The human perception of the mechanisms of thinking is changing. Physiological mechanisms of thinking
There are both similarities and differences between solving a perceptual problem and solving a mental problem. In both cases, one has to look for a hypothesis that would explain the observed facts, in both cases there are elegant and inelegant solutions, in both cases the solution often comes unexpectedly, like a sudden insight. However, the perceptual solution to a problem usually occurs super-fast, it is unconscious and not expressed verbally (this does not mean at all that thinking always occurs slowly, consciously and is formalized verbally, but often this is still so or partly so); it does not seem to require the strict motivation that demonstrative thinking requires; unlike most difficult problems of thinking, in perception the correct result is almost always achieved; and, finally, the solution of a perceptual problem leads to a perception, not to an idea.
Clearly, perception is unreasonable in one respect. We often perceive things differently than we know them, or perceive things we know very well about as unlikely or simply impossible. What is perceived can at times contradict what is known about the situation.
Perception is an active process that includes learning. Hunters can recognize birds from incredible flight distances, and they can use small differences to identify objects that look the same to other people. The same is observed in physicians examining radiographs or microscope slides to look for signs of pathology. There is no doubt that perceptual learning takes place in this case as well, but we still do not know exactly how far the influence of learning on perception extends.
A brick and a piece of explosive may look and feel very similar, but they will behave very differently. We usually define objects not by their kind, but rather by their purpose or by their basic properties. The table may have a different shape, but it is an object on which other objects can be placed; it can be square or round, but still remain a table. In order for the perception to correspond to the object, that is, to be true, our expectations must be justified.
According to modern science, "the hemispheres are responsible for a variety of mental activity, manifested in attention, perception, memory, thinking, emotions and motivation." With left-brain thinking, information is processed inductively - logically, linearly, sequentially, from analysis to synthesis. The right hemisphere is characterized by the use of deduction, the processing of information is carried out in the form of synthesis and simultaneous integration of various influences (V.P. Leutin, M. Grinder). The left hemisphere is considered the basis of formal-logical thinking, the right hemisphere - associative-empirical, metaphorical (V.L. Deglin, N.N. Nikolaenko). According to M. Grinder, people with a pronounced left hemispheric organization "are successful in mastering writing, symbols, language, reading, phonetics, arrangement of details, conversation and recitation, auditory associations."
The prerogative of people with right hemisphere specialization is imagination, random awareness, figurative memory, spatial connections, color sensitivity, singing, music, artistry, kinesthetic experiences (M. Grinder, M.A. Pavlova). Verbal information is better perceived by the left hemisphere, non-verbal - by the right
Ernst Mach published a book: Mechanics in its historical development / Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung, where, among other things, using numerous examples from the history of mechanics, he showed how particular formulas are gradually being replaced by more general ones ...
“The idea of the economy of our thinking has developed in me with the experience of a teacher, in the practice of teaching. I already had it when I started my lectures in 1861 as Privatdozent and - quite excusably - thought then that I alone possessed it.
At present, on the contrary, I am convinced that at least the premonition of this view should have been the common property of all scientific researchers who thought in general about the process of research as such. The expression of this view can take still very different forms. So, the main motive of simplicity and beauty, which is so clearly visible in Copernicus And Galilee, I would recognize not only aesthetic, but also economic. And in the "Rules of Philosophizing" ("Regulae Philosophandi") Newton the economic point of view is essential, although the economic principle is not expressed here quite clearly as such.
Ernst Mach, Mechanics. Historical and critical sketch of its development, Izhevsk, Izhevsk Republican Printing House, 2000, p. 418-419.
In the Introduction to the book, Ernst Mach points out:
“The transition to systematic scientific knowledge and understanding of facts is possible only when special estates have already developed, setting themselves the task of life to satisfy certain needs of society. Such an estate deals with special classes of natural processes. But the faces of this class are changing: old members come out of it and new ones enter. And now the need arises to inform the newcomers of the already existing experience, the need arises to tell them on what circumstances success in the pursuit of this or that goal actually depends. It is only after receiving such a message that a person is forced to think accurately about what each person can observe in himself even at the present time. On the other hand, what the old members of the class do out of habit seems to the newcomer to be something unusual and encourages him to think and study. If they want to acquaint a person with known phenomena or processes of nature, then there are two ways for this: either they force him to observe them himself, but then there is no teaching here, or one has to describe to him in some way the processes of nature in order to save him the trouble of going through each experiment himself anew.[…] ... once the ability to recognize these constant elements in the most diverse processes, to see them in the latter, is acquired, this leads to a generalizing, unified, free from contradictions and easy comprehension of facts. Since it has come to the point that we everywhere notice the same few simple elements, combined in the way we are accustomed to, they appear to us as something familiar, which is no longer a surprise for us, which is not alien and not new to us in phenomena; we feel free watching them, they no longer confuse us, they are no longer confused, they are explained. Here is the process of adapting our thoughts to the facts of reality.
