Premise
Evandro Agazzi’s contribution to the epistemology of the social sciences is explicitly contained only in a couple of papers, that are, however, particularly significant. Actually they are in a way a direct application of the most specific traits of his philosophy of science and exhibit a convincing exemplification of his fundamental thesis of the “analogical” nature of the concept of science itself, for which the only
G.
Di Bernardo (*)Faculty of Sociology, University of Trento, Trento, Italy e-mail: giuliano.dibernardo15@gmail.com © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
M. Alai et al. (eds.), Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16369-7_9
defining characteristics are objectivity and rigor. In his book on the philosophy of physics (1969) he had presented all the essential lines of his theory of scientific objectivity that remained constant during the whole of his speculation, including the rejection of any “ontological” reductionism (that would restrict science only to the study of certain subject matters) and “methodological” reductionism (that would recognize as scientific only a discourse strictly using the methods of the so- called exact sciences). The challenge was that of showing how disciplines different from the exact natural sciences could be objective and rigorous, and Agazzi took over this task first regarding psychology, in a famous paper still often referred to today (Agazzi 1976).
Two years later he addressed the same issue regarding the “sciences humaines” (focusing in particular on the social sciences) in the opening lecture of a conference of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science that took place at the University of Trento, and that appeared in its proceeding the following year (Agazzi 1979). In this seminal paper he first outlines his doctrine of scientific objectivity consisting in the fact that any science considers reality only from a specific restricted “point of view”, expressed through specific predicates that refer only to a selected set of attributes of reality, that are accessible by means of appropriate operations.
This is the ground for rejecting as anti-scientific any reduc- tionism. In the second part of the paper Agazzi analyzes a list of features that are present in the social sciences and are often taken as insuperable objections against the possibility of considering these disciplines as really scientific. He argues that such features correctly reflect certain fundamental attributes of human actions, so that they are constitutive of the specific “point of view” of the social sciences and, therefore, they are the ground for their objectivity.An equally important paper was presented by Agazzi about 30 years later, again at a conference of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science at a department of the University of Trento in Rovereto, and whose proceedings appeared in 2010 (Agazzi 2010). On that occasion he addressed the issue of replacing the rough pretension of attaining a unity between the natural and the social sciences through reductionism, by a much more elaborated interdisciplinary approach based on general systems theory and the treatment of complexity (relying on his investigations on these two topics that he had performed in the meanwhile). In this approach natural and social sciences appear “interrelated” as dealing each with different subsystems of a global complex system.
It is not by chance that these two outstanding contributions were made public at conferences held at the University of Trento since they reflect the long collaboration between Agazzi and myself that has lasted during four decades and, in particular, has led me (as professor of philosophy of science at the Faculty of Sociology of that University) to organize the two above mentioned meetings of the International Academy of Philosophy of Science (of which Agazzi was the President and to which I was also admitted). Those, however, were only two salient events of a much broader and deeper personal and scientific cooperation: Agazzi had at the University of Genoa, during the 1970s, a group of disciples working in logic and epistemology, while I had a similar group working with me at Trento, and we used to meet alternatively in the one or the other institution at regular time intervals for joint discussions and exchange of results.
This interchange was very fruitful and, for example, marked my personal intellectual evolution from a stage in which I was especially concentrated on the logical-linguistic aspect of the social sciences (Di Bernardo 1972), to a broader epistemological approach, and finally to the elaboration of a personal view in which the natural and the social sciences are ordered according to a line of continuity and differentiation that recognizes their links as well as their irreducible specificity. I gladly recognize in this personal evolution the background of Agazzi’s fundamental ideas and approaches, a significant testimony of which was the fact that the first work published in the well-known book series “Epistemologia” edited by Agazzi with the published Franco Angeli was my book (Di Bernardo 1979).For the above sketched reasons I think that a perhaps more interesting way of underlining Agazzi’s contribution to the philosophy of the social sciences would be (rather than a summary of his papers) the presentation of an example of how his views have inspired the creative work of another scholar (in this case of myself).
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