著者

戸田山 和久

出版者

Society for Human Environmental Studies

雑誌

人間環境学研究 (ISSN:13485253)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.1, no.1, pp.5-10, 2003

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Philosophical naturalism is made up of two basic claims as follows. (1) Ontological claim (physicalism); Only 'physical entities and phenomena' and what supervene upon them really exist. (2) Epistemological claim; There is no 'first philosophy', that is, every method of investigation including philosophy itself must consist of the methods which are regarded as legitimate in empirical sciences. One consequence of the latter claim is called 'naturalization of philosophy of science' which has grown to be a powerful alternative to the traditional philosophy of science such as logical positivism or Bayesianism. The main concern of this paper resides in the question whether a philosophical naturalist could believe in these two claims at the same time. For, if naturalized philosophy of science found, in empirical data from the real history of science, the fact that the ultimate aim of scientific investigation is not to reach the literally true description of the world but to attain some other epistemic values (e.g. to control the nature or to make better predictions), it might undermine the realistic reading of the ontological claim of philosophical naturalism. This possibility is overlooked by virtually all the naturalists, but might pose a serious difficulty on their philosophic research program. In the last section of this paper, I tired to propose a way-out from this predicament for a philosophical naturalist like myself. The proposal consists of these two measures. (1) to adopt a Hackingean operationist criterion concerning what exists and what not, (2) to reinterpret scientific theories not as sets of theoreteical sentences but as semantic models.