In Memoriam Elena Mamchur 8 July, 1935–14 December, 2023

In Memoriam

Elena Mamchur

8 July, 1935–14 December, 2023.

The principle of ‘maximum inheritance’, put forward by Elena Mamchur, presupposes its effect in scientific cognition even during ‘radical changes in the field of theoretical knowledge’. But she professed the same principle in life, being a reliable companion.

These words, spoken in memory of Elena Mamchur by her colleague, Professor Svetlana Neretina, will serve for me as a kind of tuning fork for my subsequent exposition. I find in these words confirmation of my deep conviction that the study of the development of scientific cognition and her work in the field of philosophy of science were not just professional activities for Elena, the choice of which could have been due to her special analytical mindset or determined by the influence of external factors. Elena became involved in science studies in the 60’s, when for many Soviet philosophers, going into epistemology or the history of science was a kind of refuge from the dictates of ideological dogmas. But there was something more to her choice than these. It seems to me that in her scientific and methodological studies, a search for vital, existential fulcrum found expression. I remember well how many years ago Elena, head of Philosophy of Natural Sciences Department at that time, asked me, a junior fellow of the Institute of Philosophy: ‘Why don’t you move to our department? You could be engaged in such a noble deed – the philosophy of science.’ It struck me then how surprisingly easily and freely scientific truth and moral action came together in this friendly phrase as something natural and undisputable. Perhaps the very principle of ‘maximum inheritance’ found expression here, which for an instant connected us with Plato’s Meno, in which Socrates, while starting to talk about what virtue is, comes to the idea of inner true knowledge as evidence of the immortality of the soul and the inseparable connection of virtue and knowledge.

Elena Mamchur was born in Tashkent (Uzbek SSR, then part of the USSR) in 1935. In 1958 she graduated from Volgograd State Pedagogical Institute (Faculty of Physics and Mathematics). In 1967, she completed a postgraduate course at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow and defended her thesis on ‘The Heuristic Role of the Principle of Simplicity in Scientific Cognition’. In 1985 she defended her D. Sc. thesis on ‘The Problem of Criteria for the Selection of Natural Science Theories’. In 1990, she received the title of full professor and headed the Philosophy of Natural Sciences Department at the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow. She was a member of the Editorial Board of International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Co-Director of the Academic Programme in Philosophy of Science at the IUC Dubrovnik.

Elena Mamchur is the author of more than 300 scientific papers and 6 books: The Problem of Theory Choice. Towards the Analysis of Transition Situations in the Development of Physical Knowledge (1975), Problems of Socio-Cultural Determination of Scientific Knowledge (1987), The Principle of Simplicity and Measures of Complexity (1989) (co-authored), Philosophy of Science in Russia: Preliminary Outcomes (1997) (co-authored), Objectivity of Science and Relativism (Towards Discussions in Modern Epistemology) (2004), Images of Science in Modern Culture (2008).

Most of the works were published in Russian, but a number of them are available in English. Among them are:

(1985)	‘The Principle of “Maximum Inheritance” and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge’, Ratio, XXVII, June, 37–48.
(1987)	‘The Heuristic Role of Aesthetics in Science’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1:2, 209–222.
(1990)	‘Is There an Ivory Tower in Reality?’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 4:1, 101–111.
(1994)	‘Sociocultural Factors and the Historiography of Science’ Trends in the Historiography of Science (Boston studies in the philosophy of science; v. 161), ed. by Kostas Gavroglu, Jean Chrlstianidis, Efthyalos Nicolaidis. P. 149–160.
(2010)	‘The Status of the Ideal of Unity and Simplicity in Contemporary Scientific Cognition’, Russian Studies in Philosophy, 49:3, 7–23.
(2010)	‘Contradictions, Synthesis, and the Growth of Knowledge’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 24:4, 429–435.
(2017)	‘The Destiny of Atomism in the Modern Science and the Structural Realism’ Social Epistemology, 31:1, 93–104.
(2018)	‘Metaphysics and Progress of Science’, Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: 62, 99–103.

