VOL. IV (XXI) 2009 - Departamentul de Filosofie si Stiinte ale ...

66 “FICTION” AND “MODEL” IN SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
“idealist positivism” and he warns that it must be separated from the skeptical
currents and from the agnostic ones 6 . In a famous paper related to the
philosophy of Als Ob, M. I. Spariosu notes that Vaihinger intended to
“reconcile German Idealism with various manners of scientific Empiricism
and Positivism which impose themselves at the end of the 19 th century” 7 , a
stand that was subsequently shared by numerous philosophers of science
and scientists: Plank, Bohr, Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Schroedinger and
Heisenberg. The concepts of the German philosopher about the scientific
fictions’ specifics must not be under posed, as he himself states 8 , to the
pragmatic theory of the truth, although, after a detailed analysis, certain
similarities between them could be detected. Anyway, even if a fiction proves
useful in scientific research, “the logical tact” and “the taste” within the
scientific community will finally decide on its practical value. From a
methodological point of view, the fiction generally understood as a product of
the imaginative faculty is applied in the field of exact sciences as well as that
of the ethical-political sciences and it is lacking entirely from the field of
historical or descriptive sciences. Establishing of causal links, an endeavor
specific to the descriptive sciences, assumes rather application of the
inductive research methods.
The fictional methodology is to be found to some extent or other in all
the exact sciences. Vaihinger identifies a number of scientific fictions in
variation with their structural complexity: “artificial classification”, “abstractive
(neglective) fictions”, “schematic fictions”, “paradigmatic fictions”, “utopia
fictions”, “type-fictions”, “symbolic (or analogical) fictions”, “personifying
fictions”, “summative fictions”, “heuristic fictions”. They can be met in
sciences such as mathematics (the void space, the point, the line, the
surface, the infinitesimal), physics (the fix line, the force lines in Maxwell, the
fictive average, the Alfa corpus, the gravity center), mathematical physics
and quantum mechanics especially (the concept of atom, the subatomic
particle, the infinite, “the physical image of the world” in Planck etc)
chemistry, biology.
II. M. Black and Mary B. Hesse tried to enlarge the field of debate over
the scientific imaginary, opposing especially the rhetorical prejudice, its being
considered something separate from or opposite to reality or to the truth. By
means of a comparative analysis related to the cognitive metaphor and to the
scientific model the two authors will discuss a more subtle concept of the
scientific imaginary, which exceeds limits of the trope as such, placing itself
in a much larger theoretical background than the linguistics’ and the
semantics’; what they tried to maintain is that beyond the literal meaning, the
6 Vaihinger, H., Op.cit., p.11
7 Ibidem, p.237
8 See Arbib, M.A., Hesse, M.B., „Language, metaphor and a new epistemology”, in
The construction of reality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge-New York,
1990, p.147-161