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Atomistic Empiricism Or Holistic Empiricism?*

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Atomistic Empiricism Or Holistic Empiricism?* ATOMISTIC EMPIRICISM OR HOLISTIC EMPIRICISM?∗ I. Atomistic Empiricism Traditional empiricism was atomistic: it assumed that scientific knowledge may be tested through direct comparison of the “atoms” of knowledge, i.e. particular sentences, with the “atoms” of experience, that is separate results of observation and experiments, or through the confrontation of small units (if only sensible) of knowledge with small units (“elementary” units) of experience. “Atomistic” tendencies in empiricism can be best observed in positivism. Especially the so-called doctrine of logical atomism in which the notions of atomic sentence and molecular sentence come to the fore, proclaimed mainly by Russell and Wittgenstein, represents decisively the viewpoint of atomistic empiricism. One of the fundamental dogmas of neopositivism is the thesis on the possibility of empirical confirmation or refutation of every statement, taken separately, by means of particular elements of experience.1 In principle, the thesis is also shared by a critic of some of other dogmas of logical empiricism – K.R. Popper. II. The Concept of Holistic Empiricism It appears that the systemic character of knowledge makes it impossible to juxtapose separate theoretical statements with experimental data; what is more, theoretical hypotheses (laws) are not only and cannot be on the whole separately tested but mostly are not (and cannot be) separated ∗ Translation of “Empiryzm atomistyczny czy empiryzm holistyczny?” Studia Filozoficzne, 12, 1975, 149-160. 1 W. Mejbaum writes that empiricism of neopositivists is based on a conviction about the divisibility of experimental material into particular building blocks: impressions in the subjectivist version, and facts in the objectivist version. We subordinate sentences to those events, and a set of those sentences may be considered to be a starting point of a programme of logical reconstruction of knowledge. The programme of reconstruction itself consists in the search for rules which would allow, on the basis of elementary sentences, to justify the whole of human knowledge which we want to consider as basic (Mejbaum 1960, p. 345). 272 Part Four: Problems of Verification of Knowledge proposed.2 For example, the Galileo-Newton principle of inertia is so much in contradiction with direct observation made in everyday life that it could not be formulated and adopted (accepted) in a different way than only in connection with those other hypotheses, which later entered into the composition of Newtonian dynamic and his theory of gravitation. It was only thanks to drawing from it, in connection with those other hypotheses (or thanks to the deduction from the system into which it was incorporated) of empirical conclusions and their confrontation with the results of experiments, it was carefully tested, or to put it more precisely, the theoretical system of statements encompassing it was tested.3 It also appears that such a “complex” indirect testing through the deduction of common consequences is generally more precise and more certain than the testing of a law taken separately. Indeed, the principle of inertia may be tested in isolation from other statements of the system, as it was done by Galileo when observing the behaviour of bodies moving on an inclined plane, or as it was done by those who immediately followed him when they studied the behaviour of bodies in a relative vacuum and the like. However, as shown by Newton, testing of this kind has never achieved, even in approximation, the degree of preciseness that is accessible when testing it together with other principles of dynamics (and Newton’s theory of gravitation), e.g. when applied to the motion of planets or the moving missile (in which case the movement of an object “is divided” into its vector components, i.e. projects on the co-ordinate axis). Apart from that, thanks to the derivation from a given law, together with other hypotheses, of conclusions and predictions in various fields, we gain a possibility of confronting that set of initial premises (thus also of the law being tested) with experience at “various points” of its application to solving various problems, so that also “the line of junction” of this law with experience becomes many-sided. As a result, we obtain testing that is more precise, versatile and reliable than in the case of testing of a law taken in isolation. This is connected with the fact that a given experimental situation, which determines the fate of a given theoretical system, usually does not consist 2 Also with this respect “the context of discovery” and “the context of justification” reveal their similarity in spite of neo-positivism. On other aspects of relationships between “the context of discovery” and “the context of justification,” see Lakatos (1970). 3 The same concerns Galileo’s law of fall of bodies. An experiment consisting in throwing objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which was as if to begin it, has probably never been conducted (see, e.g., on this question: Butterfield 1958, Part V). This law was formulated as an element of a new physical conception, which at the same time allowed its experimental testing. It is worth noting that facts of this kind, taken from the history of science, speak in favour of both holistic empiricism (holism) and the method of idealization and hypotheticism: those laws could not be the inductive results of generalizations of empirical data. .
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