Epistemology and Social Science by Bergmann Frithjof

Author:Bergmann, Frithjof [Bergmann, Frithjof]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

If we now proceed to our last example and take up structuralism next, then our few brief comments will limit themselves as before to a specific purpose: we again hope to examine only some aspects of the general logic of structuralist methodology. We want to see whether the present scheme can bring some of the outer limits of that methodology to light. In this attempt we will thus have to stay on the same lamentable grey level of abstraction.

At least one main root of structuralism is embedded in philosophy. It grows out of the very broad idea that knowledge itself is a structure, that only the imposition of relationships, or the fashioning of structures gives rise to it. As Riegel7 puts it in paraphrasing Carnap: “Knowledge and recognition do not so much consist in introspective apprehension but in active construction. At the beginning … is not the sensory impression but the sentence ( Satz as related to setzen) which alone generates knowledge by making it communicable, social and human.” Or as Poincare expressed it: “only relations between sensations have an objective value”. On which Riegel8 comments: “For Carnap, this move, although in the right direction, does not go far enough. Scientific knowledge becomes possible only through the elaboration of the systematic interrelation of relations, i.e., through the study of structures.”

Taken as a justification of the structural approach, this line of thought seems to me quite weak. Among the reasons for this are: (1) That the issue as here posed assumes acceptance of Model A in its most drastic form. Only within the framework of this model is the transition from subjective “impressions” to objective “knowledge” (at least in this formulation) a main problem. Objectionable, more specifically, is the assumption that all perception is subjective. It seems far more reasonable to believe that “sensory impressions” combine elements of both, and in that case the “construction of relationships” is no longer needed to cross the gap to the “communicable and the social”.

(2) It is not at all clear that the “construction of relationships” could solve this problem – if it did exist. If the initial impressions really were private and subjective then what guarantees that the relationships or even “the systematic interrelationship among these relationships” have “an objective value”? The relationships might be as private as the entities that they relate. (The underlying point is that there are no ways out of this privacy once it has been postulated and that this is one of the indications of the bankruptcy of Model A.)

(3) I do not see why the “positioning of sentences” should fare any better than the “construction of relationships”. The same two questions can be posed again: Is the notion that everything short of “sentences” is private and incommunicable, correct or even plausible? Is it so evident that organisms which certainly lack the capacity to posit sentences – organisms which have neither syntax nor the use of genuine symbols – are therefore also incapable of knowledge, and even of communication? Even if one denies that ants have knowledge, there is no doubt that they communicate.

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