POPPER VERSUS QUINE. OGGETTIVISMO E OGGETTIVITÀ NELLE SCIENZE RISPETTO ALL’IDEA DI DISCORSO DOMINANTE IN FOUCAULT

I defend a “realistic” position on scientific theories, which however takes into account the relativist ideas of W.V.O. Quine, in order to maintain the idea that scientific theories represent reality without, however, falling back into an essentialism that makes the science a dogmatic discourse. The correspondentist theory of truth can be arranged in such a way as to contain aspects of a “molecular” holism, in which background knowledge is linked but kept distinct from the content of the single proposition. According to this view, the proposition can still be a “representation” of the fact, always approximate and renegotiable, which illustrates the structure of the state of affairs in order to illuminate also the molecular group of states of affairs, of finite number, connected to it. Therefore, I follow the “third way” indicated by Popper in his essay Three Views Concerning Human Knowledge (1965): the theories describe or represent real aspects of the world but these aspects can always be deepened and they are never definitive, like the different levels of reality identified by a powerful microscope. The Foucault’s ideas of “power of speech” and of “dominant speech” are analyzed to show that a vital tension between realism and relativism gives always new energies to the debate on realism in philosphy of science.