Philippine E-Journals

GIACOMO BORBONE AND KRZYSZTOF BRZECHCZYN. IDEALIZATION 14: MODELS IN SCIENCE

Wilfried Vanhoutte

 

Abstract:

The post-Kantian era has brought a widespread conviction among scientists as well as scholars of philosophy that human knowledge—including the most advanced and revered version of it, named “science”—is not an exact reflection of the world as it is. Das Ding-an-Sich—the “Thing-in-itself”—appears more unreachable than ever before, as if the expansion and deepening of human knowledge—whether of nature’s molecular structure or of the remotest corners of our solar system—even aggravates the intuition of the unbridgeable discrepancy between the real but secret configuration of the universe and the body of scientific knowledge, which Man has built up over the centuries and which has allowed him a firm—though far from almighty—grasp on the internal natural processes. Moreover, not only the natural sciences, but even the social sciences appear to depend on mentally projected concepts, structures, and patterns, as they help Man better understand the cultural world that He himself has made.