The Problem of Theory Choice. Towards the Analysis of Transition Situations in the Development of Physical Knowledge is the first major work by Elena Mamchur. She focuses on the structure of transitional periods in the development of science, the role of social factors in the choice of competing programmes, and the analysis of methodological principles that play the role of extra-empirical criteria for theory evaluation. These issues will also be developed in her subsequent works. When talking about this book, Elena always drew attention to the explication of the methodological principle of simplicity, carried out in the book on the basis of an analysis of the factors of the development of scientific knowledge, and the possibility of considering this principle in connection with the concepts of invariance and informativeness. It is the invariants, in her opinion, that organize knowledge into a system. There is a tendency in physical cognition to create more and more informative theories. This trend, she points out, is accompanied by an increase in the number of invariant aspects of the theory, which leads to a limitation of the variety of theoretical parameters. For example, the identity of objects, properties, and parameters of systems with respect to a particular type of interaction is established. This allows us to talk about the increasing economy of theoretical means, and in this sense about the manifestation of the principle of simplicity, without referring to the simplicity of nature.

The search for ‘invisible’ simplicity behind visible complexity, the search for rhythms and invariants which are supposed to constitute the essence of science, became one of the themes that cut across Elena’s works. She develops the ideas of simplicity as a manifestation of nature’s unity, as the presence of invariance, repetition, and symmetry in nature. But, at the same time, the very idea of simplicity is clarified: it is not so much the statement about the simplicity of nature that has a heuristic character, as the idea of ‘simplicity in nature’. In this formulation, she believes, this idea can act as an objective basis for scientific knowledge.

‘The world is infinitely complex and diverse,' we read in her other book, The Principle of Simplicity and the Measure of Complexity. – But, the data of science show that behind the difference and complexity there are (albeit not absolutely strict) rhythms and recurrence, symmetries and invariants. They find their expression in the ‘ability’ of nature, using only a limited set of elements, to create all the diversity of the material world, in a kind of ‘standardization of details’ and means […] The very possibility of the existence of the laws of science in general, and of the laws of conservation in particular, finds its final foundation in them.

In Elena Mamchur’s works, science is presented as a process, as an evolving system of knowledge. In an attempt to combine the idea of conservation with the idea of scientific revolutions, she introduces the idea of the principle of maximum inheritance in the process of scientific cognition. In her opinion, the principle of maximum inheritance is manifested in use of all the possible ways and means to retain and utilise the obtained and tested content of knowledge and the methods of research. This principle is valid not only in situations where knowledge accumulates within a particular system of scientific ideas, but also during scientific revolutions, despite all the radical changes. It is expressed in the desire to preserve everything that can be preserved (including norms and regulators in scientific cognition). According to Mamchur, this principle expresses an objective tendency, as it manifests itself not only at the level of the subjective intentions of scientists, but often independently of these intentions and even in spite of them. Within the framework of inheritance in the development of scientific knowledge, the dynamics of norms of scientific rationality appears in a special way. According to the principle of maximum inheritance, norms such as objectivity or truthfulness, as norms of scientific rationality in the epistemological projection, remain in force despite revolutionary changes in the content of the foundations of scientific knowledge. Due to the tendency of maximum inheritance existing in science, changes in the foundations of science are not global; certain norms of scientific rationality remain unchanged and invariant.

Mamchur believes that there are at least three levels at which the continuity may be considered: that of the mathematical apparatus; the conceptual level; and the factual level. At the level of mathematical apparatus, inheritance can be traced at the transition point between the preceding and successive theories. We can also speak of the continuity of group relations of the theory. Preserving continuity at the conceptual level requires some invariance of meaning. According to Mamchur, physics resorts to the help of ‘metaphysics ’ – philosophy and worldview – to preserve the meaning of theoretical concepts. The system of categories, which at one or another stage of knowledge development serves scientists as a working thinking apparatus, contains intuitive ideas about the structure of reality, space, time, etc., which are theoretically refined in the framework of particular theories. While the theoretical part of a concept may change radically, the premised (categorical) part always remains invariant. Mamchur connects the possibility for fulfillment of the principle of maximum inheritance at the factual level with the existence of empirical data, which need to be independent of the theories being tested (or compared). She shows the possibility of distinguishing two relatively independent components of the language of the empirical layer of cognition: interpretation-description and interpretation-explanation. It is the interpretation-description that turns out to be the language that provides the possibility of objective experimental verification of the theory and fulfilment of the principle of maximum inheritance.

An important place in Elena Mamchur’s research was occupied by the issue of interaction between science and culture. In addressing this topic, she introduces, as a preliminary step, two possible approaches to interpreting this relationship: socio-cultural determinacy and socio-cultural conditioning of scientific knowledge. In the first case, the existence of a causal relationship between social processes and the development of scientific knowledge is assumed. The second case also recognises the immersion of science in the social context, while the relationship between social processes and science is deterministic but not causal.

