IEP: Positive science
IEP: problem of positive science in husserl
There are problems with the Foundation
IEP: the foundation upon which scientific inquiry rests is self-contradictory and fails to offer adequate grounding.
Taking world as given
IEP: naïveté that characterizes natural science since at every place in its procedure it accepts nature as given and relies upon it when it performs experiments.
What else is needed?
IEP: if the natural scientist cannot provide us with a “rigorous science” then what is needed and to whom can we look?
Where to find method?
IEP: “through a clarification of the problems and through penetration into their pure sense, the methods adequate to these problems, because demanded by their very essence, must impose themselves on us”
There is a new perspective
IEP: Although this critique of experience is satisfactory, says Husserl, as long as we remain within natural science and think according to its point of view, a completely different critique of experience is still possible and indispensable. It is a critique that places in question all experience as such as well as the sort of thinking proper to empirical science (p.87).
Question posed by new critique
IEP: For Husserl, this is a critique that raises questions such as: “how can experience as consciousness give or contact an object? How can experiences be mutually legitimated or corrected by means of each other, and not merely replace each other or confirm each other subjectively? How can the play of a consciousness whose logic is empirical make objectively valid statements, valid for things that are in and for themselves? Why are the playing rules, so to speak, of consciousness not irrelevant for things?”
Rigid delineation of science
IEP: “to the extent that it pretends at every step to posit and to know a nature that is in itself—in itself in opposition to the subjective flow of consciousness”
Exclusion of science and begining of reduction
IEP: every scientific, as well as every pre-scientific, application of nature “must in principle remain excluded in a theory of knowledge that is to retain its univocal sense. So, too, must all expressions that imply thetic existential positings of things in the framework of space, time, causality, etc. This obviously applies also to all existential positings with regard to the empirical being of the investigator, of his psychical faculties, and the like” (p.89).
Direction of New Theory of knowldge
IEP: Husserl is advocating a theory of knowledge that will investigate the problems of the relationship between consciousness and being in a way that excludes, not only the “thetic existential positings of things in the framework of space, time, causality, etc.,” but also the “existential positings” and “psychical faculties” of the investigator.
Consciousness as matter of inquiry
IEP: But to do so, knowledge theory can have before its eyes “only being as the correlate of consciousness: as perceived, remembered, expected, represented pictorially, imagined, identified, distinguished, believed, opined, evaluated, etc.”
Essence Of Consciousness
IEP: for Husserl, this means that the investigation must be directed “toward a scientific essential knowledge of consciousness, toward that which consciousness itself ‘is’ according to its essence in all its distinguishable forms”
Meaning of conscioiusness
IEP: investigation must also be directed toward “what consciousness ‘means,’ as well as toward the different ways in which—in accord with the essence of the aforementioned forms—it intends the objective, now clearly, now obscurely, now by presenting or by presentifying, now symbolically or pictorially, now simply, now mediated in thought, now in this or that mode of attention, and so in countless other forms, and how ultimately it ‘demonstrates’ the objective as that which is ‘validly,’ ‘really’” (p.89).
Need of improvement
IEP: the refutation of naturalism based on its consequences that he just finished accomplishes very little for him. For science gives important results.
Critical analysis
IEP: important is the principiant critique of the foundations of naturalism; and by this he means that he wants to direct a critical analysis at the philosophy that believes “it has definitely attained the rank of an exact science”
Science and reason is important
IEP: “in all modern life no more powerfully, more irresistibly progressing idea than that of science” and that “with regard to its legitimate aims, it is all-embracing. Looked upon in its ideal perfection, it would be reason itself, which could have no other authority equal or superior to itself”**
Husserl's aims
IEP: what Husserl wants to do is to provide an unshakable ground for science, so as to make it “rigorous” and “exact.” He dismisses the efforts of both science and psychology to provide such a ground owing to the fact that the “riddles” inherent in each necessarily put the solution outside of their reach.