The economy of communication and understanding is the essence of science , it contains the calming, clarifying and aesthetic moment of the latter, and it also clearly indicates the historical origin of science. Initially, any economy is directly directed only to the satisfaction of physical needs. For the craftsman and even more so for the researcher, the shortest, simplest, achievable with the least spiritual sacrifices knowledge of a certain area of natural processes itself becomes an economic goal. Although it was originally a means to an end, nevertheless, once the corresponding spiritual tendencies have developed and require satisfaction, knowledge becomes an end in the face of which the physical need is no longer thought of.
Ernst Mach, Mechanics. Historical and critical sketch of its development, Izhevsk, Izhevsk Republican Printing House, 2000, p. 13-14.
In the concluding chapter of The Economics of Science, Ernst Mach writes:
“The task of all and any science is to replace experience or save it reproduction and anticipation (Vorbildung) of facts in our thoughts. The experience reproduced in our thoughts is easier at hand than the actual experience, and in some respects can replace this latter. This economic function of science, which permeates its entire being, is clear even from the most general considerations. With knowledge of the economic nature of science. The communication of science through teaching is concerned with saving experience for the individual by communicating to him the experience of another individual.. Moreover, the experience of entire generations is preserved in the form of written monuments in libraries and thus assimilated by subsequent generations, due to which its repetition by these latter becomes unnecessary.
Ernst Mach, Mechanics. Historical and critical sketch of its development, Izhevsk, Izhevsk Republican Printing House, 2000, p. 408.
E. Mach on the psychology of scientific research, the relationship between physical and mental, the elements of the world and the principle of economy of thought.
Ernst Mach - Austrian physicist, mechanic and positivist philosopher (1838 - 1916).
Mach openly declared that I was not a philosopher at all, but only a natural scientist. First of all, he set himself the task not to introduce a new philosophy into natural science, but to remove from it the old one, which had served its purpose. He, working for more than forty years in the laboratory and at the department, had the opportunity to discern the paths along which our knowledge develops and made an attempt to describe these paths in various writings.
Theses:
1. Scientific thinking emerged from the ordinary through the division of labor and the emergence of specializations.
2. Scientific thinking is of two types: the thinking of a philosopher (the desire to combine the entire set of facts into a common picture, inventing what is missing in the existing knowledge) and the thinking of a specialist researcher (when a person generalizes all the available facts in his narrow field of knowledge, gradually expanding to neighboring areas).
3. Physical and mental contain common elements, so there is not much difference between them.
4. The researcher should be interested in the functional dependence of the physical and mental on each other.
5. The principle of economy of thinking - in a developed science, the explanatory part should be removed. It is also necessary to discard causality and leave only functional dependencies.
Psychology of Scientific Research
Mach believed that scientific thinking grew out of the ordinary. He began to consider this transformation from the time of primitive man: thanks to individual and generic memory, man had an advantage over animals. As this memory accumulates, it begins to include larger and larger spatial and temporal regions. In the end, with the development of culture, a division of labor arises, in which at least each person is deprived of a part of this memory, but the people as a whole continue to keep it. Thinking strengthened in this way can gradually itself become a special profession. Thus, scientific thinking develops out of the ordinary.
On the other hand, scientific thinking differs from ordinary thinking in that the ordinary, at least in its beginning, serves practical purposes, while scientific thinking creates goals for itself, strives to satisfy itself. However, with the growth of culture and scientific thinking begins to influence and change the ordinary.
Scientific thinking is of two types. Thinking of a philosopher, when a person strives for the most complete and comprehensive orientation in the entire set of facts (in this case, he has to rely on material developed by specialists). The thinking of a specialist researcher, when a person closes himself in one area of facts and tries to generalize something there, however, due to the fact that the boundary of this area is always set arbitrarily, he has to move these boundaries, thereby expanding the area more and more, eventually coming to the point that he has to take into account the knowledge of other specialists. Thus, all specialists in the aggregate strive for a world orientation through the unification of all their special areas. In view of the incompleteness of the results achieved, this striving leads to open or more or less covert borrowings from philosophical thinking.
The ratio of physical and mental
Mach goes on to say that everything physical can be decomposed into currently indecomposable elements: colors, tones, pressures, warmth, smells, spaces, times, and so on. These elements depend on conditions both inside the spatial limitation of our body (U) and outside it. Since these elements depend on U, we can call them sensations. And since these sensations are given only to a specific person, and he cannot evaluate the sensations of another individual, then the elements into which we have decomposed the physical can also be considered as elements of the mental. Thus the physical and the psychic contain elements in common, and consequently there is not at all that sharp opposition between them, which is usually accepted. This becomes even clearer when it turns out that memories, ideas, feelings, will, concepts are created from the remaining traces of sensations and, therefore, are not at all incomparable with these latter.
Elements of the world
When considering the above elements, which, depending on what is outside U, are physical elements, and depending on what is inside U - mental, we have elements of both the real world and our Self. Therefore, we should be interested in the functional dependence (in the mathematical sense of the word) of these elements from each other. This connection of elements can continue to be called a thing. But this thing is not an already unknowable thing. With each new observation, with each new scientific principle, the knowledge of this thing takes a successful step forward. When we objectively consider our (close) I, then it also turns out to be a functional connection of elements. Only the form of this connection here is somewhat different than that which we are accustomed to find in the "physical" realm. The unknown, unknowable something behind these elements we do not find need, and this something does not contribute in the least to a better understanding. True, behind U there is something, almost as yet unexplored - namely, our body. But with each new physiological and psychological observation, this I becomes more familiar to us. Introspective and experimental psychology, brain anatomy and psychopathology, to which we owe such valuable discoveries, are working powerfully here, going towards physics (in the broadest sense), in order to complement each other, lead to a deeper knowledge of the world. It can be hoped that all reasonable questions will, in the course of time, come closer and closer to being resolved.
The principle of economy of thought
In the name of the "economy of thought" only sensation is declared to exist. Both causality and matter are declared "eliminated" in the name of the same economy, i.e. a sensation without matter is obtained.
Mach believed that the essence of science is the economy of description and understanding, he put forward the principle of economy of thought. Matter, atom, molecule - economical symbols of physical and chemical experience. Of the theoretical concepts, the one that most simply explains this type of phenomena is preferable. From Mach's point of view, an economical mutual adjustment of judgments in one field of knowledge arises when the smallest number of independent judgments from which other judgments are derived is found. The function of science becomes a descriptive function. Mach also removed the predictive function of science. Science has only a descriptive function. Physical research: according to Mach, psychology should investigate the connections between phenomena, physics - between sensations. Purpose: to establish the dependence of some experiences on others. At the same time, laws and theory in physics are only a means to achieve goals. In this connection, from Mach's point of view, one should not only distance oneself from the explanatory function of physics. But also to abandon science in order to abandon metaphysical explanations.
Note:
Close I - the totality of everything, directly given to only one
Broad I - the totality of my mental, not excluding sensations
U - spatial limitation of our body
For this article, I will introduce two main concepts. This is sensory perception, or feelings - what we see, hear, feel, smell, taste, and thinking - the words that we think.
The article will be devoted to how these two mechanisms are separated and interconnected, as well as why the first is more important than the second.
Let's start with the fact that sensory perception exists with us from birth, and most likely even earlier. We, like animals, are originally able to see, hear and feel - these are our only ways to perceive the world. In fact, the world for us exists only in our sensory perception.
However, in addition to sensory perception, a person also has a second mental mechanism - thinking. Scientists call it the secondary signaling system. These are thinking, speech, words. This is the processing of symbols, not sensual images and experiences.
Unlike sensory perception, thinking occurs in a person not from birth, but only a few years after it. And if a person does not live among other people, it may not develop at all. However, something else is important - that thinking arises later than sensory perception. Thinking is secondary to feeling.
In fact, words are some combined fragments of sounds, pictures or other sensual images. Thinking is based on sensory perception, it would not exist without sensory perception. Obviously, it is impossible to teach speech to someone who does not perceive the world at all.
Thinking is secondary to feelings. However, in humans it is highly developed. So much so that all our attention began to be fixed on thinking and ignoring feelings. We started noticing only thoughts. Thoughts have become our only reality. They began to substitute for us the real reality, which exists exclusively in our sensory perception.
As a result, for a person it became real not what he sees, hears and feels, but what he thinks. As the joke says, if the facts contradict the theory, so much the worse for the facts. If the sensory perception of reality contradicts thinking, so much the worse for reality. Even if we see that the sensual reality does not correspond to our thinking, we still continue to persist in what we think. A person closes in his own thoughts. But there is a paradox dangerous for such a person - thoughts are still the result of feelings. All our thinking is a secondary, tertiary, somewhat-rich processing of what we sensually perceive. We cannot think of what has never been in our feelings. Thinking completely divorced from sensory reality does not exist and cannot exist.
And as a result, the more a person directs attention to thoughts as opposed to feelings, the less food for thinking remains for him. Thinking begins to slow down, slip, stall. And if a person completely tore off his attention from sensory perception, then thinking stops completely. A person loses both sensory perception and thinking. He loses everything. His psyche is in a stupor.
And since almost all people tend to fixate on their thinking, everyone suffers from this problem to one degree or another. They either trust their thinking more than their feelings and make mistakes, or they become completely fixated on thinking and then lose the ability to function. Laziness, depression, apathy are primarily the effect of a person's attention being detached from his sensory perception of reality. After all, if a person ceases to perceive reality, he loses the ability to act in it.
Therefore, we all need to learn to direct attention not to thoughts, but to sensory perception. Everything we see, hear, feel and so on. Because only this is reality, and our thinking is a product secondary to reality.
If you learn to pay attention to what you feel, you will regain your lost contact with reality. You will feel the reality in full force. You will begin to fully live your life. But this is happiness - a complete, without exception, living one's own life.
