Aristotle on Science as Problem Solving
- PDF / 865,163 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 9 Downloads / 224 Views
Aristotle on Science as Problem Solving Diana Quarantotto1
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract The paper provides an interpretation of Aristotle’s view on scientific inquiry as problem solving. It tackles passages where Aristotle emphasises the role that the problem-solving activity has in science, and where he describes the history of humans’ problem-solving activity and the historical development of natural science as a problem-solving activity. Further, the paper examines Aristotle’s practice of raising, assessing and solving problems as well as the heuristic procedures he employs to move from ignorance to scientific knowledge. Finally, it raises a question about Aristotle’s view on the epistemic status of scientific definitions: does Aristotle conceive of the definitions, which are the results of scientific inquiries, as truths (known with certainty to be true, i.e. known with certainty to be principles) or rather as plausible hypotheses that may or may not be true? Keywords Aristotle · Science · Heuristic · Problem-solving · Discovery
1 Introduction In Aristotle’s view, the goal of scientific inquiry can be described as finding the truth about things or finding the first causes of things.1 This means primarily finding the definition of a thing and then using it to deduce other properties (in itself accidents) of that thing.2 But the goal of scientific inquiry can also be described—still in Aristotelian terms— as solving problems.3 The latter description concerns the way in which definitions are arrived at: definitions are found, among other things, by formulating, assessing and solving problems; in particular, definitions provide the solution to the problems that have led to their discovery. It is this second description of the goal of scientific inquiry that I will discuss in this paper.4 That, in Aristotle’s view, the goal of scientific inquiry is to solve problems is clearly attested both by his actual scientific
* Diana Quarantotto [email protected] 1
Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
practice (as it is documented by his scientific writings) and by his theory on scientific practice. I shall address an example of Aristotle’s scientific practice in Sect. 7. In Sect. 2, instead, I shall analyse three passages where Aristotle emphasises the role that the problem-solving activity has in science. The other sections are aimed at broadening the initial picture sketched in Sect. 1. In Sect. 8 I shall use the results of my 1 Phys. I 1, 184a10–14; Phys. I 8, 191a24–25; Phys. II 3, 194b17–20; Metaph. II 1, 993b19–24. 2 Apo II 1–2. 3
Here I translate with ‘problem’ two Greek words used by Aristotle: problema and aporia. These words do not have exactly the same meaning in Aristotle’s writings; an examination of their differences would certainly benefit our understanding of Aristotle’s ‘problematic’ approach. For reasons of space, however, I cannot provide this examination here. My present inquiry is based on the hypothesis that these words are
Data Loading...
