期刊名称：Hyle : International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry
印刷版ISSN：1433-5158
出版年度：2018
卷号：24
期号：1
页码：105-107
出版社：HYLE Publications, Karlsruhe and University of Karlsruhe
摘要：I do not agree with Scerri’s claim that it does not matter whether a scientist isright or wrong. In the next paragraph in his response to my book review(Vogt 2017) he acknowledges that “The new idea, theory, and so on will thenbe subjected to experimental tests and will either stand or fall” (Scerri 2018).Isn’t that judging the theory, model, or experiment right or wrong? Scerriuses a biological analogy of the growth of a new limb and states: “My point isthat one would not regard such a development as being right or wrong. Whatone might say is that if the limb confers an evolutionary advantage to thespecies then its members will continue to reproduce and flourish.” If the roleof “the environment in the case of biological growth is now played by therealm of experimentation”, as he states then, why not judge such a developmentand those who created it as right or wrong? Scerri writes: “By denyingthat a particular scientist is right or wrong I am not denying that science as awhole might have arrived at the best possible description of the world at anyparticular epoch.” We can describe the world today without evoking the experimentallydebunked concept of ‘cold fusion’, but should we ‘deny’ thatthe two electrochemists Fleischmann and Pons were wrong? The importantself-correcting epistemology of science relies on ‘judging the limb’ in thelight of empirical evidence, logical or mathematical errors. It is dangerous tooverburden scientific theories and models with non-empirical, metaphysicalontic biases such as beauty, harmony, simplicity, and in Scerri’s case ‘organic’.
