14-27
Science and Different Images of the World
Authors: Michele Marsonet
Number of views: 80
It has often been claimed in contemporary philosophy that the scientific world-view
will necessarily replace the view of the world provided by common sense. It may be
argued, however, that common sense holds a sort of methodological primacy over the
aforementioned scientific world-view. For example, the thesis of the indeterminacy of
radical translation entails the impossibility of establishing what a scientific theory is
talking about. We can say what a scientific theory deals with only by having recourse
to our ordinary language, i.e., by assuming that we know and understand in advance
what we are talking about normally, in our daily life. It follows that science cannot be
conceived of as a form of knowledge which is totally independent of ordinary language
and, therefore, alternative to it. According to such a stance, even scientific theories
stem from the universe of meanings that belong to common language.
On his part Davidson, in challenging the scheme-content dualism, mentions both “a
dualism of total scheme (or language) and uninterpreted content”, and “a dualism of
conceptual scheme and empirical content”.1
What we have here is a real dichotomy
between these two elements, in the sense that the (conceptual) scheme is “other
than” the (non-conceptual) content that is opposed to it. Now, Davidson’s rejection of
the scheme-content distinction is supported by a set of arguments purporting to reject,
first of all, the thesis that totally different conceptual schemes can actually exist. To put
things in a very sketchy manner, he equates having a conceptual scheme with having a
language, so that we face the following elements: (1) language as the organizing force;
(2) what is organized, referred to as “experience”, “the stream of sensory experience”,
and “physical evidence”; and, finally, (3) the failure of intertranslatability. It follows
that “It is essential to this idea that there be something neutral and common that
lies outside all schemes”.2
If this is the situation, he goes on, then we could say that
conceptual schemes that are different in a radical way from each other correspond
to languages that are not intertranslatable. How can we, however, make sense of a
total failure of intertranslatability among languages? For sure “we could not be in
a position to judge that others had concepts or beliefs radically different from our
own”.3
Davidson’s conclusion is that if one gives up the dualism of scheme and world,he will not give up the world, but will instead be able to “re-establish unmediated
touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true”.4
Davidson’s solution is radical, but we are bound to ask at this point what the expressions
“reality” and “world” mean for him. They seem to coincide with the world of common
sense which is formed by the familiar objects whose antics - as he says - make our
sentences and opinions true or false. These familiar objects are tables, chairs, houses,
stars, etc., just as we perceive them in our daily life. One is not entitled to ignore,
however, that the current discussions on the problem of scientific realism arise because
there appears to be a strong asymmetry between the commonsense view of the world
and the scientific one. For instance, the table that we see with our eyes is not the
same table that we “see” through the mediation of scientific instruments, and this fact
is not trivial. It is rather easy to reach a high level of inter-subjective agreement among
the individuals present in a room about the color, size and weight of a table, and it
can also be granted that we form our beliefs in this regard by triangulating with our
interlocutors and the surrounding environment. Such an agreement, however, may
turn out to be problematic when we try to reconcile this vision of the world with what
today science tells us about it.
So, being in touch with such familiar objects as tables, chairs and stars “all the time”
- as Richard Rorty adds - has a fundamental bearing only on the ontology of common
sense, since our actual science shows that quite a different representation of reality
can actually be provided (or, even better, it shows that those objects might not exist as
men perceive them). Naturally, one can always resort to an objection of the following
kind: Why should we deem the table viewed as a collection of subatomic particles
more important than the table that our eyes see in daily life? After all, we can conduct
our life well enough even ignoring what science claims (just like men did for many
thousand years). This, however, may be judged as a serious underevaluation of the
scientific enterprise. As a matter of fact, in the last centuries we are confronted not by
one world-view, but by two complex images, each of which means to be a complete
picture of man in the world. Wilfrid Sellars called these two perspectives, respectively,
the manifest and the scientific image of man in the world.5
They are both intersubjective and non arbitrary. What are, however, these two images,
and are they really alternative? Let us note, from the onset, that the two images we
just mentioned are both idealizations in the same sense of Max Weber’s “ideal types”.
This means that, in order to discover their actual presence, we need having recourse
to a good deal of philosophical abstraction. In other words, they are not disclosed
by mere empirical recognition. For instance, we live in the commonsense view of the world, and only a complex process of reflection makes us understand that we, as
human beings, share a common view of the world, which is in turn determined by the
fact that our physical structure bounds us to conceive of reality in a certain way rather
than in another. Think about the importance that light, for example, has not only in
daily life, but even in our philosophical conceptualization of the world. The story is
complicated by the fact that each image has a history, and while the manifest image
dates back to pre-history, the scientific image is constantly changing shape.