[Nona Seção do Capítulo Quarto]
The Examination of Praxeological Theorems
The epistemologist who starts his lucubrations from the
analysis of the methods of the natural sciences and whom blinkers
prevent from perceiving anything beyond this field tells us
merely that the natural sciences are the natural sciences and
that what is not natural science is not natural science. About the
sciences of human action he does not know anything, and therefore
all that he utters about them is of no consequence.
It is not a discovery made by these authors that the theories of
praxeology cannot be refuted by experiments nor confirmed by
their successful employment in the construction of various gadgets.
These facts are precisely one aspect of our problem.
The positivist doctrine implies that nature and reality, in
providing the sense data that the protocol sentences register,
write their own story upon the white sheet of the human mind.
The kind of experience to which they refer in speaking of
verifiability and refutability is, as they think, something that
does not depend in any way on the logical structure of the human
mind. It provides a faithful image of reality. On the other hand,
they suppose, reason is arbitrary and therefore liable to error
and misinterpretation.
This doctrine not only fails to make allowance for the fallibility
of our apprehension of sense objects; it does not realize that
perception is more than just sensuous apprehension, that it is an
intellectual act performed by the mind. In this regard both
associationism and Gestalt psychology agree. There is no reason
to ascribe to the operation the mind performs in the act of becoming
aware of an external object a higher epistemological dignity
than to the operation the mind performs in describing its own
ways of procedure.
In fact, nothing is more certain for the human mind than
what the category of human action brings into relief. There is
no human being to whom the intent is foreign to substitute by
appropriate conduct one state of affairs for another state of affairs
that would prevail if he did not interfere. Only where there is
action are there men.
What we know about our own actions and about those of other
people is conditioned by our familiarity with the category of
action that we owe to a process of self-examination and introspection
as well as of understanding of other peoples' conduct.
To question this insight is no less impossible than to question
the fact that we are alive.
He who wants to attack a praxeological theorem has to trace it
back, step by step, until he reaches a point in which, in the chain
of reasoning that resulted in the theorem concerned, a logical
error can be unmasked. But if this regressive process of deduction
ends at the category of action without having discovered a vicious
link in the chain of reasoning, the theorem is fully confirmed.
Those positivists who reject such a theorem without having
subjected it to this examination are no less foolish than those
seventeenth-century astronomers were who refused to look
through the telescope that would have shown them that Galileo
was right and they were wrong.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário