Paper prepared for the XVth World Congress of Sociology, 7-13 July, 2002 in Brisbane, Australia.

The Impending Demise Of Scientific Realism.

Arne Kjellman

Email: kjellman@dsv.su.se

Dept. of Computer and Systems Sciences Stockholm University and KTH

Abstract: The problem of consciousness cannot consistently be approached from the third person's

perspective – less well known is that neither can any other scientific problem. Even if partly successful the classical realistic (or Newtonian) approach to science is bound to fail because of this restricted perspective. The knowledge feedback paths of human brain is one reason and the ”inside” features of qualia another. Here the claim is advanced that when we abandon the realist’s doctrine we are able to remove many imperfections. When instead using a subject-oriented approach to knowledge we will in one strike remove the bewildering Cartesian dualism, the troublesome chasm between the natural sciences and humanities and open the door for a science of consciousness.

This paper is concerned mainly with giving the background to a general outline to human knowledge and thinking - the subject-oriented (subjectivist’s) approach - which neither divides mind from matter, the observer from the observed nor the subject from the object. What is described here is, however, only the beginning of or the path to the subject-oriented way of thinking, which, it is hoped, can be further presented later. The aim here is rather to pave the way for such a reorientation of our scientific thinking by pointing out some severe shortcomings of the classical object-oriented (objectivist’s) approach to knowledge that has been the prevailing scientific approach since the days of Galileo and Newton. It is probably better known under the name of scientific realism – or the Newtonian paradigm.

1. Background: Most scientists take for granted (or at least behave as though they do) that the philosophical

foundations underlying science are secure – as if they were given as part of the definition of modern science. Practicing scientists are preoccupied with solving their own problems - and are mostly not at all involved with broader philosophical issues – convinced that all fundamental problems in the modern sciences in due time will be satisfactorily resolved within the established paradigm of today’s normal science. Most scientists, therefore, do not see a reason to pay attention to the hidden presumptions and the basic definitions of science in use and do not care to discuss the foundations. As a matter of fact they even seem to see a certain hazard in doing so and sometimes tend to guard the gates of science against the fake and the mystical with a faith that sometimes take dogmatic proportions. This is even more astonishing considering the fact we during the 20th century have become increasingly aware of the brittleness of the fundamental philosophical assumptions of modern science – its supporting paradigm.

The prevailing ideas was challenged by T. Kuhn's (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which held that metaphysical commitments are tacitly understood by practicing scientists, but are typically neither articulated nor subjected to scrutiny. However these metaphysical assumptions may change at times of what he calls "scientific revolutions". He also claimed the existence of a paradigm capable of supporting a normal science tradition is the characteristic that distinguishes science from non-science. Much of modern sociology lacks a paradigm and thus fails to qualify as science. Consciousness studies fails for another reason – this field of inquiry is incompatible with classical

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physics that has constituted the paradigm of science and rationality since the time of the Western scientific revolution. However science is to predict what is to come and on these grounds undertake clever actions and here human decision-making is the crucial point rather than physical manipulations of the things in some presumed pre-given world. An objective science based on the realist’s doctrine that witnessed cannot account for human feelings and intuition will leave out the most important factor affecting human decisions and fail for that very reason. However the problem does not lie within these two mentioned discourses of inquiry – they could very well be incorporated in the activities of normal science were it not for the classical definition of normal science in use.

A paradigm embodies a particular conceptual framework through which the world is viewed, as well as a particular set of experimental and theoretical techniques for matching the paradigm with this world. A further component of paradigms consist of the general metaphysical principles that guide work within a paradigm and in a wider context such principles also guide human perception and thinking. So in that sense we can within the paradigm of normal science find a sub-paradigm that is basic to not only to normal science but to all cultures of human knowledge – namely the base assumptions underlying normal human perception and thinking:

Surveying the rich experimental literature from which these examples are drawn makes one suspect that something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James's phrase, “a bloomin' buzzin' confusion." (Kuhn 1962 p. 113 – my boldface)

Then, what is in the classical paradigm of science that excludes e.g. consciousness studies from its discourse? The root problem here is the prevailing realist’s doctrine that assumes the features of our world to be both pre-given and observer-independent. The argument will be advanced that this doctrine is neither useful nor defensible any longer and the abandonment of this bewildering doctrine is an imperative necessity for the revitalization of science. The claim is that a subject-oriented approach to knowledge construction must take the place of the traditional object-oriented way of knowledge construction that is called the Newtonian paradigm in order to keep up its consistency and re-gain the credibility of a modern science that are able to unify the different disciplines.

The path we must enter upon is to admit the primacy of subjectivity and from this bright intuition find out that living beings construct their private universes - PRIVERSES – ”inside” the mind. Not in isolation, however, but rather in social communication and adaptive coexistence and in this way we can restore the forlorn scientific objectivity in the form of an ”unseen” model universe (a set of models) based on a firmly established scientific consensus. The subject-oriented approach here provides a new understanding of the world, man and human society - and also suggests a reasonable consensual framework for a cross-disciplinary approach to use in all sciences. To re-establish the conceptual foundations of science we need to follow the path appointed by the cyberneticians and pick up the fallen mantles of Carnap (1928) and the early Russell (1917) and depart from the ideas of methodological solipsism when building a science to come. It seems that the primacy of subjectivity does not to give us another option.

We will here insist that and attention to the metaphysical assumptions should be part and parcel of the doing of science – for the simple reason the metaphysical commitments that are incorporated in theories, methodologies, research questions, and hypotheses are part of the evidence for theories and models, i.e., scientific knowledge is both constructed in a social consensus and constrained by empirical evidence. In this situation the human knower has no means to reconstruct the sensory input hitting the senses – and he/she is directed to use the phenomenal impressions to guide the acts of living. To handle this situation we must use a subject-oriented approach to knowledge – that in parts are very different from the classical object-oriented approach – and this new approach, which circumvents the classical shortcomings thereby, forebodes a necessary paradigmatic change of human conceptualisation.

This paper divides into essentially two parts: a) in section 2 realism and its contrast are presented and in section 3-5 the historical aspects are elaborated and thereafter, b) in section 6-8 the realist’s doctrine is scrutinized to bring forward some annoying shortcomings of the classical approach to scientific knowledge. Since the subject-oriented approach is counter-intuitive we must proceed slowly however and first understand in which way the Newtonian paradigm the last three centuries

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throughout has governed our scientific thinking – and still do today in spite of the recent quantum breakthrough. Descartes’ cleavage into two domains - res extensa and res cogitans – that is part of the Newtonian paradigm is an obvious heritage from the Stone Age man. In this man’s naïve view the extended “furniture of the world” is “outside” the contemplating mind (and the human skull) on the very ground they can be explored by the human senses. The senses of vision and touch has provided the obvious basis of this traditional real/imaginary distinction – and what was known to these senses was also by the early scientists classified as “real” in the same self-evident manner the commonsense man still practise. Later on the science of physics in several steps has come to revise this point of view, however, this distinction is even today quite unclear. We will soon see the use of such a distinction is unscientific.

2. The two approaches In the history of science always been two epistemological approaches to the problem of building

models of the presumed world; the subjectivist’s and the objectivist’s one. In the former one takes the cognitive subject and its experience (the mind impressions) as the point of departure, whereas in the second case one proceeds from a consideration of the “worldly things” themselves and a postulation of their observer-independent existence - clearly articulated or not. However since the time of the scientific revolution, when the ideal of the “detached” scientific observer was enforced, the somewhat unspecified idea of an objective science has been held in charge. Science was to become “objective” - a science liberated from all subjective elements – this was the main idea, a science independent of the observing/describing scientist. It was thought the easiest way to bring about this situation was to recommend an observer/observed separation. This point of attack was useful in physics, however such an approximation cannot possibly work neither in the life and social sciences nor in the quantum domain of physics since here the observations made very often affect the objects of observation. The scientific observer is here evidently “in touch” with the object of observation – the observer/observed separation as espoused by classical science is here simply invalid.

However on the lawful occasion, in this way preventing the subjective elements from entering the scientific discourse also meant blocking human intuition, feelings and emotions and such a science is – no surprise – unable to understand human consciousness and social behaviour. Notwithstanding human intuition and feelings are very central when it comes to human reason, decision-making and action. Their role are very central in the biological evolution of brain, as appointed by Damasio (1994) most recently, and science, like the classical, that cannot account for human feelings will without doubt leave out the most important factor affecting human decisions.

The history displays that classical science in its deed, in spite of its clear declarations of objectivity, nevertheless heavily took guidance by the feelings and intuition of its practitioners. This fact unhesitatingly suggests the instructed non-subjectivity of the detached scientific observer is most of all a drawing-board product – a dictum that is very often neglected. The claim here is that disobedience to this very core principles of science is the actual reason for the (partial) success of modern science rather than some soundness of its basic underlying principle – the realist’s doctrine.

