Semantic loading of categories in modern science (on the example of the "Movement" concept)

The connection between Greek philosophy and science has been known for a long time. European science begins its lineage to the Greek ideas about the unity of knowledge.

Being born, the science of Europe absorbed a very large number of terms and concepts of Greek philosophy (matter, movement, atoms, life, etc.), logical principles (laws of logic and formal logic of Aristotle), as well as several methodological techniques (analysis, synthesis, observation etc.).

Naturally, over the course of many centuries, the concepts and terms used by modern science have changed their content and meaning many times. It depended on many factors: political, ideological, confessional. A real example of such a change is the conceptions of matter and consciousness. The content, meanings, relationships between these concepts have changed several times over the science development history.

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Pre-modern understanding of the category “Movement”

In Antic times, there were concepts, the meanings and properties of which were sometimes understood by different schools in a completely opposite way. This, for example, is the understanding of movement by the ancient Greeks.

European philosophy owes much of its origin to Ionian thinkers. It was they and Heraclitus of Ephesus who began to think about the origins of the world as substances.

Water, earth, air, etc. become ontological reasons for the existence of the world. The variety of reasons speaks for itself. Ancient thinkers constantly tried to find the cause in this or that substance, which seemed to them the most important. Giving advantages to some of them, the thinkers of Antiquity thereby ascribed certain properties to them. The appearance of the properties themselves did not seem to them a purposeful action, they did not conduct experiments with water, air or mind. And they simply discovered, showed these properties, which they found by contemplating the world around them with the help of very expressive metaphors.

Thales does not consider Movement separately. By Anaximander, the world is based on apeiron. Apeiron is what allows the elements to pass into each other. Along with the property of eternity, Anaximander ascribes the properties of movement to the apeiron. Apeiron is in perpetual and active movement. By the Heraclitus, Movement is already endowed with certain cosmological and ontological properties. Cosmos depends on the movement of the World Fire. World Fire is the root cause of everything, Heraclitus believes. "Way down" and "way up" - the movement of the world fire, thanks to which the Cosmos and the Universe periodically arise, then periodically disappear. He considers the existence of all things to be changeable and in constant motion (the concept of "panta rhei").

Thanks to the activities of the Pythagorean Union, the Eleatic school and Empedocles, ancient philosophy received its further development. School of the Eleats: Xenophanes, and after him and Parmenides asserted that being is motionless, although in the very being of movement they did not deny.

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Pre-modern understanding of the category “movement”

Zeno of Elea played an important role in the development of the Movement category. Using the method of proof from the opposite, Zeno showed that between reason and feelings, logical and ontological, there are compelling contradictions. Following the older Eleatics, who argued that feelings and sensory knowledge were not correct enough, Zeno saw such a contradiction in the movement category.

This is a contradiction between the “ontological” and the “logical” as understood by the philosopher of Ancient Elea. Zeno's reasoning is epicherem, i.e. concise inference, as well as aporia - obstruction, a hopeless situation.

In such his aporias as "Dichotomy", "Achilles and the Turtle", "Arrow" and "Stadium", the contradictions of the Movement conceptions of ancient Greek thought are revealed. The movement can neither begin nor end (Achilles, Dichotomy). In such aporias like “Arrow” and “Stadium” Zeno comes to the conclusion that Movement is quiescence. There is no motion, there is only the sum of the quiescence. Thus, Zeno's movement is impossible neither with the continuity of space nor with its discontinuity.

Further, Empedocles, in the concept of four alternating cycles, gives the motion ontological properties again. Filia - Love and Neikos - Anger alternately replaces each other. When Philia wins, quiescence comes in the world, when Neikos overrides - dynamics, movement, destruction. Here the motion is also painted in negative tones.

Anaxagoras, one of the founders of philosophy in Athens, also brought a new understanding to the Movement category. The world consists of the smallest particles of all elements - homeomerism, but they are passive. This is the matter of the world. They need a beginning that would become active, goal-setting and creative for them. Anaxagoras sees such a beginning in the World Mind - Nusa. It is active, it moves the world, it creates.

For Anaxagoras, motion is one of the world existence goals, its way of manifesting oneself through the Mind. The mind finds order. Movement by Anaxagoras is order, while by Empedocles, with the arrival of Neykos, everything begins to move, dynamics appears and with it chaos.

Subsequently, the movement takes a huge place in the concept of the ancient atomists Leucippus and Democritus. They took the next step after Empedocles and Anaxagoras in understanding the structure of being. They introduced the concepts of emptiness and atoms. The world turned out to be full of atoms of very different shapes, but at the same time, they are all motionless within themselves and move in relation to each other in emptiness. Thanks to emptiness, atoms were able to move and thereby create the things around us.

