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EN
The paper is a voice in discussion over Giacomo Borbone’s book The Relevance of Models. Idealization and Concretization in Leszek Nowak. The author characterizes intellectual tradition of Poznań School of Methodology and considers types of interpretation of Marx’s writing adopted by Nowak and his collaborators. According to him idealization theory of sciences resulted from two kinds of interpretations: adaptive and historical ones.
EN
After a brief comment on the historical importance of the Polish School of Logic, actually the cradle of structuralist philosophy of science, I discuss a problem in the notion of idealization, which usually is seen as a mere dropping of nullifying assumptions in order to obtain a more general theory-element.
EN
In this short paper, I will describe how I came across Leszek Nowak's ideas and how this influenced my student, Giacomo Borbone, to embark on a similar path. He has made an important contribution to the knowledge a particular school of thought and a philosopher who has often been overlooked in the international epistemological discourse, a particular school of thought and a philosopher who has often been overlooked in the international epistemological discourse, despite the existence of similar concepts within it. I also aim to provide some insights into this neglect, attributing it not to the malice of individuals but to a broader dynamic between the dominant cultural centre and intellectual peripheries, as highlighted by Nowak himself in some of his essays.
EN
Models are the coin of the realm in current philosophy of science, as they are in science itself, having replaced laws and theories as the primary strategy. Logical Positivism tried to erase the older neo-Kantian distinction between ideal constructions and reality. It returns in the case of models. Nowak’s concept of idealization provided an alternative account of this issue. It construed model application as concretizations of hypotheses which improve by accounting for exceptions. This appears to account for physical law. But it raises the problem of uniqueness: is the result unique, as physical law should be? Neo-Kantianism failed this test. Its solutions were circular justifications for claims of uniqueness. Nowak inherited the problem without resolving it.
EN
The famous saying Habent sua fata libeli, can also apply to (philosophical) ideas, especially the most abstract ones. As it seems, the invocation of this maxim may have also some application in interpreting the concept of idealization of the concept of science, for the understanding of which it is useful to pay attention to the historical, social and political context. I argue that the analytical Marxism of the Poznan School of the 1970s and 1980s was a philosophical reflection of certain modernization processes of the real socialist system (the managerial revolution and the technocratic modernization of the Gierek era), which was an attempt to “escape forward” from the dysfunctional “manual control” of the system during the period of minor stabilization of the 1960s. At the same time, this period ended the ideological functions of Marxist philosophy (March 1968) by introducing an expert dimension that emphasized the use of contemporary currents of thought present in the thought of Western countries. The idealizing interpretation of Marx as an insightful methodologist, whose legacy makes it possible to overcome methodological dilemmas in modern philosophy of science, was also aimed at finding such an aspect that made it possible to defend against factual charges directed against the Marxist system in the social sciences. A refined conceptual scheme was supposed to give the nimbus of being scientific. However, the sophistication of the late scholasticism of analytical Marxism did not save this construction in its empirical verification (the problem of predicting social phenomena) and led the author to create a non-Marxist Historical Materialism as a separate theory, which was to focus on the structural-functional analysis of the historical process, which involved putting aside the study of idealization “to the side.”
EN
One of the central aspects of contemporary epistemology lies in the difference between abstraction and idealization. While the former consists of the generalization of empirical facts, with the latter, those factors deemed secondary are neglected in order to operationalize instead those factors deemed essential. In the early years of the twentieth century, the authors such as Cassirer and Husserl acutely pointed out the limitations of abstraction, re-evaluating instead the idealizing character of scientific concepts. This distinction was also the subject of an important epistemological work published in 1980, namely The Structure of Idealization by Polish philosopher of science Leszek Nowak. At this point a question arises. In what does the originality of Leszek Nowak’s reflection consist of? It could be said that Nowak’s importance is here twofold: terminological and systematic. From the terminological point of view Nowak made a very clear distinction between abstraction and idealization, which instead in the authors such as Cassirer and Husserl are much more blurred or veiled. From the systematic point of view Nowak has extensively analysed the way mature science works. In other words, Nowak highlighted the limits – but also the values – of contemporary epistemology by comparing the latter with the idealizational approach to science.
EN
Leszek Nowak is rightly known as the pioneer of empirical concretization. As Giacomo Borbone notes, there is also a kind of conceptual concretization. This specific form of concept explication is illustrated by two transitions: from Bayesian conditionalization to Jeffrey conditionalization and from 'the straight rule' of learning from experience to Carnap's continuum of inductive methods. The paper closes with a schematic list of checkpoints for conceptual concretization in two rounds.
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