Scientific realism, in one form or other, is the philosophical position embraced by most natural scientists. This is the belief that science deals with a pre-given and observer-independent mind-external world and that the entities and structures that occur in our best theories in some sense “really” exist in this “external” world – i.e., are real. The set of these entities/structures is sometimes called the “furniture of the world” – and most often referred to as the reality. Realism does not hinge upon the real/unreal dichotomy but is rather a profound belief system most often called the realist’s doctrine and the specification given above is probably the one most common. There are variations, however, but in most cases they do not concern the terms “pre-given” and “observer-independent”, of that more later. Very problematic approaching this doctrine is the fact we have not a useful working definition of what is meant by saying that a phenomenon/entity is real – as opposed to unreal/imaginary/illusory and so forth. Well-known is also this opinion has changed considerably over time and in spite of Kant’s saying that the “thing-in-itself” is hidden to human observation we have not even paid enough attention to the eventual undecidability of this question. In approaching this problem we cannot consequently scrutinize the “real” predication– we are rather directed to attack the belief system itself - the realist’s doctrine.

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Realism comes in several varieties and also the denial of realism may take any one of numerous possible forms, each of which can be called a variety of anti-realism1 that principally denotes the rejection of scientific realism. (Dummett 1991) The realist’s doctrine - unhesitatingly an inheritance from the Stone Age man – contains at its core the hypothesis of a “pre-given” reality - that was tacitly included in the principles of classical (Newtonian) science in spite of Newton’s clear instruction to avoid every unfounded postulate in doing science. Most cultures early also developed different “thing-languages” - called natural languages - to describe this presumed reality with its conceptual “thing-items” and these languages are as such also very “contaminated” by the realist’s doctrine. Here the subject-predicate schema is the best example reflecting the enforced subject/object distinction of the observer. At a later stage more formalized languages e.g. mathematics, logic and other conceptual devices emerged in science, but clearly also they very “contaminated” by the human’s observer situation.

Well-known is that most people regard realism and the realist’s doctrine as only natural and this has become an essential part of the motivation for natural science. Clearly scientists would be unlikely to spend a great deal of time and energy on discovering the properties of the “things of the world” unless convinced that they really existed “out there”. However another school of thought loudly claims the worldly reality is just a “grand illusion” Blackmore (2001) that apart from its vociferousness fails to give some convincing arguments for such position that appears to be an absurdity for a living being smashing his or her head into a doorjamb.

It is hard to defend realism philosophically – for not to say impossible - but still there are many arguments in its favour. The strongest argument advanced is: How is one to explain the extraordinary success of classical science, if realism and Newtonian science are basically misleading? Such a weighty reason seems very hard to precipitate, but here the tentative answer simply might be that science has come up with these useful results in spite of some misleading assumptions. This for the simple reason that scientists led by intuition, feelings and useful methodologies not has paid heed to the strict rules as spelled out by classical science – fortunately we might add.

The dispute realism versus anti-realism/instrumentalism2 is as old as science but a severe crack in the realist’s amour came in the 1920's when physicists researching quantum physics started to investigate the assumptions underlying human observation and later in the 1950’s when the science of cybernetics took interest in 2nd order observation. The Copenhagen interpretation shook the foundations of physics and Bell’s theorem in 1957 made clear the realist’s approach was very uncertain (Cushing 1989) – for not to say false. Even earlier the founder of intuitionism Brouwer in 1905 on the grounds of constructive mathematics had started to question the rationality of human thought (Heyting 1975) and thus foreshadowed Gödel’s (1931) two theorems and Turing’s (1936) solution to the halting problem that effectively closed the door to Hilbert’s formalist program.

3. The return of intuition and feelings Today the cognitive sciences have made us understand perception is mainly non-deductive and

another acute problem today is that it seems human knowledge and consciousness could not possibly be captured by the methodology of classical science (Chalmers 1995). At the turn of 21st century we began to understand the problem of consciousness couldn’t simply be approached from the third person perspective as so clearly advocated by classical science. Since the also the prevailing methodology of science is developed in the same paradigm – the classical approach to the problem is likely to fail and so are also the attempts to apply classical interpretations. After all the entire standpoint taken by behaviourism and B.F. Skinner (1972) was very consistent with the ideas of classical science: “mental processes may exist, but they are ruled out of scientific consideration by their nature.” So deep was the faith in the realist’s doctrine those days that the scientists was even prone to leave the phenomenon of consciousness fully outside of the scientific endeavour and also managed to do for more than six decades. This downgrading of the role of the human being has resulted in a deepening chasm between the “two cultures” - the natural sciences and the humanities. It has led to a distrust of science on the part of people more interested in human problems and human

1 constructivism is a better term to use because it in a sense can stand on its own feet – rather than opposing

an already existing movement 2 This dispute goes under many names e.g. realism/empiricism or realism/idealism

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aspirations and inversely a disregard of the approaches and methodologies as used in the social sciences from the natural scientist’s part.

To leave the phenomenon of consciousness outside of the scientific endeavour could not last long since science – whether natural or social - is most of all the art of predicting what is to come in future and on the grounds of such predictions undertake clever actions to secure the survival of the individual and/or the society. This can be done by either affecting the evolution of the environment or simply by avoiding confronting the upcoming danger. Concerning the possible actions to take both the individual and society has a lot of options to choose among – and here a sound decision-making is the crucial point. In spite of the long withstanding attempts to plead for man’s strict rationality the history unhesitatingly shows that human decisions are highly affected by feelings. Notably we are most often frustrated and deeply surprised when we find out that the very existence of human feelings so effectively can lay waste to a rational human behaviour.

Contemplating this situation we must call in question the principles of ”objective” science as advocated in its classical sense on the ground that a science that cannot account for human feelings leave out the most important factor of human decision-making, and very likely is bound to fail for that particular reason. Such a science is, in spite of its success in the natural sciences, almost useless when applied in efforts to try to understand living action and communication, as well as the living society, just because it turn its back upon the genuine and forceful “inner” feelings of living beings. The classically “detached” observer is wholly secluded from the “inner feelings” of the studied object and the dictum of non-subjectivity unfortunately draws him away from his own feelings and intuitions. However the life and social sciences cannot do without human feelings and their influence are extensive as witnessed. More surprising is maybe the conclusion that neither can the natural sciences since the observer/experimenter is a human being most of all driven by intuitions and feelings. There are strong reasons to believe that the oversimplified principles of the prevailing classical science cannot survive the discoveries of the complex feedback mechanisms of human brain. They effectively lay in vast every possibility of “objective” perception and observation – which now instead reduces to “theory-laden observation” barely, as thoroughly demonstrated by the modern cognitive sciences. For that reason the (partial) third person perspective as advocated by classical science must be abandoned. Since science also - and in particular physics – is dogmatically based on the third person perspective one should expect a radical turn of our scientific thinking when turning to the “internal” or first person perspective Rössler (1987) needed for the development of a science of consciousness and social communication. However the first person subjective perspective is exactly what the classical scientist is taught to abhor – and instead strive for the ideal perspective of the “detached” observer turning his back on intuition, feelings and emotion in his search for eternal “objective” truth.

The science of the detached observer has unhappily put living phenomena and human consciousness under ban and therefore we will first in section 4-6 take a look backwards to understand how this awkward situation emerged. In doing so we will understand that intuition, feelings and emotion in practice never was discarded from science – but has rather been the secret lodestar. In the end we will find that Descartes nightmare has come true – the presumed world is an illusion and nothing else but an illusion – but a stable illusion however. Not as a magical illusion though - just a non-real one – and for this reason we will call it an allusion. The very moment we find res extensa to be a plain allusion it can unconstrained merge with res cogitans establishing a single monistic domain - thereby revealing the real/unreal distinction to be a bare myth. In this new proposed worldview the “detached” observer is the confused observer – and the classical ban put on subjectivity do not make us “objective” at all – just bleary-eyed. We here find a clear need to develop a science reflecting the standpoint of the living being – that besides living being moreover is the scientific observer/describer. On short we here find an urgent need of a the subject-oriented approach to knowledge.

4. The consciousness puzzle and scientific objectivity. The attempts to develop an understanding of mind’s organization or consciousness from the

standpoint of scientific realism have hitherto failed and are not even promising. Approaching this question we must contend the consciousness puzzle does not fit to well at all into the framework of classical science. The scientists trying to explain the quintessence of organization and living systems revealed in the middle of the 20th century that the classical ideas of strict reductionism couldn’t be

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applied to these domains – the concept of holism3 was born. This promising idea ought to have become very useful in any science concerned with organizations, interacting entities, agents or the like, but could not at all be successfully assimilated by a realistic science so profoundly and irrevocably caught in Cartesian dualism. Thus holistic thinking became a catchword mainly – and I claim the reason is that this idea cannot be satisfactory handled in the prevailing realistic framework. By now we have abandoned the most naïve ideas of materialism and Laplace’s4 idea of the world as ”predetermined mechanical clockwork”, however the recent developments of super string theory (Green 1999) shows most scientists are still trapped in the ideas of classical reductionism. Newton was an ambitious man and sought nothing more or less than the “system” that paced the world - the Theory of Everything – the physicists of today still do (Barrow 1994). Even so today’s natural science has neither place for life nor human feelings – oddly enough.