Moreover, which is typical, the better you learn to feel, the better you will learn to think. Because thinking, I repeat once again, is a consequence of sensory perception. The quality of feelings increases the quality of thought. Having ceased to be fixed on only one thinking, we do not lose it, but on the contrary, we develop it. So, we begin to think and act better.
I summarize. It is absolutely necessary for all people to learn to direct attention not to thinking, but to sensory perception. Only then will happiness, success, and a fulfilling life await us.
Avenarius formulated “The principle of the least as follows: “In the case of the addition of new impressions, the soul informs its ideas of the smallest possible change; or, in other words, after a new apperception, the content of our representations turns out to be as close as possible to their content before this apperception. The soul spends only as much energy on a new apperception as necessary, and in the case of a multitude of possible apperceptions, it prefers the one that performs the same work with less effort. This principle further serves as a methodological basis for the requirement of "purification of experience" and no longer appears as an independent, and even more so as a leading principle.
The “principle of the least measure of force” is a mechanical principle of least action transferred to inoseology. This already determines the metaphysical-mechanistic essence of this principle of knowledge. Avenarius then uses it as a principle of reduction, making the reduction of the unknown to the known, of the particular law to the general, the principle of scientific knowledge in general. Therefore, the “principle of the least measure of force” prevents the qualitative growth of knowledge that is not reducible to what is already known and represents something truly new. But his general philosophical tendency is also important - the “principle of the least measure of force” degenerates in Avenarius into a requirement to eliminate “everything superfluous”. apart from sensations Thus, the theory of reduction, which used to be the method of mechanistic materialism, is transformed into an instrument of subjective idealism.
"Economy of thinking" E. Mach took up the problem of "eco- and mechanics of the nominal approach" to knowledge in
connection with his research on the history of mechanics. In conditions when the mechanical model of all the processes occurring in nature seemed to scientists the only and perfect representation of them, Mach spoke out against this view. Here is what A. Einstein wrote about this later. “Even Maxwell and G. Hertz, who, in retrospect, seem to be people who have shaken faith in mechanics as the ultimate basis of all physical thinking, in their conscious thinking completely adhered to mechanics as a reliable basis of physics. It was Ernst Mach who shook this dogmatic faith. This was an important achievement of Mach as a physicist, which initiated the overcoming of mechanism in the physical science and was then used by Einstein. However, Mach himself used his criticism of mechanism not for the positive development of a physical theory, but for other purposes. In particular, he criticized the Newtonian understanding of the absoluteness of space and time, showing, on the basis of physical grounds, that the formulation of physical laws is associated with the interaction of masses ("Mach's principle"). This refuted Newton's assumption regarding the absoluteness of space and time in the sense of their independence from the distribution of gravitating masses.
However, the physical relativity of space and time established by this served as a basis for Mach to deny their objectivity. In other words, Mach, like Berkeley, did not want to notice that Newton's idea of absolute space contains, in essence, two points: the objectivity of space and its physical absoluteness. While justifiably rejecting the second, Mach wrongly extended his criticism to the first.
The denial of the absoluteness of space meant the denial of its independence in relation to matter, which made the picture of the world in some way more compact, “more economical” (there are not matter and space, but spatially ordered matter). But Mach took the path of interpreting "frugality" as an interpretation of space and time in the form of ordered systems of series of sensations, that is, subjective formations. An indirect result of this was the rejection of the epistemological basis of classical physics, which consists in the requirement that physical laws correspond to the real state of things. In place of the latter, Mach puts the subjectivist "economy of thought". It was, generally speaking, an absolutization of the methodological requirement of the logical and, if possible, meaningful simplicity and unity of the theory, which is actually used by science. And this absolutization consisted in the fact that "economy" was opposed as supposedly the highest methodological setting to the requirement of correspondence between theory and facts.
We have already seen that Avenarius, who developed the “biological” side of economic thinking as “pure 1 ,
description" ou saving thinking, actually
Ski ruled out with his “principle of least force” the possibility of forming new concepts, deriving new laws that are not reducible to already known ones. By recognizing the irreducibility of the laws of nature to mechanical ones, Mach thereby undermines the theory of reduction and at the same time casts doubt on the "principle of the least measure of force" as applied to knowledge. Therefore, he focuses on the other side of the "economy of thought": he refers to the positivist doctrine of knowledge as "pure description". Its historical source was the philosophy of Berkeley, which called for replacing the study of cause and effect with the description of the visible results of actions. It is precisely this idea that Mach perceives.
Mach clearly underestimates logical thinking, believing that it cannot provide any new knowledge. The source of the latter is only observation, intuition (Anschauung). While correctly asserting that knowledge grows out of sensations, Mach is mistaken when, on this basis, he comes to the conclusion that all knowledge is reduced to sensation. It was this idea that then served as the basis for the neo-positivist interpretation of the "principle of observability" in physics. The neo-positivist F. Frank wrote about this: “According to Mach and his immediate followers, the fundamental laws of physics should be formulated in such a way that they contain only concepts that could be determined by direct observations, or, at least, are connected by a short chain of thoughts with direct observations." But this is, on the one hand, the formulation in the bud of the neo-positivist “principle of verification”, and on the other hand, the revival of the Berkeleian thesis “to exist is to be perceived”.
