Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Science

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🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Wissenschaft

Science is the methodically ordered cognition of reality directed toward truth. It is the actualization of rationality and the capacity for truth in the communal process of cognition. The question of what science is has far-reaching consequences for the question of whether philosophy can count as a science at all — and thus for the entire ontology of the person.

Classical concept of science

For Aristotle, episteme is essentially knowledge through causes: we know something when we know the cause from which the thing is, and know that it cannot be otherwise (Analytica Posteriora I, 2). Thomas Aquinas makes this precise: scientia is certain cognition through causes (certitudo cognitionis per causas).

The classical concept of science encompasses four equally ranked principles of explanation: material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause (causa finalis). Complete scientific knowledge requires the knowledge of all four causes. According to this understanding, philosophy — in particular metaphysics — is not merely a science but the highest science, because it investigates the first principles and ultimate causes.

Essential intuition as the method of realistic phenomenology stands in this tradition: it grasps necessary essential truths through intellectual insight — not through experiment or measurement, but with the same rigor.

Modern concept of science

Since the seventeenth century, the concept of science has been increasingly narrowed to:

  • Empirical testability: scientific statements must prove themselves against observation
  • Falsifiability (Popper): a theory is scientific if it is in principle refutable
  • Reproducibility: results must be repeatable under the same conditions

This narrowing methodically excludes the formal and final cause. It is itself a philosophical decision that cannot legitimate itself within its own framework — for the thesis “only what is empirically testable is scientific” is itself not empirically testable.

For the Personhood ontology this distinction is central: if only the modern concept of science holds, philosophy is not a science — and the entire question of personhood becomes unscientific. If the classical concept of science holds, philosophy is the foundational science that first clarifies the presuppositions of natural science.

First philosophy (metaphysics)

Aristotle calls metaphysics prote philosophia (first philosophy): it investigates being as being and the first principles upon which all other sciences implicitly rely. It grounds the presuppositions of natural science:

  • That a real external world exists
  • That it is knowable
  • That causality holds
  • That nature proceeds with regularity

None of these presuppositions can itself be grounded by natural science — they are metaphysical premises. First philosophy ontologically precedes natural science.

Natural science as a regional science

From a philosophical point of view, natural science is a regional science: it investigates a particular region of being (material-quantitative nature) with a particular method (empirical-experimental-mathematical). This is not a devaluation but a localization:

  • Within its domain, natural science is extraordinarily successful
  • Outside its domain — essences, values, meaning, freedom, personhood as such — it is not competent

Thomas Aquinas offers the distinction of the gradus abstractionis: physics abstracts from individual matter, mathematics also from sensible matter, metaphysics from all matter. Modern natural science moves on the first two levels and never reaches the third.

Critique of naturalism

Alvin Plantinga has shown in Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011) that the true conflict is not between theism and science, but between naturalism and science. The presuppositions of science — the order of nature, the reliability of reason, the intelligibility of the world — are better grounded by theism than by naturalism. His Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism shows: under naturalistic presuppositions, the capacity for truth of reason cannot be grounded — and thus the foundation of science itself is undermined.

Max Planck confirmed from within physics that natural science has metaphysical presuppositions and that positivism as a purely critical method is unfruitful.

The Duhem-Quine thesis supplements this critique on the level of philosophy of science: if no experiment can test a single hypothesis in isolation (Duhem) and the totality of knowledge forms a web that touches experience only at its edges (Quine), then the scientistic thesis “only empirical knowledge is genuine knowledge” is itself not purely empirically groundable.

Ontological classification

Superordinate concept: Culture

Subclasses:

Ontological relations:

Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.

References: Bexten 2017, pp. 44—47, 208.

Further sources:

  • Aristotle: Analytica Posteriora I, 2. (knowledge from grounds)
  • Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae I, q. 1. (concept of science)
  • Popper, Karl R. (1934): Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft. Vienna: Julius Springer. (German) (falsifiability)
  • Husserl, Edmund: Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft (1911). (German) (philosophy as a science)
  • Seifert, Josef: Erkenntnis objektiver Wahrheit. Die Transzendenz des Menschen in der Erkenntnis (1972). Salzburg: Universitätsverlag Anton Pustet. (German) (the independence of philosophical cognition)

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