Abstract
In this chapter, following the works of several philosophers of the more distant past, four Doubts and corresponding to them four Assumptions that underlie any science are defined. The advanced science has to assume: (1) the world external to mind exists; (2) this external world is not chaotic, it is organized; (3) the external world is knowable, including the world beyond appearances; and (4) the external organized world is only material.
Keywords
- Assumptions of any science
- Ontological assumptions
- Epistemological assumptions
- Epistemology of psychology
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Notes
- 1.
I am going to give more evidence to support this statement in Chap. 7.
- 2.
Often it is impossible to know whether the ideas in Marxist philosophy belong to Marx or Engels (even though sometimes they may have had even contradictory opinions on some issues, see, e.g., Gouldner, 1980, esp. Chap. 9). My impression is that original most general ideas about the world, nature, etc. belong to Engels, whereas (sometimes quite inconsistent in my opinion) application of them to the analysis of society and its change belongs to Marx. At least it feels to be so with the ideas important for this book: these seem to belong to Engels rather than to Marx. As I cannot be sure about it—and actually it does not matter much because the ideas are important and not their authors—I will use “Engels and Marx” as if it is one person.
- 3.
Here it can be said that we may assume there is a nonmaterial force but that force of whatever kind just does not change anything in the organization of the material world. In that case there would be no difference between the only material universe and material universe in parallel with nonmaterial that is fully unrelated to the material. Anybody who prays to God or some other “higher” form of being and believes that the prayers can be “answered” by fulfilling the wishes expressed in prayer assumes that the organization of the world is constantly changed by such “higher” forces, by nonmaterial being.
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Toomela, A. (2019). Science is Based on Certain Assumptions. In: The Psychology of Scientific Inquiry. SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31449-1_2
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