Evidently there is something wrong with classical science and these problems have not disappeared by the emergence of quantum physics as presented today. The questions met with in consciousness studies are so counterintuitive that the time seems ripe for a radical turnover. The problem of consciousness and human knowledge must be approached from the very bottom line of science – by asking what is the reason for this counter-intuitiveness. We must reiterate the questions of the great empiricists and in the spirit of D. Hume reconsider the cause-effect phenomenon:

• There is something bewildering about human rationality – do we neglect our intuitions? • Were there some tacit and hidden assumptions introduced when science was developed? • Chaos theory has shown scientific determinism was an illusion – are there more illusions? • The social sciences face a quite different “reality” how do they cope with the environment? • Maybe cross-disciplinary approaches like cybernetics can provide a better understanding?

The path we have entered is to call into question the basic principles of science. Cybernetics

already has sown, not only the seed of understanding of consciousness, but also in the shade of artificial intelligence (AI) already foreshadowed a radical reorientation of human thinking – suggesting a constructivist epistemology to expand the ideas of the prevailing somewhat misguided realistic ontology (or materialism if one prefer) in its classical meaning. The feedback mechanism and its appearance both in man and the machine was the phenomenon that inspired Wiener, von Neumann and their colleagues to develop the conceptual framework of cybernetics during the legendary Macy Conferences. In contemplating this mechanism one realizes that what is essential here is the function of adaptive learning carried out by the feedback signal that is imposed (by “neural programming”) upon the neural tissues of brain. This signal programs the pathway of perception to produce a useful input to the mind (adaptation), i.e., sort of feedback of knowledge – that make human perception become theory-laden a term in frequent use in today’s philosophy. This “circularity” – that sometimes is called “causal circularity” - was by the cyberneticians found in many natural processes and this richness at the conceptual base of cybernetics of course attracted many different scientific disciplines. This adaptive feedback circularity also entered the living mind explaining its learning capacity. However artificial intelligence (AI) took over and the computer was the reason AI came to dominate the hard sciences and only a handful of researchers stayed loyal to the ideas of cybernetics. Among them H. von Foerster became a major catalyst for the self-organizing idea in the 1950-ties and worked away from the reductionist mainstream ideas – almost obsessed by this idea of circularity. In his own words:

“While this was going on, something strange evolved among the philosophers, the epistemologists and the theoreticians they began to see themselves included in a larger circularity, maybe within the circularity of their own family, or that of their society

3 Which in fact has become the banner of the systems sciences. 4 “An intellect which at any given moment knew all the forces that animate Nature and the mutual

positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”

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and culture, or being included in a circularity of even cosmic proportions. What appears to us today most natural to see and to think, was then not only hard, it was even not allowed to think!” (H. von Foerster 1992)

What did they do? They confirmed the ideas of the newly born quantum physics: That the observer must be included in the description of the system observed – but they did so by using a quite different approach!!! Outrageous - because these findings violated the basic principle of scientific discourse that flatly demands the separation of the observer from the observed. The classical principle of “objectivity” clearly spells out: The features of the observer shall not enter the description of his observations.

This dictum has been the prevailing scientific ideal since the days of Galileo but in spite of that we have very seldom taken the trouble to ask the following questions:

1. Is it even possible to “objectively” describe (model) universe independent of the features of the

observer? 2. Is it possible to “objectively” describe human consciousness independent of the features of the

observer? According to the mentioned “principle of objectivity” we must describe consciousness from

“outside” in order to be objective. But is this really possible and if not what happens to the so highly celebrated scientific “objectivity?” Are we not caught in a trap? The suggestion that human consciousness is indescribable sounds abstruse – maybe the principle of “objectivity” is somewhat wrongly stated? Maybe the observer must be included in every scientific observation and description? Maybe the subject-object distinction imposed by the natural languages in use is the aberration? In asking these questions we once more encounter the “circularity” that once puzzled the cyberneticians. And clearly, when cyberneticians tackled the problem “how do we come to know what we know” they were not only profoundly caught by this “circularity”. They also entered the forbidden land – they were accused of doing non-science.

We seem to be badly caught in a trap - however we are by reason of our classical thinking only I will claim. Fortunately there is a feasible way out of this embarrassing dilemma that is called the subject-oriented approach to knowledge. The predicament, as more full presented (Kjellman 1999), is the very reason for the choice of the subject-oriented approach – and I claim it can be resolved by this approach only. However the acceptance is problematic and even today such ideas are met with polemics and stubborn resistance and most people shake their head when meeting the claim that science must (first) be subjective in order to gain the status aimed for by classical “objectivity”. Notwithstanding – the claim is that we in this way we can build a sound consensual science.

5. Looking backwards. First we will try to show how the classical science that replaced the medieval speculations

unintentionally gave rise to the present situation and thereby understand how the behaviourist movement could dominate the American psychology for six decades. We therefore put the clock back to Galileo and Descartes that both were very important founders of the modern scientific methodology. Following van Fraassen (1980) we understand the situation before them was somewhat different than today’s since Aristotle, the exemplary of the Middle Age, had insisted that science aims not just to describe the phenomena but also to explain them. Explanation, he then went on to identify with the explication of something "deeper". This led to a view of science as describing the laws of Nature - as opposed to "mere" regularities as they appeared in the mind of the observing scientist. He thereby in a sense referred to Nature as to provide the “correct” answer – the truth. Several medieval philosophers developed Aristotle’s account of the world in depth and because they were also theologians, they were neither content with nor allowed to let Nature give all the answers to physics. Since mechanics was the main issue in those days they instead introduced God as the “ultimate mover”. This step was no to wide, however, considering they anyhow had to refer to God to provide the answers in ethical questions. On these reasons we must understand why most medieval thinkers insisted to prove the existence of God.

Here is the point where we should pause and ransack also our own scientific thinking. Today we as scientists find the medieval search for God the “great mover” a bit naïve. Notwithstanding the bulk of

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natural scientists are in their daily life seriously involved in costly projects dependent on or looking for the “ultimate entities of Reality” and in the same vein they are also quite as eager to use Nature as a point of reference when testing the “truthfulness” of the scientific models used. As a consequence the truth conception has become very central in the realist’s philosophy, as van Fraassen so clearly points out, and that scientific realism tries to give us a literally true story “what the world is like”:

Science aims to give us, in its theories, a literally true story what the world is like, and acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it is true. This is the correct statement of scientific realism.

Quine readily agrees (1990) but the realist’s focus on the truth conception means both the acceptance of a method of decision (decision procedure) and an open specification of the possible outcomes of this decision procedure. As Dummett (1991) says:

It is difficult to avoid noticing that a common characteristic of realist doctrines is an

insistence on the principle of bivalence - that every proposition, of the kind under dispute, is determinately either true or false (my boldface)

Accepting this principle means to admit the use of classical (binary) logic as a decision tool and the

use of some pre-given reality as the point of reference. We will see the very moment we start call in question the basic postulates of realism the basic traits of the classical human truth conception also come to a point of cross-examination.

Accepting the anti-realist position, on the other hand, means that all we as living beings have at our disposal are the “phenomena on the stage of mind” – and what is behind these phenomena that can provide the ontological answers is regarded a hypothetical matter. In the absence of a worldly reality there is in this approach no need of a truth conception – at least not to establish the “truthfulness” of the models used. In this view the capricious postulates of realism as inherited from the Stone Age man definitely has no place in modern science. However by that statement we do not wish to say that reality and God do not exist – we just want so say that we as scientists do not need such concepts at the conceptual base of our knowledge. It is essential here also to understand the question of the truthfulness of the models (theories) as used in science generally is undecidable, of that more later.

Returning to the scientific revolution we draw attention to some men, Galileo and Descartes and later Newton that revolutionized the very nature of scientific activity. They selected the concepts science should employ, redefined the goals of scientific activity, and altered the methodology of science. Their reformulation not only imparted unexpected and unprecedented power to science but also bound it indissolubly to mathematics. In fact, their plan practically reduced theoretical science to mathematics. To understand the spirit that animated mathematics from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, we must not only examine the scientific methodology as laid out by these prominent men – but also, more important, take a closer look on how they practiced the paradigm of science thus established.

