The why and the how: Evandro Agazzi on the limits of pragmatic reductionism

This article aims to show how the scientific realism proposed by the philosopher Evandro Agazzi contributes to the epistemological development of social discursive psychology. To do this, the debates led by Ian Parker and John Greenwood in the early 1990s about scientific and critical realism are addressed. In this debate, the limits of naive empiricism and discursive idealism, which began to predominate in discursive social psychology, are highlighted. Evandro Agazzi's assumptions about scientific realism are then presented to account for the contributions of scientific realism to the epistemological development of discursive social psychology.

Evandro AGAZZI: Introduction. Part One: PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS. Paul HORWICH: Realism and Truth. Evandro AGAZZI: On the Criteria for Establishing the Ontological Status of Different Entities. Aristides BALTAS Con-straints and Resistance: Stating a Case for Negative Realism. Michel PATY: Predicate of Existence and Predictability for a Theoretical Object in Physics. Part Two: OBSERVABILITY AND HIDDEN ENTITIES. Francois BONSACK: Atoms: Lessons of a History. Alberto CORDERO: Arguing for Realities. Bernard d'ESPAGNAT: On the Difficulties that Attributing Existence to Hidden Quantities May Rise. Massimo PAURI: The Quantum, Space-Time and Observation. Part Three: APPLICATIONS TO QUANTUM PHYSICS. David ALBERT: On the Phenomenology of Quantum-Mechanical Superpositions. Gian Carlo GHIRARDI: Realism and Quantum Mechanics. Michel CROZON: Experimental Evidence of Quark Structure Inside Hadrons.

Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa and Evandro Agazzi, eds., Life: Interpretation and the Sense of Illness within the Human Condition: Medicine and Philosophy in Dialogue

Evandro Agazzi’s epistemological consideration of the objectivity in the sciences fully legitimates the rationality of metaphysical inquiry as well as the embedding of science into broader contexts of moral, social and political nature. His main argument is the intrinsic limitation of any object assumed by a particular science, when human knowledge always takes into account reality as a whole. Science cannot exclude the questioning of the whole as such; much more, each specialized field of scientific research suffers a kind of contingency. Such a logical defense of the legitimacy of metaphysics was for me a strong support in building my own theory on the relationship between common sense and metaphysical research, whose goal is the rational mediation of the immediate certainties about the whole, namely the discovery of the causes of the existence of beings and the determination of their true nature. Unifying Agazzi’s epistemological justification of metaphysics with Gilson’s theory of realism as the very method of metaphysics, I was able to give a critical definition of ‘common sense’ as the primary truth in approaching reality—a truth that, although pre-scientific, is absolutely undeniable and so makes metaphysics as a science possible.

Review - Varieties of Scientific Realism, Ed. Evandro Agazzi, 2017, Springer.

This article is an analytical review of a recent volume written by Evandro Agazzi, namely, The Knowledge of the Invisible. It points out how Agazzi takes his starting point from faith to develop the centrality of reason. One of the central themes is the epistemology of religion. It concludes with a brief mention of the notion of hope.

Evandro Agazzi’s volume Scientific Objectivity and its Contexts is here introduced. First, the genesis and the content of the book are outlined. Secondly, an overview of Agazzi’s philosophy of science is provided. Its main roots are epistemological realism in the Aristotelian/scholastic tradition, and contemporary science-oriented epistemology, especially in Logical Empiricism. As a result, Agazzi’s thought is nicely balanced between empiricism and rationalism, it avoids gnoseologistic dualism by stressing the intentionality of knowledge, and it insists on the operational and referential character of science. Finally, an account is given of Agazzi’s view of the origin and nature of scientific objects, which allows to understand how his sophisticated and “perspectival” realism differs both from naive realism and constructivism.

Evandro Agazzi has shown the possibility of a reconciliation between logical empiricism and realism through the proposal of his conception of scientific objectivity, which replaces the notion of entity with that of object, conceived as a structured set of properties. This conception, on the one hand, has been developed from a more empiricist perspective, according to which the reality of the object is shifted to one of its predictable properties, and on the other hand, has produced his fruitful criticism of the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics and his demand for a realist interpretation based on the introduction of new non-classical concepts.

<i>Probabilistic Thinking, Thermodynamics, and the Interaction of the History and Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the 1978 Pisa Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science, Volume II</i>. Jaakko Hintikka , David Gruender , Evandro Agazzi

