Logical Neo-realism and the Problem of Objectivity, Between Husserl and Socrates

In the light of the considerations treated in the previous paragraphs, the inherently problematic complexity of the objectivity of human knowledge emerges. And if we especially consider the explosive evolution of knowledge since the birth of modern science intertwined, ab origine, with increasingly pressing and sophisticated technological devices, we can better understand how the problem of the objectivity of knowledge coincides with the understanding of the dynamics of the critical-conceptual growth of the technical assets of knowledge (for an in-depth analysis of this subject see the precise observations of Geymonat 1977 and 1970­76, on whose work see also Minazzi 2001, 2004b, 2010).

A good critical understanding of the specific nature of objective knowledge made available by science is the decisive aspect of our problem: hic Rhodus, hic salta (to quote Marx). Incidentally to deal with this problem we can still refer to the interesting and precise indications which Galileo gave in The Assayer (1623), in which, from a purely methodological point of view, he consistently insisted in reaffirming that sci­entific knowledge always proceeds from a critical and problematic intertwining between “necessary demonstrations” and “meaningful experiences”. Mathematics and the experimental dimension are the opposite poles, and yet mutually integrated, of a new style of research, the very one that was inaugurated by the scientific approach, in whose name these two opposing polarities, referring on the one hand to the autono­mous and creative force of mathematical thinking and, on the other hand to the constraints established by experimental verification, are capable of being integrated with each other so happily and fruitfully that we can better understand the world and realise how things really are. The interesting aspect of Galileo's approach is rooted precisely in his programmatic refusal to unravel, with an algorithmic formula, the very nature of this relationship which can be established between strictly deductive mathematical inferences and the multiple practices of technological and scientific laboratory experiments.

If we opt for the second answer, Galileo's methodological indications appear to be in perfect harmony with the more mature considerations of another great Western physicist, Albert Einstein's. In fact Einstein, reflecting on different epis­temological perspectives legitimately suggested by his many fundamental scientific contributions, realised how the activities of a militant scientist may seem, at least in the eyes of systematic epistemologists, to be the result of the attitude of an “un­scrupulous opportunist” (see Einstein 1949). An “unscrupulous opportunist”, because militant scientists can be realistic, because they seek to describe a world that exists independently of the acts of perception, or can be idealistic, because they consider theories as the result of the free invention of the human imagination, or else they can be positivist, because they believe concepts are justifiable only to the extent that they provide a logically rigorous representation of the relations which can be established among sensory experiences, or can even be Platonic (or Pythagorean), at least insofar as they consider the criterion of logical simplicity as the preferred means of scientific research.

Ergo, we cannot do innovative scientific research if we stick to an epistemo­logical belief to which we swear eternal fidelity, because militant scientists who significantly innovate the scientific tradition, must always be able to build and intertwine, case by case, discipline by discipline, that particular relationship which could possibly be structured between the polarity of creative thinking and the rigid constraints of experimental verification. Exactly as Galileo argued in 1623, since during his own scientific work he had evidently experienced the truth of this inherent flexibility of scientific practice. Moreover, unsurprisingly, during his lifetime Galileo worked on very different scientific disciplines, passing from astronomy to the dynamics of rigid bodies, from some biological observations to the discussion of the problem of the flotation of solids on liquids, from the con­sideration of problems of mathematical analysis to the study of the resistance of materials, etc. etc. The extent and complexity of his investigations must have led Galileo to develop a full critical awareness that the claim to arbitrarily and uni­laterally reduce science to this or that specific method (inductive, deductive, con­ventionalist, abductive, verificationist, falsificationist, idoneist, etc.) was an approach which appeared to be quite inadequate to explain the actual and intrinsic complexity of scientific research.

Reaching this more sophisticated methodological awareness, Galileo, contra Descartes (and also contra the endless array of later epistemologists, who on the contrary usually shared the “Cartesian syndrome”), Galileo thus opened up the prospects for a new and very different epistemological, methodological and philosophical assessment of scientific knowledge. With wise methodological cau­tion, Galileo in fact reminds us, negatively, that the objective knowledge we can really achieve in different areas of investigation can never be coerced into this or that abstract method, into this or that rigid methodological rule, which we should then limit ourselves to applying systematically as a kind of template. Positively, it reminds us that knowledge is always the result of a free, creative and oppositional interplay (with the natural world, which by its nature is always “deaf and inexorable”), within which we must be able to use all our intelligence, all our creative imagination, all our technical skills and also all our tenacity in order to finally achieve—if we're lucky—an objective increase in our knowledge of the world.