Galileo, to begin with, dismissed the qualitative methodology of the scholastic thinkers and in Il Saggiatore (1627) he described the true methodology of the natural sciences. To liberate science from magic and pure personal speculations he proposed science should avoid the “why” questions and instead concentrate on pure description, i.e., to present “how” things happens. Empirical observation, mathematics and subsequent mathematical modelling were the correct methodology to use in science. We here observe the schema of observation/modelling - an apparently recursive procedure to construct a model of the phenomenon under consideration. After validation such a model was intended for use on later occasions when doing scientific prediction. The detached scientific observer become the ideal – the third person (external) observer – that could reflect on our presumed common reality from “outside” in order to construct a set of “truthful” models for its control. In this view the senses during observation works more or less like a camera’s objective – first the existence of a common unary pre-given reality was assumed and secondly this reality was believed to be more or less “truthfully” mapped onto the observer’s mind appearing in the “form” of a mind phenomenon.

Galileo was well aware that some of the properties “seen” were affected by the human senses and he spoke about the primary and secondary qualities – the latter he called the “qualities of senses” - but neither he or later realist generations has taken the trouble to explain how it could even be possible to make such a distinction. And from that day the very goal of physics become to describe the world as it

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really was, i.e., and in an “objective” way contrary to the way it appeared in individual human subjective experience. The “sense qualities” like colour, taste, smell and heat were to be omitted – they did not belong to the descriptive world of physics. Here it is very important to observe the sneaking and tacit reality postulate here imposed: There is a unary reality of things with properties that are independent of the individual observer. This postulate is in force in any realistic setting - openly declared or tacitly. (see e.g. Rorty 1980, Bunge 1977) Even Newton most insistently claiming that science should consistently avoid all unnecessary postulates did not recognize this dubious situation.

From another point of view already Kant (1781) claimed that das Ding an Sich, i.e., the thing-in-itself, is hidden to human knowledge. Accepting this Kantian thesis amounts to the belief that the reality postulation cannot possibly be falsified and for that reason it should be banned from the scene of science according to Popper’s falsification dictum - nevertheless Popper openly was a sworn realist (Eccles & Popper 1977).

Here, as a quite different angle of attack we meet with the very nucleus of the subject-oriented approach: It precautionary avoids5 the reality postulate – and come out in the other end with a new definition on objectivity - and of human consciousness as well. An obstacle, however is that this view also demands a revision of both the realistic conceptual framework and the “thing-languages” as used in today’s science – and require the scientists to use quite a different approach of thinking. The subject-oriented approach takes the stance of the observing subject – paying regard to the primacy of its privately collected knowledge. So does also Berkeley’s philosophy (1710) that in some respects are very similar to the subject-oriented approach – the latter does not make reference to any deity however.

To the layperson realism is only natural but we must ask what was the reason for applying the realist’s postulate in science? This was a pure reaction to the extensive speculations of scholasticism but unfortunately this postulate more or less poured out the baby with the water. In the lawful ambition to become “objective” the realistic science introduced a postulate that effectively shut out human intuition and feelings from the scene of science – and thereby also human consciousness. Schrödinger is very clear about this predicament of science:

We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective world ... I conclude that I myself also form part of this real material world around me. I so to speak put my own sentient self (which had constructed this world as a mental product) back into it - with the pandemonium of disastrous logical consequences that flow from the aforesaid chain of faulty conclusions (E.Schrödinger 1958, p.118)

Subjectivity became a word of abuse and a consciousness study was from then on impossible. Physics in the footsteps of Newton and followers, become the norm setter for all modern scientific activity, and thereby the exclusion of human feelings and intuition from the natural sciences even had a deeper aspects but the very absence of feelings – subjectivity and interest in feelings become the hallmark of non-science. The situation is even worse, as we shall see, because the very moment scientists introduced Nature or God as the key for extraction of some presumed truths - science was build upon the sand. Considering the terrible faith of Galileo’s career one comes to understand there was no other choice at that time however.

The ideal of Galileo as described above - the scientific mind and the mind of clarity – become the all-pervading ideal. Science should be performed from the “outside” by the thus detached and trained observer, which accordingly in a pure third person perspective described the phenomena of the pre-given world (reality) in a set of models (mathematical or verbal). These descriptions could later be approved or not and possibly modified by other scientists and thus purified from possible subjective elements. However today we understand that the process of observation is not fully that straightforward.

5 However this does not at all mean to reject the possibility of a common unary “outside” reality – opposite

to scientific realism this question is left open

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6. The predicament of classical science. In spite on its lawful occasions the banishment of intuition and human feelings from science

apparently was a blind alley. The support to such claim is given from the fact that a detached observer can neither build a science nor describe its phenomena completely and consistently. The reason is that there are in this celebrated “outside” position numerous phenomena inaccessible to him. Such a science, i.e., the classical science is perfectly unable to answer the obtrusive questions concerning human nature simply because it leaves human consciousness, feelings, emotions and drives aside. Schrödinger concludes this is a high price to pay:

..the two most blatant antinomies due to pure awareness of the fact that a moderately satisfying picture of the world has only been reached at the high price of taking ourselves out of the picture, stepping back into the role of a non-concerned observer. The first of these antinomies is the astonishment at finding pure world picture ‘colourless, cold, mute'. Colour and sound, hot and cold are our immediate sensations; small wonder that they are lacking in a world model from which we have removed our own mental person.(E.Schrödinger, 1958 p.119)

But even to physics and mathematics this voluntary detached position has meant inadequacy as most prominently showed by Bell and Gödel’s theorems. The latter showed that Hilbert’s formalist programme was infeasible and Bell’s that quantum physics very likely is incompatible with the ideas of scientific realism. The latter is no great surprise is no surprise it is quite easy to understand that observations at the quantum level where the object of observation is influenced by observation. The enforced observer-observed distinction cannot possible be valid in this situation and in fact any detached observer are unable to correctly describe the phenomena at the quantum level. But even at the classical level he is unable to describe his own universe, since an observer cannot possibly be “outside” his own universe - neither can he completely and consistently describe any other “outside” phenomenon without taking for granted that the observations of the phenomenon studied are observer-independent. Such an assumption is maybe a mean of approximation, and unless he is willing to include traits of the individual observer in the model of the portrayed phenomenon he is forced to such an approximation. This is a rather risky assumption – for not to say improbable - and Schrödinger agrees:

Without being aware of it and without being rigorously systematic about it, we exclude the Subject of Cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand. We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective world. (E.Schrödinger, 1958 p.118)

An observer-dependent world must by necessity be described by models that also include the traits of the observer in question – and in science we are not at all used to this type of models. Today we understand the process of observation is not mind-independent, the evidence collected here by the cognitive sciences is massive. But then how come we still use models that have no explicit reference to the observer? We begin to understand they are only partial and approximate, and mainly fulfil the demands of the non-living phenomena met with in physics. We must remember that physicists – for the use in physics - introduced the decree of scientific objectivity and that this approximation works fairly well there - at least outside the realm of quantum physics.

To Descartes the essence of science was mathematics – the “objective world is space solidified or geometry” and his mechanistic philosophy extended even to the functioning of the human body – the solid bodies and space were extended – but not God, and the human soul - and we here find the root of Cartesian dualism. Damasio insists this amounts to a misunderstanding of the biological evolution:

At some point in evolution, an elementary consciousness began. With that elementary consciousness came a simple mind; with greater complexity of mind came the possibility of thinking and, even later, of using language to communicate and organize thinking better. For us then, in the beginning it was being, and only later was it thinking. p.248)

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This is not fair at all to Descartes. His intentions were not to explain the biological evolution but rather to find a stable foundation of the science in becoming using his “method of doubt”. By the definition of a mental domain “Cognito ergo sum”(I think, therefore I am) it is possible to define the existence of our private knowledge – which is nothing else but our Self – the embodied mind. As a matter of fact this approach contains the seed of the subject-oriented approach but at a later stage he undeniably separated the human body from its mind in a concession to the mechanistic thinking of his time – and this was a mistake as Damasio rightfully points out. However, this was the right thing to do in an age of dawning objectivity. Without this capricious body/mind separation that came at a rather late stage of the Meditations (1641) Descartes had possibly been able to develop the immaterialist’s ideas presented by Berkeley almost hundred years later. Also Damasio, in spite of being a realist, guided by life-long performance and intuition suggests a lapse from the classical path of “objectivity” and recommends a close connection between body and mind to allow for the workings of feelings in human reason and science:

The lower levels in the neural edifice of reason are the same ones that regulate the processing of emotions and feelings, along with the body functions necessary for an organism's survival. In turn, these lower levels maintain direct and mutual relationships with virtually every bodily organ, thus placing the body directly within the chain of operations that generate the highest reaches of reasoning, decision making, and, by extension, social behavior and creativity Emotion, feeling, and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. The lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of high reason. p.XV

Thus contributing to the scientific revolution Descartes did not grant the wisdom of Galileo's reliance upon experimentation – he rather claimed the “clear and distinct” ideas, i.e., that human intuition should provide the basis of science. The Greeks, the medieval scientist and even Descartes believed that the mind should supply the basic principles. The facts of the senses, Descartes said, can only lead to delusion, but reason penetrates such delusions. From the innate general principles supplied by the mind, we can deduce particular phenomena of nature and understand them and it was in the quest for such principles Descartes found the “clear and distinct” idea “Cognito, ergo sum” he believed nobody could doubt.