Insufficency of ealier Epistemology
IEP: He notes that the traditional discipline of epistemology has failed to do this and suggests that what is needed is an investigation that is directed toward “a scientific essential knowledge of consciousness, toward that which consciousness itself ‘is’ according to its essence in all its distinguishable forms.”
Critique only to its foundation
IEP: Husserl is not criticizing the results of science (the structural design and dignity of the house that science built) but only the foundation upon which those results rest.
Philosophy as foundation for science
IEP: a science of nature is inadequate if it is not ultimately grounded in a strictly scientific philosophy
Point of departure
IEP: Husserl says that all natural science is naïve in regard to its point of departure because the nature that it investigates “is for it simply there.” In other words, the things that natural science investigates are its foundation because they mark the point of departure for natural science.
Foundation should be known
IEP: These things are simply taken for granted uncritically as being there and “it is the aim of natural science to know these unquestioned data in an objectively valid, strictly scientific manner”
Non self-suffiency of science
IEP: if certain riddles are inherent, in principle, to natural science, then “it is self-evident that the solution of these riddles according to premises and conclusions in principle transcends natural science.”
Vicious cycle
“to expect from natural science itself the solution of any one of the problems inherent in it as such—thus inhering through and through, from beginning to end—or even merely to suppose that it could contribute to the solution of such a problem any premises whatsoever, is to be involved in a vicious circle” (pp.88-89).
Absurdities
Absurdities of natural science when it is "adopted in an effort to 'naturalize' consciousness and reason"
Blindness of natural scientist
IEP: He "naturalizes reason" and therefore is not aware of absurdities he commit.
IEP: “One who sees only empirical science will not be particularly disturbed by absurd consequences that cannot be proved empirically to contradict facts of nature”
Absurdity in Practice
IEP: The absurdity in practice, says Husserl, becomes apparent when we notice that the naturalist is “dominated by the purpose of making scientifically known whatever is genuine truth, the genuinely beautiful and good; he wants to know how to determine what is its universal essence and the method by which it is to be obtained in the particular case” (pp.80-81). Thus, the naturalist believes that through natural science and through a philosophy based on the same science the goal has been attained; but, says Husserl, the naturalist is going on presuppositions; indeed, to the extent that he theorizes at all, it is just to that extent “that he objectively sets up values to which value judgments are to correspond, and likewise in setting up any practical rules according to which each one is to be guided in his willing and in his conduct” (p.81). It is this state of affairs that drives Husserl to the observation that the naturalist is “idealist and objectivist in the way he acts”; since both of these cannot be true at the same time, the naturalist is involved in an absurdity (p.80).
Absurdity In Theory
IEP: Clam is that Empirical science deals only with empirical facts
But How does it assert its laws which it uses?
By induction
But it is logical reasoning due to transitivity in logic
So it doesn't just rely on experiences
Pure Scientific method leads to experience
IEP: every method of experiential science leads back precisely to experience. But isolated experience is of no worth to science
Scientific method employs logical laws
IEP: “it is in the methodical disposition and connection of experiences, in the interplay of experience and thought which has its rigid logical laws, that valid experience is distinguished from invalid, that each experience is accorded its level of validity, and that objectively valid knowledge as such, knowledge of nature, is worked out” (p.87).
Problem with Psychology
Problems with Foundations
IEP: The same holds true for psychology in its domain of consciousness.
It's task
IEP:It is the task of psychology “to explore this psychic element scientifically within the psychophysical nexus of nature, to determine it in an objectively valid way, to discover the laws according to which it develops and changes, comes into being and disappears”
Matter of inquiry
“those events are thought of, nevertheless, as belonging to nature, that is, as belonging to human or brute consciousnesses that for their part have an unquestioned and co-apprehended connection with human and brute organisms” (p.86).
Presumption in all psychological judgments
“every psychological judgment involves the existential positing of physical nature, whether expressly or not” (p.86).
Episte as psycho
To Husserl, this all points to the absurdity of a theory of knowledge that is based on any psychological theory of knowledge.