Publication Details

Abstract

The programme of building-up integrated science was in the centre of attention of logical positivism. From the historical point of view we can state that the realization of this programme has never passed beyond the limits of project. There were several reasons why, the most important ones being the gnozeological starting points of the subjectively orientated radical empirism and the absolutization of formal means of linguistic fetishism. The representatives of logical positivism had separated thinking from the material world in result of their accepted ideas about the possibilities of philosophy, and of their strict antimetaphysical attitude. They had founded the building-up of integrated science upon the inevitability of reducing the propositions to their empirically verifiable content and upon the supposed possibility of transforming all statements into the form of statements of physics. This resulted in reducing the theoretical nucleus of science and of scientific cognition to sensualistically tuned experience by means of thp identification with protocol statements by the final number of logical steps. The principle of physicalism, which is the basis of the logical-positivist conception of integrated science, started from the simplified understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge and the unification of science on its basis meant cramping the complicated process of creation of knowledge into the limits of phenomenalism. Just as integrated science is possible only on the basis of accepting the dialectical-materialistic approach to the process of cognition, the conception of integrated science of logical positivism remains on the ground of metaphysics still more dogmatic and intolerant than that which the representatives of logical positivism wanted to replace.