But the atomists did not receive a solution to the question of the movement cases, its appearance. For atomists, motion is eternal. Thus, they managed to formulate a certain idea of the law of conservation of motion. Based on the atomists' doctrine of necessity, we can conclude that movement was endowed with the property of necessity, and any random was rejected.

Only the later follower of the Greek atomists Epicurus introduces randomness into the ontological picture of the world. According to Epicurus, atoms can move not only under the influence of certain reasons, but also randomly change their movements, colliding with others and thereby changing the course of things.

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Pre-modern understanding of the category “Movement”

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At the next stage in the development of ancient thought, the sophists proclaimed that two opposite opinions can be simultaneously true or simultaneously false.

The older sophists, relying on Heraclitus, reinforced by Cratilus, "legalized" the existence of contradictory properties in an object or conception. Thus, the accumulated ideas about the movement, sometimes very contradictory, turned out to be true thanks to the sophists.

In this brief review, we will ignore the theories of Socrates, Plato and their followers because of the too ethical and socio-philosophical orientation of their ideas.

Here we will go straight to the concept of the famous thinker of Ancient Greece - Aristotle. Thanks to his ideas the category of movement acquired a form complete for Antiquity.

The concept of causes plays a huge role in the teachings of Aristotle. He identifies four causes or primordialities: a material cause (or "from what?”), formal reason ("what is this?”), movement ("where is the beginning of the movement?”), aim reason ("for what?"). Moreover, all these reasons, according to Aristotle, are eternal and are reduced to one another, except for the material one.

And such a triune reason for Aristotle is God. Movement again becomes involved in the creation of the world. For Aristotle, motion is something more than physical movement in space. He introduces the doctrine of categories. There are ten categories, three of which Aristotle attributes the properties of movement. They are quantity, quality and place. The movement of quantity is growth and decline, quality - qualitative changes, places - spatial movements. In the doctrine of the movement cause, Aristotle denies spontaneity.

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The complexity of the idea

Thus, confining ourselves only to the framework of Antiquity, we were able to trace how one of the modern science conceptions – Movement - arose and took shape as a theoretical category. Already the ancients attributed various properties to it, often returning to the properties that had already been discarded at previous stages.

The movement occupied a different place in the picture of the universe. For some, movement is the cause, order and origin of the world, while for others it is the opposite. In the future, a huge number of properties were attributed to the movement.

Using this concept as an example, we see that in the XXI century any of the scientific concepts have gained a huge number of characteristics, properties and meanings. Some of these properties are rejected by scientists as knowingly incorrect. But as the quantity and quality of empirical data increases, they are again attributed to Movement.

It becomes clear that the Movement, as an important concept in Greek philosophy, had a very “hard time”. The Movement was considered from various positions of philosophical analysis; various ontological, logical, epistemological and other properties were attributed to it. Moreover, sometimes such properties were relative in some thinkers, absolute in others, and completely absent in others. Having accumulated all these properties, the Movement entered the conceptual composition of European science. It cannot be said that the researchers who followed the Greek thinkers relied on their predecessors. Often, they did not even know the ideas of their predecessors or even have their manuscripts. Movement conceptions were created anew. Sometimes they echoed in some way what the Greeks talked about and taught, and sometimes they did not. But one very important difference appeared, which now prevailed in the movement conceptions. New thinkers, in contrast to the thinkers of Antiquity, have already begun to rely on experiments.

We were faced with such a huge volume of material and, accordingly, with the problem of understanding it. The question arises about those methodological methods that can make it possible to resolve them.

Sometimes even looking at an old problem in a new way can provide new vectors for solutions. The problems are a complex and varied combination of ideas not only from different areas of philosophical knowledge but also facts and theories of natural and social sciences.

New methodological instrument

?In connection with such a complexity of the considered conceptions, it seems necessary to use a method that can most adequately analyze the main provisions of both theories. Complexity, and in contrast, simplicity, has long attracted the attention of researchers. They explore simplicity-complexity as a parameter value. For this, the object should be represented as a system with a set of parameter values (SP analysis).

The systemic dimension of a scientific theory, its structure and development make it possible to reveal new aspects of knowledge.

The essence of the approach is that the object under study, for example, a scientific theory or concept, is represented in the form of a system, i.e. a systemic model of a scientific theory is being built. System characteristics and system patterns are investigated on the system model. The first stage of the SP analysis is building the system of the object to study by distinguishing three system descriptors - concept, structure and substrate.

