The Concept of Idealization in Ernst Cassirer's Theory of Knowledge

(ProQuest: . denotes formulae omitted.)IntroductionIn the field of science the issues concerning the scientific method and the formation of scientific concepts have played a crucial role and the debate about them is still alive; in fact antinomian polarities like reductionism/ complexity or realism/anti-realism continue to keep alive this debate.In the history of science, this problematic junction, in its more mature phase, can be found in the methodological and conceptual revolution made by Galileo Galilei who, after the critique of many aspects of Aristotelian physics, revolutionized the scientific method (further, in the section entitled "Aristotle and Galileo's Platonism," I will analyze the epistemological implications of this revolution that have been decisive for the consecutive reflections about the formation of scientific concepts). We can sum up the Galilean legacy by taking inspiration from this quotation: "[. ] the mathematical scientist (filosofo geometra), when he wants to recognize in the concrete the effects which he has proved in the abstract, must deduct the material hindrances [,. ]. "1Galileo, in substance, is telling us that that in order to investigate scientific phenomena we must turn our gaze to a new theoretical procedure no longer based on Aristotelian abstraction but on what modern philosophers of science call idealization. This methodological and theoretical revolution allowed Galileo to overcome the limits and fallacies of the old AristotelianPtolemaic system, but how was it possible? It was possible thanks to the systematic use of idealizations and models in science. But what is the difference between abstraction and idealization? Obviously, the roots of abstraction can be found in Aristotle who "conceived of the universal, the result of the process of abstraction, as that which is common to many individuals; as such - i.e. as primary substances - individuals cannot be fully captured in terms of universals. However, although real individuals elude our thought, we can conceive of the qualities, as real as the individuals themselves, which constitute what is shared by a certain number of individuals. It is just because individuals possess these common qualities that we can group them together and classify them as belonging to species and genera;"2 the theoretical procedure of abstraction comes from the capacity of human intellect to obtain the universal from the particular (this procedure has been formulated in many ways, for instance, by the scholastic tradition, by rationalism and by the modern empirical tradition: see the reflections of Aquinas, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, or Hume). It means that while abstraction is applied by human intellect to obtain universal concepts from the knowledge of particular objects (by the generalization of empirical facts), "idealization" proceeds "enclosing in parenthesis" some aspects of phenomenal reality that we consider secondary, to take into consideration the essential factors of the phenomena under investigation.3So, Galileo applied, with a more or less mature methodological awareness, the scientific method that the Polish philosopher of science Leszek Nowak called the "method of idealization and gradual concretization. "4According to Nowak, there is an essential difference between abstraction and idealization:A scientific law is basically a deformation of phenomena. It resembles much more the logical structure of a caricature than that of the generalization of facts. The crucial point for a proper understanding of the Idealizational procedure is that it differs fundamentally from that of abstraction [. ]. Abstraction, i.e. the omitting of properties, leads from individuals to sets of individuals (and from sets of individuals to families of sets, etc.). Idealization does not do this. Omission of the dimensions of physical bodies does not yield any set of physical bodies but the mass-point. …