A New Idea of Scientificity
The new idea of scientificity emerges starting from Cosmology, the discipline that Kant defined structurally unscientific, because inherently unable to draw on possible experience.
On the contrary, for Agazzi, after the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century, “the most interesting aspects for us originate from the fact that this discipline, which is now recognized as a science, and moreover a physical science, can be considered so only by widening the usual scientific criteria of natural science” (Agazzi 2008: 195-196). Obviously we should not hide the difficulties, nor is it appropriate to face the problem superficially, because we have to take into account that the issue is complicated by the fact that “it is difficult to identify the object of cosmology” because in order to do so correctly you must be able to answer the question “What kind of object is the universe?” (ibi: 196). Clearly the most difficult problem is that it does not occupy a visible space in its entirety, nor has boundaries defined with precision, since it expands in all directions. Precisely for this reason, “it cannot be empirically denoted as a well-defined system of things, neither can it be characterized as a structured set of certain attributes or properties (as in other sciences)” (ibid.). Therefore we cannot omit the fact that, apart from what noticed so far, “compared to the natural sciences (to whose context it purports to belong) cosmology does not fulfill the requirement of empirical controllability, i.e. the ability to prove its theoretical hypotheses” (ibid.).Therefore its scientificity lies somewhere else, in a meeting point that until some decades ago seemed inadvisable, because it was linked to the already mentioned contraposition, between science and history. On the other hand, Agazzi, inheriting the best of what in another occasion I have defined as “complex neohistoricism” (Gembillo 1999), expressly states that
difficulties of this type can be overcome by recognizing that cosmology - since in essence it makes an effort to reconstruct a history of the universe - has the right to claim the conditions of scientificity that are recognized for historical sciences, which in fact are not of experimental nature, and cannot avail themselves at will of the past data, even though they are “empirical” (i.e.
they cannot avoid to be based on factual data), yet they try to offer not just descriptions, but also interpretations and explanations (Agazzi 2008: 196).This does not mean that cosmology should belong to a different “context”, abandoning the field of classical sciences to enter among the human sciences, since an important aspect links it to the former context, namely how it implements “interpretations and explanations”, since
to provide the latter, cosmology draws on the physical sciences and their theories, so it would seem that it is able to adopt that ‘nomological-deductive’ model of scientific explanation that (at least according to the current epistemology) characterizes mature science and physics in the first place (ibi: 197).
Agazzi rightly believes that, however, this is not the correct answer to the problem of the scientific status and the sense of Cosmology, since it goes beyond the methodology of classical sciences. He adds that “you cannot say that either,” and he justifies his considerations by inviting us to reflect that “the laws of physical theories—confirmed now—serve to explain phenomena that take place within the universe, but there are no laws to explain the phenomenon of the universe taken as a whole” (ibid.). Therefore it is no longer possible, either in this specific case or in general, to appeal to any form of reductionism, since it is now clear that the Whole cannot be explained on the basis of its individual parts, and
this fact blocks the way to a possible analytical-reductionist solution, as seen above, that would consist in showing that the properties of a ‘whole’ result from the composition of the properties of its parts, in other words, that the laws that govern the parts allow to deduce the laws of the whole (like, for example, some people think that the properties and laws studied by biology can be derived from those of chemistry) (ibid.).
This dream, already secular and difficult to erase completely despite its already clear illusoriness, still does not take into account the specific nature of that “whole” represented by the Universe in its entirety, nor the fact “that there are no laws or properties of the universe as a whole that can be established with a minimum of explicitness, in order to show later how they are derived from the laws of physics” (ibid.).
The solution to the problem lies in the idea of commonality that has already emerged clearly, for example, in scientists like Ilya Prigogine, and here appropriately stressed by Agazzi, who notes thatthese, that in the eyes of many scholars are among the objections that one can address to the recognition of cosmology as a science, actually lose almost all their strength if we stress again that the epistemological characteristics of this discipline are very close to those of the historical sciences, and it represents a noticeable example of a historiographic natural science (ibid.).
Agazzi with his usual grace argues in this way an issue that has aroused fierce controversies and sharp contrasts among the most important scholars of the twentieth century. On his part, he adds that
therefore, as the ‘scientific’ historian may use sectorial knowledge related to various spheres of human history in which perhaps some ‘laws’ or at least ‘regularities’ can be traced, without thereby being forced to recognize the existence of ‘laws’ of history as a whole, so the cosmologist uses different contributions of theories provided with laws concerning certain aspects of the evolution of the universe, in order to reconstruct the lines of such a development, and to tell such a story as objectively and rigorously as possible (ibid.).
The guarantee that everything respects the parameters that make an approach rigorous is provided by the fact that it must be recognized that “this research for objectivity and rigor is already the necessary and sufficient mark to qualify as scientific a cognitive endeavor (even if, of course, its results should be judged and evaluated in the light of the requirements of rigor and objectivity actually achieved)” (ibid.).
These conclusions were made possible precisely by the methodological turning point occurred thanks to systems theory and the perspective of Complexity that have shifted the attention from the elements to the whole, from the parts to the whole.
Agazzi does not fail to highlight it, stressing that what said so farmight be enough to report the interest and the peculiarity of this new science that, in particular, has been set up thanks to the legitimation of the ‘holistic’ point of view that characterizes contemporary science, which has completely overcome the narrow overspecialization of the strictly analytical approach (ibi: 198).
Having said so, and to support all the arguments carried out so far, it should also be noted that “cosmology is an interdisciplinary science in the right sense that we have already made clear, namely in the sense that it seeks ‘contributions’ not from a wide array of different disciplines, but just from those few disciplines that are really needed to investigate the problems it studies” (ibid.). In this case it is important to insist that “in the essence physics, astronomy, astrophysics, mathematics” (ibid.) are the ones whose interaction provides methodological credibility to Cosmology at the moment when it presents itself as a rigorous “historical reconstruction” of an inherently historical entity as the Universe turned out to be. The reference to these few disciplines might seem restrictive for the interdisciplinary character that Cosmology presents, but
watching things a little deeper we notice that it simultaneously uses two fundamental physical theories that, until now, could not be ‘unified’, namely the theory of relativity and quantum theory, but it uses them avoiding their insurmountable collisions, in the sense that relativity essentially serves to determine the choice of a ‘model’ of the universe (for example the expansion model rather than the steady state one), while quantum physics, even in its more advanced parts regarding the elementary particles, is used to ‘fill in’ the model and actually write the different chapters in the history of the universe (ibid.).
Naturally, Cosmology can pursue its proper goals not in a vague and extemporary way but “only thanks to a sophisticated mathematical processing of selected models, and by using the tools and results of astrophysics and astronomy, which can provide those few but significant empirical findings upon which it can rest” (ibid.).
A similar debate should be carried out for the other sciences that have characterized the twentieth century, making it a fundamental theoretical turning point. However, even limiting myself to the considerations taken into account so far, I think I gave a basic idea of how Evandro Agazzi managed to get in tune with the ensuing scientific and epistemological issues and to show the way for a deep renewal of science in our time. To wit, a renewal that finally leads to heal the wound that science itself opened at the moment of its birth and then had to heal. Today this is happening, or at least this is the direction taken by those who have had the taste and the courage to question the activities that they themselves were helping to strengthen and renew. It is not easy to take note of all this for those epistemologists who bet everything on the perspectives proposed by the old science, that seemed too good to be abandoned. Agazzi, however, fully belongs to those who understood that being practical and realistic does not mean believing in a static and abstract reality, but conforming oneself to its “perennial historicity”.