On the Sociological Turn in Epistemology

The question whether the accounting of beliefs is different in the realms of the "natural sciences" and the "social sciences "is not new in epistemology. But it is hardly a question any longer whether "the social" plays a role in scientific knowledge. The point of hot disputes between philosophers is whether "the sociology of knowledge may step in to explain beliefs if and only if those beliefs cannot be explained in terms of their rational merits" or whether the link between social setting and knowledge claims is of an intrinsic, essential quality. Put in other words is "sociology only for deviants "and is a sociological account to step in when and only when there is some deviation from the norm of rationality, or is both, the genesis and the maintenance of all human knowledge social? The claim that knowledge is social means more than just mere holding that knowledge is contextual, that it is produced at some place and time, it is a thesis about the limits or boundaries of inquiry. The rightness of concepts, all standards and presuppositions are part of tradition, they are relative to tradition. Knowledge always reflects a perspective on the world, a context which is not only expressed, but produced and reproduced by this type of knowledge. Knowledge cannot be understood in terms of the simple criteria of correctness - knowledge both reflects and reconstructs the various purposes, contexts, interests, assumptions, and functions of the various intellectual efforts. Does this mean, then, that following the tradition of Scepticism, evaluations, standards, or universal claims should be denied to be formulated ? The point that seems very important to me is that no understanding of the world is a direct, unmediated process, any person's contact with reality involves the understanding of concepts, presuppositions, and standards, which are by no means some simple logical relationships, or literal words and sentences. This applies to the social and historical sciences as well: there is no ultimate explanation of historical events (as Karl Marx has thought, for example).In a way this kind of point of view is very unwelcome, and disturbing, because it is leaving behind the distinction between science and ideology, between knowledge and opinion. All evidence, all data have their theoretical context, experiments and observations do not exist alone, but in a theoretical context. And theoretical context influences perception, which opens up paths to debate.

Karl Mannheim has separated natural sciences from cultural, because the purity of "formal knowledge" is distinct from our beliefs, which are subjective, influenced by our interests, and are therefore similar to ideology. For Mannheim the accounting for the natural sciences comes through "evidence", and when a discovery is made it adds up to the results of the past, correcting and completing earlier knowledge. The shift is not paradigmatical, but of a degree: the later stage supersedes the earlier, what is added is more of the same type, and a theory is valid forever. This does not hold for cultural sciences: "Every epoch has its fundamentally new approach and its characteristic point of view, and consequently sees the 'same' object from a new perspective." Mannheim's "cumulative" account of the natural sciences has been criticized by T.S.Kuhn, for whom theoretical shifts in science are not simply rational solutions to increasing knowledge, and the standards of inference and evaluation are of a paradigmatical nature. From this difference commentators draw different conclusions, one view being that natural sciences require a sociological account, and another - that a new and richer notion of rationality is necessary.

The contemporary problems of the various sciences, the methods they use, their scientific concepts at least partially follow scientific tradition, which constitutes the history of the sciences. The problems, with which sciences occupy themselves, are not chosen independently from the current historical processes, the methods used and the formulation of concepts - similarly. When a certain science pays attention to a certain problem, it is following old questions, trying to answer them, if possible, in new ways. In the history of sciences there are periods of intensive growth, which are often followed by periods of stagnation. In Ancient Greece philosophers were interested in basic problems, connected with natural phenomena. Before that knowledge was mainly concerned with practical issues - in architecture, ship-building, etc. Pythagoras and his school were the first to organize this knowledge in a scientific way, by discovering the meaning of mathematical proportions in the natural phenomena. This brought on to the flourishing of mathematics, astronomy and physics. Until the Italian Renaissance there was silence in connection with these problems, except for the Arabic countries, which achieved some remarkable results in practical sciences, but since this was not followed by theoretical scientific discoveries, this knowledge did not develop some depth interpretation of nature. A new epoch in the development of science starts with Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, a period which still takes place in our time. And there is no guarantee it will not end soon, or that science will not turn on to other, different phases, with human interest directed at other things. Science is not outside of history, and our personal actions would not amount to much, had history been not favorable for these concrete issues of investigations.

