2024-04-08 - 2024-04-12
Giridhari Lal Pandit
University of Delhi
It may sound trivially true to assert that scientific progress always results in a positive impact on the scientist’s own understanding of science and rationality of science as distinct from non-science. The same could be said about the public understanding of science in which academic institutions of learning, research laboratories, and industries have, as a rule, great stake. If we turn to the philosopher - methodologists of science and the whole diversity of epistemic communities interested not just in science-and-technology-studies, but in the advancement of science itself, we will be least surprised to find abundant interest in the rationality of science, on the one hand, and in the rationality of improvement (of) science, on the other. The proposed lectures will aim at articulating problems cantering around the following question: Is the movement from science to improvement (of) science a methodological imperative? It was the economist Peter Schumpeter (1954) who in a lighter vein remarked:
“…a ‘science’ is ‘any kind of knowledge that has been the object of conscious efforts to improve it’ - Schumpeter J (1954) History of Economic Analysis. Oxford University Press, New York, P. 7.
Whether we are thinking of physics and astronomy, or medicine and biological sciences, if the very idea of a science entails the idea of an improvement science as an imperative, we can legitimately ask: What kind of rational enterprise is it which the idea of an improvement science entails? It is reasonable to answer this question by arguing that the very idea of an improvement science entails an important distinction between the method(s) a science as a domain of KI in its own right can legitimately employ, and the methodology of science as a normative enterprise which can advance the inner development of science (Pandit 1983, 1991, 1989, 2002 a-b; 2007, Pandit and Dosch 2013; Pandit 2021)).
Against this methodological backdrop, I will propose the Methodology of Wis-Design-Improvement Science (MWISc) as a normative enterprise to turn the technology-driven KI around. Technology-driven KI is known for traditional wisdom of culture, i.e., the tradition of putting the cart before the horse (Pandit 2021). A reversal of this tradition is imperative, so that KI is driven by MWISc. In this context, I will relate Pierre Duhem´s methodological insights in the field of philosophy and methodology of physics (La theorie physique, son object et sa structure, 1906 - English translation 1954) with those of the methodological practices of Werner Heisenberg and Albert Einstein, and, to some extent, to my own methodological proposals (Pandit 1983, 1991, 2020 a-b; Pandit & Dosch 2023; Pandit 2021).
Giridhari Lal Pandit (Prof. Dr.)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38909-2
https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies6040090
www.gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz-gesellschaft.de
Philosophia (2020) 48:1117–1145. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00121-4
Jr. of Constructivist Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/10720537.2020.1728118
