Abstract
At the beginning of the twentieth century, science became a specific, circumscribed and autonomous subject of reflection within philosophy. Interest was therefore fuelled to explain the fundamental aspects on which scientific knowledge is based and a series of methodological proposals were put forward to guide the correct construction of the same. The greatest contribution to this undertaking would be made by the movement of logical positivism and by the science philosopher Karl Popper.
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Notes
- 1.
Forerunners of this movement, among others, are indicated (and not always entirely correctly) including the German physicist Ernst Mach (1838–1916), the Austrian physicist, mathematician and philosopher Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (1844–1906), the German philosopher and psychologist Hermann Brentano (1838–1917) and the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong (1853–1920).
- 2.
Despite sharing the same intellectual perspective, the authors are also very different from each other, whose positions are not always compatible or whose positions are not always compatible or superimposable.
- 3.
Even if the term positivism is rejected by Carnap.
- 4.
Principle that stems from a philosophical conception with a marked mechanistic character, according to which each phenomenon or event of the present is necessarily determined by a historic phenomenon or event.
- 5.
We say former Wittgenstein because thereafter he radically distanced himself from the initial positions expressed in Tractatus.
- 6.
In social sciences, this position has led to the rejection of mentalism and an embracing of behaviourism. Behaviourism rejects the use (for example) of concepts of intelligence, intention, interpretation and so on, to explain human behaviours because concepts (being in the mind) cannot be observed. Behaviourism only focuses on actions, only on observable entities. If in the context of biology all the phenomena of life can be described and explained through physical and chemical laws, in the sphere of psychology, behaviourism theories consider that all the psychic and mental processes must necessarily be reduced to behaviours and must therefore be expressed in neurophysiological terms.
- 7.
If we are consistent with a constructivist approach, we should use the term “attributes” instead of “properties” or “characteristics”. In fact, the properties are elements possessed by the referent (therefore an objectualist position), while the attributes are elements attributed to the referent by an observer. Added to this is the fact that different observers could attribute different elements to the same referent.
- 8.
Paradoxically, this term, with its Latin roots, made up of verum (true) and facere (make, render) seems more akin to a constructivist epistemology.
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Gobo, G., Marcheselli, V. (2022). Epistemology: The Foundations of Scientific Knowledge. In: Science, Technology and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08306-8_3
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