As a contrast for Galileo the first principles come from experience and experimentation: “when we have the decree of nature, authority goes for nothing” – thereby banning human feelings and intuitions clearly levelling the ground for the detached observer. The monumental works of Newton – heavily backed up by Locke - involved the decisive step in this direction. Descartes’ call for human intuition went unnoticed – at least on the surface.

We must conclude, however, that in spite of the frequent declarations and precautions undertaken science did not become “objective” by the bare denial of human feelings – nothing the least. Not even the called upon third person perspective could have been helpful in that respect – at least not for an observer equipped with an adaptive brain. Instead now the intuitions and the personal feelings guiding leading scientists could now in principle run freely rampant behind the curtains of scientific “objectivity” – since not even the great scientists were faithful to the classical paradigm as spelled out. Luckily - we hasten to declare – since this is probably the main reason of the outstanding success of the natural sciences. The great scientists rescued science and mankind by lying stress on intuition and ingenious creativity – disobedient to the rules of “strict objectivity” they themselves stated. The eventual idle imaginings emerging were washed away in the discussions and subsequent consensual discourse of science – however the bright lodestar was their own personal feelings and scientific intuition. The astonishing successes of classical science and the enormous impetus to creative work that it derived from that source probably would not have come about if science faithfully had accepted the Galilean ideal as spelled out.

Concealed and surprising we here find that human intuition and feelings were never aborted from scientific as practiced even at the time of the scientific revolution. Galileo spelled out the rules of an “objective science” but as a matter of fact he did not follow the rules himself. He, and Newton fifty years later, believed that a few key or critical experiments would be enough to yield correct fundamental principles. Moreover, many of Galileo's so-called experiments were really thought-experiments; that is, he relied upon common experience to imagine what would happen if an experiment were performed. He then drew a conclusion as confidently as if he had actually performed

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the experiment. He says in fact that he experimented rarely, and then primarily to refute those who did not follow the mathematics. Though Newton performed some famous and ingenious experiments, he too says: “I use experiments to make my results physically intelligible and to convince the common people.”

For Galileo, as well as for Huygens and Newton, the mathematical part of the scientific enterprise played a greater part than the experimental. Evidently the men who fashioned modern science approached the study of nature as mathematicians, in their general method and in their concrete investigations. They were primarily speculative thinkers who expected to apprehend broad, deep and immutable mathematical principles either through intuition or through crucial observations and experiments, and then to inferred new laws from these fundamental “truths” of mathematics.

What the great thinkers of the seventeenth century envisaged as the proper procedure for science did indeed prove to be the profitable course. The search for laws of nature produced, at the time of Newton, extremely valuable results – however on the grounds of tiny experimental knowledge. Instead intuition and the brilliance of imagination were the guiding principles. In their deed they were pronounced subjectivist’s establishing the principles of an “objective” natural science – deeply influenced by mathematics and at he same time heavily guided by their feelings and scientific intuition. The lack of this insight is the very predicament of classical science – and this insight will refresh the tarnished reputation of Descartes, who most of all is blamed of the introduction of Cartesian dualism.

7. Different world views: We now leave the history of science behind and in this section the ontological assumptions behind

the realist’s doctrine are introduced. On all fronts, debate between realists and their anti-realist opponents is still very much open and the very issue is as explicated by Schrödinger (1958) “two general principles that form the basis of the scientific method, the principle of the understandability of nature, and the principle of objectivation” - but he very carefully pointed out – as if he were hesitant – that he only is a presenter of the established rules in charge:

some people seemed to think that my intention was to lay down the fundamental principles which ought to be at the basis of scientific method or at least ‘which justly and rightly are at the basis of science and ought to be kept at all cost.’ Far from this, I only maintained and maintain that they are - and, by the way, as an inheritance from the ancient Greeks, from whom all our Western science and scientific thought has originated. (E.Schrödinger, 1958 p.117)

The “understandability of nature” as stated above tacitly implies the postulate that “nature is pre-given”. To apply the “principle of objectivation” to human observation, on the other hand, is the realists vainly attempt to make the skilled human observer “objective” (non-subjective) i.e., a principle stating that the extraction of observer-independent knowledge is possible. So what Schrödinger discusses above is in principle the fundamental postulates of the realist’s doctrine: the pre-given reality (or at least its “furniture”) is the legitimate object of observer-independent (scientific) observations. Formulated in this way the realist’s doctrine in an involved way also depends on the notion of truth that on a closer inspection turns out to be very paradoxical. And this is not enough! We will soon recognize that the postulates of the realist’s doctrine indeed are very daring - in spite of their obviousness. Maybe we straightforwardly are ready to accept the thesis that “the world is pre-given”- but “observer-independent” seems, on the other hand, very presumptuous – and today we have collected enough evidence to suggest that this idea is not even plausible.

The branch of philosophy of science that deals with modelling the existence of things in the presumed real world is ontology (or metaphysics). Modern metaphysics is aimed at accomplish clarity of thought by a careful study of its concepts and that scientific research proceeds on a number of metaphysical hypothesis. The following list of ontological principles occurring in scientific research (Bunge, 1977) must suffice here:

There is a world external to the cognitive subject. If there were no such world it would not be subject to scientific inquiry. Rather we would resort to introspection or to pure mathematics instead of attempting to discover the unknown beyond the self.

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The world is composed of things. Consequently the sciences of reality (natural or social) study things, their properties and changes. If there were real objects other than things it would be impossible to act upon them with the help of other things.

We here once more recognize the postulation of an ontologically pre-given world composed of things as the subject to scientific inquiry. To do science means to convert such metaphysical base assumptions into structures that can be conveniently handled in some modelling environment for the production (computation) of useful predictions. E.g. Bunge starts by simplifying physical matter and one of his maxims enjoins to hypothesize unobservables in order to account for appearances. He strips the real things of all their properties and what remains is the qualitatively indeterminate particular, the bare individual, that are endowed with the capacity of associating, i.e. of forming composite entities. The association of bare individuals is then a beginning of complexity and thus a step towards realism. A fully qualitied individual, if substantial or concrete, is called a thing and a complex thing with coupled components is termed a system. This is how Bunge tackles the basic problem of traditional metaphysics i.e., that of substance and attribute. By these steps he explicates the classical physicist’s realist approach.

It is also natural to turn to an ontological view in the context of philosophy of science to seek a formal base for the notation of model. In part this could be done by a study of various aspects of language use. Signification and representation are the key concepts in such endeavours and the physicist most often use the language of mathematics modelling the phenomenon met with. In that respect computer scientists is slightly different inasmuch they mainly rely on computation, simulation and experiments with computational universes. When it come to metaphysics or the social sciences the application of different theories of meaning are used to extract the essences of verbal statement that are assigned truth values on such interpretations. Thus truth evaluation is essential and part of the realist’s doctrine as already indicated by the earlier citation of van Fraassen.

Given this background we will in this section scrutinize the realist’s doctrine and its supportive framework and in the same vein we clarify the very question posed in this paper:

• Is it rational, then, to behove that in science we are approaching some presumed truth about a

pre-given external world – or even to assume the “thingy furniture” of such a world to exist?

And in the case we can accept such an existence we may further also ask: • Is it rational, then, to presume that the observation of these things (existences) is in some sense

can be considered “observer-independent?”

If we are able to reject either the “pre-given-ness” of reality or the “observer-independency” of observation, we are also able to reject the realist’s doctrine. For this reason we in this paper concentrate on the question of the eventual “pre-given-ness” of reality and postpone the question about the extraordinary feature of “transparency” or “conformity” attributed to the human brain namely its “observer-independency” until later.

What we here aim at is discussing realism and the realist’s doctrine and its relation to empiricism but such a distinction is unclear since they all come in different shades, e.g. naïve, critical, methodological realism versus instrumentalism, idealism or constructivism et cetera. To try to clear-cut the discussions we will disregard the many varieties and instead we discuss the objectivist’s versus the subjectivist’s approach - or in my terms the object oriented approach versus the subject-oriented approach to human knowledge. Also this distinction fall back on the conceptual cut that has divided human thinking into two different realms – res extensa and res cogitans, i.e., the furniture of the world or the ontological things per se, and the knowledge of them, i.e., the epistemological aspects of these presumed things.