The subjective-idealistic essence of this principle is beyond doubt. However, even apart from this, the "pure description" reveals its inconsistency by the fact that in it, in essence, the active role of logical thinking is reduced to nothing, and science is replaced by flat empiricism. Therefore, Machism could not count on success in the conditions of the scientific development of the 20th century, when the problems of the logical structure of science began to occupy an important place in the theory of knowledge more and more.
In the empirical description and application of the "economy of thought", in essence, three heterogeneous understandings of this principle are mixed up. Firstly, this is a didactic desire to express the available scientific content in the simplest possible form; secondly, the methodological requirement to formulate problems in the simplest way and apply the simplest means to solve them; thirdly, the “metaphysical” assertion that nature chooses the simplest means to perform its actions [see 26, p. 204-205]. , which excludes the objectivity of the material world, the more consistent positivist Mach understands the “economy of thought” only as a principle of cognition. But what is the origin of the latter? , of course, do not contain any "economy" Hence, thinking gives something that is not in sensation! Hence, the "principle of economy" is not taken from experience (= sensations), but precedes any experience, constitutes its logical condition, as a category of Kant"
As in all questions of the theory of knowledge, Mach and Avenarius are inconsistent in pursuing the principles of "economy of thought" and "pure description". Epistemologically, both principles are constituent parts of the empirio-critical theory of knowledge. But along with this, in the works of Avenarius and Mach, we constantly come across elemental materialistic moments in the interpretation of knowledge that are incompatible with the original subjectivist attitudes. Thus, Mach argues that the "complete and simplest description" of which the physicist Kirchjuf spoke, "the economic representation of the real" is Mach's own formula, and the postulate "the agreement of thought with being and the agreement of thought processes with each other" expresses the same thought. “Adaptation of thoughts to facts turns, when they are communicated to other people, into a description, into an economic representation of the real in a complete and simplest description.” However, at the beginning of the second decade of the XX century. Machism (empirio-criticism) collapsed in the face of new facts of natural science, the epistemological conclusion from which was the conviction that subatomic physical reality is irreducible to simple combinations (complexes) of sensations. In "physical" idealism, the latter is replaced by a "logical construction", requiring for its creation new logical means, which were given by mathematical logic. But it was precisely logic that constituted the stumbling block for Machism, which was based on narrow empiricism and the psychological interpretation of logical laws and forms of thought. Therefore, Machism is rather quickly replaced by logical positivism - this first developed form of modern positivism, neo-positivism or analytical philosophy.
4. CONVENTIONALISM OF A. POINCARE
On a number of epistemological issues, the famous French mathematician, physicist and methodologist of science Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) joined empirio-criticism. In his philosophical views, even more clearly than in Mach or Avenarius, we see the dependence of empirio-criticism on the ideological processes associated with the revolution in natural science at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
If Mach in many matters, especially
A. Poincare benno in the period of his formation about the "crisis of physics"
doctrine, relied not so much on
A. Poincaré already saw these changes well and tried to subject them to epistemological analysis.
In the book The Value of Science (1905), Poincaré formulated the well-known proposition that "the progress of science endangers the most stable principles - even those principles that were considered basic" As a result - "the modern crisis of mathematical physics", to which he devoted the eighth chapter of his labor. Here is his argument. Brownian motion casts doubt on Carnot's principle, according to which there is a constant scattering of motion: in this case, we see how, before our eyes, first mechanical motion turns into heat (by friction), then, on the contrary, heat turns into mechanical motion, and all this without no losses, as the movement is carried out constantly. The principle of relativity in the classical (Galilean) sense is called into question, since the experiments of Michelson and Morley showed that the speed of light is absolute, that is, does not depend on the speed of the light source. Newton's third law is compromised by the fact that the energy emitted by a radio transmitter has no rest mass and there is no equivalence of action and reaction. The principle of conservation of mass is undermined by the fact that the mass of microparticles is an “electrodynamic mass” that depends on the speed and direction of movement. The law of conservation of energy is questioned in connection with the discovery of intra-atomic energy, etc. [see. 84, p. 127-140]
What will remain untouched among all these catastrophes? - asks Poincaré. And what is the epistemological status of science, which so recently was firmly convinced that the knowledge it has achieved is an objective truth?
We have already seen what conclusion Machism comes to: science does not reflect a reality independent of sensations. Poincare joins this conclusion. “It is impossible,” he writes, “a reality that would be completely independent of the mind comprehending it, seeing it, feeling it. Such an external world, even if it existed, would never be accessible to us. But what we call objective reality - in the final analysis - is that which is common to several thinking beings and could be common to all; this common side, as we shall see, can only be harmony expressed by mathematical laws” [ibid., p. 9-10].
“But in this case, before Poincaré
Conventionalism J r j r
the question arises about the essence of mathematical laws, as well as the laws of nature in general. Already in Science and Hypothesis (1902), Poincaré argued that the laws of nature should be understood as conventions, that is, conditionally, by agreement, accepted provisions. “These conventions are products of the free activity of our spirit, which, in this area, knows no obstacles. Here he can assert, since he also prescribes ... ".
It was this concept of law as a conditionally accepted provision, i.e., convention, that became the leading concept of Poincaré's epistemological doctrine, hence the name of conventionalism. It represents an illegitimate conclusion from certain real facts of the development of science. First of all, among these facts, one should single out the creation of non-Euclidean geometries, which showed that Euclid's geometry is not the only possible geometric system. Different systems of geometry differ from each other, according to Poincare, by different conventionally accepted definitions of some of their initial concepts. “What is the origin of the original principles of geometry? asked Poincaré. “Are they prescribed to us by logic?” Lobachevsky, having created non-Euclidean geometry, showed that it is not. Do our feelings open space to us? Nor is it, because the space discovered by our senses is quite different from the space of the geometer. Does geometry come from experience? A deeper discussion will show that it is not. We have to conclude that these principles are nothing but conventions. Poincaré even argued that the mathematician himself "creates the facts of this science, or, to put it another way, it is his whim that creates them."
To substantiate this point of view, we encounter two lines in Poincaré. One leads to the rather vague assertion that conventional principles are chosen by the subject on the basis of his "convenience", his views on "utility", etc. "No geometry can be truer than another; it can only be more convenient.” The second boils down to the assertion that the conventions (prescriptions) we choose must be mutually consistent, and, moreover, must be chosen so as to reflect the relationship between things. “These prescriptions are necessary for our science, which would be impossible without them; they are not necessary for nature. Does it follow that these prescriptions are arbitrary? No, then they would be useless. Experience preserves our freedom of choice, but it guides the choice, helping us to recognize the most convenient path. But this is not enough. If science were built on the basis of arbitrary conventions, then it “would be powerless. But every day we see how it works before our eyes. This would be impossible if it did not give us the knowledge of something real; but what it can ultimately achieve is not things in themselves, as naive dogmatists think, but only relations between things. Outside of these relations there is no knowable reality.
Poincaré's arguments cited are striking in their combination of incompatible epistemological principles. On the one hand, this is a pragmatic setting of the subjective “convenience” of the accepted principles, on the other hand, it is recognition as the basis for choosing relations between things. If the conventions we adopt are determined only by the subject, then how can they express different relations between natural things? If conventions are adopted on the basis of "convenience", then why not clarify this many-sided concept and recognize that "convenience" is a consequence of the truth of the theory, and not a self-sufficient quality of the chosen system of axioms? Here we must take into account that, having put forward a number of epistemological propositions, Poincaré does not develop them consistently [see 2, vol. 18, p. 267] But the idealistic principles of approach to knowledge put forward by him in general became the basis for many idealistic speculations. One of the first to come up with such a "development" of Poincaré's views was the French idealist philosopher Edouard Leroy (1870-1954), who tried to implement a "synthesis" of Catholicism, Bergson's intuitionism and ... science. He argued as follows: if the truths of science are conditional, conventional, and if science cannot cognize objective reality, then it should be recognized that science is of practical importance only for a certain area of human actions. Religion, on the other hand, has every right to exist in another area of human actions and in the field of worldview. and science has no right to deny theology
The latter devoted an entire chapter of the book “The Value of Science” to the refutation of the conclusions drawn by Leroy from the philosophical positions of Poincare.
Poincaré contrasts Leroy with the criterion of practice, arguing that "if scientific 'recipes' have the meaning of rules of action, it is because they ... lead to success. But to know this already means to know something, and in that case why are you telling us that we are not able to know anything? . Science foresees, Poincaré continues, and the success of foresight is the reason why it can be useful and serve as a rule of action. Science can improve its predictions and thereby confirms its objectivity. Finally, the criterion for the objectivity of science is that it reveals the objective connections between things. The measure of objectivity for the connections disclosed by science is “exactly the same as for our belief in external objects. These latter are real in the sense that the sensations they evoke in us appear to us to be interconnected, as it were, by some indestructible bond, and not by chance of the moment. Similarly, Science reveals to us other connections between phenomena, more subtle, but no less strong ... They are no less real than those that communicate reality to external objects” [ibid, p. 189].
Considering Poincaré's controversy against Leroy's attempts to derive fideism from his epistemological constructions, V. I. Lenin wrote: “That the author of such reasoning can be a prominent physicist is admissible. But it is absolutely indisputable that only the Voroshilov-Yushkeviches can take him seriously as a philosopher. They declared materialism to be a destroyed “theory”, which, at the first onslaught of fideism, is saved under the wing of materialism. For this is the purest materialism, if you think that sensations are caused in us by real objects and that “faith” in the objectivity of science is the same as “faith” in the objective the existence of one things". However, materialism, in which Poincaré seeks refuge from fideism, is immediately replaced by assertions that "everything that is not thought is pure nothing", that one cannot "think anything but thought", etc. Again, he cannot deal with "constructs" in theory.
Not only that, Poincaré often identifies reality with the relations of things, allegedly inconceivable without connection with the mind that perceives them. The objectivity of these relations lies in the fact that they are "common and remain common to all thinking beings." This point of view, apparently, was borrowed by Poincaré directly from the French "neo-criticist" C. Renouvier, but goes back to the English philosophers of the 19th century, the epigones of the Scottish school, W. Hamilton and G. Mansel. It is connected with the opposition of the "absolute" (analogous to the Kantian "thing in itself") to concrete things connected by relations with each other. Since cognition is a relation, the supporters of the “philosophy of the relative” argued, to the extent that the “absolute” (reality as it exists in itself) is unknowable: having entered into a relationship with the cognizer, it ceased to be an “absolute”. This agnostic conception is uncritically from Renouvier and is perceived by Poincaré.
“Nevertheless, when Poincaré
Science and Hypothesis J
"judges like a natural scientist,
he expresses a number of interesting thoughts about science, the ways of its development and the progressive change of scientific theories. Objectively, these thoughts helped to overcome the crisis in physics to a certain extent. Thus, in his "Last Thoughts" (the book was published posthumously), he comes to the idea of the reality of atoms as material particles, each of which has infinite complexity, representing the "whole world". Poincaré approaches the fact of replacing Newtonian mechanics with new mechanics based on the principle of relativity (he associated the latter with the name of Lorentz) in many respects correctly, seeing in it not a bare denial of the previous theory, but an ascent to a qualitatively new level of knowledge. He highly appreciated the quantum hypothesis of M. Planck [see. 83, ch. VI, VII]. The works of Poincaré, devoted to the analysis of new physical theories, are imbued with faith in the possibility of science to ever more deeply reveal the secrets of matter.
These conclusions of Poincaré are to a certain extent based on his teaching on the role of hypothesis in science, developed in the book Science and Hypothesis. Already in it, Poincaré tried to avoid the extremes of skepticism and dogmatism, because in the latter case they take a scientific theory on faith as an absolute truth, due to the fact that it is a scientific theory. Meanwhile, Poincare emphasizes, scientific theories are rather hypotheses, fruitful approaches to truth, each of which, however, then does not die entirely, but leaves something stable, enduring, and it is the true reality."
The development of science is, according to Poincaré, contradictory. The progress of scientific knowledge combines the unification of knowledge, the discovery of new connections between phenomena that seemed to us isolated from each other before, and the discovery of more and more phenomena of different quality, which can find their place in the system of scientific knowledge only in the future. Two opposing tendencies - towards unity and simplicity on the one hand, towards diversity and complexity - on the other, constantly compete with each other. At the same time, the forms of combining knowledge are changing: if in the 19th century it seemed that the unity of science was achievable on the basis of classical mechanics, then at the beginning of the 20th century. a decisive turn is brewing, consisting in the fact that the place of mechanical principles is occupied by electromagnetic principles.
And yet Poincaré comes to such an ideological conclusion from his interpretation of the relationship between science and hypothesis, with which one cannot agree. Since our knowledge concerns only relations between phenomena, Poincaré believes, it should only meet the requirement that the same relations be established between the models that we put in the place of “things” as between the “things” themselves [see. 234, p. 190]. Therefore, it is completely indifferent what kind of "reality" we are talking about - it is important that two contradictory hypotheses express the same relations, for "it may happen that both express true relations, while the contradiction is rooted in those images in which we clothed reality." Quite positivistically, Poincaré argues that questions about "genuine reality" should be excluded from the everyday life of scientific research "... they are not just unsolvable, they are illusory and meaningless"
Thus, the relativity of our knowledge leads Poincare again and again to relativism, and then to the denial of the ideological significance of philosophy. At first, he came to this conclusion based on an understanding of the laws of science as conventions, now he comes to them based on an understanding of science as a hypothesis that speaks only about relations of things, but not about the things themselves. His thought about the illusory nature and meaninglessness of philosophical questions echoes the later constructions of neopositivism, as Poincaré's conventionalism echoes them. The difference is that Poincaré considers philosophical concepts as metaphors " The scientist need not avoid them just as much as the poet need not avoid metaphors; but he must know their value. They can be useful, giving satisfaction to the mind, and they cannot be harmful, as long as they remain indifferent hypotheses.
Of course, philosophical concepts that are built on the basis of scientific knowledge (or consciously opposed to it) cannot be indifferent to scientific knowledge. They contribute to the development of science if they clearly see its prospects, reveal and improve its methods, formulate the real tasks of scientific research, or they hinder this development by introducing elements of agnosticism, fideism, and idealism alien to science. In the works of Poincaré himself, we constantly encounter precisely this dual function of philosophical concepts.
Conventionalism of Poincaré and his Poincaré and the problem of interpretation of scientific axioms as the basis of mathematics
The propositions left a significant imprint on his understanding of the foundations of mathematics and logic. Poincaré took an active part in the unfolding at the beginning of the 20th century. debate about the foundations of mathematics. This dispute was caused by the development of the doctrine of logicism, which reduced mathematics to logic and denied any significance of its "intuitive" justification. Poincaré was one of the first to criticize logicism.
As rightly noted by V. F. Asmus [see. 11, ch. 8], the French scientist's defense of intuition in mathematics contains two aspects, essentially indistinguishable by him: purely mathematical and philosophical.
On the one hand, Poincare argues like a mathematician who is trying to find out what exactly in mathematical research cannot be achieved in a formally logical way and needs other, meaningful means. Such a means is, according to Poincaré, intuition, which allows the mathematician "not only to prove, but also to invent" . If mathematicians did not have intuition, then all mathematics would be reduced to tautologies and could not create anything new. In his polemic against logicism, Poincaré was right in the sense that mathematics really cannot be reduced to logic. Many of the mathematical problems he solved, connected, in particular, with the relation to the actual infinity, are still the object of dispute in mathematical science [see. 105, p. 300-302; 106, p. 50-51].
As for, on the other hand, the philosophical interpretation of Poincare's intuition, it combines the recognition of intuition as a way of formulating indefinable initial concepts and unprovable propositions (axioms) of mathematics with the Kantian, in fact, understanding of intuition as the ability to carry out a "synthetic judgment a priori". The first statement is a statement of the fact that in addition to logical discursiveness in mathematics, another method is also needed that allows one to formulate some substantive propositions. This method Poincaré calls intuition; the question of its action within the framework of mathematics is a mathematical question. “Logic and intuition each have their necessary role. Both are inevitable. Logic, which alone can give certainty, is the instrument of proof; intuition is the instrument of invention." But the question of the meaning of the very concept of intuition is a philosophical question, and the assessment of its solution given by Poincaré can be, from the point of view of dialectical materialism, only negative.
After all, what Poincaré understood as spontaneous intuition is, in essence, something completely different, namely, the act of conscious fixation of positions that have developed and crystallized in mathematical thinking on the basis of billions of times repeated practice. And since the logical laws of thinking also act as a consolidation of human practice repeated billions of times, dialectical materialism sees in this latter the common root of both “intuition” and consistent logical thinking, which Poincaré opposes to each other.
We can add to this that, introducing intuition, Poincaré inevitably includes essential elements of psychologism in his mathematical conception. Arguing with the logicists, he wrote: “Russell, no doubt, it seems to me, is not concerned with psychology, but with logic and epistemology; I will be forced to answer that there is no logic and epistemology independent of psychology; and this admission will probably end the dispute, as it will reveal an irreparable divergence of views. And in fact: a new positivist trend that grew up on the basis of the philosophical understanding of logicism - neo-positivism diverged from Machism, abandoning psychologism, although it owed much to Machism, and above all the subjective-idealistic interpretation of the sensory-empirical basis of science.
At the beginning of the XX century. empirio-criticism has spread widely both in bourgeois philosophy and among the social democratic intelligentsia. Under the guise of "recent positivism", its supporters spread revisionist ideas, trying to emasculate the materialist and revolutionary content of Marxism by "combining" it with Machism. Therefore, V. I. Lenin came out with a sharp criticism of Machism, both in the person of its founders and their followers. Lenin's conclusions about the epistemological essence and social role of empirio-criticism retain their significance even today, being even more confirmed by the tendencies that emerge in the course of the evolution of modern positivism.
VI Lenin points out the following. First, a comparison of the theoretical foundations of Machian philosophy and dialectical materialism reveals the idealistic and agnostic essence of empirio-criticism. Secondly, empirio-criticism (Machism) is one of the numerous schools of modernity, the place of which is determined by the fact that it went from Kant to Berkeley and Hume, thus completing the trend begun by neo-Kantianism and the immanent school. Thirdly, Machism was associated with idealistic conclusions from the revolution in natural science at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. and reflected in itself the epistemological crisis of the natural-scientific materialism of the last century. On this basis, Machism came to a relativistic denial of the objectivity of scientific knowledge, to agnosticism and idealism. Finally, fourthly, “behind the epistemological scholasticism of empirio-criticism one cannot help but see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle that in the last analysis expresses the tendencies and ideology of the hostile classes of modern society. ... The objective, class role of empirio-criticism is wholly reduced to serving the fideists in their struggle against materialism in general and against historical materialism in particular.
Acting as the second historical form of positivist philosophy, Machism largely prepared the further development of positivism. Among the elements borrowed from Machism by neo-positivism are the doctrine of the "neutrality" (in the philosophical sense) of sensory experience, the concept of "principled coordination" of subject and object and the "principle of observability", as well as conventionalism, widespread in its semantic interpretation by neo-positivists from the field of logic on the whole of science, and then on the worldview However, neopositivism could not accept the Machian psychologism in the theory of knowledge and logic, which too openly gravitated towards subjective idealism and did not harmonize with the formalist tendencies that prevailed in neopositivism.
