In ordinary experience, we base knowledge on more or less subjective sensory perception, whereas scientific knowledge is based on objective data. In this paper we try to analyse the changes that have taken place in ordinary language so that it could become an effective tool for reasoning in the exact sciences. We will start, in the first part of the paper, from the assumption of realism and epistemic accessibility of reality (i.e. the assumption that there is a reality independent of us to which we have epistemic access). In the second part of the paper, we will try to describe the changes that have made possible the stabilization of the epistemic contact with reality. We will show that the notion of the pictorial form, introduced by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, is capable of describing the stabilization of the epistemic contact. In the third part, we will describe the instrumental extension of the epistemic contact so that we can reach phenomena, objects and relations that are inaccessible to sense perception. We will use Wittgensteinʼs notion of a language game to analyse such instrumental extensions. Finally, in the fourth part, we offer an account of idealization, which results in quantitative data that form the basis of the scientific description of reality. Although several of these transformations (with the possible exception of the interpretation of idealization) have already been described in the literature, we see the contribution of our paper not so much in the individual details as in integrating them into a theory that makes it possible to link our everyday understanding of reality (also referred to as the life-world or the manifest image) with its scientific representation.
By definition mathematics is traditionally considered to be a discipline consisting of purely analytic propositions. The aim of the present paper is to offer arguments against this entrenched view and to draw attention to the experiential dimension of mathematical knowledge. Following Husserl's interpretation of physical knowledge as knowledge constituted by the use of instruments, the author is trying to interpret mathematical knowledge also as acknowledge based on instrumental experience. This interpretation opens a new view on the role of the logistical program, both in philosophy of mathematics and in philosophy of science.
Mathematics is often interpreted as an a priori discipline whose propositions are analytic. The aim of the paper is to support a philosophical position which would view mathematics as a discipline studying its own segment of objective reality and thus contributing to our knowledge of the real world. The author tries to articulate in more details such a position which has been proposed recently by Penelope Maddy.
In the paper the author compares Ian Barbour's four types of relationship between science and religion with Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions and with George Lindbeck's theory of the nature of religious doctrine. It turns out that these three theories can be brought into correlation. On one hand Kuhn's theory can be refined and three kinds of scientific revolutions can be discriminated, which (together with normal science) correspond to Barbour's four types. On the other hand Lindbeck's three views on the nature of doctrine can be complemented by a fourth view and in this way brought into correspondence with Barbour's theory. With this fourth view on the nature of doctrine, thye author suggests to characterize doctrines as the forms of transcendence. In the paper he shows in which ways transcendence relates to Barbour's theory and to Kuhn's concept of scientific revolutions. He analyzes the role of theological motives in the works of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, and shows how the scientific revolution relates to the integration between science and religion.
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