The Role of Reason

The search for certainty was not the only—and probably even not the principal— motivation for that elaboration of rational justifications that was required for knowledge in the classical Western tradition.

The principal motivation was rather the aim to understand and explain that is typical of human cognition and which produces the second of the two evident ‘facts of life' that were mentioned at the beginning of this Introduction: in order to understand and explain what we see, we introduce something we do not see. We intend this ‘seeing’ in a very general sense, as meaning ‘ascertaining’ in the different ways in which we could use this notion and the result of which are descriptive statements. For many practical purposes such an elementary cognition is sufficient, but in many other circumstances we are led to put forth certain how-questions or why-questions. For example, a detective who is trying to ‘reconstruct’ the dynamics of a murder occurred in a room tries to imagine (on the ground of the factual evidence at his disposal) how the killer can have come into the room, with what kind of weapon and from which position he could have assailed his victim, how he could have left the room without being seen by anyone, etc. All these (and other) are reasonable conjectures about unobserved facts that must be checked by means of additional factual evidence regarding not the murder in the room but some of the imagined circumstances. If the controls are positive and with significant consilience, the result of the investigation might lead to the identification of the killer and, to complete the investigation, it will be also necessary to answer some why-questions, in order to explain why that individual arrived at killing his victim. Dozens of similar examples can be found in our everyday relations with other people or in the use of machines. It was this fundamental cognitive attitude that produced the birth of Western philosophy, when the desire to understand and explain was addressed to the whole of reality, to the regularities appearing in the sky and on the surface of the Earth, to the course of human events and to the sense of human existence.

No wonder, therefore, that this cooperation of ascertaining, understanding and explaining was explicitly recognized as constituting the proper structure of knowledge. A cooperation that it would be restrictive to qualify as a correlation between sense perception and reasoning: it would be more appropriate to speak of a synergy of ‘empiricity’ and ‘logos’, where by empiricity we mean not only the content of sense perception, but also, for instance, the content of a historical document, of a dream, of a feeling (i.e. whatever we could consider as a datum, as a factual information), and by logos we mean the various activities of the mind through which empiricity is interpreted, elaborated, understood, made ‘intelligible’ and explained. We can express this fact by saying that human knowledge walks on two legs, empiricity and logos, and that, thanks to this synergy, it becomes broader and deeper. But what do we mean by ‘broader’ and ‘deeper’ ? If understood seriously this means that previously unknown entities have been brought within the domain of our knowledge, and also that previously unknown properties of already known or newly discovered entities were brought into the domain of knowledge. No restriction is implicit in this process, in particular it is not supposed that the newly discovered entities or properties have to belong to the same kind of empirical evidence as the one of the explained facts. Sometimes this can be the case: for example, if the killer is discovered, he will be an entity of the same kind as the killed person; or, when the new planet Neptune was discovered thanks to the prediction based on a theoretical inference within Newtonian celestial mechanics, it was an entity of the same kind as the already known directly observed planets, and was also empirically observable. In other cases this may not happen: for instance, if in order to discover the killer it was necessary to suppose his intention of killing that particular person, and we had independent evidence and arguments to support this hypothesis, the said intention is a mental entity whose nature is very different from that of the other facts ascertained through the empirical evidence; or the particular structure of the genetic code of an animal which explains the particular color of its eyes has a chemical nature very different from the perceptual nature of the color.

For the same reason, if eventually it is concluded that a certain unobservable entity introduced to explain a certain empirically ascertained fact does not actually exist, this does not depend on the nature of the entity, but on the inadequacy of the explanation. For example, in antiquity lightning was explained as a weapon thrown by angry gods and the existence of such gods was later denied not because they were supposed to be supernatural invisible entities, but because their existence was considered an inadequate explanation of atmospheric phenomena. Also the existence of phlogiston was denied after a certain time, despite that it was supposed to be of the same nature of the usual physical entities, because the explanation it provided for chemical phenomena was inadequate.

Despite the above considerations, a certain diffidence remains regarding the cognitive purport of reason because its intervention in the process of cognition is often considered as a kind of intromission, of manipulation, of shaping that possibly distorts the genuine representation of the world that, on the contrary, is supposed to be faithfully mirrored in the perceptual moment of cognition, due to the ‘passivity’ or ‘receptivity’ of the senses. This is probably the implicit feeling that supports the preference for empiricism.

<< | >>

↑

Source: Agazzi E. (ed.). Varieties of Scientific Realism: Objectivity and Truth in Science. Springer,2017. — 411 pp.. 2017

The Role of Reason

More on the topic The Role of Reason: