At the beginning of the last century appeared the General theory of knowledge by Moritz Schlick, the founder of “ Vienna circle ». Finally, we are proposed a translation of this major work which, breaking with intuition, thinks knowledge as a description of reality from conceptual structures inherited from modern science.
Eighty-eleven years after its publication in Berlin in November 1918, Christian Bonnet offers here a remarkable translation of elegance and precision, coupled with a substantial introduction and a precious French-German bilingual index, important works of philosophy of sciences and knowledge of XXe century. This experienced translator and commentator was able to benefit, in his patient work, from the critical edition of the volume of the complete works of Moritz Schlick which is published this year in Vienna this year and which constitutes, in a way, a beautiful and voluminous excuse (946 pages) given by our German -speaking neighbors to the delay taken by French science.
Moritz Schlick (1882-1936) is better known to the specialized public as the founder of “ Vienna circle »: A research group bringing together personalities as important as Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), Otto Neurath (1882-1945), Hans Hahn (1879-1934) or Philipp Franck (1884-1966), originally, At the very beginning of the 1930s, a unitary program that dominated the philosophy of science for almost thirty years. If there General theory of knowledgein its two editions of 1918 and 1925, undoubtedly served as a major reference to this current, it belongs to another period, that, pioneer, of the emergence of the philosophy of sciences as a discipline and must then be placed in view previous works by Ernst Mach (Knowledge and error1905), by Henri Poincaré (Science and hypothesis1902) or of Pierre Duhem (Physical theory1906) so as not to quote the less known representatives of theErkenntistheoria In Germany, Erich Dürr, Rudolf Eisler, August Messer or Gustav Störring. Even more – but it is the benefit of the cadets: Schlick is younger and the work later – it certainly constitutes, if not the first, at least the most successful attempt to produce a theory of knowledge appropriate to the “” new physics “Developed by Einstein from 1905: the theory of relativity of which we are still the legatees and obligated. Now, relativistic physics, neither machs, nor Poincaré, nor Duhem still had been able to shoot in their works of the very first years of the century, for obvious historical reasons, the main lessons.
Theory of knowledge and theory of relativity: impossible intuitive knowledge
Schlick is not mystery of his purpose, since from the foreword of the first edition, he intends to make his system derive from the new results of physical theory: “ A general theory of knowledge can therefore take as a starting point that knowledge of nature (P. 30). It is certainly not a question of limiting yourself to this precise scientific horizon, since as it is good generalthis theory is entirely turned towards supreme, ultimate principles, which are worth for all sciences. Nevertheless Einstein, little quoted here but examined in the previous works of Schlick, “ The philosophical meaning of the principle of relativity »From 1915, or Space and time in contemporary physics From 1917, was in fact present everywhere, in watermark but in majesty.
The theory of relativity which, as Christian Bonnet indicates in his preface, “ highlights the conventional character of certain of our judgments, such as those by means of which we define the concepts of time and space “(P. 11), cannot be foreign to the major thesis of Schlick, which he supports on more than 500 pages:” Talk about “ intuitive knowledge Is a contradictio in adjecto (P. 139). This strong critical thesis, turned both against kantism in all its forms (the Orthodox Kant of the Criticalbut also the Neokantians or the representatives already mentioned of theErkenntistheoria) that against the empirical psychology of the Brentano school, the Empiriocriticism of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius or even the phenomenology of Husserl – that is, the main currents of the theory of knowledge in the German -speaking world of the beginning of the century – justifies a refoundation which goes through three stages forming the three parts of the book: 1. to say what is or what must be, even what is not or do not can’t be there awareness2. redefine the relationships of the psychological to the logic in the examination of the thought3. Finally attack the scientific and more particularly physical construction of the reality.
