Agazzi's Approach

We start from the following statement by Agazzi, published in 1969, in his first important book where he presented his theory of scientific objectivity:

It is necessary to understand that the decline of a genuine theory does not mean you have recognized that it is false, but that it was partial; and replacing it with a new one is not a mere substitution, but its being replaced by a better theory, which is able to capture a greater number of reality determinations.

Agazzi’s very recent latest book, Scientific Objectivity and Its Contexts, is not only a further development of his view on scientific objectivity proposed in 1969, but an analysis so long, wide and deep as to constitute, as he himself admits, a whole life’s work. Here, he puts forward similar theses, obviously enriched by years of elaboration, such as the following:

It is not fully appropriate to consider theories as true or false, but rather as more or less adequate. Now, it may well happen that a particular theory which turns out not to be ade­quate from several points of view and is therefore replaced by another, remains partially adequate from certain points of view; and this is enough to afford an understanding of its predictive success. This success depends on those parts of the theory which are adequate. (Agazzi 2014: 301)

One of the central ideas of this discourse is that “after a certain time an objecti­fication meets its ‘limits,’ and without being proven false, it is proven partial, that is, not such as to exhaust reality” (p. 405). This does not mean that “each different theory has to do with a different reality [...], but that they have to do with different aspects or attributes of reality, which we express more precisely by saying that each theory has to do with different referents that result from different objectifica­tions of reality” (ibid.).^[72] However, such a “partial truth”, according to Agazzi, has nothing to do with an “approximation to truth” or with an “approximate truth”, but it has the meaning of a “complete truth on a partial domain” (ibid.).¹¹

As far as the knowledge expressed in scientific theories is concerned, a change in theory is one thing, actual progress is another.

What is really evident is that in every discipline there is a succession of theories in time— that a change occurs—but one which does not by itself imply progress. In order for change to be considered as progress, the factual ascertaining of its having occurred must be accompanied by a value-judgment of some sort, enabling us to claim that the new situa­tion is better than the old. The difficulty lies precisely in the determination of this ‘better’. (Agazzi 2014: 370).

Before proposing our own approach, we have to dwell upon a couple of important preliminary specifications.

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