Gaston bachelard – wikipédia, a enciclopédia livre

A. Theodor W. Adorno · Adrian

Gaston Bachelard , the French epistemologist and philosopher of science, was born at Bar-sur-Aube. In he received his doctorate of letters and in became professor of philosophy at the University of Dijon. From to he held the chair of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. Bachelard expounded a dialectical rationalism, or "dialogue" between reason and experience.

His philosophy was a departure from the view of rational discovery as a process whereby new knowledge is assimilated into a system that changes only insofar as it grows. He rejected the Cartesian conception of scientific truths as immutable elements of a total truth that is in process of being put together like a jigsaw puzzle. According to Bachelard, experiment and mathematical formulation are mutually complementary.

Mathematics is not merely a means of expressing physical laws, nor is it a static realm of ideas; it is "committed. Scientific hypotheses, and even scientific facts, do not present themselves passively to the patient investigator but are created by him. The investigator's reasoning and the natural world on which it operates together constitute a second nature over and above the crudely empirical one.

Bachelard described his conception of this two-way process in which rational organization and experiment are in constant cooperation as a "philosophy of saying no" philosophie du non. It involves negation because the scientific attitude is necessarily "open" or "available" disponible , and the scientist may be obliged at any time to recast his formulation of reality by facts which fail to fit into the old formulation.

Since it is frequently mathematical, the reformulation may not necessarily involve the adoption of a new model, but it will often be analogous to a change of structure. At the same time, there will be no jettisoning of truths: The philosophie du non destroys nothing, Bachelard held; it consolidates what it supersedes. The framework may be recast and the picture of reality transformed, but only in such a way that the new phenomenon might have been foreseen.