The development of the sciences (with the specific methods of the concrete sciences and the changes of their paradigms) is connected with, but is not the same as the development of the human thought in general. It is apparent that the changes in both, the concrete knowledge in science, and the development of thought in general, are heavily dependent on the circumstances under which this knowledge and development occurs. This does not only apply to the realm of the natural sciences, where inventions become old very quickly, but to art as well: had Picasso lived on an inhabited island he would not have created his masterpiece, or had Einstein lived ten centuries ago, he would not have been a great scientist. All human knowledge is relative: science, and even art. But natural sciences are that sphere of knowledge, which grows old by definition with incredible speed: every perfect performance in science means putting forward new, unsolved questions, which, in their turn need to be solved by future investigations, hopefully surpassing contemporary results. This opens up the huge problem of what, then, does being rational mean after all, if every circle of answers and every "perfect" explanation only opens up another circle of questions and new puzzles to be solved. It seems that the rational is giving explanations by reducing the unknown to the very small amount of knowledge available to us at that certain space of time in which we live, and without even the slightest guarantee that there is some "progressiveness" in the line of the development. Between the known data and a new event there can exist a huge field of things unknown, and if we cannot, for example, explain some strange new event, we call it "supernatural" or "impossible". The realm of the unknown is endless, which is obviously apparent in the situations when a scientist discovers some different result than the one s/he has been seeking for. It is only a childish belief that the mathematician comes to some valuable result working methodically at his writing-desk, measuring everything with a ruler or other mechanical tools. And although mathematical imagination is different than imagination in art, the psychological process is in both cases the same - something similar to Plato's "ecstasy." Moreover, sometimes a dilettante can make a discovery as important, or even more important than the specialist. But the dilettante lacks the confirmation of a work-method and s/he is most of the time uncertain about the meaning of an idea, which has suddenly occurred, and unable to evaluate it and bring into reality.

Problems in science, and in art too, are inherited, which is proven once more by the fact that problems, solved by tradition thoroughly are left behind, and contemporary science does not occupy itself with them, because such activities would be meaningless. For example, a theorem, proved in a simple new and non trivial way remains a history. In art similar instances are especially easy to recall, which brings forth various excessive thoughts in the key that art is something unnecessary, needless. Which brings forth the disturbing thought, can rationality, then, become blunt to, and can the craving for something new make science "needless" as well. There is an obvious link between personal interactions and the development of sciences. This is not only the question of the formation of various "circles" or "schools", only, but the fact of close friendship and contact between scientists, working for the same cause. New experiments bring along difficulties, paradoxes, and their interpretations are shared among people with similar interests, discussed, and the exchange of information is crucial for the development of any branch of any science. This exchange is not done so effectively through publications, but through personal discussions of important problems with colleagues.

The problem of "the rational" and "the social" I regard as the problem of two perspectives, of two different approaches to reality. The first one I will call the purely theoretical or the scientific. If focuses on the theoretical thinker as interested in problems and solutions valid in their own right for everyone, at any time, whenever certain conditions, from the assumption of which the thinker starts, prevail. The second perspective is the sociologist's perspective of double vision, pointing to the link that exists between the thinker, the thought and the thinker's social world. It is "double" because it acknowledges not only the "knowledge of" and the "knowledge about" things, but the knowledge how beliefs provide motivation to justify what is being done and interprets reality in such a way that the justification is made plausible. From this perspective all ideas have a social location, thoughts do not occur in isolation from the social context in which particular people think particular things. This link is most easily seen when thought legitimates, justifies or explains a particular situation. The link is not direct, but neither is it absent altogether. Words, emotions, self-interpretation and actions are predefined by the society one lives in, and so are such things as one's cognitive approach to the surrounding universe. Society predefines for us the fundamental symbolic apparatus with which we grasp the world, order our experiences and interpret our existence. The same way it constitutes our values, information and logic - the store of "knowledge" - the structures of society become the structures of our own consciousness. The "sociological" account does not exclude the "rational", but includes it, encompasses it, by pointing to the way the "rational" is rational for the thinker.

Experiments in the field of cognitive science yield contradictory conclusions regarding most experiments in the field of inheritance and socializing, and I will not argue for the privilege of any point of view: the distinction between what exactly is inherited or genetically encoded in an infant and what is achieved by learning is very fuzzy. What is important and hardly disputable is that perception and experience depend on the way reality is taken-for-granted (as in the Mueller-Lyer arrows).

It is a common experience that the arrows are seen to be different lengths. This can be accounted for from a culturological point of view as well: that the illusion is born because we are accustomed to inside and outside corners when living in societies where distances are identified by the everyday geometrical experiences (of buildings, corners, street curbs, etc.). It could be argued here that our society does have a neutral way of telling the actual length of the arrows: by measuring them with a ruler. How can handling the ruler, measuring, adding numbers be social? Are not there any eternal values in mathematics, for example? Is not applying a ruler and measuring the two lines the most appropriate and logical way to behave when making a decision which line is longer and which is shorter? The problem with making such a decision is that it is entirely taken out of context, and applying measures to everything would be unnatural most of the time. This is not so much connected with the problem of questioning the world-taken-for-granted, but with the problem of which things and how are rendered visible. The structures taken-for-granted are not questioned by the inhabitants of the structure in question as a rule. An exception would be the person who starts re-evaluating whatever has been imposed as a self-evident world. Because everyone approaches reality similarly, the world-view resulting from this becomes self-validating. Its proof lies in the reiterated experience of other man, who take it for granted as well. Reality is socially constructed.

