Revija za sociologiju, Vol. 54 No. 3, 2024.
Izvorni znanstveni članak
https://doi.org/10.5613/rzs.54.3.3
Evolutionism and antirealism in Lelas’s theory of science
Tomislav Bracanović
orcid.org/0000-0001-8168-2194
; Institut za filozofiju, Zagreb, Hrvatska
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* Dopisni autor.
Sažetak
The paper discusses how Srđan Lelas (1939-2003), as one of the first Croatian philosophers of science, tried to derive a specific version of scientific antirealism from evolutionary considerations. While proponents of scientific realism believe that scientific theories refer to the objectively existing world and can provide true descriptions of that world, proponents of antirealism believe that claims about the objective existence of at least some parts of that world are not always neutral with respect to the theory and that instead of the truth of scientific theories, it is better to talk about their theoretical usefulness and predictive power. Lelas formulates the antirealist perspective as a thesis about the non-instrumentality of the cognitive subject (the subject’s role as a specific cognitive tool is inextricable from any cognitive achievement) and believes that he finds support for this in “modern Darwinism” of R. Lewontin, according to which the organism is one of the central and ineliminable factors of evolution and evolutionary explanations. The paper critically examines Lelas’s drawing of a parallel between antirealism and the idea of the organism as an ineliminable factor of evolution. It appears that the parallel drawn entails several problems that Lelas did not fully develop: the problem of genetic fallacy, the issue of inconsistency with standard conceptions of biological functions in the philosophy of biology, and the neglect of theories of units of natural selection that reject the central role of the organism. The conclusion briefly recapitulates the main considerations of the paper and offers a tentative assessment of Lelas’s philosophy of science.
Ključne riječi
Srđan Lelas; scientific antirealism; theory of evolution; objectivity of knowledge; units of natural selection
Hrčak ID:
332234
URI
Datum izdavanja:
31.12.2024.
Posjeta: 914 *