DESCRIPTION: Jan Woleński (born 1940) – analytical philosopher, logician, epistemologist, legal theorist and researcher of the history of the Lviv-Warsaw School. He is a professor of humanities and professor emeritus at the Jagiellonian University. He is a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a number of foreign scientific societies. His academic work focuses on: the ideas of the Lviv-Warsaw School, one of the greatest achievements of 20th-century Polish humanities; the issue of the theory of truth; the philosophy of law, considering the relationships between logic and legal theories. The text in question was written in connection with the international scientific conference entitled Science vs. Utopia: The Limits of Scientific Knowledge, which took place at the Institute of Philosophy of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in November 2011. The author states that the view that science requires philosophical presuppositions and leads to philosophical consequences is formulated very often. Some philosophers and scientists argue that science presupposes the reality of the objects studied, the objectivity of knowledge, determinism, etc. Similarly, it is often said that science, e.g. physics, leads to determinism or indeterminism. The author of the article takes a position contrary to such views. If terms such as ‘assumption’ and ‘consequence’ have their standard meanings, i.e. they refer to the premises of deductive or even inductive arguments, then scientific reasoning is not based on philosophical presuppositions, and scientific statements do not imply philosophical consequences. According to Woleński, this position can be justified by referring to examples from history. One such example is the fact that the same (or at least very similar) interpretations of scientific theories are proposed by scientists with radically different philosophical views. This state of affairs is well illustrated by the case of A. Einstein, N. Bohr and quantum mechanics. A similar argument applies to philosophical conclusions derived from scientific statements. The author's point of view does not suggest that science and philosophy are mutually separate disciplines. On the contrary, they are interrelated, but their mutual relations should be analysed using more complex tools than just the premise/conclusion structure. "A few additional observations are in order. Firstly, every hermeneutic has its explicit roots in philosophical traditions. There is no other way of catching a given hermeneutic than embedding it into the history of philosophy, for instance, taking into account the development of the determinism/indeterminism debate. Secondly, there is no unique reading of data, including theoretical and empirical ones, motivating hermeneutic interpretation. Thirdly, the adopted hermeneutic never liquidates a given philosophical controversy. Fourthly, explicit logical schemes of arguments supporting philosophical proposals are important, because they allow us to control arguments; hermeneutical paramétrés do not go against this function. Moreover, but it is related to my metaphilosophical view, the main philosophical aim does not consist in solving problems arising in philosophy, but rather making them explicit and clear. Thus, philosophical solutions are always relative to a given hermeneutic" (p. 132).
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English
Język Polski