A Leading Paradigm of Modern Russian Philosophy of Science

Abstract

The book under consideration is written by the leading Russian philosopher of science. It summarizes the results of the most productive stage of the leading trend in modern Russian philosophy. Moreover, it is even more interesting as a reflection of certain tendencies some of which will inevitably become influential in future. But let me start with the results. Up to the end of 60th Russian philosophy of science was dominated by the ontological bias with its adherents dealing mainly with the problems of development, causality, space and time formulated in the quasi-optimistic context of advances in hard sciences. Yet the next stage was marked by the logico-methodological research devoted to structure and dynamics of scientific knowledge. At the ontological stage the main problem consisted in reducing the disciplinary ontologies of the natural sciences such as relativity, relativistic cosmology, quantum mechanics, quantum chemistry and genetics to dialectical materialism (a cornerstone of the official culture), saving the bodies and souls of the partisans both in sciences and scientific philosophies. Yet at the next stage they had to deal with the problems that appeared to be more complicated now. Now one had to deal not with (usually illiterate) ‘‘apparatchics’’ but with real Russian scientists as well and to reveal and to demonsrate the heuristic potential of Russian philosophy of science. Moreover, one had to meet the challenge of western post-positivism too. The efforts to scrutiny the history of science and to revalue (critically) western achievements finally resulted in the image of science as a comlicated system of knowledge subject to slow historical evolution. The system appeared to be a self-regulated one, with the dynamics consisting in passing from one type of self-regulation to another and forming the level hierarchy of the elements involved. When the new levels of organization occur they influence the old ones and transform them. Putting it in more clear-cut terms, all the main results obtained belong to one of the following three parts. The first part (i) reveals the genesis of scientific knowledge, the second one (ii) structure and functioning of the most developed forms of it, while the third one (iii) describes the dynamics of knowledge (and especially the scientific revolutions).