Science and Philosophy: In Dialogue?

Positivism and Science

A difficult and complex question in philosophy today concerns the discussion regarding the intersection and “boundaries” of the harder empirical sciences and the distinct activity of philosophical enquiry.  Given the success of scientific discovery, one temptation in the early 20^th century was to claim that disciplines such as biology, chemistry, physics, and the like were (or would eventually become) exhaustive for understanding the world and nature.  This position, known as “positivism”, claimed that genuine inquiry into the world of nature either had to be reducible to empirical testing and measuring or was known to be true tautologically.[1]  Anything that did not conform to these modes of inquiry, such as classical metaphysics and theology, were considered pseudo-scientific in their mode of enquiry.  

Standing in contrast to this reductive position, the French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain argues in his Degrees of Knowledge that a bifurcation can be made between sciences as affirmative, to which he ascribes the empirical “hard” sciences and studies, and the more deductive science of proper “explication” or knowledge of and from first principles:[2]

Briefly, we can say that science in general deals with the necessities immanent in natures, with the universal essences realized in individuals in the concrete and sensible world.  The distinction has been drawn between the explicatory or deductive sciences, which attain to these natures by discovery (constructively in mathematics, and from without to what is within in the case of philosophy), and the affirmative or inductive sciences, which only attain these natures as signs and substitutes, blindly so to say.  These latter have assuredly a certain explicative value, without which they would not be sciences, but which consists in indicating the necessities of things by way of sensible experiment, not by assigning their intelligible reasons.

Maritain’s distinction between the two sciences of the “explicatory” and the “affirmative” does not distinguish entities as they exist in the world, but rather between different ways of grasping entities in the world.  It is this distinction that forms the basis of Maritain’s own investigation and his defense against positivism: namely, the three degrees of abstraction (by which we attain the natures of physical objects, mathematical objects, and metaphysical objects).  Even so, if all Maritain has done here is provide room for a study of metaphysics or a natural philosophy based upon principles, there remains the question as to how the two modes of enquiry interact with one another—if at all.  Are the affirmative sciences corrective of the explicatory?  Do the explicatory sciences have their own interpretive autonomy in relation to what can be measured and analyzed empirically?

The Cenoscopic and Idioscopic

Another distinction made in philosophy, taken first from Jeremy Bentham, but developed by C. S. Peirce is the distinction between cenoscopic and idioscopic sciences. The cenoscopic sciences are characterized by their study of what is common among the many and divergent, and the idioscopic is characterized by the specializing or the breaking apart of inquiry:[3]

In cenoscopy, things escape the eye not by being hidden by virtue of their tininess or hugeness, or their extension over eons of time or involvement in hyper-complexities of culture, but simply by their commonness. Their very obviousness requires a conscious direction of our attention, like that needed to notice the ticking of a clock that your ears were hearing all the while you conversed with someone, but which remained unperceived because you were otherwise occupied…The “idioscopic,” by contrast, is a “look” that is idios – “singular, special(ized)” – and that began to be cultivated in earnest only in modern times. It has become the very glory of modern science, and has brought countless blessings and maledictions into our contemporary biosphere.

Whereas cenoscopy offers us a “grand theory of everything” and seeks to unite the divergent modes of enquiry, idioscopic enquiry by its nature seeks to break apart, to isolate, to experiment upon, and to measure.  Neither science is necessarily wrongheaded in what it seeks to inquire, but both are deficient with regards to understanding the world and how we relate to it:[4]

In summary, these four areas of human knowing – the astronomically big and the microscopically small, the biologically compounded and the culturally complex – invite idioscopic science to don its instruments, mount its experiments, measure and hypothesize about the objects in question, and finally to fashion technologies that will hopefully more deeply integrate humankind with its environment, solve problems and cure diseases.  Still, the great ideal at the heart of all knowledge, namely, the desire to unify data and bring synthesis to multiplicity, floats temptingly over these four areas as it does over the divisions within each of them.  Knowledge by definition tends toward unity.

What philosophy offers the idioscopic (here I’m grafting roughly onto Maritain’s affirmative as roughly equivalent) is a unified whole of the diversity in the hard sciences.  While idioscopic science by its nature compartmentalizes and divides the study of the world, rightfully so within its respective subject-matter, it is at a loss in attempting to find unity within the multitude.  By contrast, the cenoscopic, in providing its own accounts and studies of the world based upon shared commonness, oftentimes misses the mark in its enquiry—one could think of the Eleatic philosophers and their cenoscopic inquiry concluding the impossibility of change and mutation and the eternal permanence to being.

A Habit Formed

Famously in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle quipped that among the commonly identified virtutes, many of them go unnamed.  A virtue famously for Aristotle is taken to be a mean between two vicious extremes, being informed by the goods sought after deficiently or in excess in both vices:[5]

So, virtue, is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative to us and determined by a rational principle, and by that which a prudent man would use to determine it.  It is a mean between two kinds of vices, one of excess and the other of deficiency; and also, for this reason, that whereas these vices fall short of or exceeding the right measure in both feelings and actions, virtue discovers the mean and chooses it.

The question I would like to ask is: what sort of “unnamed” virtue must a person be formed in today if both the cenoscopic and ideoscopic sciences are to be retained?  Is it healthy to siphon off one habit of cognizing the world in the absence of the other?  Are there points where both scientific inquiries intersect, or one ought to claim priority, and if so, is there a habit needed to secure this intersection?  If there can be found such a habit, what kind of vicious extremes could be seen to impede the exercise of such a virtuous inquiry?

Join the Conversation!

We’ll be discussing these and more conversations in our Philosophical Happy Hour this Wednesday (17 April 2024) and we’d love for you to join. Use the links below!

---

[1] Creath 2022: “Logical Empiricism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.).

[2] Maritain 1937: Distinguer pour unir ou Les degrés du savoir. Reference to the English translation by Bernard Wall, Degrees of Knowledge, 43

[3] Paine 2021: “On the Cenoscopic and Idioscopic and Why They Matter”, in Reality: a journal for philosophical discourse, online [PDF]: 5-6.

[4] Ibid, 12.

[5] c.335/34bc: Ἠθικὰ nικοάχεια in the English translation by J. Thomson, The Nicomachean Ethics, 42.