Relativismus ve světle nejnovější filosofie přírodních věd

• Authors: Boris Cvek

Title variants

EN

Relativism in the light of the most recent philosophy of the natural sciences

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

The idea that man first knows and, if he knows correctly, then conducts himself successfully, is a form of atavism which stands in the way of reflection on the fact that the history of crafts is, to begin with, the testing of various approaches, and only subsequently the ascertaining of what is, and what is not, the means to a goal. In the relativity of intelligence it is thus possible to invent and put forward any number of things, but not all are realisable in the practice of crafts, and here relativity ends. The fact that something is actually reproducibly possible for us to make in the surrounding world is not relative, and it is precisely in this way that technology spreads so successfully at the multi-cultural level why it even erases the original diversities of culture. In contrast, the explanatory function of the natural sciences is relative, making sense only in the context of what is already known and accepted. New theories tend to be unintuitive and even though they function better than the old ones, they seem to make our world much less comprehensible than it was from the viewpoint of the old theories. Natural science is so successful because it experiments and only then takes agreement with experimental practice as the criterion of acceptability. Scientific theory is therefore only our way of setting up experiment in a reproducible way (and of using it in technology).

Keywords

EN

Relativism; philosophy of the natural sciences

Discipline

• PHILOSOPHY: PHILOSOPHY

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Filosofický časopis (Philosophical Journal)
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 59
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 269-276
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Boris Cvek

• Filosofický časopis, redakce, Filosofický ústav AV ČR, v.v.i., Jilská 1, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic