Journal articles on the topic 'Indeterminismo scientifico'

This paper considers a series of unresolved matters from scientific debates in the 19th century about vitalism and indeterminism. Beginning with everyday experiences of being alive, which at times invoke agency in relation to both the human and the non-human world, alongside the cognitive bias of blaming others and excusing ourselves, the paper moves into an overview of those earlier debates, in a period when psychology was emerging as a discipline separated from philosophy. One common account is that vitalism was put into the dustbin of history by a form of scientific rationalism (which was avowedly reductionist about causes and completely deterministic in its logic). However, the paper considers the various ways in which vitalism and indeterminism have remained important in the academy, across the disciplines. A critical realist position is offered at the end in order to draw out implications of this lack of resolution of older debates for contemporary psychology.

Tue author describes the theory of chaos as a scientific revolution which reaches beyond the microphysical indeterminism of Quantum Mechanics by abolishing determinism also on the macroscopical level. With a simple non-linear system the notions bifurcation, strange attractor, universality of chaos, self-organization and criticality are explained and illustrated through examples.

Evolutionary processes are conditioned both by unique phenomena and probabilistic ones. Given probabilistic factors, one may speak of changeability of evolution. This essay attempts to model evolutionary processes by modeling changeability in the natural sciences. Yet a framework of determinism and indeterminism appears inadequate to apprehend evolutionary processes. Autodeterminism is a more promising framework for addressing the causal, functional, and probabilistic dimension of evolution. Such an approach ensures the possibility of perceiving and presenting the complexity of evolution. The essay proposes that the synthetic theory of evolution conjoins factors of evolution, determinism, and changeability. The question still remains whether one can say that real being, which exists in the stream of time, is the subject of philosophy. This puzzle may be resdved by showing that besides the scientific cognition of nature, there is another possible cognition--the philosophical cognition. This is reflected in a significant group of problems of philosophical cosmology which are not addressed by the natural sciences due to their research methods.

John S. Bell openly questioned the dominance of an orthodox quantum interpretation that had seemingly raised the principle of indeterminism from an epistemological question to an ontological truth in the late 1920s. He understood the inevitability of indeterminism to be a theoretical choice made by the founding architects of quantum theory, not a fundamental principle of reality necessitated by experimental facts. As a result, Bell decried the general lull in quantum interpretation debates within the physics community, and in particular, the complete omission of Louis de Broglie’s deterministic pilot wave interpretation from all theoretical and pedagogical discourses. This paper reexamines the pilot wave’s rise, abandonment, and subsequent omission in the history of quantum theory. What emerges is not a straightforward story of victimization and hegemonic marginalization. Instead, it is a story that grapples with tensions between the polyphony of individual voices and a physics community’s evolving identity and consensus in response to particular sociopolitical and scientific contexts. At the heart of these tensions sits an international scientific community transitioning from a politically fractured and intellectually divergent community to one embracing a somewhat forced pragmatic convergence around rationally reconstructed narratives and concepts like the impossibility of determinism. The story of the pilot wave’s omission gives us a window into the inherent power that theoretical choice and a congealing rhetoric of orthodoxy have on a scientific community’s consensus, pedagogical canons, and the future development of science itself.

One of the fundamental questions of life sciences is one of whether there are genuinely random biological processes. An affirmative or negative answer to this question may have important methodological consequences. It appears that a number of biological processes are explicitly classified as random. One of them is the so-called somatic hypermutation. However, closer analysis of somatic hypermutation reveals that it is not a genuinely random process. Somatic hypermutation is called random because the exact outcome of this process is difficult to predict in practice. The case of somatic hypermutation suggests that there may be no scientific evidence of a single case of ontologically random process in the biological world.

ArgumentIn 1877, a young mathematician named Joseph Boussinesq presented amémoireto theAcadémiedes sciences which demonstrated that some differential equations may have more than one solution. Boussinesq linked this fact to indeterminism and to a possible solution to the free will versus determinism debate. Boussinesq's main interest was to reconcile his philosophical and religious views with science by showing that matter and motion do not suffice to explain all there is in the world. His argument received mixed criticism that addressed both his philosophical views and the scientific content of his work, pointing to the physical “realisticness” of multiple solutions. While Boussinesq proved to be able to face the philosophical criticism, the scientific objections became a serious problem, thus slowly moving the focus of the debate from the philosophical plane to the scientific one. This change of perspective implied a wide discussion on topics such as instability, the sensitivity to initial conditions, and the conservation of energy. The Boussinesq debate is an example of a philosophically motivated debate that transforms into a scientific one, an example of the influence of philosophy on the development of science.

While the classical form of determinism seems to be in regress as the thesis of physical indeterminism has now been justified, the deterministic model of scientific description of phenomena has not been devalued in science methodologies. However, the present disciplinary forms of determinisms do not represent an unambiguous, uniform, universal, absolute and directly determining pattern, appropriately typical for the classical concept of determinism. In the context of deliberations on the issue of freedom, that fact prompts thinking on the scope of contemporary deterministic elucidations as well as queries whether contemporary compatibilist explanations are still valid with regard to incoherent determinisms. Examining the category of determination will help, among others, to assess the adequacy of Nicolai Hartmann’s philosophy against the background of the on-going dispute over freedom. The thesis of determinative pluralism, rooted in the ontology of the real being, points to the axiological context as indispensable for explaining the problem of freedom, as it is going beyond its often narrowed framework.

Scientific theories and methods developed within the framework of quantum and relativistic physics are the most representative paradigmatic instantiations of non-classical science. The profile of non-classical science is exposed through the analysis of a set of epistemic ideals and methodological principles. The adoption of the principle of operational relativity of phenomenal descriptions showed that a reference to the means of observation had become an intrinsic part of scientific description strategies. The transformation of the concept of objectivity can be seen in a specific combination of operationalism with interactional phenomenalism and constructivism. The introduction of the principle of complementarity marked the deviation from the standards of a monologic and linear description of the objects under study. This principle provides the operational basis for the integration of different parts of our knowledge with regard to non-trivial cognitive situations featured by the indeterminacy relations. Another prominent methodological trend is the reconsideration of the value of strict deterministic explanation strategies in favour of probabilistically oriented approaches. Scientists have encountered a new class of regularities that are typically analysed in terms of various types of statistical and non-causal determination. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to assume that any probabilistic account of natural phenomena implies indeterminism.

Desde la visión de lo que Brown (2001) denomina “Ortodoxia Científica” se analizan críticamente tres argumentos establecidos por Chavarría (2011) en su presentación del paradigma de la complejidad: 1. Los avances de la ciencia moderna han demostrado que la objetividad científica es imposible y que la realidad está sujeta a formas irreductibles de incertidumbre e indeterminismo; 2. La validez del conocimiento científico no depende de (o sólo de) criterios cognoscitivos, sino esencialmente sociales y políticos y 3. La Ortodoxia Científica propugna una concepción metodológica de la ciencia y las limitaciones e insuficiencias en la práctica de muchos investigadores (por ejemplo, la pobreza teórica) es un rasgo inherente de las investigaciones cuantitativas y objetivas. A partir de dicho análisis, se concluye que la formación en investigación social no puede sustentarse en una visión relativista de la realidad y del conocimiento y en la confusión entre ciencia e ideología. AbstractFrom the view of what Brown (2001) calls “Scientific Orthodoxy” three arguments stated by Chavarría (2001) in her introducing of the complexity paradigm are critically analyzed: 1. The modern scientific advances have demonstrated that objectivity in science is impossible and reality is uncertain and indeterminate; 2. The validity of scientific knowledge does not depend (or does not only depend) on cognitive criteria but essentially on social and political criteria, and 3. Scientific orthodoxy supports a methodological view of science, and the shortcomings and insufficiencies in the practice of many researchers (for example, lack of theory) are inherent features of quantitative and objective research. Therefore, it is concluded that education and training in social research cannot be based on a relativist view of reality and knowledge and on the confusing of science and ideology.

Purpose The scientific criterion of determinability (predictability) can be framed in realist or in constructivist terms. This can pose a challenge to design researchers who operate between scientific research (which favors a realist view of determinism/indeterminism) and design practice (which favors a constructivist view of determinability/indeterminability). This paper aims to develop a framework to navigate this challenge. Design/methodology/approach A critical approach to “scientific” design research is developed by examining the notion of (in)determinism, with particular attention to the observer-based projection of systemic boundaries, and the constructivist understanding of how such boundaries are constituted. This is illustrated using automata theory. A decision-making framework is then developed based on a diagram known as the epistemological triangle. Findings The navigation between determinism as a property of the observed, and determinability as a property of the observer follows the navigation between realist and constructivist perspectives, and thus has a bearing on the navigation of the kinds of design research distinguished by Frayling, and their implied primary evaluation criteria. Research limitations/implications The presented argument advocates a constructivist view, which, however, is not meant to imply a rejection of, but rather, an additional degree of freedom extending the realist view. Originality/value This discussion contributes to the establishment of observational determinability as observer-dependent. The proposed framework connects the navigation between deterministic observables and determining observers to the navigation between the design criteria form, meaning and utility. This may be of value within and beyond design research.

