Scientific Realism, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Science

The paper provides a thorough account of the relationship between Ernst Mach’s thought and that of an apparently more intellectually distant near-contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche. The consistency of their views is in fact substantial, as I try to show within the paper. Despite their interests being different, both Mach and Nietzsche were concerned with the same issues about our intellectual relationship with the external world, dealing with the same questions and pursuing a common aim of eliminating worn-out philosophical conceptions. Moreover, it can be argued that both Mach and Nietzsche converged on what we now know as the problem of realism versus anti-realism in the philosophy of science, and that they both rejected ‘representational’ (realist) conceptions of science in favour of a certain sort of pragmatic anti-realism, whose focus was on the role science plays as a means of orientation.

Software Defined Networking pourrait marquer le départ d'une nouvelle ère informatique. Un rapport du front de la recherche. La recherche sur les réseaux est actuellement très limitée par les unités de réseaux d'ordinateurs courantes du commerce comme les routeurs et switches. On souhaiterait que ceux-ci soient plus ouverts et puissent plus facilement être adaptés aux besoins spécifiques des chercheurs. C'est ainsi qu'on aimerait pouvoir par exemple influencer soi-même le comportement du réseau au moyen d'applications réseaux de sa propre création. Mais en réalité, les composants de réseau sont à structure hiérarchique: "Control/Management et Data (Forwarding) Plane" sont dans une boîte. Les fournisseurs proposent des ensembles complets qui ne laissent que peu de marge de manoeuvre pour des besoins spécifiques. En 2008, les chercheurs de l'Université de Stanford (Californie) se sont mis en quête de moyens permettant de supprimer les limites imposées par la structure monolithique des éléments de réseau: ce concept a été appelé Software Defined Networking (SDN). Il est caractérisé par le fait que les niveaux de contrôle et de Data-(Forwarding) sur les routeurs et switches sont physiquement séparés: l'intelligence (control layer) est découplée de la boîte au moyen d'une interface ouverte (par exemple OpenFlow), externalisée et gérée de manière logique et décentralisée. Cette séparation permet l'utilisation de matériel courant dans le commerce. Il en résulte la plus grande flexibilité souhaitée au niveau des possibilités de configuration et de programmation des réseaux. La flexibilité accrue exige cependant une plus grande attention au niveau de la sécurité: cette séparation des niveaux entraîne des points faibles de sécurité comme la liaison vers les contrôleurs.

"On the Ontology and Doctrine of Appearance of the Real External World" (1916) is the first publication from a vast corpus of writings by Hedwig Conrad-Martius (CM), a phenomenologist from the Munich School. The phenomenon of "the real external world" encloses within itself everything that "exists outside" (Daraußenseinde) and that is "of the external world" (Außenweltliches). The "self-presentation" that deeply characterizes the sensory givenness is an essential foundation in the phenomenon of the reality, to the extent that it distinguishes it from everything that "lacks a Being- for-itself" and thus misses what might be presented externally. Although sensory appearance is not itself the totality of the external world, CM determines that the pure observation of what the sensory appearance presents by itself and in itself, and not of what is above and beyond it, provides the "framework for the whole" of the research, since by sensory presentation "the book of the real world is being opened". The paper proposes a critical explication of both constitutive phenomena of the sensory givenness, "feeling's givenness" and "manifest appearance givenness", and suggests a metaphysical interpretation that explicates them in terms of the relation between immanence and transcendence that seems to be a key to the understanding  the phenomenology of reality that that unifies the entirety of CM's writings.

Tradução de "Bas van Fraassen’s Philosophy of Science and His Epistemic Voluntarism", de Kathleen Okruhlik (2014).

Bas van Fraassen’s anti-realist account of science has played a major role in shaping recent philosophy of science. His constructive empiricism, in particular, has been widely discussed and criticized in the journal literature and is a standard topic in philosophy of science course curricula. Other aspects of his empiricism are less well known, including his empiricist account of scientific laws, his relatively recent re-evaluation of what it is to be an empiricist, and his empiricist structuralism. This essay attempts to provide an overview of these diverse aspects of van Fraassen’s empiricism and to show how they relate to one another. It also focuses on the nature of van Fraassens’s epistemic voluntarism and its relationship to his empiricist philosophy of science.