Moreover, Galileo himself, at least in relation to this perspective opening up of the horizon, took some steps backward. He did so, for example, as already men­tioned, when he believed he could still attribute to human knowledge (understood as sapere intensive) an absolute and unchangeable scope, and as a result elaborated a coherent cumulativistic picture of scientific knowledge. But this is now an absolutistic conception of scientific knowledge, which can no longer be accepted for several reasons. If anything, always on this terrain of contemporary scientific knowledge, we will feel a greater philosophical and critical harmony with Ein­stein's different positions. He openly recognises that the objectivity of knowledge can only be established in the effective and complex intertwining realised by associating different accentuations of the various components which always exist between the dimension of the Lebenswelt (common sense especially woven toge­ther and built by the impressions of the senses and by the way of living of all people), and that of pure ideas, identified thanks to an effort of creative imagination, by which we can then precisely and deductively develop theories whose conse­quences, through the fundamental practical mediation of technology and experi­mental trials, enable us to return again to that same Lebenswelt in which we live, and perhaps to amend it in the light of new knowledge and new tools.

The critical understanding of this very complex universe of scientific discourse did not fail to be present in some writers and philosophers of the twentieth century belonging to the current of thought of European rational criticism. While appre­ciating the rigour of the neo-positivistic lesson, they also saw its limitations rooted in its (metaphysical) inability to understand the heuristic value of the notion of Kantian transcendence, thus remaining a prey to a radically and rigidly empiricist approach. A radical empiricist vision, in whose name they claimed, invariably, that we can actually reduce the abstract level of ideas and theories to empirical facts alone. As is well known, precisely in an effort to implement this impossible and utopian programme of epistemological reductionistic research, neo-positivism went through different phases and forms, through which it gradually and constantly weakened precisely the radical empiricist reductionism of its origin, expressed perhaps in the most abrasive terms in the first schematic formulation of the Vien­nese verification principle, the legitimate offspring of the equally metaphysical approach in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921).

Hencelogical empiricism, in the course of its history, finally realised, especially in its American phase, that between the abstract level of theories and that of experi­mentation there is always a relationship of reciprocal relative autonomy.

Those who were never uncritically ensnared by the metaphysical approach of the neo-positivists found themselves in the best position to appreciate the fruitfulness of their research, at the same time devising a critical, sophisticated and aware reac­tivation, of the tradition of transcendentalism. This complex and fruitful operation emerges for example, with undoubted clarity, in the reflections of the philosopher Giulio Preti, who unsurprisingly developed a very interesting and fruitful form of historical objective transcendentalism in the light of which he proposed an inter­esting and fruitful research programme of neo-realistic logic, which makes it pos­sible to reconsider the problem of the objectivity of knowledge by tying up the loose ends of all our previous considerations. To define his starting point Preti wrote as follows:

It is rather a historical-objective transcendentalism, which surveys the constructive forms of the various universes of discourse through a historical-critical analysis of rules of method that have been imposed historically and still apply in knowledge, etc. In short, it is a transcendental Ontology (or rather transcendental ontologies) which does not claim to understand the forms and structures of a Being in itself, but seeks to determine the way (or ways) in which the category of being is enacted in the historically mobile and logically conventional (arbitrary) construction of the ontological regions by scientific knowledge (in particular) and culture (in general) (Preti 2011: 297).

This interesting programme was born within a deep, free, original and fruitful critical reassessment, based on various constructive hybridisations, drawn from different and even opposing traditions of thought, which range from the tradition of neo-Kantian transcendentalism to Husserl's early phenomenology, from the tradi­tion of Dewey's and Marx's pragmatism to logical empiricism and analytical philosophy. But Preti did not limit himself to dialoguing with major contemporary traditions of thought, because he was also able to establish his research programme —which at one point he named with the emblematic expression of transcendental logical neo-realism—with some of the major conceptual traditions of classical and medieval thought (for an in-depth study of his thought see Minazzi 1984, 1994, 2004a, 2011, and Minazzi [ed.] 1987, 2009, 2015). But what did Preti mean by neo-realism? Here is his answer:

“neo-realism” is a relatively new name for a very old doctrine. It is a position that in fact the author of these essays has derived from meditation on and discussion of the more strictly philosophical (theoretical) problems of the contemporary analytic philosophy, logic and epistemology (of Moore, Russell, Carnap, Ayer, etc. etc.) in the light of the doctrines of the early Husserl (of the Logische Untersuchungen and the Ideen). But it goes all the way back to fourteen-century scholasticism (Preti 2011: 37).