This article is the result of a book review of a work by Stefano Gattei. The starting point of Popper's view is that "almost every phase of our scientific development is under metaphysical rule, that is, ideas that are tested, ideas which determine not only what problems we need to explain, but also what kinds of answers we will consider to be one that is important or satisfactory or accepted, and as a remedy, or guarantee, of a previous answer". Popper's indeterminism is important because Popper's custom begins by considering an intuitive Laplacian view of determinism: "the world is like a motion picture film: or a projected image. Parts of the film have proved to be the past. And unproven people are the past. front". Popper has always been claimed to be a metaphysical realist: to him, to be a realist means to think, in covenant with common sense, that the world of his existence is independent of human beings. It means, "my existence will end without the world coming to an end too". As well as other metaphysical positions, realism is a non-testable conjecture: "realism is neither proven nor disproved".

The article through the prism of self-organization theory and nonlinear approach is carried out analysis of the basic principles of science postnonclassical and their extrapolation of a different nature. Particular attention is paid to the principle of non-linearity and stochastic bifurcation transitions in the social and natural structures. Specificity of determinism and indeterminism ratio in these periods. The author proves the thesis that the formation of a non-linear way of thinking does not mean the end of the old scientific paradigm and the limits of the classical picture of the world, and we are talking about some methodological synthesis within the modern picture of the world, which is carried out in a non-linear worldview. It is established that history is a complex open system, the stability of which is constantly violated under the influence of both internal and external factors that are sources of selfdevelopment of the system. The historical process is determined by two opposite tendencies - the tendency of entropy, destruction and the tendency of negentropy, creation. These two tendencies form, respectively, the bifurcation and evolutionary trajectories of society. Nonlinear vision of trends in social development, structuring the ordering of the social system raises the question of the impossibility of a single, ideal, universal social order. The theory of self-organization opens the way to understanding the alternative of history, because at the points of historical turning points due to the purposeful will of historical subjects is a choice from a range of possibilities.

Policy-making is usually about risk management. Thus, the handling of uncertainty in science is central to its support of sound policy-making. There is value in scientists engaging in a deep conversation with policy-makers and others, not merely ‘delivering’ results or analyses and then playing no further role. Communicating the policy relevance of different varieties of uncertainty, including imprecision, ambiguity, intractability and indeterminism, is an important part of this conversation. Uncertainty is handled better when scientists engage with policy-makers. Climate policy aims both to alter future risks (particularly via mitigation) and to take account of and respond to relevant remaining risks (via adaptation) in the complex causal chain that begins and ends with individuals. Policy-making profits from learning how to shift the distribution of risks towards less dangerous impacts, even if the probability of events remains uncertain. Immediate value lies not only in communicating how risks may change with time and how those risks may be changed by action, but also in projecting how our understanding of those risks may improve with time (via science) and how our ability to influence them may advance (via technology and policy design). Guidance on the most urgent places to gather information and realistic estimates of when to expect more informative answers is of immediate value, as are plausible estimates of the risk of delaying action. Risk assessment requires grappling with probability and ambiguity (uncertainty in the Knightian sense) and assessing the ethical, logical, philosophical and economic underpinnings of whether a target of ‘50 per cent chance of remaining under +2 ° C' is either ‘right’ or ‘safe’. How do we better stimulate advances in the difficult analytical and philosophical questions while maintaining foundational scientific work advancing our understanding of the phenomena? And provide immediate help with decisions that must be made now?

