If you want to understand, if you want to come to a picture of what science is, what knowledge is, it could be a good start to try to become clear about the general content of the concept.
Many activities are today characterized as "Science!", while other activities are just as definitely characterized as "Pseudoscience!", maybe without the one making the judgement always having made it clear to himself what he really means with the words he is using. Especially when you try to come closer to an understanding of what "an anthroposophically fertilized art of healing" could mean, but also "anthroposophical natural science" in general, it becomes important to become clear about the different aspects of the concept and the problems with which it is connected.
THE GENERAL CONCEPT OF SCIENCE
Every scientific activity is characterized by two partial activities
One is some form of observation/perception. It can take place directly, through the senses, somewhat more indirectly via some form of an, in one or another respect sense improving instrument like a microscope, a telescope or stethoscope, or even more indirectly via some detecting instrument like a Geiger counter, an electrocardiograph or an X-ray apparatus (Harré 1976).
The other part is some form of thought activity It "surrounds" and penetrates the observation/perception; A more or less conscious thought activity takes place as an introduction to the observation. It directs the attention in a special direction, "chooses" observations, steps somewhat back during the direct moment of perception/observation, to dominate once more after the direct moment of perception/observation.
The thought activity distinguishes between different parts of that which is observed/perceived, gives them names or makes a more specific conceptual analysis of them, it may also quantify them and then relates them to each other, logically or mathematically.
So far, most people who have given the problem a thought would probably agree.
A "CULTIVATED"; CUT CONCEPT OF SCIENCE
But if you want to relate the concept to the rich flora of activities that are today termed "science" and get any help to see what they have in common, you have to specify the concept a step further.
If you look at what is today termed science, you find that only certain types of perception and certain types of conceptual formulations are permitted to use in connection with activities that in a more strict sense are characterized as scientific.
As far as perceptions are concerned, a number of different types of instrumental perceptions dominate. Different forms of more direct sense perceptions have a more ambiguous status. If you continue to perceptions of different forms of inner, psychic states; states of the soul, you have come to a type of perception with a very dubious status, to put it mildly, as something on what to base scientific knowledge. When you come to perceptions of a more spiritual nature, you have passed outside the border surrounding those types of perceptions that are discussed.
On the conceptual side, spatially oriented concepts of a mechanical character dominate. They should preferably relate to something that is quantifiable and it is very satisfying if the quantified perceptions (especially when one of the not exact sciences is concerned) have been chosen in a random way, exist in a great number and have to be put through a computer program to make it possible to describe the results with the help of a mathematical model, or to make it possible to point to more definite connections (significant correlations) between factors that you otherwise don't quite understand how the are related to each other.
How has this situation come about?
THE "PARADIGM" CONCEPT
In 1962, the historian and philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, put forward the concept of "paradigm", to make it possible to understand how scientists work and why, at different times in history, they have chosen a specific way to describe a phenomenon that would otherwise be difficult to understand, why they have chosen observations of certain aspects of the phenomenon and certain types of models to describe it, when other observations and models might have been just as good.
The concept is a summarizing term for those factors that direct and put a limit to how you are permitted to work within a group of researchers and what is understood as "science" and "not-science" within that group.
Within the theory of science in Sweden you today find a distinction being made between at least six such factors. They are: a definite picture of the world, a specific concept of what science is, a special ideal of science, a number of aesthetic ideals, a certain ethic and also a certain "self perspective"; an opinion of the role of the researcher in research (Törnebohm 1974, Wallén 1974, Lindström 1974).
As will be more clear later, a definite concept of matter also plays a very definite role as a paradigmatic factor.
At first glance the concept of paradigm may seem somewhat bewildering (Mastermann in 1970 pointed to 21 senses in which Kuhn used the term), but it becomes clearer if you look at it as a way to describe how every question, problem and hypothesis that you formulate during the daily experimental research, independently of if you are conscious of it or not, is connected with a more or less explicit position in relation to basic philosophical problems. With the paradigm concept the basic philosophical problems have become visible again in science, but now related to empirical scientific research.
It makes it possible to characterize different groups of paradigms in a broader perspective, from the point of view of how they are related to the questions that have been discussed by philosophers for a number of centuries, the basic questions concerning the nature of reality (ontology), the nature of knowledge (epistemology) and the questions of the nature of values ("practical philosophy").
It also makes it possible to start to try to understand and characterize the relation between the more natural-scientifically oriented medicine of today and the more spiritual-scientifically oriented art of healing that exists today as anthroposophical medicine.
"FUNCTIONALISTS" AND "PHYSICALISTS"
With the idea-oriented, "idealistic" reality-orientation of science from its first beginning in Greece up to and on through the time of scholasticism, as also with the following "materialistic" reality-orientation of science you also find connected specific positions in relation to the questions of what matter is and what knowledge is.
Toulmin and Goodfield (1964) distinguish between three different polarized fields in which the conceptual understanding of matter has been moving through history. They are the polarized field between a more organic and a more mechanistic conception of matter, between a more functionally and a more structurally oriented view of matter and between more "continuistic" and more atomistic opinions on the nature of matter.