According to this perspective, the object-of-knowledge coincides, therefore, with knowledge itself, namely technical and scientific competence in a given historical society. The issue is, therefore, no longer to investigate an “external” or “internal” structure of knowledge, because the way knowledge is conceived has itself chan­ged. Knowledge, then, can only start from itself, because the justification of sci­entific knowledge cannot be located either in the notion of an alleged superior divinity (which would be the guarantor of knowledge), or, even less, in referring to experiences which, as a factual and experimental basis, would justify a certain knowledge in themselves. On the contrary, the epistemological perspective delin­eated by Preti reminds us that the foundation and most authentic and reliable justification of science—in its objective cognitive scope—is rooted in its own autonomous plan of transcendentality, within which a relatively autonomous knowledge is established, which may be ultimately based only on itself (both in relation to the theoretical factors and in relation to those inherent in the world of praxis and its more or less effective technological working principles). In this perspective, then, the objectivity of knowledge is rooted in objective unsaturated paradigms, which though they have no substantial and metaphysical unity, yet enable us to gather a few threads of truth in relation to the real world that we wish to study and investigate. Offering an example, inspired by the famous medieval dis­pute over universals and their significance, Preti then underlines how the innovative solution proposed by neo-realist mediaeval logicians consisted in rejecting both the solution of traditional metaphysical Platonic realism (which reduces a dog to its unchangeable, eternal and substantial eidos) and the solution of radical nominalism (which on the contrary reduces a dog to a mere flatus vocis, a comfortable sum­mation, obtained from simple induction, of every possible experience we have of flesh and blood dogs). But on the contrary.

For the neo-realist there instead returns the idea of the objective paradigm (and this is why we also call them “realists”), but not as a substantial unity “in itself”. The significatio (or concept) of “dog” is to dogs as, say, the project of a building designed by an architect is to building (or even the potentially unlimited class of buildings) which is actually built to that project. So signification and denotation are not hard direction of reference to different metaphysical realities: the ultimate reference is always to dogs (to buildings) in the flesh (in stones and mortar). This is expressed in the distinction (to which that between significatio and suppositio seems to be reduced) between suppositio pro significato non ultimato and suppositio pro significato ultimato. The ultimatio is the complete intuitive fulfilment of that “project” that was the concept of meaning in the name (in the categorematic term), and when the term stands for the content of this type, it denotes. The meaning differs from the denotation not by genus but by species: it is an incomplete a denotation, one not completely fulfilled, and therefore in a certain sense, vague (it contains notes that remain indeterminate, and therefore variables) (Preti 2011: 42).

Thus the semantic incompleteness always connected to a given term allows us, when it is properly transposed onto the plane of linguistic objectivity, to compre­hend the epistemic problem of the objective constitution of things. There emerges again the problem—drawn from Cartesian philosophy—of the relationship between esse obiectivum and esse formale on which the issue of the constitution of the objects of knowledge might be based. But in order to grasp the object of knowl­edge, we then have to follow the approach suggested by Kant with his “Copernican revolution”, and understand that our natural orientation and its ingenuous realism has to be suspended to adopt the perspective of an analytical level of meta-reflection on different disciplines, to understand all the different elements which structure the object-of-knowledge. The hyphens used in this expression are intended to show how this object-of-knowledge cannot even be understood if we are not able to grasp the precise “regional ontology” (to use one of Husserl's categories again) within which the knowledge proper to each discipline is constructed. The consequences of this transcendentalist approach are dual: concepts are in fact intended as unifying functions (or as the result of different unifying functions), while the object-of-knowledge is configured as a continuous task and an open project with the aim of learning to start from knowledge itself, that is from its technical and sci­entific competence and its various conceptual frameworks. The history of modern science since the seventeenth century to the present is in line with this; it testifies that the justification of scientific knowledge and of its technological practices can never be supplied from outside science itself. In this way, as science is justified by its history, so our objective knowledge of the world is likewise rooted in language universes, conceptual categories, problems, verification and falsification methods, which were devised by a certain technical competence and a type of knowledge at some stage of its cognitive and pragmatic development. In this perspective, the truth of objective knowledge can then no longer be thought of as being “commensurate” with, or as being a “correspondence” with, an object metaphysically given beyond our own possible experiences (as Kant taught us); because, if anything, the objectivity of our knowledge appears as an infinite and always open research programme where knowledge is “configured as ‘a commensuration of the actuation of knowledge to its own intentional direction'” (Minazzi 2011, p. 161). Which brings us back, first, to the most authentic Socratic perspective, according to which the search never ends, because truth coincides with the search for truth. But now this Socratic awareness about knowledge and its relative autonomy is firmly held together by the lesson of the early Husserl, who perceived the plurality of the different levels of transcendentality within which different morfe are established, within which hyletic data are systematically subsumed, creating the objective world in which we live (Minazzi 1996 and 2004c).