The article analyzes the complex interaction of the abstract and specific in L.S.Vygotsky’s works. The specific is analyzed as a unity in diversity, as a complex, contradictory, heterogeneous and nonlinear-logic unity. We have proven that L.S.Vygotsky, searching for such content-rich specific that can be a «cell» in psychology, implemented actually the idea of systematicity in psychology. The advantages of «unit analysis» are explicated in view of the fact that a “unit” (unlike an “element”) includes the most simple as well as learnable form of everything that in its “unfolded” state (mentally, on the basis of accumulated scientific facts) allows getting truly specific knowledge. The general way of cognition is pointed out: a philosophical and methodological idea about an object (abstract) - contemplation - analysis – finding of specific-universal - practice - new methodology etc. – the spiral of cognition. A task (supertask) of L.S.Vygotsky’s cultural and historical theory was to build (to unfold) the specific human psychology as a modus (“unit”) of substance. Methodological principles of monism, indeterminism and systematicity are described as fundamental ones in psychology. L.S.Vygotsky’s works highlight Spinoza’s understanding of eternal development, so the concept of development becomes even not a principle but the fabric of a study subject in Vygotsky’s theory. The inner unity of psychology is explained as the most complex relationship of biological and psychical attributes and connections within the psychological domain. Inter-functional psychological systems include not only components of higher mental functions but also natural, biological and cultural ones, namely everything that is covered by “a human being’s psychological life” as a concept. There are many systems, but they are interconnected, forms semantic dynamic systems after emergence of conceptual thinking. We should mention that relations embrace all human personality, they are constantly changes as for their essence and they are the main key to understanding of a human being. “Affect – intellect” antinomy is understood in the sense that all the phenomena from both conscious and unconscious domains, being actualized into an event.

AbstractMost physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to “speak” of indeterminism, its inability to present us a worldview in which new information is created as time passes. In such a case, scientific determinism would only be an illusion due to the timeless mathematical language scientists use. To investigate this possibility it is necessary to develop an alternative mathematical language that is both powerful enough to allow scientists to compute predictions and compatible with indeterminism and the passage of time. We suggest that intuitionistic mathematics provides such a language and we illustrate it in simple terms.

AbstractIn this paper the authors provide an epistemological view on the old controversial random-necessity. It has been considered that either one or the other form part of the structure of reality. Chance and indeterminism are nothing but a disorderly efficiency of contingency in the production of events, phenomena, processes, i.e., in its causality, in the broadest sense of the word. Such production may be observed in natural and artificial processes or in human social processes (in history, economics, society, politics, etc.). Here we touch the object par excellence of all scientific research whether natural or human. In this work, is presented a hypothesis whose practical result satisfies the Hegelian dialectic, with the consequent implication of their mutual reciprocal integration. Producing abstractions, without which, there is no thought or knowledge of any kind, from the concrete, that is, the real problem, which in this case is a given Ontological System or Reality.

