Galilean Methodology and Abductive Inference

Abstract

Galileo, in founding modern science, ended up attributing a decisive role to the deductive method by means of which human reason must do violence to sense in order to know the world. This emphasizes, in a highly admirable way, precisely the constitutively counterfactual aspect of modern scientific reasoning, which no longer starts from empirical observation, but rather conjecturally constructs a theory whose mathematically deduced conclusions are then placed in relation to the experimental dimension. This revolutionary approach to scientific research outlined by Galileo has not always been understood. On the contrary, the empiricist image of science has often been superimposed on the very way in which scientists work. Peirce’s elaboration of abduction corrected this empiricist reading of science, emphasizing the need to include abduction itself in a great multiplicity of perspectives, all very open and very broad. The essay retraces this complex knot concerning the most correct epistemological image of scientific knowledge, following and analyzing the contributions provided by both the empiricist and idealist traditions, and then focusing on the contribution of two authors such as Peirce and Vailati who, in two different contexts, grasped the importance of a normativist vision of scientific knowledge and the role of deduction and of Peircean abduction itself. In this way, the critical problematic nature of scientific knowledge is placed at the center of our image of scientific knowledge.