The concept is exactly what we want to tell about the object. It can be attributive or relational. The structure is the way we want to study the object. As well as a concept, a structure can be attributive or relational. The substrate is the object we study itself. If the concept is attributive then the structure corresponds to some relations of the studied objects and vice versa. In SP analysis it’s called a principle of duality of system modelling.

The concept, structure and substrate are the first-order descriptors. The relations between the first-order descriptors are the second-order descriptors. These second-order descriptors indicate the presence of specific system attributes. In our case, with the attributive concept, they are attributive system parameters.

So, the second stage of the study is the identification of specific system parameters. There are also general system parameters and sub-parameters. One of the examples is statistical and dynamic parameters. However, not all systems can be divided into such categories. The social-ecological system is a dynamic one. If we take time as the basis for the dividing. In such a system time plays a significant role.

But to reach the prognostic stage in our analysis we need to concentrate on the general system parameters. Attributive parameters can be point or binary. It means these parameters divide the objects on such it belongs to and it does not belong to. Also, there are linear system parameters. They are characterised by the degree of the attribute or the validity of the object. It means that attributes are characterised by categories “more” or “less”. (As we see, there is a degree on the measurement scale.) Cohesion and simplicity-complexity are these linear system parameters.

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Further research. Science nowadays.

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The concept of motion has reached the science of the 20th and 21st centuries with all its contradictory attributive structures that we mentioned before.

New methodological principles will help scientists to understand such problems. Using methodological conceptions, philosophers of science must provide comprehensive explanations of emerging problems, mechanisms of science history, and its general principles of development.

This research is based on just such an aspiration. How to be? For example, in the beginning, the concept of atoms of Leucippus and Democritus had a purely ontologically speculative basis. But thanks to the science of the early 20th century, some of the ideas of ancient philosophers were experimentally confirmed. The philosophical concept has become scientific. Truly, there was everything in Antiquity! Some of the properties attributed by Leucippus and Democritus to atoms were used by modern scientists. A-tomos is an indivisible. But it turned out that the atom is not the smallest particle. It consists of something and has its own strict structure. Each atom has its own. Atoms can be synthesized; on the contrary, they can be "disassembled". There are even smaller elementary particles. And so on and so forth.

What about the concept of atoms of Leucippus and Democritus? What is it - philosophy, fiction, or part of the history of science, which had its own heuristic meaning? Maybe the ancients just guessed, or modern scientists were too lazy to come up with a new concept and plagiarized the old one?

Maybe this is a coincidence, or maybe just all physicists who dealt with the problems of the atom studied the history of philosophy at the university and knew that potentially an atomic description of the structure of being had already existed long before them.

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Modern science and SP analysis

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In SP analysis binary, linear and polysemantic properties are distinguished. The concepts of science history can also be divided into studies, in which the history of science examines properties with binary, linear or polysemantic parameters.

Binary research is when a historian or philosopher considers science history as the appearance or absence of any property or attributes in there. For example, the presence of the church authority during the Middle Ages or the presence of a strictly descriptive language in scientific theory. Such properties either exist or they are not. For example, logical positivism views all science until the early 20th century as a system that lacks properties: the presence of a strict description language.

Linear parameters mean the presence of properties in science history, which can be characterized as “more” or “less”. The characteristic of linear parameters is that they create a certain intensity scale of the property. For example, the change in the authority of the church for scholars since the Middle Ages, or the relationship between alchemy and modern chemistry. Binary and linear studies are often not found in their pure form. It seems possible to talk about the binary-linear nature of most studies of science history. Using the example of the importance of the church authority for science, we can talk about the binary-linear nature of the analysis. Since the property of having authority is binary, and the decrease in its value over time is linear.

In the theoretical construction of the cumulativeism conception, the presence of progress is not binary, but linear. The progress of science itself is not rejected, but the question is posed: to what extent is one scientific theory more progressive than the one that came before it. The theory of direct progress of science is being built, thanks to the linear parameters of the consideration of progress itself. Progress acts as a concept of the system itself.

The polysemantic value of the parameter is the presence of 3 or more properties of the object, but the number of properties is limited. Such studies of science history include the theory of scientific revolutions by Thomas Kuhn: to define scientific revolutions, it is required to find some characteristic properties in the period of science under consideration. We can speak about their presence strictly definitely, as about binary properties. But at the same time, there are much more of them than two.

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Modern science and SP analysis

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SP analysis allows us to explore science history by combining all these types of analysis or by examining one object with several types at the same time. This is achieved since this analysis has developed systems that can be independently investigated for the presence of binary or polysemantic properties. These systems can be related to each other to study linear characteristics.

Moreover, the same object or fact can be considered as a system with an attributive concept and as a system with a relational concept. In the philosophy of science, there are a large number of concepts for the development of science. There are also several methodological ideas about the history of the development of science.