However it is very important to remember that the very same moment we start questioning the reality of the worldly things we must not fall in the same trap as Descartes did – and most realists do: We cannot hypothesize “extension” neither to the “observer-subject” nor to the “thing-objects” under consideration – we must leave this question open and until further notice consider them in the abstract. By such a move the classical Cartesian cut and the subject/object distinction will coincide – that also make the link to the “thing-oriented” human language much more easy to handle. There are

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also strong reasons to point out that the transition to “subject-oriented thinking” is not easy at all – since we must totally liberate our minds from the classical idea that “something can exist (determinately) outside the mind.” We must understand – and have fully clear - that the very moment we (accidentally or not) place an entity “outside” the mind – we make it pre-given (!) By doing so we have in fact accepted the realist’s doctrine with its accompanying dualistic viewpoint. We here also note that whether the object in question is “observer-independent” or not does not at all affect the present situation.

The beliefs in the prevailing object-oriented approach, as mentioned, tacitly rests on – the existence of a ”real world out there”. However there is more to it but existence, because in order to build knowledge about the world “out there” a living being must assume this world to be stable in some respect – thus we have to attribute some degree of permanency to our environment in order to build a useful knowledge base and a platform of intersubjective communication. Thus we assume today’s Eiffel tower is also tomorrows Eiffel tower both in its appearance and meaning. This presumed world is accordingly supposed to be both ”consensual”(to avoid the ambiguous term “objective”) - and sometimes also in another sense ”real”. But the dichotomic subject/object relationship must not be confused neither with the relationship real/imaginary nor the material/nonmaterial. To avoid reference the latter rather uncertain dichotomies the classical approach is preferably called the “object-oriented approach” rather than the realist’s approach.

As a contrast the subject-oriented approach is more straightforward and in this case the obvious base of knowledge is our personal conscious experience. Here the problems start to build up when we try to share our raw subjective knowledge with other fellow beings. In fact we do not even have to consider interpersonal communication to understand what problems the occurrence of e.g. a hallucination means to the thinking subjects ability to predict its own coming actions and adapt to its changing environment. This approach supports the thesis the “world” is mainly a construct in and of the human mind – and moreover a privately constructed universe – a priverse. This is accordingly the antithesis of realism – that unchains from both pre-given-ness and observer-independence. The standpoint from which constructivism takes off is called subjectivism but since subjectivity has become such a loaded word it is preferred to speak about the object oriented approach (realist) and the subject oriented approach (constructivist) to knowledge instead.

8. Is the world real? The dispute as discussed is quite straightforward: Either we take the “things of the world” for PRE-

GIVEN and try to capture its features by using the “thing languages” we have at our disposal. In this formulation this is clearly a process of discovering a pre-given world – that as well must be considered unary when aiming at scientific objectivity. Otherwise it is NOT PRE-GIVEN, i.e., it is constructed out of our collected knowledge (of it) – constructivism - and in this case the final result cannot possibly be considered unary.

Part of the problem with realist/anti-realist debate is that the reality conception rests on the unclear and floating real/unreal dichotomy that as such give rise to a whole chain of questionable dichotomies: material/non-material, real/dream, real/illusion, concrete/abstract, touchable/untouchable and so on. Some hundred years ago the sense of touch was able guide the scientists in such decisions – however this criterion of touchable is not relevant any longer. It is surprising that the science of physics, that obviously has taken such a pride in the logic of thinking and the rationality of man, has not paid more attention to the crucial and decisive question of what counts as real. Since a decision in favour of realism or against it certainly makes a profound difference to our conception of the world the crucial question here is: By what means do we have to arrive at a decision?

When stating: “Reality is real” we first of all we need a decision procedure that can output yes/no as an answer to this question. Such a procedure can be housed in a computer or, as most often, in a human mind. Classically such a procedure is considered to have a binary outcome Y/N – in which case the statement is called a proposition – the truth-value of which can be calculated by prepositional calculus. However such a specified procedure can fail to produce any output and we then say the question is undecidable and then the output domain is considered at least ternary Y/N/U. In general it is impossible to know in beforehand whether a decision procedure comes to a halt or not, i.e., are able to produce a decision Y or N – which is the essence of Turing’s halting problem. In some cases, however, it is possible to predict that the procedure under consideration will “hang”; in which case we

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symbolically say it produces U as an output. For instance when a procedure lacks of a criterion of halting it will “loop forever” - a situation pretty well known to a computer programmer. The same situation applies here when we have no accepted definition on the “real” conception. The question “Is reality real?” or even the more general one: ”Is X real?” is undecidable accordingly – which of course is the very reason of its protractedness of these veritable pseudo-discussions.

Against this background we must ask why science has not come up with a sound definition of “real” – a concept that is so essential and central in the realist’s conceptual framework and such a demonstrative property included in the physicist’s worldview. We understand we for that reason have to avoid all the dubious dichotomies making reference to the unspecified “real/unreal” distinction and this fact make Descartes´ nightmare true: “We cannot possibly convince ourselves we are not always dreaming” – and this understanding is delayed simply because we as scientists has refused to define the “real” conception.

For an object to be “real” in the sense of “touchable” an observer-independent existence (in the form of its “outside-ness”) was required at the time of the scientific revolution. The scientist’s inner organs were “touchable” in the sense he could touch somebody else’s organs during dissection for instance. There are today however several phenomena that are considered to “have an existence of their own” without being touchable e.g. atoms, genes, light rays, quanta, phonons etc. The strategy of expanding the “real” domain to compromise more and more phenomena has been the questionable strategy to keep physics the science of the “real” phenomena – as opposite to abstract ones of mathematics for instance. This hesitation has resulted in the impossibility of obtaining an answer to the very common question “Are the objects of physics real?”– in spite of the manifold and vainly attempts throughout the years. However if there is an answer to this question this has to be provided at a metalevel of physics, i.e., in metaphysics in its very literal sense – using a language evaluating the statements of physics. We readily agree with Dummett (1991): ”We are swimming in deep waters of metaphysics. How can we attain the shore?”

The question “Is X real?” is by way of lack of definition in principle undecidable (and should for that reason not even be posed). We are here rather directed to attack the belief system itself, i.e., the realist’s doctrine and our task is to come in the position that we on a consensual basis unanimously can accept or reject the realist’s doctrine. This for the simple reason the Quine/Duhem thesis prevents us from rejecting a single statement or some other part of it – for instance the truth conception. Instead let us question its very fundament – the doctrine statement that most often boils down to: “The pre-given reality is observer-independent” and we must be clear about that doctrine statement is an expression in a modelling framework – a verbal model - or a statement in language-game using the terminology of Wittgenstein.

However we are not better off attacking the doctrine statement since as Dummett correctly points out: “No observation of ordinary physical objects or processes will tell us whether they exist independently of our observation of them.” For obvious reasons neither the sense of touch nor any other sensation can guide us in answering such a question – that is to say the science of physics that relies entirely on observation (measurement) cannot here possibly provide an answer. Neither can any other human observer caught in classical thinking (this remark is important!) and from that standpoint also the question of “observer-independency” seems undecidable and the realist’s doctrine as a whole. In that case we maybe can opt to accept the realist’s doctrine as a matter of social decision? Rorty (1980)

Unfortunately such a social declaration will leave us very frustrated – and the reason is obvious: The test as proposed above is blindfolded by the tacit acceptance of the realist’s doctrine. We are certainly in need of better arguments before we are ready to accept or reject the realist’s doctrine. To stay clear of realism and its restricting doctrine we must as the very first step contemplate the ‘furniture of the world’ in the abstract.

Then we are, in order to avoid the useless real/unreal distinction used above, in a position to reformulate the undecidable question “Is X real?” into its opposite: “Is X non-real?” and provisionally specify an anti-realists doctrine6 by simply negating the realist’s doctrine. “Reality is NOT [pre-given AND observer-independent]” which in any logic evaluates to “Reality is NOT pre-given OR observer-dependent”. This proposition evaluates to true when the proposition “Reality is NOT pre-given” is true

6 in an anti-realistic framework we can also give place for a three-valued logic

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no matter the outcome of the “observer-dependent” question and we once more recognize we can sidestep this very question. We specify, as well, that the anti-realist doctrine, for the reasons mentioned above, must avoid to establish a real/unreal distinction – and therefore the essence in this anti-realist’s doctrine is the denial of it. To be an anti-realist is to deny the usefulness of the real/unreal distinction in all its shades – and in consequence we cannot seek the answers to such questions.

9. Is the world pre-given? Instead we seek an answer to the “pre-given” question: “Is reality something prior to man?” or even

“Is there a phenomenon X in the environment of man prior to his own existence?” In short we discuss the eventual “prior-to-man-validity” and the meaning of the statement “X is”. The answer “yes” here seems very reasonable – but we nevertheless understand such a conclusion is not deductible valid in the realist’s belief system. The reason, as mentioned, is that neither the sense of touch nor any other sensation can guide him in answering such a question. Nevertheless the answer “yes” here seems so obvious for the simple reason ‘no sane human doubts that man entered the scene of evolution at a rather late stage.’ The affirmative answer here seems so self-evident and we will see this self-evidence has fooled mankind for thousands of years.

Notably we are here not discussing some abstract and possibly “hidden” existentials of the world. Instead we are discussing the verbal model “X is” because this is all we have to discuss. The model “X is” can be mental or propositional – in the first case it is a private model (a judgement) and as a thinker I can discuss this model “inside myself”. However as a private person I can never on my own find out whether “X is prior to man” or even “prior to my existence.” Of course I could try with some “outside” help and ask my ancestors. However there could be some factor in the evolution of man that make both me and my ancestors the victims of a common delusion – and we will see this is actually the case. In conclusion I cannot possibly convince myself that this question has an affirmative answer. Once more we might think that also the question “Is X prior to man?” undecidable – on a private basis. Since the same reasoning applies to every other human being a consensual science must come to the very same decision: The very statement “X is prior to man?” (the verbal model) is undecidable – which amounts to say that also the question ”is X pre-given?“ is undecidable. Given this answer we once more ask if it is feasible to accept the realist’s doctrine as a matter of social decision?

The answer “yes” is correct provided such a decision does not violate some other basic scientific principles. However it does – since both Occam’s razor and Newton’s dictum of the avoidance of unnecessary postulates in science prevent us from taking such a social decision. And here we find the very problem that lies at bottom of modern science. We cannot make such a social decision and at the same time keep up consistence for the simple reason it is possible to build a science without using the mentioned “pre-given” postulation. This is fairly easy to show (Kjellman 1999) and this can be done by using a subject-oriented approach that incorporates the anti-realist’s doctrine. Due to space limitations, however, we must refrain from this here. We here just establish that this is one important and compelling reason to accept the anti-realist’s doctrine from a scientific point of view and another weighty reason will be given now.

Let me along this line sketch how is it possible to build a science on the assumption that “X was NOT prior to man” and, at first sight, even more astounding “X was NOT prior to me”? Actually all we have to do is to wake up from the lengthy ontological “blind flying of mankind” presuming that X is an ontic object basically and instead realize that X must be considered to have both ontic and epistemic aspects. Then all the pieces fall on their places. We conclude X was not prior to me because I had no knowledge of X until the first time I met with the impression I to name by the sign ‘X’ – the epistemic object. On this ground we must accept that the “epistemic object marked by X” – the mental impression – certainly was not prior to me and in consequence NOT PRE-GIVEN. What eventually was pre-given at this point of time is its ontic aspects, however these are hidden to both me and the rest of mankind, for the simple reason these aspects coincide with the aspects of Kant’s famous “thing-in-itself”. And when the ontic aspects are hidden the sign ‘X’ cannot possibly point at them, and the meaning of X cannot possibly be connected to the ontic aspects of X as traditionally envisioned.

If somebody is uncertain at this point we claim the question if the ontic aspects of the object X are hidden or not has very little importance to science the very moment we realize that we use only the epistemic aspects of X for the sake of prediction, description and understanding. What are left then

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for human scientific discourse to handle are the epistemic aspects of X – the impression (and its features) as appearing in the human mind. This is a very strong reason, for not to say compelling as pointed out above, to accept the provisional anti-realist’s doctrine. “X is NOT pre-given” and also the variant “(the knowledge of) reality is NOT pre-given” now portrays a useful state of affairs – and is true in that sense.

Of course it is not very surprising we have been able to show the phenomena of mind to be non-real, however this is clearly not the point. We have rather shown that if science insists on using the real/non-real distinction then all human knowledge must be considered non-real and the “reality phenomenon” must be considered my collected knowledge – my private universe or PRIVERSE. What else there is beside this knowledge is plain guesswork. The physical/mental domain, which is classically divided, conflates into a single monistic non-real domain. Ontology vanishes - the domain of traditional ontology becomes another name for epistemology. In that view the private perceptually evidenced reality we are “surrounded by” is a plain allusion – sort of a private instrument panel of living.

We attain the same result when we eventually wipe away as useless the real/unreal distinction. Then we must accept the answer “the world is as it is” (i.e., unknowable) and understand that reality is but part of our knowledge housed in mind’s memory - a non-extended allusion – very much like a stable dream. Under these conditions the proposition “reality is pre-given” is clearly false and for that reason we cannot liken the “real” with the “pre-given.” As a matter of fact even the troublesome dichotomy true/false is useless under the anti-realist doctrine (e.g. see Rorty 1982) – but this is a question to be treated elsewhere.

A strict use of the subject-oriented approach shows that the assumption of a pre-given reality that lies at the bottom of the realist’s doctrine is misleading and must for that reason be abandoned. We have since the dawn of science taken the “worldly thing” for given and the mind’s impression for its model. However due to the feedback paths of human brain we cannot possibly reconstruct the “worldly things” outgoing from their models (the mind impressions) – in consequence the pre-given-ness of reality is a misconception as are the possibility of attaining scientific objectivity through perception.

The subject-oriented approach promotes the acceptance of the anti-realist doctrine and this is the only choice left unless we are not willing to endure in a dreadful state of unscientific undecidability. Here we find another reason to abandon the classical object-oriented approach, beside the before mentioned wish to incorporate intuition, feelings and emotions in the picture of science.

We have now in hand a new interpretation that reveals the “hidden” and misunderstood feature of the declared “pre-given ness” included in the realist’s doctrine – nothing “outside” the human mind can be considered to be “pre-given” at time of the birth of the epistemic mind. For this reason we conclude the statement “X is pre-given” is misleading and therefore useless. This very intuition now appears “clear and distinct” in the sense declared by Descartes – and can therefore be approved consensual. This amounts to say that also the propositional model: “X is pre-given AND observer-independent” supporting the realist’s doctrine also is misleading and useless – and we are now finally in the position that we on a consensual basis unanimously can reject the realist’s doctrine and in the same move the traditional object-oriented approach to knowledge. We are left with one remaining alternative only – the subject-oriented approach to knowledge.

The human priverse is a private phenomenon. However we note that whether this new bulk of subject-oriented knowledge is as well “observer-independent” or not, has no bearing on the decided acceptance of the anti-realist doctrine. We are therefore licensed to leave the question of “observer-independency” in this paper – with the simple remark it is now fairly simple to figure out the answer to this question.

We now also understand why science was able to proceed so well without a clear definition on the real conception – the discussion above reveals that science in fact has very little use of a clear-cut real/unreal distinction. On the conceptual level, as a matter of fact such a distinction is perfectly unnecessary and confusing. In this approach there is just one domain of knowledge – the phenomenal domain. In that view also human perception reduces to pure introspection. All impressions can be treated on the same level – the level of human feelings. When we aim at an answer in terms of real/unreal - the essence-question as once formulated by Aristotle - we find it undecidable. However scientific rigor should in future prevent us from the use of this uncertain distinction.

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The subject-oriented approach shows that the phenomenal impression to be treated as primary and the “thing of reality” reduces to a projective mapping only – an allusion. Thereby also the idea of a “pre-given reality” vanishes and in the same step one of the basic tenets of physics: The possibility to perform some truth evaluation by observation. The subject-oriented approach is a monistic view making use of one mental domain only – and here the phenomenal categories are attributed “properties” for classification purposes only. We simply group living experience in classes (types) for the sake of communication and in order to minimize memory – and the “attribute slots” of these type schemata are filled with values the very moment we perceive, measure or fancy a specified phenomenon.

10. The support from quantum physics The acceptance of the anti-realist’s doctrine also captures the essence of Bohr's, Wheeler's and

Heisenberg's interpretations of modern quantum physics, i.e., that we cannot speak about a state or property until the observation (measurement) in question is actually performed – i.e., is part of our knowledge. Von Neumann once also extended this interpretation by suggesting that a measurement process (observation) only occurs in the mind, thus giving consciousness an independent role in this process of construction. This suggestion is also in perfect agreement with the subject-oriented interpretation – and the need for the famous “collapse of the wave function” vanishes – or at least reduces to a spectacular metaphor.

The wave function of quantum mechanics is under the subject-oriented approach plainly a model in the mind of the scientific researcher that is outward projected onto a constructed “hypothetical reality” in the form of a spatial prediction pattern once the circumstances around a planned scientific experiment is known. There is no need to introduce some mysterious “collapse” at all just because the wave function is plainly the calculating aid used by a well-educated scientific mind. So it is - unless we prefer to call all measurements for a “collapse of the object measured.” The constructivist have no use for a such saying because he is living in a single (monistic) knowledge domain. All there is – is the living’s phenomenal priverse giving rise to “colourful impressions” triggered by some unknowable “clues from outside” (as seen from the traditional realistic point of view). These “colourful impressions” are instantly “projected outwards” at the “place of the reality-object.” The latter is simply the method of human vision to “code the distance” between the mind and the allusive object.