توانایی کشیدن خط تمایز دقیق بین هستومند‌ها ی مشاهده‌پذیر  و  مشاهده‌ناپذیر  در نظریه‌های علمی به عنوان موضوعی مورد مناقشه در بین دو دیدگاه مخالف واقع‌گرایی علمی  و پادواقع‌گرایی  هنوز یکی از موضوعات باز در فلسفه علم می‌باشد. یکی از استدلال‌هایی که به نفع واقع‌گرایان ارائه شده است مدعی است که نمی توان علی‌الاصول خط تمایزی بین این هستومند‌ها کشید. از طرف دیگر پذیرش انسجام دیدگاه پادواقع‌گرایی به نوعی مستلزم پذیرش تمایز بین هستومند‌های مشاهده‌پذیر و نامشاهده‌پذیر می‌باشد. اگر به هر وسیله‌ای این تمایز به صورت اصولی رد شود نتیجه آن عدم انسجام دیدگاه پادواقع‌گرایی خواهد بود. پادواقع‌گرایان برای دفاع از انسجام دیدگاه خود مبهم  بودن مفاهیم مشاهده‌پذیر و مشاهده‌ناپذیر را مطرح می‌کنند. در این نوشتار تلاش خواهیم کرد تعبیری از منطق خطی  را معرفی نماییم که با به کار بردن آن می‌توان وضوح بیشتری به محل نزاع بین واقع‌گرایان با پادواقع‌گرایان در مورد ناسازنمای  ابهام بخشید. نشان خواهیم داد که اگر تعبیر مورد نظر در ناسازنمای ابهام به کار گرفته شود به صورت منسجم تری می توان ادعا کرد که بر خلاف نظر پادواقع‌گرایان مبهم بودن مفاهیم مشاهده‌پذیر و مشاهده‌ناپذیر به نفع دیدگاه آنها نخواهد بود.

In his book, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences, Thomas Seebohm articulates the view that history can serve to mediate between the sciences of explanation and the sciences of interpretation, that is, between the natural sciences and the human sciences.  Among other things, Seebohm analyzes history from a phenomenological perspective to reveal the material foundations of the historical human sciences in the lifeworld.  As a preliminary to his analyses, Seebohm examines the formal and material presuppositions of phenomenological epistemology, as well as the emergence of the human sciences and the traditional distinctions and divisions that are made between the natural and the human sciences.

As part of this examination, Seebohm devotes a section to discussing Husserl’s formal mereology because he understands that a reflective analysis of the foundations of the historical sciences requires a reflective analysis of the objects of the historical sciences, that is, of concrete organic wholes (i.e., social groups) and of their parts.  Seebohm concludes that Husserl’s mereological ontology needs to be altered with regard to the historical sciences because the relations between organic wholes and their parts are not summative relations.  Seebohm’s conclusion is relevant for the issue of the reducibility of organic wholes such as social groups to their parts and for the issue of the reducibility of the historical sciences to the lower-order sciences, that is, to the sciences concerned with lower-order ontologies.

In this paper, I propose to extend Seebohm’s conclusion to the ontology of chemical wholes as object of quantum chemistry and to argue that Husserl’s formal mereology is descriptively inadequate for this regional ontology as well.  This may seem surprising at first, since the objects studied by quantum chemists are not organic wholes.  However, my discussion of atoms and molecules as they are understood in quantum chemistry will show that Husserl’s classical summative and extensional mereology does not accurately capture the relations between chemical wholes and their parts.  This conclusion is relevant for the question of the reducibility of chemical wholes to their parts and of the reducibility of chemistry to physics, issues that have been of central importance within the philosophy of chemistry for the past several decades.