Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS    Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS

Maria Carla Galavotti
University of Bologna

On the significance of context for an epistemology “from within”

The “received view” of epistemology developed by logical empiricists focusses on the syntactical and semantical aspects of the language of science, pursues the ideal of the unity of science and traces a sharp distinction between a context of discovery and a context of justification, pertaining respectively to scientists and epistemologists. This is contrasted with an epistemology “from within” the sciences, done in a pluralist and pragmatist spirit. This kind of epistemology, heralded in the first place by Patrick Suppes, focusses on the pragmatical aspects of scientific knowledge, takes the context of discovery as an essential component of the study of science, and regards the study of the specificity of different disciplines as a prerequisite for the search of unifying traits.

In the framework of an epistemology “from within”, myriad notions are seen as context-dependent. This brings to the foreground the very notion of “context”. The need to refer to context in order to define crucial notions will be illustrated in reference to probabilistic causality. Furthermore, some hints towards a characterization of context will be put forward.