It is not difficult to see an inner connection between an organic, a functional and a continuistically oriented conception of matter as different expressions of a common, underlying "idealistically" oriented understanding of reality, even though the connection has not always been unambiguous in all cases (different researchers have not always been consequent). It is also those aspects that dominate all research into the nature of matter up to and partly also after the time of scholasticism.
It is also not difficult to see a more mechanistically, structurally and atomistically oriented conception of matter as three different expressions of an underlying, in a more proper sense "materialistically" oriented understanding and conception of reality. This conception has, as mentioned earlier, its proponents already during the time of the early Greek science, but lives on more in seclusion to the time following the scholastic period.
The historian of science Northrop also distinguishes, but from a somewhat different perspective, between a "functionalistic" (Aristotelian) and a "physicalistic" theory of nature as two of three basic theories of nature during the period of Greek science (ref by Törnebohm 1977). The two terms generally coincide with what here has been described as an "idealistic" and a "materialistic" view of reality. We will return to the third theory of nature later.
VIEW OF KNOWLEDGE
With the two opinions/views of reality and the respectively connected opinions/views of matter you also find connected definite points of view on the problem of knowledge.
The view of knowledge as a paradigmatic factor has two components (according to Törnebohm). One is a more theoretically oriented part; "view of science". The other, termed "science ideal", refers to that science, which within a paradigm is considered to be the best expression/reflection of what science "is" and should be.
It is most common among non-physicists today to point to "physics" as a science ideal, whereby they normally have an inner picture of classical physics, as it looked during the first part of the last century (neither within the natural scientifically oriented tradition of medicine nor within the theory of science one has forgiven Planck and Einstein that they popped up during the 20th century and confused the concepts).
To understand the more theoretical part of the problem of knowledge, it is possible to take the general concept of science as a starting point.
Scientists pursue scientific research with among other goals that of attaining knowledge. Knowledge can be characterized as "a summarizing description of perceptions/observations in a conceptual or mathematical form". But let us look at man(/woman) to understand the problem better.
As human beings we have experiences. We make observations and form concepts, ideas and judgements. At our disposal we have four senses, more bound to organs, localized in the head; sight, hearing, smell and taste, and a fifth sense, more "spread out" over the whole body; touch.
"PRIMARY" AND "SECONDARY" QUALITIES
How do people make use of the human senses within the "physicalistic" and the "functionalistic" research traditions?
Within both traditions one distinguishes between what are termed "primary" and "secondary" qualities (Marti 1974). With the term "primary qualities" one referred to the unchangeable qualities of reality as such. The term "secondary qualities" referred to those qualities that man experiences via the senses, the changes of which could be understood as the result of changes in the relation between the unchangeable, "primary" qualities. On this point one finds agreement between the two traditions.
But when asked what is "primary" and what is "secondary" the answers differ.
To "the physicalists" it is the spatial qualities, passively experienced by sight, that one ascribes to the indivisible building stones of matter, "the atoms", that one experiences as most real. To them belong extension ("fullness"), form, size, position in space and the state of movement or rest. As "secondary" qualities one counted the other half of sight impressions; colour, as also the other sense impressions; sound, smells, tastes and touch impressions
The "functionalists" have an opposite orientation. They take their starting point, not in a part of the sight experience, but in the most opposite sense; the touch sense and the active experience of touch (Eld-Sandström 1971). Here they distinguish between degrees of two basic touch qualities; warmth and humidity with the extremes hot-cold and warm-dry. These four (two) basic qualities are however considered to be "secondary" in relation to the four "primary" qualities "Fire", "Air", "Water" and "Earth"; "the elements", approximately corresponding to the four states of matter: "plasma", "gas", "fluid" and "solid".
It is interesting that one meant that each of the elements only could be experienced by a simultaneous experience from two directions; via two of the the basic secondary qualities: simultaneous dryness and warmth for "Fire", simultaneous wetness and coldness for "Water", warmth and humidity for "Air" and coldness and dryness for "Earth".
The division of the touch qualities into warm-cold and humid-dry can seem somewhat confusing against the background of the richness of the different touch experiences that one can have as an experiencing subject.
But it is interesting, if you see it in relation to the fact that in the special touch-sense in the head; taste, one finds a differentiation into four basic types of experiences; sweet, sour, bitter and salty, in spite of the fact that the taste buds for the different tastes do not differ anatomically from one another in any obvious or principal way.
In the Chinese culture, a corresponding doctrine of the elements was developed at about the same time as it was developed in the Greek culture (6th-4th century BC).
During the "idealistic" period of science one built the world picture on the basis of the doctrine of the elements, just as one, during the following "materialistic" period of science has put much energy into the work of building a consistent world picture, based on the idea of the atom.
2007-04-11 03:58:01
·
answer #1
·
answered by Vtang 4
·
0⤊
0⤋