemological categories expressing the purposes and values of scientific knowledge. Its need follows from the nature of development of modern science. Preservation of the traditional epistemological categories applied to the analysis of this development results in rough relativism. This danger can be eliminated, having developed the holistic system of epistemological values proceeding from the principle of historicism and “collective” understanding of the subject of scientific knowledge. Both of these bases allow to disclose historical and cultural conditionality of processes of scientific research and broadcast of their results. Such purposes and values of science as the truth and the objectivity of knowledge have historical measurement: they exist only in the course of continuous emergence and destruction, being affected by cultural factors. The collectivity of the subject of scientific knowledge is defined together with concepts of a “transcendental” and “individual and empirical” subject according to the principle of complementarity (N. Bohr) finding an epistemological transcription. The possibilities of political subjectivity of science in connection with the epistemological investigations from participation of scientific communities in political structures and movements are considered.

In the article the thoughts about science as a creative process are presented in the context of the historical-cultural epistemology, specificity of which is presented in the material by B.I. Pruzhinin and T.G. Shchedrina. Tendencies in the modern world’s development – social, economic, political, communication – do not give rise to doubts about the presence of a paradox: the more globalized the world becomes, the more science gravitates towards the status of applied – this determines its effectiveness. Nonetheless, what is lost when emphasizing efficiency? To answer this question is worth remembering that the intellectual revolution in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries was based not only on the works of Bacon, Descartes, and Newton but also on the radical position expressed in Machiavelli’s “Sovereign” who placed utility above virtue. As soon as science becomes a pragmatic business, prestige, fame, safety, and comfort begin to depend on its success. Knowledge is power, but in the new political and social realities, the main thing is practical, utilitarian, and effective. By becoming disciplinary, technical, science gains power – but is this power not limited to its own constructions? Paradoxically, science, performing a service function, begins to lose the status of an instance of meaning. Serving society, it, nevertheless, is not a connecting force in society – they resort to it for recipes and solutions, but they do not consider it as a common cause, and as a platform for social interaction, they expect a product from science, but not meanings and values, benefit, but not virtues. However, what is a product of science? How is its performance measured? And who determines the effectiveness? This article attempts to partially illuminate these issues, including in the field of their consideration existentially loaded aspects of the scientific community’s creativity – aesthetic, technical-digital, including computer games. Collective intuition as the acquisition of new experience, as the creation of previously nonexistent contexts in which new objects, events, and phenomena are placed – all these are key conditions for a world of uncertainty in which science is already required not only objective results but also involvement in the joint comprehension of existential projects. Truth there is not always the result, but rather a beginning, which requires, among other things, the derivation of all scientific consequences for which other forms of habitation of experience are open – aesthetic, playful, performative.

The author considers some methodological problems of contemporary psychological research in the context of the concept of cultural-historical epistemology, as it is represented in the paper by B.I. Pruzhinin and T.G. Shchedrina. The author claims that the key problem of the modern science lies not in the question of how to conduct research correctly, but how to express the results so that another scientist can reproduce them. What are the criteria for their validity and reliability? With this problem in the background, it becomes obvious that there is a fundamental gap between the theoretical and methodological part of a particular study and the description of the selection and methods, the organizing procedure for empirical research, and the analysis of the results. Scientists’ attention is focused on the development and implementation of empirical research, while the actual production and reproduction of knowledge happen to be outside the scope of solving research problems. In the latter case, we mean the entire procedure for the reproduction of knowledge, including the theoretical and methodological substantiation of the novelty and relevance of the research, the empirical part of the scientific work itself, and, of course, the cultural-historical interpretation of the results, or, more correctly, their reasonable explanation. The problem of psychological knowledge replication is considered in the article. Also, the criteria for the replication of knowledge at various points of scientific and psychological research are discussed, in particular – the criteria of constancy and renewal of knowledge in experimental situations, which presuppose the conceptual setting of the studied phenomena, and of the facts’ correlation from different experiments (including the conceptualization of their continuity with the historical tradition of psychological science). Considerable attention is paid to the specific object field of psychological science and, thereby, to the analysis of such scientific procedures as description, interpretation and explanation. Especially, the methodological arguments are analyzed which make it possible to introduce the procedure for explaining scientific data into the criteria system for the replication of psychic phenomena.