The point here is to see whether this social constructivist view still holds in the realm of science. For the purity of the example I will take the case of the theoretical scientist, as someone who undertakes theoretical contemplation for the sake of understanding and observing. The ultimate end of science is not always the mastery of things in nature, society control or fighting back something (a disease, for example), and maybe not even happiness. There are technical devices for the mastery of the world, but here the question is something else. There is a difference between scientific theorizing and the application of science in practice. Theorizing allows one to abandon the world of everyday relevances and to make a leap into disinterestedness, or a shift into another relevance structure - that of whether or not the anticipated will pass the test of verification by supervening experiences. The scientist has to select the object of his inquiry (state the problem at hand), and the anticipated solution becomes then the goal of the scientific activity. But by the mere stating of the problem the sections of the world which are related to the problem as relevant, are defined at once. This determines the "level" of the research - the demarcation line of what does and what does not pertain to the problem. There are things to be investigated, and the real of the world, considered irrelevant to the problem in question, are accepted as given, as "data", without questioning. Then the problem stated has open horizons - the hidden implications within the problem itself, together with the problems to be stated afterwards. All this is handed to the scientist by the historical tradition of his science: results and problems obtained by others, solutions suggested by others, methods developed by others. This theoretical universe has its peculiar province of meaning and cognitive style. The regulative principle of a science-branch can be formulated: "Any problem emerging within the scientific field has to partake of the universal style of this field and has to be compatible with the preconstituted problems and their solution by either accepting them or refuting them." Theoretical thinking is a process, though its presentation comes in static terms. The world of scientific thought remains apart from the immediacy of the world of everyday life, and in a sense the theorizing self has no social environment and stands outside of social relationships, but, all the same, the theoretical scientist has to bid up an artificial device, comparable to the world itself - this is the method of science, which constitutes ideal models, a likeness of reality. But this theoretical model is possible only within a universe of discourse, which is pre given to the scientist (as the outcome of other people's theorizing), and, again, it is founded on the assumption that other people, too, can make the same subject matter the topic of their theoretical thought and that will be the verification or the falsification of their results by mine and mine by theirs. But this presupposes communication, and communication is possible only outside the pure theoretical field. The pure theoretic attitude has to be dropped in order that the scientist returns to the world of daily life, paradoxically, it seems, because this is the world he has left as inaccessible to direct approach by theorizing . Scientific activity presupposes co-operation between the scientists, their teachers, and the teachers of their teachers, a co-operation by mutual influence and criticism - scientific activity is socially founded. In the construction of the scientific world there are the boundaries of the realm of the scientist's science, which has been inherited from the scientist's ancestors as a stock of approved propositions. And, again, the postulate of adequacy requires that the typical construction is compatible with the totality of both our daily life and our scientific experience.

Scientists traditionally select problems which have an impact on reality (in contrast to the example I tried to follow through above). History of science shows quite transparently that in pursuing a problem scientists are motivated by the practical use of science. The ancient interest towards mathematics and astronomy are connected with the application of this knowledge in sailing, in building, in land surveying. XV-th century is famous for the Great geographical discoveries, and it is more than a mere coincidence that Copernicus made his discoveries soon after this period. Galileo, backing up the ideas of Copernicus, used the telescope, which was a new invention then, and demonstrated that instruments of technology, which are invented for purely practical purposes, come quite handy in science. And, vice versa, science stimulates new scientific discoveries. Scientific discoveries traditionally are invented for practical use, and this is a criterion for meaningfulness of the results of the efforts invested in a scientist's work. Atom physics from the first half of our century is connected with another, although a pitiful example of the consequences science has upon practical reality, something which shows the contradictory meaning of everything in the world, and especially that actions have unpredicted consequences. But there is more to the motive of being interested in the practical outcome of science, connected with the wish to see that a new found idea works, to verify in an unprejudiced way that something from the reality has been grasped correctly.

