The principle of continued culture is moreover at the root of modern scientific culture. The modern scientist is a more apt recipient than anyone else of Kipling’s austere advice: ‘if you can see your life’s work suddenly collapse, and then start work again, if you can suffer, struggle, and die without complaint, you’ll be a man, my son. (formation p. 249)
For a philosopher who declares that ’the real is never what one might think, but what one ought to have thought, the true can only be ‘the limit of lost illusions’. So it is not surprising that no realism, least of all empirical realism, finds favor as a theory of knowledge in Bachelard’s eyes. The real does not exist before or outside science. Science does not detect or capture the real, it indicates the intellectual direction and organization with which ‘one can be assured that one is approaching the real’.” (Canguilhem I craft p. 84)
Carnap - research relevance of scientific concepts...
What then in the end has Polanyi done to free us from the choice that Bertrand Russell left us with – the choice between honest skepticism and dishonest hope? – This was the choice that Polanyi saw as the root of so much of the despair and violence of the modern world, leaving men as it does with no honest hope, yet with moral passions that must find an outlet. He has shown how our faith, imagination and personal judgment, so long paralyzed by the poison of skeptical doubt, in fact run right through all our knowledge. Without faith in a real universe and in our own powers of getting hold of some direction and sense in it, there is no knowledge at all. Science relies on these same powers and stands or falls with them. The skeptics cheat by relying on powers which they cannot admit to be real; if things are as bad as the skeptics say, then they are much worse, for there is no sense anywhere, even in skepticism. (D. Scott p. 197) Som Canguilhem siger: Strictly speaking
Descartes said that theoretical science remains the same in its essence no matter what object it deals with – just as the sun’s light is the same no matter what wealth and variety of things it may illuminate. The same may be said of any symbolic form, for language, art, or myth, in that each of these is a particular way of seeing, and carries within itself its particular and proper source of light. The function of envisagement, the dawn of a conceptual enlightenment can never be realistically derived from things themselves or understood through the nature of its objective contents. For it is not a question of what we see in a certain perspective, but of the perspective itself. (Cassirer myth p. 11)
We must recognize the participation of the ‘subject’, and learn to see therein not only an essential limitation but a positive condition for all our knowledge of nature. Even in the field of mathematics and the mathematical sciences the proposition that Kant put in these words holds good: ‘that only is known a priori in things which we ourselves put into them’. Thus even physics owes the revolution in its mode of thought, which has been of such benefit, solely to this conception: seek in nature (without imputing it to nature) that which reason itself has prescribed, even though reason must still learn all that from nature, and purely by itself would not know anything about the matter. If this be true for physics, it is so to a far greater degree for history. Here ‘subjectivity’ enters, in the general sense of theoretical reason and its presuppositions, but in addition the individuality, the personality of the author continually asserts itself. Without that there would be no active historical research or writing. (videre med Ranke; Cassirer p. 232)
