ON GENERIC EPISTEMOLOGY

Abstract

This text proposes a generic epistemology, relatively independent of any discipline, with the aim of understanding newly emerging scientific objects and disciplines, as well as new logics of interdisciplinarity. This epistemology is also relatively independent of the present, requiring a thinking of the future as something other than the realization of the present ; somewhat like that suggested by the practice of scenario planning. It does not supplant “disciplinary; epistemology, but seeks to demonstrate, through their simultaneous exercise, the passage from a critical to a fictional paradigm, where disciplines are decentred and philosophies immersed in the sciences ; not the “established; sciences we know from descriptions constructed along the lines of classical disciplines, but emergent or future sciences, for which the intention of the researcher is constitutive. The question is no longer that of the criteria of scientificity, but that of the identity of science.

Keywords:

• generic
• object
• discipline
• prosence
• fiction
• immersion
• site of interdiscipline

Notes

We heartily thank Muriel Mambrini-Doudet and Benoît Weil for their attentive reading of this article and their numerous suggestions.

1 See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-K_theory> (accessed 28 Aug. 2012) for a summary – the article also contains references and links to several papers on C-K Theory by Hatchuel and others. [Translator's note.]

2 Kant.

3 Legay.

4 Laruelle, Philosophie.

5 Hatchuel and Weil.

6 Legay and Schmid.

7 See Schmid, Mambrini-Doudet, and Hatchuel.

8 François Laruelle, Seminar at Petit Collège, 18 June 2007, to appear in Nicole Mathieu and Anne-François Schmid, eds., Modélisation et interdisciplinarité. Six disciplines en quête d’épistémologie (Paris: Quae, 2014).

9 Paris: Kimé, 2011.

10 Schmid, “Question.”

11 Varenne, Du Modèle; idem, Formaliser le vivant.

12 Galison.

13 Armatte and Dahan-Dalmedico.

14 This expression could be interpreted wholly within the framework of Alvin Goldman's Social Epistemology.

15 Some examples of the putting to work of “fiction” in philosophy of mathematics: Mathematics without Foundations, Science without Numbers (Hartry Field, 1908), Mathematics without Truth (Field, 1990), “Mathematics without Numbers” (Geoffrey Hellman, 1989), Structuralism without Structures (Hellman, 1996), Truth and the Absence of Fact (Field), Mathematics with no Objects (Burgess and Gideon), Foundations without Foundationalism (Shapiro), etc. … In French: Jean-Pierre Cléro, (2004), Les Raisons de la fiction, les philosophes et les mathématiques, Armand Colin and Hamdi Mlika, Quine et l'antiplatonisme (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2007).

16 In a paper entitled “Epistémologie générique, fiction et raisonnement mathématique” (<www.M2Real.org>, INSA de Lyon, 10 Dec. 2010), we have demonstrated that fiction can be understood through the generalization of the notion of hypothesis such as Poincaré conceives it.

17 Granger.

18 Recall, for example, Russell's “zigzag theory” to avoid contradiction, or again the importance of this notion in the reflection on diagrams (Mullarkey).

19 Analytical philosophy is the proof of this, but one finds it also in Continental philosophy, in François Laruelle's Une biographie de l'homme ordinaire (Paris: Aubier, 1985), which, through non-philosophy or non-standard philosophy seeks new interactions between sciences and philosophies.

20 Hottois.

21 Varenne, Qu'est-ce que l'informatique?