Developing the thesis of the socio-cultural conditionality of scientific knowledge, Elena offers her own solution to the question of the mutual influence of science and culture. She defines the relationship between social context and knowledge as a kind of synchronous determination. The history of ideas provides plenty of examples that can be explained by this kind of determination. It is unlikely, for example, that it was the development of physics that determined the emergence of linear perspective in Renaissance painting, nor is the opposite conclusion likely. In the interaction of such different phenomena as science, art, and technology, it is impossible, she believes, to identify something that genetically predates the others. But we can speak, Mamchur believes, of a parallelism of ideas or ‘archetypes’ of thinking, to use C.G. Jung’s terminology, which in this or that epoch almost simultaneously arise in relatively loosely connected spheres of intellectual activity. Mamchur draws attention to the selective nature of such synchronisation: parallelism is established only in relation to certain ideas, while many other ideas that were in circulation in the culture at the same time remain outside the emerging systemic relations. The cultural field is structured, and non-overlapping conceptual subsystems emerge. The carriers of such subsystems are heterogeneous communities based not on direct communication, but only on attunement to a certain idea or concept.

It is difficult to present in a short essay the whole range of issues that concerned Elena and about which she expressed her vision, offered analyses of emerging problems and methods of their solution. I will name just a few: structural realism; the problem of ‘inner truth’; objectivity vs objectness; the status of Bacon’s experimentum crucis; the relationship between fundamental science and modern technology; aesthetics and science; the ethical responsibility of the scientist. I would like, however, to dwell on one topic in more detail. It is about Elena’s last published work ‘On the Multi-Flow Model of Natural Sciences Development’ ((2021) Vox. Philosophical Journal, 33, 1-12).

In this work Elena proposes an outline of an innovative model for the development of scientific cognition, which she defined as ‘multi-flow model’. She attached special importance to this small draft and planned to further develop the ideas expressed there.

She considered the multi-flow model as a continuation of the ideas of Russian physicists Nikolai Podgoretsky and Yakov Smorodinsky, developed by them in their work on the axiomatic structure of scientific theories (1980), and Carlo Rovelli’s model of transition periods in science (2004). Elena draws attention to the conclusion reached by Podgoretsky and Smorodinsky: there are no complete, logically closed axiomatic theories in physics, as is the case in mathematics. To complete an axiomatic theory in physics, it is always not the minor details that are missing, but something internally important and defining. So, for example, in Newton’s time it was not known what force was, later scientists did not know the reasons for the stability of atoms. This unrecoverable incompleteness of the theory each time makes scientists abandon an almost complete axiomatic system and start searching not for a broader axiomatic structure, but for another axiomatics.

According to Elena, such heterogeneous axiomatic structures form a kind of flows, different in content and even contradictory to each other, which seem to be layered on top of each other. Science appears in the form of a hierarchical ladder with the layers of information going deep, which are built one above the other. Sooner or later, these flows meet and what happens is what Podgoretsky and Smorodinsky, in their two-flow model (to use Mamchur’s term), called the ‘conflict of encounter.’ At the point of their encounter, logical and factual contradictions between the pictures of the world contained in the flows are revealed, and it is possible to abandon the erroneous ideas accumulated in them. However, unlike mathematical knowledge, in the case of physical knowledge the ideal of complete resolution of contradictions is not achieved, which leads to the coexistence of two, three or more flows. Unlike mathematics, physics is more labile, as Elena notes.

She discovers the same structure, which we can call, to use a musical term, polyphonic, in Rovelli’s epistemological research. But if Podgoretsky and Smorodinsky were looking for an opportunity to build a unified axiomatic system of physics, then K. Rovelli seeks to restore the unity and integrity of science as they were trying to do in the days of classical physics. However, the components of the new synthesis Rovelli is creating are already different from those in the classics. Rovelli draws attention to the fact that philosophers of science paradoxically continue to use the linear model when they consider the discontinuous nature of the development of natural science, explaining the gaps that arise by the incommensurability of successive theories. He suggests correcting this contradictory interpretation of transitional periods with the help of a phenomenon that Mamchur defines as multi-flowing: Rovelli argues that in real science there is never one theory, which is assumed in a linear model to be replaced by another, but several theories that need such replacement. In this regard, he introduces a number of epistemological principles in which Mamchur distinguishes the themes of inner truth, scientific realism, maximum inheritance, facts ‘forever’, which allow us to discover connections that permeate conceptual gaps.

There is something musical in this last unfinished sketch of Elena Mamchur. It’s as if the individual themes, she developed over the years, are intertwined in a polyphonic composition. And they continue to resonate …