Closely connected with this are the motives for the choice a scientist makes when following one or another theory or hypothesis to interpret some phenomenon. Theories are preferred not because one is more clear or not so contradictory as another, but because the scientist is hoping to take part in its development and to be able to verify it personally. The wish to take part in things personally, to be able to help some idea unfold and see the results from personal efforts is maybe stronger than the rational evaluating of different theoretical ideas. Of course, the theories of choice must both point to a possibly true line of thought-development. From here springs an interesting paradox: the logical reconstruction of the conceptual structure and the testing of scientific theories does not really provide the advance of science. There is certainly a difference between the rules of testing as described by philosophers and the actual research process. But by applying the approved method, by which the experiment is justified, science would never have developed. The methods of justification of certain theories are overpowered by other procedures, belonging to the realm of discovery. Standards of justification forbid moves that are "external", but science survives, because these moves are allowed to prevail. Scientists often "interpret the evidence so that it fits our fanciful ideas, eliminate difficulties by ad hoc procedures, push them aside, or simply refuse to take them seriously." Both contexts are simultaneous and they are both equally important for the growth of science.

Another distinction, which Feyerabend points out to be invalid (after Neurath), is the distinction between the observational and the theoretical terms. Theories and observations can be both abandoned - theories can collapse because of conflicting observations, and observations may be removed for theoretical reasons. Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions, not before them: ". . . Eliminate part of the theoretical knowledge of a sensing subject and you have a person who is completely disoriented and incapable of carrying out the simplest action. Eliminate further knowledge and his sensory world (his 'observation language') will start disintegrating, colors and other simple sensations will disappear until he is in a stage even more primitive than a small child. A small child, on the other hand, does not posses a stable perceptual world which he uses for making sense of the theories put before him. Quite the contrary - he passes through various perceptual stages which are only loosely connected with each other (earlier stages disappear when new stages take over) and which embody all the theoretical knowledge available at the time. Moreover, the whole process starts only because the child reacts correctly towards signals, interprets them correctly, because he possesses the means of interpretation before he has experienced his first clear sensation."

The development of the individual is connected with the development of science and the development of society. The flexibility of the human mind (where most "instincts" are replaced by "institutions"), leads to our bondage to society in our innermost being. The sphere of the problematic in the philosophy of science is connected with the case when a scientist's anticipations are not answered. What has gone wrong - is it a question of mistaken anticipation or a mistake in the analysis of facts? But the "given facts" come into the picture because there are expectations to be answered, if there are rules to be followed. Expectation and observation collide, but the observation is constituted by the expectation. The solution invents a theory that is relevant, falsifiable, but not yet falsified. Criticisms follow the solution, and when a criticism succeeds, it creates new problems: to explain why the theory was plausible to that point, how are successful consequences of the old theory to be explained and to find out why the theory has failed (Popper's school).

Some ideas do not start from a problem, but from other things, like playing, or even from accidents (the discovery of penicillin, the discovery of the Roentgen rays, the discovery of vitamin C, and many more). could these developments be excluded? The old and the new paradigms are seen the new encompassing the old, while in reality they only overlap in certain segments where the shared part represents problems of the old theory, remembered and made to fit the new one. What, then, marks off the new paradigm, in comparison with the old one? The principles of critical rationalism (which take falsifications seriously, increase content, and avoid ad hoc hypothesis), as well as the principles of logical empiricism (which prescribe to be precise, to base theories on measurements, and to avoid vague and non-testable ideas) seem at least questionable, because they do not give an account of the development of science. science is not so entirely rational, and the difference between science and methodology, the fact that there are "deviations" and "flaws" shows the weakness of method, and, perhaps, the weakness of reason's laws as remaining valid under all circumstances.

The problem of method is a question of tradition as well. It is held that we have been following for some hundreds of years the method of Copernicus, Galileo, and their followers from the XVI and the XVII centuries. Heisenberg holds that Galileo has followed the tradition of Plato, abandoning the tradition of Aristotle. Galileo turned aside Aristotle's descriptive science and took on Plato's structural science, and experience was important for him as experience based on mathematical connections. If we put some distance between ourselves and our immediate experience and idealize it, we can approach the mathematical structure of phenomena, achieving. simplicity, which is necessary for a new stage in our understanding. Aristotle, according to his immediate experience, has acknowledged that light objects fall slower than heavier objects. Galileo has suggested that in vacuum all bodies would fall with equal speed, and that this can be expressed in simple mathematical terms. It was not possible to check this in Galileo's times, but Galileo's thesis brought forth new experiments. The new method was not attempting to describe the immediate visible facts, it was trying to project experiments, to design artificially phenomena, which could not be observed directly in the usual circumstances, but were figured out on the grounds of mathematical theory. The new scientific method is characterized by two typical features: the attempt to carry out every time new and very precise experiments, which idealize and isolate the experience, and to create this way new phenomena, which are compared with mathematical structures in the role of the laws of nature. Why did Kepler, Galileo and Copernicus believe in this new method and how does contemporary science follow their principles?