In this article, the author proceeds from the conceptual reversal of cultural-historical epistemology to the personal, historical, and social experience of a representative of an intellectual culture (scientist, philosopher) and his understanding and rethinking of his methodological attitudes. The idea of the article is that cultural-historical epistemology makes it possible to present natural-scientific and philosophical individual reflection as a specific component of the development of special tools, which are capable of recording and assessing the methodological effectiveness of research activities taking into account individual cognitive experience. For this purpose, the author turns to the issue of an autobiographical narrative – a narrative containing the personal experience of working scientists rethinking their own methodological attitudes. The specific character of ego-documents, and moreover, ego-texts of a natural scientific kind in this case is corroborated by the ideas of cultural-histori - cal epistemology. A scientist is turned to Other, whether in himself or in the narrative. Here scientific methodology and autobiographical narrative are conceptually mixed. As the main material reveals the meaning of the above idea, ego-texts by A.A. Ukhtomsky (his notes in notebooks, correspondence, and memoirs) were selected. While comprehending the fate of domestic and foreign science and also perfectly imagining the further development of multiple “systems of knowledge”, Ukhtomsky still saw a living person – the Interlocutor – behind this process. The need to preserve this image in front of oneself, to preserve the Dominant on the face of Other, this internal orientation, are brought by Ukhtomsky to a conceptually higher level. In this case, the narrative is viewed as a type of reflection that allows one to explicate and give a personal assessment of the effectiveness of the methodological guidelines, based on which the scientist chooses certain areas of research.

The author discusses some tensions between realism and constructivism in the theory of knowledge and the corresponding research programs in the philosophy of science. In this paper, he argues that the development of transcendentalism can help reduce these tensions. He considers the way for Kant’s transcendentalism development, which is connected with the semiotic interpretation proposed by K.-O. Apel. The author suggests the new interpretation of transcendentalism according to which the transcendental exists as a proto-norm, which is a spontaneous act that assigns the “given” object either the status of a sign reffering to a certain meaning, or the status of a meaning reffering to a certain expression (sign). The author develops G. Frege’s concept of meaning and argues that the existence of two kinds of meaning (meaning-1 and meaning-2), which corresponds with the two fundamental characteristics of consciousness: intensionality and responsiveness. Given this, a transcendental act generates either intensional or responsive meanings of the reality. The proposed symbolic interpretation of transcendentalism allows us explain the emergence of realism and constructivism as semiotic types of cultures and overcome the tensions between them. It is also shown that this version of symbolic transcendentalism is promising for explaining the nature of absolute existences in both classical and non-classical physical theories. The examples of such existences as absolute space and absolute time in Newtonian mechanics and absolute standards in G. Weil's theory of gauge fields are considered. These transcendental existences cannot be interpreted as real physical objects, and at the same time they are necessary for the interpretation of physical experiments. The author comes to the conclusion that transcendentalism is a promising program for the development of philosophy of science as an area for researches in normativity, sign-symbolic structures of cognitive processes, and the forms of knowledge.

This review article reveals the structural components of the chess metaphor, which represent in an unusual perspective the properties of a linguistic sign and its connection with mental processes. Strict rule-following and the conventionality of the material plane of expression turn chess into a convenient illustration of a universal linguistic structure. Particular attention is paid to the computer profile of the chess metaphor, since it reflects a whole complex of philosophical problems of computer science about mind, thinking and intelligence. In the proposed paper, the presentation of most of the material is based on the works of F. de Saussure, L. Hjelmslev, L. Wittgenstein and their interpreters, in whose texts an obvious important place is occupied by chess analogies and theoretical conclusions initiated by them. First we investigate chess metaphor in the context of language and speech structures. Next, we analyze the "chess track" in the problem of individual language and the rule-following problem. The final part is devoted to the technical elements of computer chess and the influence of this area of computer science on some of the points of cognitive theories of language and mind. The author of the article emphasizes a nontrivial transformation of the conceptual content of the chess metaphor, which indicates the evolution of computational tendencies in modern theories about language and mind. The article substantiates the thesis that the traditional chess metaphor used in the XX century in the philosophical investigation of language and mind, today it takes on a realization in the framework of computer models of the chess game. Machine deep learning can significantly expand the horizon of computability. Game interaction makes it possible to ascribe the elements of intentional content to machine functions. Nevertheless, all the argumentation in the work is aimed at proving that the rules governing language and mind are rules different from the rules of computer intelligence.

The article focuses on analyzing the changes that have occurred in the procedures for assessing scientific knowledge during the period of their massive introduction into the economy, politics and everyday life, as well as the formation of a new social position of the expert. Up to this point, the assessment of scientific knowledge often took place within the scientific community. In that case, a special role was played by “authority” able to evaluate projects basing on criteria intrinsic to the scientific ethos. The active introduction of scientific knowledge into the social life encouraged the emergence of a new expert’s social position differing from an intrascientific “authority”. In their work, they have to evaluate projects that involve large financial resources and contribute to changes in social and economic life, and therefore, in addition to scientific criteria, such experts consider any possible economic, political and social consequences of the project implementation. Along with it, the formation of the new expert’s social position and its active use by scientists leads to several problems. First, the expertise and expert practices are beginning to be used by scientists to legitimize their own position in science and fight rival groups. Second, these processes can provoke a decrease in diversity both within science itself and in the number of cognitive practices; also they can limit the emergence of new approaches to the analysis of technological, economic, political and social innovations.