Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Urteil; Unterschied: common-sense - Wissenschaft; Galileo; Newton

Kurzinhalt: Classical scientists like Galileo, Newton, and Einstein are not interested in mediating concrete, particular, descriptive relations; their interest lies in correctly mediating the explanatory relations that ...

Textausschnitt: 2b Scientific Judgments

32/5 If we shift from common-sense to scientific judgments, we can illustrate another specific type of the general form of reflective understanding. What, are scientists doing when they are making scientific judgments?1 In chapter 2 we discussed the way that Galileo designed certain experimental procedures in order to test his hypothesis that all bodies fall with certain accelerating speeds. If a set of measurements of falling bodies are conditioned as Galileo hypothesized, then bodies will fall at the predicted speeds. But his set of measurements yielded the predicted proportion of distances to durations, and so he was correct in affirming his law of falling bodies. Such a scientific judgment, while it is generally like a common-sense judgment, is also specifically different. (129; Fs)

33/5 In a common-sense judgment you do not decenter yourself from descriptive correlations and recenter yourself as an understander in a world of strictly intelligible correlations; rather, you remain within the world where the sun rises and sets and the earth does not rotate. There is a mistaken tendency to think that common-sense knowers do not mediate their immediate, sensible givens, but they do. As a common-sense knower, you mediate the world of things about you through ordinary linguistic patterns of meanings that make up your native language. You know what things are by learning that language, identifying certain objects in and through their appropriate attributes. (129; Fs)

34/5 Galileo, however, was not patterning his immediate visual field since he had abstracted from descriptive correlates to focus on strictly explanatory correlates which, to be verified, required special experimental procedures. In verifying his hypothesis, Galileo reflected back on an observational field, but it was not an ordinary observational field. It was an experimentally mediated field and, more important, his intent was to reach an ultimate explanatory goal that would mediate, not only immediate experimental observables, but the entire universe of observables. (129; Fs)

35/5 Classical scientists like Galileo, Newton, and Einstein are not interested in mediating concrete, particular, descriptive relations; their interest lies in correctly mediating the explanatory relations that ground and explain why things behave and are seen and heard in the way they are. Thus scientists can explain why you see the sun rising and setting and why such judgments as the sun rises and sets are correct only within a very limited context. To understand and judge things concretely is to judge them comprehensively and completely in their relations to one another and in their particularity. (129; Fs)

36/5 Common-sense judgments focus on concrete particularities, not on the concrete as universal and comprehensive. This explains why Galileo's laws and those of his contemporaries eventually led to the more comprehensive, systematic explanation of Newton, and from Newton to Einstein's even more comprehensive and more unified understanding and judging of the concrete orderings of things to one another in our physical universe. This also explains why common-sense judgments may be certainly correct while scientific judgments are only probable, although converging toward a fully comprehensive explanation. (130; Fs)

37/5 Scientific judgments are cumulatively verified. Thus Galileo's laws of terrestrial motions and Kepler's laws of celestial motion are subsumed within Newton's systematic explanation of both terrestrial and celestial movements. In other words, just as practical knowing assimilates past advances, complementing, modifying, and correcting them, so scientists also correct, modify, and advance past scientific contexts. (130; Fs)

38/5 For example, if we were to trace the history of chemistry from the four-element theory of earth, air, fire, and water which developed in ancient Greek thought to the nineteenth-century ninety-two-element theory, we would have a marvelous example of scientific learning which proceeds, not deductively, but developmentally and discursively, as scientists assimilate, complement, correct, modify, eliminate, and cumulatively advance past, direct, and reflective theoretical understandings. Human learning, whether in practical day-to-day living or in scientific pursuits, proceeds by trial and error, advancing and declining in remarkably different but related ways. (130; Fs)

39/5 To understand and judge this learning, you must know how insights accumulate into systematic unities and then generate further questions and insights that may demand corrections or, more important, a fundamental reversal through inverse insights. Knowing is a dynamic structure of three interrelated levels of cognitive activities that involves a much richer and more complex range of associative cyclings and recyclings of those levels than you could ever explicitly appropriate and formalize. In this interplay of functionally related levels of knowing, it is the second level of understanding that unites the third level of judging to the first level of experience by transforming your outer or inner conscious experiences from potentially intelligible experiences into actually intelligible experiences. (130; Fs)

40/5 For example, once you learn a language, you no longer simply experience familiar objects such as stones, trees, and water; rather, you experience them in truly intelligible ways if you can correctly name them in the familiar common-sense language world in which you live. Or you can experience the same objects in a scientifically probable way if you have acquired a chemical understanding of what stones and water are and why they behave the way that they do. The point is that not only do you verify your experiences of the world about you, but you also verify your intelligible experiences of the surrounding world. The sensible world about you and the felt world within you is mediated, transformed, and made luminous by your insights and judgments. (130f; Fs)