Stanisław Kamiński
Science and Method. The Concept Of Science and the Classification of Sciences
Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, Lublin 1998

 

Summary

Science and Method. The Concept of Science and the Classification of Sciences (editions: I960, 1971, 1981) is based upon the belief in the importance of systematic, theoretical and practical study of science. The book seeks to be a multi-faceted introduction to those diverse interests, studies and disciplines which have, in the past and the present, been devoted to the phenomenon of knowledge (Gr. episteme, Lat. scientia) and its modern pattern: the natural sciences.

The book is an original attempt (preceding Thomas Kuhn's) to apprehend, primarily from a philosophical rather than historical point of view, the paradigmatic development of various conceptions of science. It seeks to do this pointing out specific tendencies in the development of human knowledge in general and of scientific knowledge in particular. For that reason it is more than a methodological study. It contains extensive reflections and information concerning the history and methodology of various sciences. Although this study is primarily devoted to the history of various conceptions of science, it also involves the history, both of science itself and particular sciences themselves, as well as the history of the methodological reflection on them. Primary emphasis is laid, however on the epistemological aspect of science, i.e. on the cognitive value of scientific concepts and methods.

The book has five main chapters, divisions, which reflect the author's methodological creed: to clarify a phenomenon means to display its genesis, structure and functions. Accordingly Chapter One tries to clarify the ambiguity of the term science by examining (in § 1) the main types of its referents. They include: a) some formal elements of knowledge - language, method and institution; b) a specific kind of knowledge; and c) a field of culture. § 2 makes some philosophical comments not only about the term science and other related terms (cognition, knowledge, belief, faith, wisdom, pseudoscience) but also on science itself, e.g. on the ontological and epistemological position of science among other kinds of knowledge, and on a possibility of its (essential) definition.

Since a comprehensive study of science should try to take into account all its relevant aspects: the humanistic, logical and philosophical, ones the sciences of science are arranged (§ 3) into three groups: the humanistic (history, psychology, sociology, economics and politics of science), the formal (logic of scientific language, formal logic, theory of scientific reasoning and methodology of science) and the philosophical (ontology and epistemology of science, a relevant part of philosophy of culture) sciences of science. Each of these numerous sciences of science (theoretical and practical, history of science, philosophy of science, epistemology, theory of science, logic of science, logical theory of science, logic of knowledge, methodology) is explained and defined in its different meanings.

To understand the term science adequately, Chapter Two reviews the ways in which science has been historically understood from European antiquity until the present. The history of the concept of science is accompanied by and compared with both the history of science as well as philosophy. The aim of this chapter is to show that although there have been many different concepts of science, they all preserved some genetic and functional identity. There were four radical and fundamental revolutions in the history of science: of Aristotle, Galileo, Comte and Popper. Each in turn gave birth to the four main conceptions of science: the classical, modern, positivistic and Popperian. Detailed attention has been paid to the methodological views, trends or influential methodological schools and the modifications of the concept of science in the 19th and 20th century, especially since the Second World War.

In order to arrive at a descriptive connotative definition of science Chapter Three deals systematically with the problems of the nature and with dynamics of science and its various functions in society and culture. The question about the nature of science (§ 1) can be posed as cjuaestio iuris or cjuaestio facti but in neither of these two cases can we obtain a universal and timeless criterion of scientific knowledge. A pluralistic approach to the reality (understood variously as facts, objective or subjective phenomena, states of affairs) seems for the author to be the most appropriate. The same pluralistic view is to be held with regard to the aims of scientific knowledge: these include the subjective motives of the scientists, their intellectual interest (curiosity) or the more objective, autonomous theoretical (scire propter ipsum scire) - like a description and an explanation of the reality - and practical goals of science.

Together with other modern philosophers the author is convinced that scientific method and scientific rules are essential to the scientific enterprise, even though scientific method is neither singular nor a simple one. The decisive criterion of scientific knowledge is the method (§ 2) but the concept of scientific method is itself the subject of serious discussions among realists and conventionalists (instrumentalists), rationalists and irrationalists, apriorists and empiricists, deductivists and inductivists, naturalists and antinaturalists. It is the subject-matter of science that determines the method of its inquiry and there are respectively two main scientific methods: the deductive and inductive. The latter is further subdivided into the methods of the natural sciences and of the humanities, the statistical method and the reductive method of the classical philosophy. There follows (§ 3) a characterization of the structure and dynamics of a scientific theory. The scientific theory, understood traditionally as a deductive system whose functions are to describe, explain and predict phenomena, can develop both synchronically and diachronically. To the many qualifications of a "good" theory pertain among others, creativity and simplicity, but seldom its truth. Nonetheless scientific knowledge is rational, realistic and objective, methodical and systematic, generalized, but at the same time specialized, theoretical and justifying, but in some way practical too. § 4 considers the place of science in human life and culture, especially its relations to religion, art, morality and technology.

The historical and systematic Chapter Four focuses on the phenomenon and the problem of diversity and unity of sciences (§ 1). It reviews and examines the different attempts to systematize the sciences in the past (§ 2) and the present (§ 3). The task of classification of sciences is especially important today because of the increasing specialization of sciences and the keenly felt need for their unification and for cooperation among different sciences (§ 4). None of the present classifications (typologies) can adequately embrace all existing sciences. There still remains the problem of the methodological autonomy of a given science and the possibility of many, and intersecting criteria of classification of sciences. There are many factors - both inside and outside sciences - that can unify them, e.g. it is the same human mind (cognitive faculties), which investigates, and the same world that is investigated, but the unity of science does not necessarily involve one scientific method and one language (as is demanded by the ideal of the neopositivistic Einheitswissenschaft).

The systematic Chapter Five gives an epistemological and methodological account of the main types of sciences. At first glance it seems that the deductive and inductive sciences (§ 1) - formal (mathematics and logic) or real (empirical) sciences - differ from each other with respect to their subject-matter and method. But this would be too simple since the demarcation between these sciences involves some important philosophical and methodological decisions. The same applies to the distinction between natural sciences and so-called humanities that use the method of explanation and understanding respectively (§ 2). Undoubtedly most of the modern methodological reflections are devoted to natural sciences as a paradigmatic case of science but the plurality of reality permits and demands other ways of scientific knowledge, too.

The dichotomous separation of theoretical and practical sciences is also controversial (§ 3). It does not help much to say that the former employs descriptive, the latter normative expressions. The Aristotelian distinction between theoretical, practical and technical knowledge was in this respect much more subtle. The scientific character of philosophy is disputable too (§ 4). A clear methodological account of it is not easy because of the historical and current plurality of conceptions of philosophy. Here the distinction between the two types of philosophy - autonomous (i.e. independent from sciences) and continuous with sciences - seems very important. Particularly difficult for many philosophers of science is any attempt to call theology a science (§ 5). But this might be less problematic if they could look at theology as a specific (founded on revelation) type of knowledge in the medieval meaning of science (scientia).

Summarized by Andrzej Bronk