Artikkel analüüsib meie digitaalsusest küllastunud elu Friedrich Nietzsche filosoofia perspektiivist, lähtudes küsimusest, kas digikeskkondades töös olevad suundumused senise inimliku iseduse fragmenteerimiseks võivad olla sillaks üleinimese suunas liikumisel. Esimeses osas visandatakse Zygmunt Baumani ja Rein Raua dialoogi põhjal peamised digikeskkondade laialdase levikuga kaasnevad isedust kujundavad aspektid, mis on autorite meelest ohtudeksväljakutseteks senisele inimsusele. Teises osas esitatakse tõlgendus üleinimese tähendusest ja mõiste seostumisest teiste peamiste ideedega Nietzsche filosoofias. Arutluse tulemusena asutakse kaitsma üleinimese hoiakulist tõlgendust. Viimases osas hinnatakse kõiki eelnevalt piiritletud digikeskkondade levikuga seotud aspekte ning jõutakse järeldusele, et kuigi need süvendavad üldjoontes juba Nietzsche ajal ilmnenud massiühiskonna tendentse, ei determineeri tehnoloogia üheselt iseduse moodustamise mehhanisme ega välista üleinimese suunas liikumist. The article analyses our digitally saturated life from the viewpoint of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, starting off with the question whether the trends, which are at present actively fragmenting human selfhood in digital environments, could act as bridges for the movement towards overman. The first part of the article sketches, based on the dialogue between Zygmunt Bauman and Rein Raud, the main selfhood-shaping aspects which accompany the spread of digital environments and which could, according to the authors, challenge or threaten the humanity. The authors point out seven main problems: the fragmenting of selfhood in online environments; impossibility of developing or expressing originality; excessive convenience, especially in human relations and communication; wide-spread dependence on the content offered by digital environments; damage to mental capacity; too little physical activity, and the polarisation of viewpoints due to the sound box of virtual communication. Many of the listed problems are still older than the accelerated spreading of computer networks, but they have become more pressing due this process. The second part of the article offers an interpretation of Nietzsche’s concept of overman. The use of the concept of overman is not strictly specified in Nietzsche’s work, it is often presented in the form of hints and metaphors. In order to reach the interpretation, the concept under discussion has to be put into relation to several other unclear concepts, which makes the developing of the interpretation the most complicated and substantial task in the article. To establish the first starting point, the article argues that Nietzsche was not a humanist, that the overcoming of man is a clear intention in his thinking, expressed also by the concept of overman. For Nietzsche, the future of man was not decided by biological or technical aspects but, rather, by cultural-psychological aspects. Nietzsche believed that a whole set of preconditions and beliefs, which are essential for being a human and which he called higher values, were disintegrating during his lifetime. Thus, overcoming man was not only his normative objective, but also an inevitable process which had already started in the conditions of the well-established cultural contingency. Next, the article specifies the aspiration to overcome man, listing the main attitudes and characteristics of the modern man which should, by Nietzsche, be overcome. These include: life-denying and weakness-cultivating monotheistic religion and the morals it supports; all kinds of beliefs in the primacy of the soul (and its immortality) and the marginalisation of the body; herd instincts and the moulding of humans into an identical mass, including the cult of equality and democratism; any kind of belief in progress, including belief in scientific progress as a hidden form of teleological explanation of the world; techniques of self-creation which cultivate the persistent identity and stability of a person and discourage experimentation; hedonism, and the avoiding of suffering and making it pointless. These attitudes are deeply rooted in in the modern Western people, but according to Nietzsche’s view, they are unavoidably disappearing in the nihilistic processes of the era. Nietzsche outlines five possible strategies for coping: conservatism, the attempt to preserve the existing absolute-based values; passive nihilism, fading and declining, and Doomsday predictions; active nihilism, the destruction of everything and the enjoyment of this process; retreating into hedonism and refusing to think about great matters – in Nietzsche’s terminology – the last man; striving to live towards overman, or the total and extreme nihilism. The article proceeds to analyse the reasons why Nietzsche believes that man should overcome these characteristics also in the normative meaning. The question why Nietzsche despises hedonism and man’s search for a stable form of existence acquires a central position here. In order to find answers, it is necessary to move from Nietzsche’s anthropology to his metaphysics and to introduce the concept of the will to power. The article avoids robustly vitalistic interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy and interprets, using the model of the hermeneutic circle, the will to power and perspectivism and their interactive aspects. The article states that for Nietzsche, the world, which is understood as the will to power, does not submit to inevitability or laws but is indeterminable, and man is indeterminable as well. Nietzsche denies the self-sufficiency of selfhood as a Cartesian subject, as well as the freedom of will, which does not mean the acknowledgment of determinism in the light of mechanism, but means the affirmation of indeterminism. For Nietzsche, human selfhood has two opposing characteristics – self-preservation and self-overcoming. He believes that the soul is formed by the plurality of urges and affects, and self-preservation or self-control manifests in the ability to mould this plurality into a hierarchical unity and to preserve this unity. However, a person with open senses, a “free soul”, can be overwhelmed by the abundance of life and the multitude of competing urges and affects. The experimental existence, suggested by Nietzsche, means that a person does not retreat into a stable pattern of self-preservation, but moves further, does not avoid suffering and in the dusky regions of self-creation, risks the disintegration of selfhood in the sea of affects. Following these lines of interpretation, the article reaches a clear interpretation of the concept of overman, stating that overman is not, and cannot be, a (future) being, expressed by describing a set of certain characteristics, but it is an attitude – a risky experimental break from the mechanisms of identity preservation – openness to unknown. The third part of the article examines, based on the above results, all the seven digitalisation-related problems, listed in the first part, and evaluates their status from the viewpoint of living towards overman. Results of the evaluation are divided into unambiguously good – for the phenomena that develop the overhuman potentiality, unambiguously bad – for the phenomena that favour the retreat into the existing selfhood, and relatively good – for the phenomena that break down the existing humanity and accelerate the processes of nihilism. According to the author, fragmentation of selfhood is unambiguously good from the overhuman point of view; excessive convenience and impossibility of originality are unambiguously bad. Polarisation is a relatively good phenomenon. The rest of the problems – damage to mental capacity, too little physical activity and the spread of dependencies – cannot be unambiguously evaluate and the article points out both their good and bad aspects. The article concludes with the statement that some of the trends, which are at present actively fragmenting the existing human selfhood in digital environments, could act as bridges for the movement towards overman (in the meaning of attitude, of living towards overman, given to this concept in the article).