Anarchistyczna teoria rewolucji naukowych

Abstract

The recent attempts at formulating an universal theory of scientific revolutions strive at disclosing the mechanisms governing all shifts of scientific paradigms. Two basically different types of interpretations may be distinguished among them. In the first approach the laws of revolutions are described in the sociology of science; in the second – the laws are claimed to be a result of an internal rationality of science. The paper contains critical comments on both these interpretations and proposes an anarchistic theory of revolutions as a counterproposal, in which particular scientific revolutions are directed by different laws depending on complex relationships between external (sociological) and internal (rational-empirical) conditioning of the growth of science. There is no objective foundation for optimistic believing that the complicated process of the evolution of science could be represented by one plainmodel; on the contrary, there are many reasons to accept a complex alinear evolution of scientific knowledge. From the analysis of the evolution of systems developed in Rene Thom’s theory of catastrophes one sees how strict are the relationships between the course of the evolution and the number of factors determining the growth of systems. If the evolution of a system governed by a potential is determined by no more than four different factors, there are seven structurally stable possibilities of discontinuous evolution of the system. A growth of the number of determining factors is followed by a rapid increase of the number of possible variants of evolution. In this context, any attempt at developing a unique non-trivial model of scientific revolutions expresses epistemological optimism stronger than that which in the medieval times led to the search of the philosophers’ stone. A neo-Hegelian rationalist attempt at extending a single metascientific theory to cover all scientific revolutions will yield either a set of generalites describing merely the phenomena implied in the very concept of a revolution, or an attempt at fact-disregarding speculation unverifiable because of the lack of exact data concerning past scientific revolutions. It is significant that in the course of the metascientific revolution which took place within our century, the revolution in metamathematics took a completely different course than the revolution in the epistemology of natural sciences. Breakthrough discoveries in mathematics had not been preceded by an increase in the number of anomalies but followed the attempts at defining the foundations of mathematics. Moreover, no claim could be made that this revolution led to incommensurable changes in the basic concepts of the integer or set, though certain terms (e.g. the infinitesimals in non-standard analysis) changed their meaning. The attempt to formulate an universal theory of scientific revolutions on the basis of known facts concerning the Galileo – Newton and Einstein – Planck revolutions would be just as risky an undertaking as to try to develop a theory of society on the basis of observations of two pensioners. Such attempts raise questions of representative ample, criteria of generalizations, principles for distinguishing essential from non-essential factors. For this reason all proposed theories of scientific revolutions are merely conjectural, whereas the belief in a single universal theory may be upheld only in highly idealized approaches where simplicity becomes more important than adequacy.