The Second Surrogate: Objective Knowledge

Abstract

Even if an abstract sentience, housed accidentally in “an organism N”, is taken to be the inevitable ingredient of any form of cognition; even if instrumentality is wholly transferred to theoretical language; even then, not all tensions inside logical empiricism are thereby removed. One of those left is the strain between normative and descriptive assignments; between the urge to establish norms, and the determination to be realistic about science; the strain that has gradually brought the Viennese programme to its end. To be realistic about science calls for at least tentative respect for the intuition of working scientists, the intuition which does not cherish the excessive logicism, nor does it fully appreciate the instrumental interpretation of scientific theory. A realistic approach cannot ignore the view, well entrenched in the scientific community, that theoretical terms should refer to real but unobserved (or usually only indirectly observed) entities and properties. From Newton’s and Descartes’ natural philosophy, via Boltzmann’s materialism and Einstein’s realism, to the contemporary realist interpretations of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, a great majority of scientists hold that any theoretical language, once the theory is accepted, must be taken literally as a true description of the reality underlying observation.