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Empiriocriticism

While the positive science is considered the base of any true cognition and the subject matter of the scientific philosophy, the question of base of the science itself and whether all elements of science are truly scientific arises. The answer for it was tried to give by the second wave of positivism or by the empiriocriticism. According to it positive sciences are the only descriptions of the observable data. Only these latter are scientific accordingly. All other elements are metaphysics (that is something unobserved and unverifiable, alienated from the reality) and, therefore, cannot be scientific. Even more they have no sense at all. The most philosophical sentences are of this kind. The true scientific philosophy is possible as a work on purifying the science from unscientific elements (i. e. from metaphysics). The purifying consists in revealing what belongs and what doesn’t belong to the observable or empirical data. That’s where the name ‘empiriocriticism’ (the critique of the empirical) comes from.

The main representatives of empiriocriticism ─ the German physicist E. Mach and the German philosopher R. Avenarius ─ understood the philosophy namely in this way. As a specimen of the scientific character they recognized the physics. For it’s the most successive experimental science with almost no metaphysics in[26].

But, as the consistent analysis shows, even in the frame of physics it’s not always possible to get rid of all metaphysic elements concerning such principally unobservable thing as atoms, molecules etc. How to be? The outlet was found in the so-called principle of economizing the thinking. According to it all these elements are means for economizing the thinking that is some sort of schemes of empirical data arrangements and structuring, convenient mnemonic constructions etc. All that we can see in real are tracks in the Wilson’s camera, radiation spectra etc. We cannot keep on in our memory all this scope of information about the empirical data (it would take a lot of our memory, i.e. thinking for) and, therefore, in order to ease our task we invent the constructions such as the above atoms (consisting of a nucleus and electrons revolving around it). They are the only means of economizing our thinking and no more.

 

 


Date: 2014-12-21; view: 1141


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