View from the Right, Volume I: Heritage and Foundations by de Benoist Alain

Author:de Benoist, Alain [de Benoist, Alain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912079964
Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd.
Published: 2017-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

Epistemology and Scientific Discovery

‘Suppose you are visiting a city for the first time. You use a map to guide you. Suddenly, you discover that the map does not correspond at all to the layout of the city’s streets. You do not say, ”The streets do not obey the law of the map”. Instead, you say, “The map is wrong”. This is precisely the situation of the scientist faced with the so-called “laws of nature”. The laws constitute a map of nature drawn up by physicists. If one discovers a disagreement somewhere, one does not ask whether “nature” has disobeyed, but rather if the ”physicists” have made an error’. This observation is made by the logician Rudolf Carnap in Les fondements philosophiques de la physique , 311 a work whose original edition appeared in 1966.

With this example, characteristic of the Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis ), Rudolf Carnap, who was born in Germany in 1891 and died in the United States in 1972, intended to show that ‘natural laws’ do not have the absolute character that is often attributed to them.

The work of the Vienna Circle is not yet well-known in France despite recent efforts to make them better-known, particularly by Armand Colin with the collection Epistémologie , directed by Pierre Thuillier.

In the 1930s, this school of scientific philosophy reached the height of its influence. Its leading representatives were Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Otto Neurath, and Philipp Frank. They first taught in Germany, and then in the Anglo-Saxon countries.

The “Scientificity” of the Proposals

Heir to a long empiricist tradition going back to Hume, Locke, and Stuart Mill, the Vienna Circle situated itself in the continuation of the ‘empirio-criticism’ of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, which Lenin maltreated in his Materialism and empirio-criticism (1905). He was also influenced by the early philosophy of Bertrand Russell and by that of Wittgenstein, as well as by early developments in modern physics, formal logic, and the analysis of language.

In reaction to the German idealism of Schelling and Hegel, the theorists of the Vienna Circle felt that questions as to the ‘why’ of things, inaccessible to the scientific method, were by this fact ‘deprived of meaning’.

For them, the only sensible question was the question of ‘how’. Consequently, they distinguished two kinds of science: the empirical sciences (or natural sciences), and the formal sciences, like mathematics, logic, and so on. Only the first, they said, teach us something about the world. The second, whose propositions are so universal, and consequently always true, are nothing but conventional systems which facilitate reasoning, but they do not instruct in any way.

It is in contact with this circle, but on its margins, that the Austrian philosopher Karl R. Popper, now seventy-four, published his most famous book, Logik der Forschung , 312 which has been translated into French with a preface by Jacques Monod.

Born in Vienna, and emigrating to New-Zealand in 1937, Popper lived in Great Britain since 1946. It did not take him long to establish a position in intellectual circles, which lead him to chair, from 1959 to 1961, the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.

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