Metascience DOI 10.1007/s11016-014-9938-z
Book notice Gustavo Bueno: Sciences as categorical closures. Oviedo: Pentalfa, 2013, 143pp, €15.00 PB Lino Camprubı´
Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
This is an English translation of a very short and quite dense Spanish original in which Gustavo Bueno summarizes and updates his philosophy of science as presented in 5 volumes in the 1990s. From then onwards, Bueno and a number of authors have developed this philosophy through specific applications to fields as diverse as classic chemistry, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, cybernetics, Darwinism, ethology, geology, plate tectonics, anthropology, sociology, economics and psychology. This has resulted in a number of doctoral dissertations, books and articles. Unfortunately, that wealth of literature is for the most part only available in Spanish, although some of it has been produced in English and French or has been later translated into German and Chinese. Therefore, this translation is a welcome step towards an overdue effort. Gustavo Bueno is known as the main developer of philosophical materialism, one of the few last efforts to construe a comprehensive and coherent philosophical system in direct conversation with the natural and social sciences. His founding book Ensayos materialistas dates from 1972. From then onwards, Bueno’s production has gone beyond ontology to philosophical anthropology, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion and more concrete analysis of, among others, the ideas of culture, the state, happiness and democracy. Invariably, Bueno’s approaches to those topics combine a deep and critical knowledge of the history of philosophy with an up to date familiarity with current debates and developments in the relevant disciplines. This is also the case for Bueno’s philosophical theory of science. On the one hand, Bueno’s book offers powerful criteria for classifying existing theories of science. On the other, Bueno’s own theory is built, very much as Latour’s, from
L. Camprubı´ (&) Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany e-mail:
[email protected]
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inside laboratories. There, he finds bodies of knowledge composed not of readymade theories about nature but of bodily movements, apparatuses, formulae, conversations and theorems. Bueno takes specific scientific fields as his units of analysis and traces the ways in which they attain the individuality that makes them different from one another. His main thesis, the one which gives title to this book, is that each science resembles what topologists call a categorical closure, that is, a set of objects and relationships the operations with which render new objects and relationships belonging to that same set. As such, summing operations with natural numbers produce new natural numbers. This sense of production permeates Bueno’s theory: his hyper-realism goes beyond both naive realism and relativism postulating that each scientific field is transforming reality into its own scale of magnitude and producing new entities accordingly. But what makes each of these fields scientific? The common feature to all scientific fields, Bueno argues unapologetically, is that they are able to construct truths. This is where Bueno’s originality makes this book a must. Scientific truths are not defined either as correspondence of a theory with the world or as coherence with the rest of the theory, but as relationships of identity between different operational courses and pathways within a scientific field. The book provides a graphic example: one can calculate the area of a circle by dividing it into triangles or into rectangles, and both paths were essayed in ancient geometry. These alternative paths have nothing in common, and we should not take for granted that they should render the same result. When they do, however, A = pr2 becomes a theorem. Stressing these processual identities makes Bueno’s philosophy of special interest to historians, since it describes theorems as ‘‘crystallizations’’ within a given material context. Thus, his account of spectroscopy or thermodynamics complements analyses by authors such as M. Norton Wise, Nancy Cartwright, Ian Hacking and Peter Galison. According to Bueno, a scientific truth emerges when the various operational paths that give birth to it offset one another through their identity, which to some extent goes beyond the scientists’ subjectivity. Bueno uses this conclusion to frame many of the famous disputes around objectivity and the distinction between natural and human sciences under a very different light. The book ends up with a discussion of the particularities of history of science and the relationships between science and philosophy. The limits to the sciences do not come from beyond them. Rather, in the process of their making, fields limit each other building material and disciplinary borders, however permeable. Philosophy discusses the ideas that traverse multiple fields or those who emerge in no-man’s land. One of these is the idea of science that Sciences as Categorical Closures contributes to clarify.
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