Agazzi’s Notion of ‘Objectivity’ and the Search for Truth in Sciences

When in the year 1990 I published my first essay on the logic of scientific reasoning and its metaphysical presuppositions (see Livi 1990), I quoted in many pages what Evandro Agazzi had written about the principles of logic in general (see Agazzi 1961,1981, 1998) and much more about the realistic background implicitly present and effectively performing in all kind of scientific research (see Agazzi 1974, 1978,

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DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16369-7_12

1981, 1987, 1988, 1991). The essay I mainly quoted is La questione del realismo scientifico (cf. Livi 1990: 70-78), an essay in which the limits of logical formalism are clearly detected (see Agazzi 1985). In the following years I noted that the Italian philosopher was developing this issue in many papers and especially in two impor­tant books: the first one in Italian, Ragioni e limiti del formalismo (Agazzi 2012), and the second one in English, Scientific Objectivity and Its Contexts (Agazzi 2014). In the first of those books Agazzi expounds his point of view about the question of truth in science and clarifies the necessary epistemic relationship between every scientific demonstration and its alethic presuppositions, intrinsically implied by the logical func­tion of the inference. Commenting on Aristotle’s doctrine of syllogism, Agazzi notices:

In order that a syllogism (i.e. a correct argument) becomes a demonstration, certain rig­orous requirements must be satisfied by its premises: they must be true, certain, more certain than their conclusions and ‘causes’ of the conclusions themselves. Leaving aside here these and similar further requirements [...] it is sufficient for us to point out that the domain of logical inference is bound to truth in highly committed sense.

Those considerations led Agazzi to build, in the latter book, an original and coher­ent theory of what he calls ‘objectivity’. According to him, objectivity should be understood in a weak sense (as inter-subjective agreement among the specialists) or in a strong sense (as having precise concrete referents). In both cases objectivity relies upon the adoption of operational criteria designed within the particular per­spective under which any single science considers reality. The ‘object’ so attained has a proper ontological status, dependent on the specific character of the criteria of reference. Agazzi shows how this theory can be applied equally well to the nat­ural sciences and philosophy (metaphysics and ethics). Assuming the most correct methodologies from traditional, analytic and continental philosophy, Agazzi brings them to a fruitful complementary interplay in the philosophy of science, and so he offers a clear methodological framework for interdisciplinary investigation. This justifies a form of scientific realism, in basic agreement with what we know as philosophical realism. Both are grounded in the natural realism of common sense knowledge. According to Agazzi’s theory, the awareness of such a “historical determinacy” of science justifies including in the philosophy of science the prob­lems of ethics of science, the relations of science with metaphysics, and the social dimensions of science that overstep the traditional restriction of the philosophy of science to an epistemology of sciences (physics, mathematics, biology).

1.1 How Any Reference of Scientific Statements

Presupposes a Realistic Background

Agazzi then moved to the study of foundational problems in the empirical sciences, at the same time elaborating his own original philosophy of science.

This position, in turn, has led me to vindicate a fundamental role for truth in science (something that had been almost banned from philosophy of science) and to study how truth can be attained, either by direct reference, or by argument, and this offers a founda­tion for admitting also the truth of non-observationally testable statements.

1.2 How the Theory of ‘Objectivity'Leads to the Justification of Metaphysics

Agazzi’s epistemological consideration of the objectivity in the sciences fully legitimates also the rationality of metaphysical inquiry (also regarding the meta­physics of science) as well as the embedding of science into broader contexts of moral, social and political nature. For the Italian philosopher metaphysics has the epistemological status of a true science, the science of the whole. His main argu­ment is the intrinsic limitation of any object assumed by a particular science, while trough common sense we can know reality as a whole and make it the object of an inquiry. In an essay published in 1999 Agazzi expounds his argument as follows:

A science is never concerned with the entire domain of ‘reality’; rather, from this it des­ignates its specific domain of ‘objects’ by resorting to some ‘predicates’ which can be thought of as representing its ‘viewpoint’ on reality. [...] It can be maintained, therefore, that every science characterizes its objects or determines its proper ‘domain of objects’ by means of its specific predicates. It follows that whatever is not characterized by these predicates falls outside the competence of this science while, on the other hand, everything which can be characterized by them falls within its competence.

For Agazzi science cannot rationally stop questionsonthe whole as such; much more, there are moments when the viewpoint of the whole comes into play within the scientific discourse itself. As Agazzi said above, each specialized field of sci­entific research suffers a kind of contingency. This implies the characteristic of ‘refutability’ for scientific statements, as Popper suggested. One can never be sure that reality (or even only physical nature) can be described fully by means of those predicates which are selected in order to establish a certain domain of inquiry. Hence, one must always expect to be confronted with aspects of reality which can­not be treated by means of the accepted tools of inquiry. When such cases appear, one is faced with the problem of the ‘whole’, in relation to which he must measure the inadequacy of his previous viewpoints. So Agazzi can say:

Speaking more generally, whenever one is concerned with the problems of the ‘founda­tions’ of science—and this happens not only in the philosophy of science, but at times also in science itself—one cannot help being involved with the viewpoint of the ‘whole’. These clarifications make possible a clear evaluation of the philosophical position which reproaches metaphysics for neglecting in its statements the continuous control of expe­rience. In order to be correct, that is, in order not to confuse the ‘contingent’ choice of the viewpoint of the ‘whole of experience’ that characterizes science with a ‘necessary’ requirement for every meaningful discourse, those advocating that position must prove that the ‘whole’ coincides with the ‘whole of experience’. Surely, there is no such proof in the entire history of philosophy, and such a claim must be held to be purely dogmatic. What is more, if such a proof were ever to be proposed it would necessarily be meta­physical, for in order to show that the ‘whole’ coincides with the ‘whole of experience’ one cannot help taking ‘the viewpoint of the whole’ which means adopting a metaphysi­cal attitude. What has been said thus far is fair not only to metaphysics, but to science, because it does not claim that science contains at least some metaphysical elements, as some philosophers today seem to maintain. In fact, when we established that science is obliged to admit mediation of experience, to accept non-empirical elements in its theo­retical apparatus and to resort to a synthetic use of reason, one might have felt inclined to consider all that as a claim that these are unavoidable metaphysical components of any scientific knowledge. But this is not true because all these elements always concern the ‘whole of experience’ (Agazzi 1989: 51-52).

In order to show how this can happen, Agazzi gives an example from physics. A concept like that of an ‘electron’ is clearly obtained by a mediation of the empirical evidence, since it does not refer to something directly observable: it is a theoretical construct and, as such, non-empirical. Despite that, this concept should not be classified as metaphysical because the predicates through which it is characterized are still the usual predicates adopted to circumscribe the whole of physics, like mass, charge, etc. This shows that it is possible to mediate experi­ence, which means to transcend the field of immediate evidence, without leaving the whole of experience as a thematic domain of inquiry. On the contrary, when a metaphysician says, e.g., that God exists, he does not intend that this entity is definable through the same predicates as those characterizing the usually expe­rienced things, but, quite the contrary, that it belongs to a broader whole with respect to the whole of experience, that is the whole of reality as such, without any restriction.

1.3 Metaphysics and the Relationships

Between Man and Nature

After discussing the legitimacy of holding the viewpoint of the ‘whole’ along with the viewpoint of science and after laying a sound foundation for this, Agazzi proceeds to see whether such a viewpoint, besides being legitimate, is somehow required, and he demonstrates that this is actually the case. His point of departure are the relationships between man and nature. He says:

Can such a question be envisaged correctly with the help of scientific knowledge only, or does it also call metaphysics into play? Beyond all doubt a metaphysical consideration cannot be dispensed with, because every possible proposal about the correct way of con­ceiving this relationship follows from an ‘interpretation’ of man and nature respectively, which cannot be attained by means of science alone. In fact, every scientific consideration necessarily unifies man and nature, but this happens simply because, as repeatedly noted above, every science must employ its own uniforming criteria or ‘viewpoints’ or ‘specific predicates.’ [...] Every science is done by instituting uniformities and deleting differences; i.e., by introducing at least one viewpoint under which things can be considered as uni­form even if they differ under many other viewpoints. If this be the cognitive procedure of science, it can be easily understood that one can scarcely expect to discover differences between man and nature by continuously applying tools of inquiry which render only uni­form knowledge of the two. On the other hand, if the two terms of the relation are not conceived as distinct the very problem of their relationship becomes immediately mean­ingless because identity is the only relation that can hold between two indistinguishable. It follows that only a metaphysical perspective, which enables one to consider man as a ‘whole’ and nature as another ‘whole’ can provide the correct approach to our question. Moreover, in order to study this relationship we need a broader viewpoint; we must con­ceive man and nature from the viewpoint of a ‘whole’ in which there is place for both. Such a viewpoint cannot be the rather general viewpoint of the ‘whole of experience’ because, from a purely methodological consideration, we cannot be sure that the adop­tion of this viewpoint, which despite its breadth is still specialized, would not lead us to neglect differences which cannot be perceived within it. The only methodologically cor­rect position is therefore to adopt the genuinely general viewpoint of the ‘whole’ without specification, i.e., the authentic metaphysical viewpoint (Agazzi 1989: 55).

Such an epistemological defense of the legitimacy of metaphysics was for me an efficient support in building my own theory on the relationship between com­mon sense and metaphysical research, whose essential goal is the rational media­tion (i.e., interpretation) of the immediate certainties about the world, namely the discovery of the causes of the existence of beings and the determination of their true nature. Unifying Agazzi’s epistemological justification of metaphysics with Gilson’s theory of realism as the very method of metaphysics (cf. Gilson 1990), I developed my own theory of common sense as the primary knowledge of reality as a whole, and so a material (not yet formal) metaphysical knowledge, whose truth, although pre-scientific, is absolutely necessary to make metaphysics possible as a scientific approach to the whole of reality (cf. Livi 2010).

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