Introduction, How to Move in the World of Signs. PART I: THEORETICAL SEMIOTICS. Andrzej BOGUS_AWSKI: Conditionals and Egocentric Mental Predicates. Wojciech BUSZKOWSKI: On Families of Languages Generated by Categorial Grammar. Katalin G. HAVAS: Changing the World - Changing the Meaning. On the Meanings of the Principle of Non-Contradiction. Henryk HITZ: On Translation. Solomon MARCUS: Imprecision, Between Variety and Uniformity: The Conjugate Pairs. Jaroslav PEREGRIN, Petr SGALL: Meaning and Propositional Attitudes. Olgierd Adrian WOJTASIEWICZ: Some Applications of Metric Space in Theoretical Linguistics. PART II: METHODOLOGY. Evandro AGAZZI: Rationality and Certitude. Irena BELLERT: Human Reasoning and Artificial Intelligence. When Are Computers Dumb in Simulating Human Reasoning? Tomasz BIGAJ: Analyticity and Existence in Mathematics. Geoffrey B. KEENE: Taking up the Logical Slack in Natural Language. Andras Kertesz: Interdisciplinarity and the Myth of Exactness. Jan SRZEDNICKI: Norm as the Basis of Form. Juri S. STEPANOV: Cause in the Light of Semiotics. Jerzy A. WOJCIECHOWSKI: The Development of Knowledge as a Moral Problem. PART III: HISTORY OF SEMIOTICS. Erhard ALBRECHT: Philosophy of Language, Logic and Semiotics. Gerard DELEDALLE: A Philosopher's Reply to Questions Concerning Peirce's Theory of Signs. Janice DELEDALLE-RHODES: The Transposition of the Linguistic Sign in Peirce's Contributions to The Nation. Robert E. INNIS: From Feeling to Mind: A Note on Langer's Notion of Symbolic Projection. Roberta KEVELSON: Peirce's Semiotics as Complex Inquiry: Conflicting Methods. Jerzy KOPANIA: The Cartesian Alternative of Philosophical Thinking. Xiankun LI: Why Gonsung Long (Kungsun Lung) Said White Horse Is Not Horse. Lucia MELAZZO: A Report on Ancient Discussion. Ding-fu NI Semantic Thoughts of J. Stuart Mill and Chinese Characters. Irene PORTIS-WINNER: Lotman's Semiosphere: Some Comments. Joelle RETHORE: Another Close Look at the Interpretant. Edward STANKIEWICZ: The Semiotic Turn of Breal's Semantique. PART IV: LINGUISTICS. Klaus HEGER: Passive and Other Voices Seen from an Onomasiological Point of View. Laszlo I. KOMLOSZI: The Semiotic System of Events, Intrinsic Temporal and Deictic Tense Relations in Natural Language. On the Conceptualization of Temporal Schemata. Wac_aw M. OSADNIK, Ewa HORODECKA: Polysystem Theory, Translation Theory and Semiotics. Anna WIERZBICKA: THINK - a Universal Human Concept and a Conceptual Primitive. PART V: CULTURAL SEMIOTICS. Gianfranco BETTETINI: Communication as a Videogame. W_odzimierz KRYSI??N??SKI: Joyce, Models, and Semiotics of Passions. Hanna KSIAZEK-KONICKA: Visual Thinking in the Poetry of Julian Przybo_ and Miron Bia_oszewski. Urszula NIKLAS: The Space of Metaphor. Maria Caterina RUTA: Captivity as Event and Metaphor in Some of Cervantes' Writings. Eero TARASTI: From Aesthetics to Ethics: Semiotic Observations on the Moral Aspects of Art, Especially Music. Ladislav TONDL: Is It Justified to Consider the Semiotics of Technological Artefacts? Vilmos VOIGT: Poland, Finland and Hungary (A Tuatara's View). Thomas G. WINNER: Czech Poetism: A New View of Poetic Language. Johan WREDE: Metaphorical Imagery - Ambiguity, Explicitness and Life. Else M. BARTH: A Case Study in Empirical Logic and Semiotics. Fundamental Modes of Thought of Nazi Politician Vidkun Quisling, Based on Unpublished Drafts and Notebooks. Paul BOUISSAC: Why Do Memes Die? Wojciech KALAGA: Thresholds of Signification. Adam PODGORECKI: Do Social Sciences Evaporate?

Book Reviews in this Article: Bioetica e persona edited by Evandro Agazzi. Medicine, Law and Social Change by Leanna Darvall.

Evandro Agazzi’s original proposal of characterizing science through only two requirements, objectivity and rigour, amounts to advocating a concept of science that aims at being general but at the same time admitting a distinction between science and non-science and, in addition, capable of convincingly applying to different sciences. This result he has attained by elaborating an “analogical” concept of science, in the sense that the basic requirements of objectivity and rigour are characterized and satisfied not according to a unique model, but in articulated specific ways from science to science. Therefore, reductionism is the opposite of scientificity, contrary to what has been maintained by several scholars. The social sciences are the domain in which Agazzi has concretely put to test this claim: they do not satisfy many features of the paradigmatic “exact sciences” but, instead of saying that they are not sciences, or that they are sciences but totally at variance with the exact sciences, he has discussed how they have a specific way of being sciences. What Agazzi has discussed in general terms, is analyzed in some details in the present contribution, where physics, biology and sociology are considered in their common elements and in the specificity of their single features, that entail epistemological as well as ontological differences.

The deep link between the philosophy of science and the history of science in the thought of Ludovico Geymonat, Giulio Preti and Evandro Agazzi. The theoretical reasons of historical epistemology.

In the present work I attempt to describe Evandro Agazzi’s research on philosophy of logic and mathematics. In particular, after a general introduction to his works, I focus my analysis on the philosophical implications of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems. This is because they have always remained a constant point of interest in Agazzi’s research. In particular, I wish to offer a tribute to Agazzi’s mastership by analysing Godel’s thought on the consequences of his Incompleteness Theorems for the philosophy of mind. That is part of the research developed by Fano and I ( Epistemologia 36(2):207–232, 2013) after Agazzi’s conference in Cesena (2006) and it is for me a way to honour Evandro Agazzi’s constant stimulus to the researches in philosophy of logic and mathematics.

In this paper I analyse the contraposition between two families of interpretations of QT. On the one hand, Information-Theoretic Interpretations of QT, the family of interpretations that understand QT to be a theory about information. On the other hand, those interpretations (e.g. Bohmian mechanics or GRW) that provide an analysis of measurement interactions and ‘open the black box’. The main aim of this paper is to undermine the basic assumption that one of the two approaches should prevail over the other and to outline the background for a viable alternative to this assumption. In the first part of the argument I use the three main features of a Kuhnian paradigm-shift (World-change, Kuhn-loss, Conceptual change) to dissect and invalidate the reasons behind the expectation that a solution of the quarrel will determine the ‘victory’ of one position to the other. In the second part of the argument I argue that Evandro Agazzi’s account of scientific objectivity might harmonize the ontologies of the two interpretations in a realist framework.