Epistemic obstacles and the marriage of fantasy to rigor: A response to suchting

✍ Scribed by Stellan Ohlsson

• Book ID: 104785767
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1995
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 636 KB
• Volume: 4
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0926-7220
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00487759

✦ Synopsis

Reality is difficult to know because the projection of reality onto experience creates misleading similarities and differences. Also, the projection is one-to-many in the appearance-to-reality direction, a fact that prevents us from reasoning from appearance to reality. The mode of thought that is associated with the Galilean revolution in science is a response to these epistemic obstacles. Its main characteristic is a marriage between imagination and formalization. This mode of thinking is as universal within post-Galilean science as the epistemic obstacles it is designed to overcome, but it is not salient in either common sense or Aristotelian science.