Critical rationalism, stemming from the Kantian enterprise, can be characterized by three traits:
- The renunciation of its dogmatic and metaphysical pretensions.
- The integration of experience within an experimental dialectic.
- Recognition by reason itself of its limits and its historicity.
Kantian synthesis
The development of modern experimental physics, at the end of the Renaissance, with the major figures of Galileo, Torricelli, and Newton, will gradually lead to a revision of the status of reason in its relationship with experience. “Hypotheses non fingo“, “I do not form hypotheses”, declares Newton: the science of nature requires the observation of facts, and cannot be derived from a priori principles alone. Kant, very attentive to this question, takes note of it in the Critique of Pure Reason. He distinguishes three faculties:
- The sensibility or faculty of empirical intuitions, by which something is given to us.
- The understanding or faculty of concepts. The pure categories of the understanding are the rules that allow us to organize experience a priori, for example the relation of causality.
“Neither of these two properties is preferable to the other. Without sensibility, no object would be given to us and without understanding, no one would be thought (…) From their union alone can knowledge come out. To know, then, is to apply concepts to intuitions, so that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts, blind.””
- The reason or faculty of Ideas. Since an Idea cannot correspond to any object given in experience (God, the immortality of the soul, freedom), such supersensible objects cannot therefore be objects of knowledge in the sense defined above.
We can therefore consider that Kant operates the synthesis between empiricism and rationalism, giving right to one as well as the other. But this synthesis actually operates in the sense of critical rationalism:
“That all our knowledge begins with experience, there is no doubt…. But if all our knowledge begins with experience, that does not prove that it is all derived from experience.”
The empirical given indeed, given certainly irreducible to reason, can only be organized and give rise to knowledge through the a priori forms of our mind:
- a priori forms of sensibility itself, which are space and time,
- pure categories of the understanding which constitute, so to speak, the logical structure inherent in our mind, structure in which we shape the data resulting from the sensibility to operate the synthesis, and from which derive all the logical functions of our judgments.
So reality itself remains forever unknowable to us: we have access only to phenomenal reality.
If therefore Kant turns away from the Cartesian postulate of the simple and innate ideas constitutive of a pure knowledge independent of experience (dogmatism), it is to substitute for them the pure categories of the understanding which are the condition of possibility of any experience. possible.
Abandonment of metaphysical claims
As a consequence of the Kantian critique, claiming to know supersensible objects is an illegitimate use of reason. Thus are invalidated the attempts to rationally demonstrate the existence of God: against the ontological argument of Saint Anselm and Descartes, Kant explains that from the simple concept of God, one cannot analytically deduce its existence. “So I had to suppress knowledge and substitute belief.”
It is the end of metaphysical pretensions and the dogmatism of reason. In the 1830s, Auguste Comte, in his Cours de philosophie positive, described the positive, or scientific state that intelligence has finally reached in these terms:
“Finally, in the positive state, the human mind, recognizing the impossibility of obtaining absolute notions, gives up seeking the origin and destination of the universe, and knowing the intimate causes of phenomena, in order to to endeavor solely to discover, by the well-combined use of reasoning and observation, their effective laws, that is to say their invariable relations of succession and similarity.”
It is now a question of understanding how a phenomenon occurs. Observable facts are bound by laws which only express their constant relations.
It is in this perspective that in 1964, E. Kahane, in his Rationalist Dictionary, can define it as follows: rationalism explicitly includes hostility to all metaphysics, the refusal of everything unknowable a priori, and the exclusion of any other alleged mode of knowledge, such as revelation, intuition reduced to itself, etc.
Experimental dialectic
Far from excluding experience, Kantian rationalism makes it one of the two sources of our knowledge and in this sense reconciles rationalism and empiricism. But it is worth clarifying what is therefore meant by “experience”:
It cannot consist, as a naïve empiricism would believe, in a raw fact, in a truth of the real giving itself to us in the evidence of immediate observation. Without the mediation of reason, in fact, experience would remain mute and could teach us nothing. The facts do not speak for themselves. Kant – it is necessary to mention it again here – insists on this at length in the Critique of Pure Reason:
“[Physicists] understood that reason sees only what it itself produces according to its own plans and that it must take the lead with the principles which determine its judgments, following immutable laws, which it must compel nature to answer its questions and not allow itself to be led, so to speak, on a leash by it; for otherwise, made haphazardly and without any plan traced in advance, our observations would not be connected with a necessary law, something that reason demands and needs. Reason must therefore present itself to nature holding, in one hand, her principles, which alone can give to mutually concordant phenomena the authority of laws, and in the other, the experimentation which she has imagined. ‘after these principles, to be instructed by it, it is true, but not like a schoolboy who lets himself be told whatever pleases the master, but, on the contrary, like a judge in office who forces witnesses to answer questions that he asks them.”
Thus, if you force or train a tiger to jump through flaming rings, you can calmly conclude: “The tiger is an animal that leaps through flaming rings. »
What is thus schematically traced to us is the approach of experimental science as it has been taking shape since Galileo:
- Rigorous observation of a phenomenon that one seeks to explain
- Formulation of a hypothesis, which is a statement that can be tested
- Experimentation, by developing a set-up to test the validity of the hypothesis.
In the same way that a “man of experience” is not only a man who has lived, but a man who has been able to reflect on this experience in order to draw lessons from it, experience for the scientist only has meaning according to the problems he seeks to solve, and the rational hypotheses he develops for this purpose.
The experimental device, carried out in the laboratory, is rationally planned and built by the researcher, according to the hypotheses he wants to test. It requires a complex apparatus, which is itself the result of a previous theoretical effort. The laboratory experience is therefore not the real in its raw state, but a reconstructed and selective real, in which the truth is elaborated through a set of operations and rational procedures which correct our naive and spontaneous approach.
(Includes texts from Wikipedia translated and adapted by Nicolae Sfetcu)
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