Model “ symbolic »Knowledge
The first part first relegates the actual psychological investigation to promote a model “ symbolic “Knowledge, by building concepts and coordination rules. Knowledge combines the univocity of the designation which is that of the concept, which is at best instantiated in the written sign – a conventional sign refers to a class of things or relations between things – to the rules of logical coordination which are stated in What has been called implicit definitions from David Hilbert – a concept is then completely defined therein from intuition by the relationship he has with other concepts. The result is a logical-conceptual architecture, a structure in a word, which will be about confronting the facts. Two types of statements then form the whole of knowledge: the rules of logical coordination between the concepts of science, posed in the implicit definitions which are conventions, are added the points of application to the facts, to the real, which qualify another body as statements as hypotheses. Science is thus a system of statements which articulates definitions or conventions to hypotheses, both establishing relationships between concepts which, depending on the case, will be said to be analytical or synthetic. If the logical tools mobilized by Schlick is still not very much elaborated when compared to that of a Russell or a carnap at the same time, we cannot not consider the impact that such a definition could have been able have on future representatives of the Vienna Circle: knowledge is issued by a new theory of the judgment of any intuitive model, whether pure or a posteriori. No simple representation of an object in perception or in pure intuition, no immediate contact with reality can be qualified as knowledge: “ Through lived experience and intuition, we do not conceive and explain anything. We certainly acquire a familiarity with things, but never an intelligence of things. It is only the latter that we want, when we want knowledge, in any science as in all philosophy. “(ibid.)
Psychology and logic of knowledge
The second part, no doubt the most original, tries to go beyond antipsychologism which could have been placed at the foundation of Schlick’s approach in the first. She also exceeds it so that, unlike a Hans Reichenbach, epistemologist close to the Vienna circle, was able to blame the General theory of knowledge to be built precisely on a “ psychologism ». It is then a question for Schlick to account for the emergence of these logical-conceptual structures on which all knowledge is based, from the point of view which is that of psychology. Far from leading to a skeptical position as has often been asserted, psychology, once understood and well conducted, leads on the contrary to the defense and illustration of a logical model of knowledge. Schlick shows how, in the continuum Psychic, emerge from discrete entities called concepts and relationships between these discreet entities which take on a character of truth (of univocal correspondence) without mobilizing something as a perception or an internal intuition, again, that is to say -Dire without calling on a fallacious doctrine in the eyes of the author, who is that of the evidence. “” This concept of inner perception is with that of “ phenomenon “(…) One of the most unfortunate who were produced by philosophical and psychological thought. This conceptual monster is responsible for many useless cogitations and countless pernicious problems. (P. 224)
“” The transcendent order of things »»
After the criticism of internal perception as a sneaky form of intuitionism, it is his most obvious manifestation, that which goes through the concept of “ phenomenon Precisely, which is criticized in the last part of the work, the largest, devoted to the problems of reality. Reality is nothing that is only conceived “ phenomenally Or like the correlate of a pure or empirical intuition. It has no specific character of immanence to consciousness, but it is truly a form ofin itself which encompasses psychic experiences as much as things and relationships between things. Admittedly, this in itself is accessible to us by experience, but it must only mean for us that a small part of reality is given to us each time, and not, as we have often supposed, that reality consists all whole in this manifestation or donation. It belongs to conceptual constructions, such as that of physical space and time which are not intuitive, to order it in systems: thus, “ The order of contents of consciousness in space and in time is at the same time the means by which we learn to determine the transcending order of things which are beyond consciousness. And this order is the essential step that leads to the knowledge of these things. “(P. 374) Also a reality will not be said to be physical, as opposed to a psychic reality, as it will be described in a system of quantitative spatio-temporal concepts, which is that of science of nature. It is therefore science that gives knowledge its form.
Until the end of his General theory of knowledgeSchlick will hold its line: to make known a case of description to the means of conceptual structures, and not the extension of an immediate, pre-scientific, more or less silent report, in an intuitive word, in the world. In this, Schlick is undoubtedly a pioneer, like any essential pioneer but like any pioneer to exceed. It will belong to subsequent works, that of a carnap for example, even more that of a Wittgenstein, to refine the logical formulation and to experience the validity of such a structural model of knowledge.