For example, cumulativeism and anti-cumulativeism can be distinguished here.

The theory of cumulativeism is based on the idea of the continuity of the development of knowledge. From lat. “Cumulatio” - increase, congestion. Cumulativeism excludes the possibility of qualitative changes in knowledge. The development of knowledge is a sequence of theoretical systems, in which each subsequent one includes the previous one as its own particular case. There is linear progress: subsequent theories are more general, they explain everything that was explained by their predecessors, as well as additional facts. Т1 – Т2 -- .... Тn ?are interconnected so that each subsequent theory includes the previous one as a special case.

Cumulativeism as a system belongs to chain systems. A chain is a system whose relational structure relates each element to no more than two other elements. This is how the representatives of cumulativeism imagine the historical development of science. Each new theory - correlates only with the previous one and is the basis for a new theory based only on it, but additionally explaining some more facts. The limiting case of a chain system is a closed system. But the theory of cumulativeism cannot be attributed to such systems. In a closed system, each element correlates directly with two and only two other elements of the system.

Non-cumulative models are associated with post-positivist epistemology and the philosophy of science.

The most famous in this regard are the models of T. Kuhn, P. Feyerabend, I. Lakatos. All of them accept the thesis about the theoretical loading of facts and about the change in the meanings of theoretical terms during scientific revolutions. As a result, gaps are formed in the growth of knowledge. Kuhn and Feyerabend defend the thesis of complete ruptures - the incommensurability of old and new paradigms (fundamental theories). Examples: phlogiston chemistry and Lavoisier's oxygen chemistry, Newtonian mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity. All concepts change their meanings, facts from old knowledge systems are not preserved.

Fundamental breaks - changing ways of seeing the world (16-17 centuries). As a result, theories turn out to be rationally incomparable, and the choice between them is carried out only on worldview and socio-psychological grounds. The history of science appears as a discrete process devoid of continuity. The scientific community, historically and synchronously, splits into communities of adherents of various fundamental theories, who do not accept and do not understand the views of their opponents (for example, the discussions of Galileo and Bruno with the scholastics).

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Modern science and SP analysis (part 2)

In 1911 E. Rutherford proved that an atom consists of a nucleus and negatively charged particles - electrons. But this scheme, proceeding from the laws of classical mechanics, could not exist. The most difficult problem that faced the researchers: according to the laws of electrodynamics, the electron should eventually fall onto the nucleus.

Niels Bohr found a way out of this situation by introducing the concept of energy quanta that are released during the transition of an electron from one orbit to another.

Quantum mechanics, which appeared in1925-1926, operates with laws that determine not the motion of a particle - its position and speed at any given moment, but only the probability of position and the probability of speed.

A situation arose when quantum physics, answering the questions of classical physics, denied the classical idea of the definiteness of coordinates and speed. But quantum mechanics cannot be explained without the classical concepts of "speed" and "coordinate".

With all this, quantum mechanics differs from A. Einstein's theory of relativity.

The theory of relativity has thrown away the classical concepts of space, time and motion. In quantum mechanics, the classical concepts of "speed" and "coordinates" are applicable to all phenomena of physics, but with the condition of limiting their accuracy. According to N. Bohr: "The decisive moment is the realization of the fact that no matter how far the phenomena go beyond the framework of the classical physical explanation, all experimental data should be described using classical concepts."

The concepts of classical physics are exact, binary, they either exist or not. The concepts of quantum physics - in turn - take on the character of linear parameters in SP analysis.

But, undoubtedly, something else is also: the substrates of the systems of classical and quantum physics contain elements that are clearly contradictory. This can be seen in the example of the phenomenon of particle transmutation in quantum mechanics.

In 1929, P. Dirac wrote the equation of motion of an electron. One of the results of this equation was the discovery of the positron. A positron is an electron, but with a positive charge. The classical concepts of the structure of matter allowed for changes in matter. But these changes were reduced to a rearrangement of the structure of matter at the level of the atom or its constituent parts. Transmutation is not such a regrouping. Accordingly, there are no classical mechanical laws here either. Using the categorical apparatus of the SP analysis, it should be noted that, in terms of relational parameters, both systems have the parameter “partial coincidence in the substrate”.

If we consider science from a historical perspective, then this is not a resource system. It means that it’s such a system that the attribution of certain property by some elements prevents the attribution of the same property by other system elements. Different, sometimes contradictory properties are present during the development of science. But at a certain stage of development, science is a resource system. Resource system - such a system when the number of elements is strictly limited and they will be listed at a certain stage of development.