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Auguste Comte (19th
century) by Louis Jules Étex
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THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
Classical
science—by “classical” we mean science in its origins—combines Descartes’
rationalism with Enlightenment empiricism, that of Hume, for example. Uniquely
Western invention, classical science declares that knowledge is true to the
extent that it satisfies the strictures of formal rationalism, particularly
mathematical formalism, verified by empirical observation. The ideal of
classical science is Newtonian cosmology.
The
application of classical science to the understanding of social reality was
originated by Auguste Comte. In this respect, he is considered the “Father of
Sociology” or “Father of Social Science.” His novel understanding he called
“Positivism.” Positivism and its progeny is the dominant theory of knowledge in
management and business research.
Today
there are variant conceptions of science. Contemporary science often does not
follow the Newtonian ideal, for one. Not all scientific concepts are
exclusively mathematical. Some consider pure mathematics, science without
reference to empirical reality. Mathematical descriptions of social reality are
as a rule probabilistic, not deterministic like Newtonian mechanics. And so on
and so forth.
Public domain image
ReplyDeleteImage link:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Auguste_Comte_by_Louis_Jules_Etex.jpg
Gonzalinho
“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
ReplyDelete—Galileo Galilei, 1623, translated from the original Italian by Museo Galileo, Florence, Italy
The beginning of the Scientific Revolution in Renaissance Europe
Gonzalinho
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
ReplyDelete[Immanuel Kant’s] first major work of philosophy came in 1781, The Critique of Pure Reason, which covered his views on the intellectual battle between metaphysics and rationalism. This was joined in 1788 by The Critique of Practical Reason, which dealt with ethics, and in 1790 by The Critique of Judgement, which covered Kant's thoughts on aesthetics.
Perhaps Kant’s most significant contribution to Enlightenment thought was to challenge the hitherto dominance of empiricism, that is the reduction in importance of metaphysics based on the belief that thinkers should focus on facts and measurements which are based on sensory experience, that is, the physical world around us. Enlightened thinkers, in reaction to the long-held dominance of religious views in Western thought, had discarded many metaphysical topics as unworthy of enquiry because they believed that provable answers could never be found to certain questions like “Does God exist?” and “Why is the universe made in the way it is?” Thinkers were now looking for certainty. Kant agreed in part with this empirical approach to knowledge, but in his Critique of Pure Reason, he proposes that full sensory experience and sensation can never be fully realised; all we can do is experience aspects of “things in themselves”. In other words, even the empiricists had a dubious claim to absolute certainty.
Kant believed that some knowledge must be independent of sensation, examples given include our concepts of space and time, freedom (in the sense of choice and intention), immortality, and God. These things are a priori knowledge, things that we can think about without ever experiencing them directly, things that our minds can impose upon our experiences. Indeed, Kant goes so far as to say that experience without these a priori ideas is impossible. “Kant thus restored metaphysics to a central place in philosophy” (Chisick, 239), even if he himself believed that a metaphysician must be very careful not to waste time investigating what he called the noumenal world, the world beyond the sensory world that can never be known with certainty.
References
Chisick, Harvey. Historical Dictionary of the Enlightenment. Scarecrow Press, 2005.
https://www.worldhistory.org/Immanuel_Kant/
—Mark Cartwright, “Immanuel Kant,” World History Encyclopedia, January 18, 2024
Kant set forth the metaphysical ground of the Scientific Revolution, albeit post hoc.
The revolution sought and found truth in a priori knowledge confirmed by empirical phenomena. The ideal of this type of knowledge was Newtonian physics.
It was not the science of Aristotle or the medievals, which was simply understood as knowledge, especially that which is systematic and organized. According to this definition, theology would be considered a science—a notion that doesn’t coincide with the contemporary mind.
Kantian idealism took its place as the epistemology of the Scientific Revolution.
Gonzalinho
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the time of the Industrial Revolution, Auguste Comte sought to apply the epistemology of science to understanding social phenomena. The West at this time had been astonished by the newfound power of science to explain the natural world, and now intellectuals hoped to extend the methodology of science to understanding social reality. Just like Karl Marx around the same time, Comte aspired to develop a science of society, although the philosophical underpinning of Marxism was principally Hegel, who followed upon Kant. Comte has been anointed “Father of Sociology,” the latter a term he himself invented.
DeleteGonzalinho
To the Editor:
DeleteRe “The Life of Pi, and Other Infinities” (Basics, Jan. 1): Modern math’s finessing of infinity with “unreal” numbers and “infinite sets” would have been impossible without the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It was Kant who taught mathematicians to turn inward. What they got from Kant was the idea that the laws of physics — meaning, above all, mathematics — are products of the human intellect.
Kant taught that science imposes an intellect-created matrix upon the physical world. He ruled out the infinitesimal taken in any literal, “counting” sense.
For Kant, numbers were human-invented tools. They are not embedded ready-made in nature. Time, too, Kant pointed out, is subjective and relativistically human. He rejected Newton’s notion of absolute time.
For these reasons, the influential philosopher Hermann Cohen attributed the foundations of modern calculus and, in fact, the procedures of modern science to Kant, as did great latter-day scientists like Henri Poincaré, inspirer of modern time zones.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/science/sciences-debt-to-kant.html
—Albert L. Weeks, Sarasota, Fla., “Letters: Science’s Debt to Kant,” The New York Times (January 8, 2013)
Kant discarded the untestability of Aristotelian metaphysics, a philosophy which had been so dominant during the medieval period, and established a new metaphysics, which he named “transcendental idealism.” Kant synthesized Hume’s empirical skepticism and Descartes’ formal rationalism to establish the ideological foundation of modern science, with particular relevance to the physical sciences. His metaphysics launched an epistemological skepticism that persists to this day, especially in the West, even though postmodernism, which is pluralistic, has moved beyond it.
Gonzalinho
THEOLOGY AS SOCIAL SCIENCE
ReplyDeleteThere is an empirical aspect to theology according to which theology can today be considered a science, especially in the sense of “social science.” The manner in which priest exorcists go about understanding demonology, for example, in critical aspects is in fact scientific. There is an observable, empirical aspect to demons because they act on the natural world, not only on the physical world but on the human psyche as well.
Gonzalinho
ARISTOTELIAN SCIENCE IS NOT MODERN SCIENCE
ReplyDelete“For any science to get off the ground, the scientist has to believe the world is intelligible. That the world is endowed with some intelligible structure. Where [does that idea] come from? It comes from the belief in the Creation. If God has made everything, then we know that the world isn’t God. It’s other than God. But if God has made everything, then everything is stamped with some sign of God’s great intelligence. Creation is the theological assumption behind the emergence of the sciences. Once you see that, you see this very deep compatibility between religion and science.”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/N5NuAYRiYFQ
—Bishop Robert Barron, “The Compatibility between Religion and Science,” YouTube video short, May 15, 2025
The starting point of the Roman Catholic religion is revelation. The starting point of science is empirical observation. Because they have different starting points, they sometimes come to different and conflicting conclusions. With Barron as with the Roman Catholic Church in general, it is very unfortunate but not surprising that Roman Catholicism fails to acknowledge this obvious truth, obvious at least to persons of intellectual integrity. This clip comes across as an ideological polemic that is tragically blind to the basal reality of a fundamental incompatibility between the Roman Catholic religion and modern science.
Barron’s idea of science is Aristotelian, and Aristotelian science is categorically not modern science. Intelligibility does not make our understanding of the natural world scientific, even more so it does not make our understanding of the natural world true. Our interpretation of the natural world may be intelligible yet it may also be false in this respect—it is controverted by empirical data. A classic illustration, hundreds of years old, of this point is geocentrism.
There are modern analogues of the scientific repudiation of geocentrism. Monogenism, an intelligible theory of human origins, is from a scientific point of view highly, highly improbable—in this respect, monogenism is false. Polygenism, not monogenism, is the most plausible scientific explanation of human origins.
The Roman Catholic doctrine of monogenism takes as its starting point revelation. Modern science, beginning with empirical data, voluminous besides, concludes with polygenism.
We underscore that we are not rejecting monogenism as a religious doctrine. We are asserting that monogenism is not science in the modern sense of the term.
Monogenism no doubt is a doctrine fully compatible with Aristotelian science. However, science is not defined by intelligibility, and monogenism, however it might claim to reveal the intelligence of God, is, according to our current state of knowledge, not science.
What Barron asserts concerning science as a way of understanding the natural world is true of Aristotelian science. Aristotelian science is not modern science.
Gonzalinho
The quantum world is a strange place. If you look at an object, it changes. If you know how fast it’s moving, you can’t know where it is. Measurements that happened in the past can seemingly be erased later. Particles are sometimes waves and can be in two places at once. Cats may be both dead and alive. These are things we say when talking about the quantum world, but is this really what is going on?
DeleteQuantum mechanics is an incredibly well-established theory. It has passed every test it’s ever been subjected to. It underlies much of the technological progress we have seen in the past century, for what would electronics be without discrete energy levels, which came to us courtesy of quantum mechanics? We have the mathematics and we know how to work it, yet even after a century of debate, we don’t know what the mathematics of quantum mechanics means.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2328087-can-particles-really-be-in-two-places-at-the-same-time/
—Sabine Hossenfelder, “Can particles really be in two places at the same time?” NewScientist, July 11, 2022
Intelligibility does not define science. The imperative of intelligibility is an artifact of Aristotelian philosophy.
Gonzalinho