| dc.description.abstract | The central purpose of this thesis is to develop a theory of
scientific inquiry, or scientific method, within the context of a
setting which is fundamentally sceptical. Thiis the thesis aims,
among other things, to thoroughly explore, and show the dire consequences
of, the rival justifications approach to rational inquiry. Moreover, the thesis has the rather. perverse programmer of attempting
to avoid an anti-rational relativism as the indirect consequence of
the attempt to defend scepticism (in one particular version - that
is, the version which I call Socratic scepticism). Since, I claim.
justificationism itself leads to relativism, and since the Socratic
sceptic can avoid relativism, and since the justificationist wants
to avoid relativism, such a justificationist ought to join me in my
Socratic scepticism.
However, I have no illusions that this thesis will, or even can,
produce any such result.
The argument of the thesis basically runs in the following order:
first, in the Introduction, I explain the difference between two types
of evolutionary process ('coupled' and ' decoupled') and I suggest that
the search for knowledge in science ought to be conceptualised as a
'coupled' evolutionary process. This claim is made good later in the
thesis, and particularly in Chapter 3- which aims to show why the
traditional divorce between the 'context of discovery' and the 'context
of justification' should be replaced by a unitary 'context`' for our
methodological theories - the 'context of inquiry'. Before this, however.
I investigate (in Chapter. 1) a number of rival general approaches to
scientific method and scientific rationality, and try to defend what
I call the 'normative approach'. The defense of this approach hinges
upon showing that it can avoid 'transcendentalism' - wherein every
theory of method become rationally adoptable. This problem tackled
in Chapter 2 - where, in particular, I show how it can be possible to
have 'synthetic', but non-nationalistic, theories of scientific method,
and where I develop a method for both critically appraising, and developing
such theories. This then leads, after Chapter 3 argues the thesis that
methodology is 'about' the context of inquiry, to te consideration (in
Chapter 4) of what I claim to be the fundamental problem of rational
inquiry - the problem of Plato's Meno. In this chapter I develop a
solution to this problem which is Socratic sceptical: and this solution
is then defended, in Chapter 5, against Michael Polanyi's 'tacit knowledge'
solution to the Meno. Finally, in Chapter 6, I consider two
further objections to the sceptical solution developed in Chapter 4 -
one of these, the Kuhnian objection, fails to hit the mark; but the
other, the problem of content, desiderates a search for a replaeement
to our original theory. This replacement is then developed in the
rest of Chapter 6. | en |
