DESCRIPTION: Witold Marciszewski (born 1930) – philosopher specialising in logic, associated with the University of Białystok. His research also covers the philosophy of language, philosophy of science and rhetoric. This article was published in connection with a presentation at the international conference entitled Science versus Utopia. Limits of Scientific Cognition, which took place at the Institute of Philosophy of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw on 23-24 November 2011. Within the framework of a pragmatic approach, the author takes into account two characteristic features of knowledge, both of which have enormous potential for growth: the scope of science, whose boundaries can shift indefinitely, and the certainty of its judgements, which increases as the boundaries achieved are reinforced. According to the author, the essence of the pragmatic approach is to treat epistemic necessity as a gradable attribute of judgements. In accordance with common usage, ‘necessary’ is a gradable adjective, as it has a relative (comparative) form. The degree of epistemic necessity of a scientific statement depends on how indispensable it is within a given field of knowledge (Quine's metaphor). The higher the epistemic necessity, the greater the damage to knowledge would be if this point of view were abandoned. At the top of this hierarchy are the laws of logic and arithmetic. Among the physical laws at a high level (of epistemic necessity) we would include the law of gravity, both because of its universality, i.e. its colossal range of possible applications (pushing boundaries), and because it is empirically confirmed by countless cases (blurring boundaries). "Scientists happen to give up certain intuitions, even those supported by centuries of everyday experiences, in the case of their disagreement with a theory enjoying a wide range of theoretical and technological applications. The pragmatist strategy does not need to be defended with philosophical arguments, since empirical sciences in their practice spontaneously follow such strategy in a natural and spontaneous manner" (p. 69).
CONTENTS: 1. Frontiers versus limits. 2. Some samples o f limiting principles. 3. Newton’s gravitation as a “good cat” to advance frontiers of science. 4. Epistemic necessity as a high degree o f indispensability. 5. The inferential and computational power of higher-order logics. 6. Pragmatic insights (“this should work”) beyond common intuitions. 7. Conclusions.
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