Zagadnienie możliwości falsyfikacji twierdzeń w filozofii przyrody

Abstract

According to the traditional approach philosophical statements can be neither falsified nor confirmed empirically because of epistemological differences between philosophy and science. In spite of this tradition Prof. K. Kłósak in his metatheoretical contributions to the philosophy of nature presented a theory of ontological implications for scientific statements. Accepting epistemological differentiations between science and philosophy he outlines in the theory 3 various methods enabling empirical confirmation of philosophical statements. In the paper presented here the author develops Kłósak’s ideas investigating possibilities of falsification of philosophical statements using empirical counterexamples. Very often general statements of the philosophy of nature, are formulated on the basis of the common sense observations extrapolated universally. These extrapolations can be false when applied to extreme states of matter, e.g. near the cosmological singularity, inside of the event horizons, etc. Scientific data can be useful in the philosophy of nature in order to reveal baseless generalisations and to introduce new interpretations omitted in simplified philosophical solutions. In order to illustrate this procedure concrete examples of falsification of philosophical statements are presented. The author does not accept an epistemological anarchism in which scientific and philosophical terms could be mutually mixed. However, he does not accept either a specific modification of T. Kuhn’s incommensurability theory in which languages of philosophy and science are to be mutually untranslatable.