The objects of knowledge (i.e., the knowable objects and their features) can be found in a human mind only and are there stripped off from all ontological features. Their perceptual confirmation (the allusion) on the other hand is outward projected onto a hypothetical domain that we normally name reality – or the environment. This very idea in the same vein discredits the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction hypothesis. The appearance of an object – the phenomenon lies clear for analysis in the percept and this is all there is. We cannot speak about contraction for the simple reason the reference made to an “objective” object is faulty. Inside/outside comparisons are as faulty as true/false declarations because we lack the reference for such doings. For the simple reason that knowledge rises in a mind (and assisted by a mind) only the ontic aspects of the object cannot be part of human knowledge. The “out-there-ness” is a plain allusion and only part of a private and mind-internal human language (i.e., a modelling framework) sometimes referred to as “mentalese.”

What are the features of Kant’s famous “thing-in-itself”? The thing as seen from the point of view of itself? What is that supposed to mean? Maybe in the God’s Eye view7 or the Objective Man’s view? Does not these two views in a sense coincide? What perceptual apparatus is then in charge? No one at all? Since every human model is explicated in terms of human feelings we cannot even figure out what such saying could possibly mean. The impressions we have access to are the impressions of our private minds, i.e., the “clues from outside” as processed by our perceptual apparatus. What part come from that “outside” and what come from the “theory-laden” perceptual apparatus cannot possibly be reconstructed because of the conceptual feed-back. This is why the “thing-in-my-view” is the only knowledge there is (in a mind) – what else there is we cannot make models of or in the word’s of Wittgenstein we cannot speak of – and accordingly do not understand. This is also why it is a mistake to take an inside/outside (or ontological/epistemological) distinction as postulate of science.

7 An expression used by Putnam 1981

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We learn by experience how to establish such a distinction and the use of this distinction is to classify the entities of or our knowledge, i.e., an epistemic-inside distinction.

What the “thing” is to anybody else, or to itself, is always hidden (unknowable) and this we cannot speak and for that reason the world has to be constructed from “inside” to “out”, which is to say that the mind’s phenomenon must “project onto the thing” - there is simply no other way around. We understand the idea of “objectivity” as something like the God’s Eye view or the clue to some eternal truth is a confusion. The “objective” mind is the consensual mind – a mind that by careful training and learning has adopted to the paradigm (norms) of its social group – even if this is a group of scientists. This is the essence of Kuhn’s writings – but he fails to point out that there is no other option. The adaptive brain is fit for a changing enviroment a classical fixed type of lense-perception would simply be disastrous in this situation. Evolution has made the choice for us – it favoured adaption and flexibility and ignored man’s confused pursuit of truth. After all this pursuit is just a reminiscence of the search for a God – but once we accept the subject-oriented approach we will find a God in ourselves, which opens up the individual possibility to each human being to make him good or evil – perhaps generous or greedy – all in parity with your own qualities.

11. Conclusions: In the classical paradigm of science one take for granted that the detached observer with its ordered

third person view is a scientist able to deliver descriptions liberated from all subjective elements - at least so after a process of “purification” carried out by means of a scientific debate. A citation from “What is Science” by A.F. Chalmers (1978) summarizes a widely held common-sense view of science:

Scientific knowledge is proven knowledge. Scientific theories are derived in some rigorous way from the facts of experience acquired by observation and experiment. Science is based on what we can see and hear and touch, etc. Personal opinion or preferences and speculative imaginings have no place in science. Science is objective. Scientific knowledge is reliable knowledge because it is objectively proven knowledge. I suggest that statements of the foregoing kind sum up what in modern times is a popular view of the kind of thing that scientific knowledge is.(Chalmers, 1978, p.1)

The object-oriented approach and these beliefs taken together compiles into the Lakatosian “hard

core” of the realist’s doctrine, in which the paradoxical truth conception plays a central and confusing role.

The predicament of this classical science, however, is that the “detached” observer thereby is shut off from the feelings provoked by the object of observation, which is a serious obstacle in the living and social sciences. The “objective” (non-subjective) observer become deliberately shut off from his/her own feelings – which altogether have resulted in a science that is totally unable to take human intuition, feeling and emotions under consideration. A science that was unable to account for human feelings and therefore deliberately left out the most important factor affecting human decisions.

One may think this situation could be more acceptable in the science of physics. This is not so, however, because the paradoxical truth conception penetrates the use of the common thing-oriented natural languages of man, which is the meta-language used discussing (meta)physics – or any other branch of science as well. Even at the classical level the physicist is unable to describe his own universe, since he as an observer cannot possibly be “outside” his own universe - neither can he completely and consistently describe any other “outside” phenomenon without taking for granted that the observations of the phenomenon studied are observer-independent. However this situation is not at hand as clearly shown by the modern cognitive sciences. Neither are observations at the quantum level observer-independent since the probing “light-quanta” influences the objects of observation. This has always been the situation in the social sciences, however, where the object of observation is highly influenced by the observer and the observations made. We now understand the classical paradigm was not fit for use in the social domain even by the time of its introduction.

So the success of science is not due to the soundness of its methodology but rather to the brilliance of its scientists that tacitly put their trust on intuition, feelings and experience and succeeded to develop a useful science in spite of misleading assumptions. In this situation we must also remember that the notion “success of science” a very relative notion. We can rightfully prize ourselves by landing a man on the moon but in this situation, however, we often tend to forget that we have no idea how to prevent the devastating conflicts ravaging the world.

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The path we have followed was to challenge the classical paradigm is to question the “real” conception and since we could not attack the very conception we rather concentrated on the realist's doctrine. Our first step was to show that even if the acceptance of this doctrine were undecidable – which is the commonest opinion – a social decision to accept the doctrine would be unscientific.

The cure was to step out of the realist’s doctrine and in doing so we also managed to reject this very doctrine on the grounds that even if the things of world are ontologically given this situation is not at hand for their epistemological aspects – the knowledge of these presumed “things.” By rejecting the “pre-given” core assumption of realism we are able to reject the realist’s doctrine with its accompanying principle of bivalence and celebrated truth/false distinction. Since the object-oriented approach is in the core of the realist’s doctrine and we are also able to reject this approach in favour of the only alternative left – the subject-oriented approach to knowledge. For several reasons this approach is the cure for the problems met with: 1) it avoids the classical “pre-given” postulation 2) it allows for observer-dependent observation 3) it stays clear from the confused use of social truth decisions at different levels in common use in the Newtonian paradigm.

Accepting the subject-oriented approach also means to legitimate and prescribe the first person view for scientific use and thereby we remove the classical banishment of intuition, feelings and emotions. The curse of Cartesian dualism is forever dispatched and in a sense we are able to define a pure “introspective science” where among other achievements the door will open wide for a science of consciousness.

The subject-oriented approach here offers the possibility of a unified research program by providing: a) a set of well-formulated basic assumptions – “core assumptions” b) clear guidance for future research c) the ability to deliver a coherent overall story bridging the chasm between the humanities and natural sciences. R. Carnap (1928) once embarked on this project inspired by B. Russell (1917) but this is not the place to revive this issue.

Suggesting such a radical reorientation one might ask what will happens to science. The concept of truth will radically change for the better and alongside with it the rules of logic. Science will lose its “obsession of objectivity”; all decisions will reduce to consensual agreements where the natural and social sciences conflate. Measurements, perceptual impressions, inner feelings and thinking become nothing more than subjective facts to be treated at the same level of human experience — it is just the choice of concepts, tools and measuring sticks that makes the difference.

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Kjellman, A., (1999) “The Subject Oriented Approach to Science and the Role of Consciousness” at the 1st Int. Conf. on Sociocybernetics in Colimbari, Crete. [2001] (2001) Revised in “Directions in Sociocybernetics”, (ed. Lee R.E.), International Review of Sociology, Special Issue, in progress. Putnam H. (1981) Reason, Truth, and History, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Quine, W.V.O. (1990) Pursuit of Truth, Cambridge MA and London England: Harvard Univ. Press. Rorty, R. (1982) Consequences of Pragmatism, Univ. Of Minnesota Press. Rorty, R. (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton University Press. Russel, B., (1914) “The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics”, Scientia. Also in [1917] Russel, B., (1917) Mysticism and Logic, and Other Essays, London. Rössler, O.E. (1987) “Endophysics”, In: Real Brains, Artificial Minds. Ed. by J.L. Casti and A. Karlqvist, North Holland, New York. Schrödinger, E., (1958) Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, reprint 1967. Skinner, B.F. (1972) Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Bantam, New York. Turing, A.M. (1936) "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Proc.of the London Math.Society, Series 2, 42 (1936-37): p. 230-265. van Fraassen, B. C. (1980) The Scientific Image, Oxford: Oxford University Press von Foerster, H. (1992) “Ethics and Second order Cybernetics”, Cybernetics & Human Knowing , Vol.1, No.1

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