The first question seems to have a theological answer. Galileo has held that nature is the second book of God (the first being the Bible), and that it is written in mathematical letters, and that we should learn its alphabet if we want to read it. Kepler, in his work about the world harmony was even more straightforward, maintaining that God has created the earth according to his creative ideas. These ideas are pure forms, which Plato has acknowledged and they are accessible to human beings in the appearance of mathematical relations. Human beings are capable of understanding them only because they were created as a spiritual similarity to God. Physics is a reflection of the divine creative ideas, and this is the reason why physics is serving God. It is obvious that in these thought-systems theology and philosophy are very much merged together, and that the development in science had theological grounds. This is not typical for contemporary science, but the method has remained, because it was unusually effective. It was a successful method because the experiments proved repeatable, and the results could be registered as being the same, in as far as they were carried out under the same circumstances. This is not a self-evident thing, because for its being true it is necessary that all natural processes should be causally determined, that the order of things should follow the laws of cause and effect. In due time the repetition of a certain type of causality became one of the main principles of science. From this main position in science comes the understanding that we are investigating nature as "it is in reality". We begin by building up a view of the world existing in space and time and following its own laws independently of the observing subject. This is the reason that we try to isolate carefully any influence coming from the observer. The new phenomena, which we construct in an experiment should take their place in reality, and there should be no doubt that they exist "out there", and not only in the head of the experimenting scientist: all interference is excluded. But the question remains - are scientists justified to follow this tradition of Copernicus and Galileo ? What happens in reality when there is no observer present and how do we know what "real" or "reality" means there? Contemporary physics contains many examples of difficult problems, where tradition does not help (the epistemological problems of the quantum theory, for example.

Contemporary empirical science draws its concepts and mathematical formulas from experimental evidence. But this is not entirely true, because approaching the unknown scientists do not only use tools which permit direct observation, and laws are not formulated only with the help of such directly observable evidence. What is questioned in this case is not the traditional scientific method, but only the suggestion that concepts and mathematical relations can be simply abstracted from experience. Heisenberg holds that in the quantum theory it is impossible to rely on absolute causality, but experiments, when they are repeated many times, can lead on to observable statistical laws. Furthermore, by repeating analogous series of experiments an objective evaluation of these laws can be also achieved. This for Heisenberg can be counted for a natural branch of the traditional method, a method, which is taken to give objective, i.e. true statements about the changes in nature.

The history of the concepts with which science attempts to argue about phenomena is traditional as well. After Galileo and Copernicus, when the new science was beginning from astronomy, the speed and the position of bodies were the first concepts to describe natural phenomena. Newton later used the concepts of mass and force. Newton's mechanics was used for describing the movement of atoms and from here - to describe the characteristics of matter. The movement of light was understood as fast movement of small particles, or series of waves, and waves were matter of some sort. Scientists thought that the smallest particles of these waves were following, in the long run, the laws of Newton. Only in the XIX-th century it became clearer that the electromagnetic phenomena have a different nature, until Faraday introduced the concept of electromagnetic field. In this case tradition was not helpful. Only after the discovery of relativity the idea of the existence of ether was dismissed, and with it the possibility to reduce electromagnetism to mechanics. In the other branches of physics the conceptual problem was even worse, because a lot of the old concepts were unsatisfactory, and needed some clarification. But, on the other hand, at the beginning of a research it is impossible to not use words in their connection with the old concepts, because the new concepts do not exist yet. A language is learned through tradition, and traditional concepts give us the means to think about problems and ask questions. When the discovery that the atom consists of a nucleus and electrons was made, it was impossible not to ask - where are these electrons and what are their orbits? When observations are made about stars, which are very far away from the Earth, a seemingly logical question arises: do some two events take place simultaneously? These pointless questions are not just mere "prejudice" - it is the case when basic scientific concepts have to be revised, and tradition, or the historical process here can be a stumbling block, until the new concepts obtain social recognition.

The changes, which have affected our contemporary approach towards nature are a symptom of the deep changes in our existence, which affect all the spheres of life and our way of thinking in general. At the time of Galileo and Newton the medieval way of perception of reality was still at the bottom of the dominating thought-system, where everything in nature and nature itself was seen as God's creation. The discoveries were interpreted as God's permission for the humans to have a glimpse of the created by God reality. By isolating some processes from their natural context Galileo interpreted them mathematically, i.e. explained them in a new way, showing the infinite problems science had to face from then on. For Newton reality was already not only something created by God, which was to be viewed only as a whole.

The experimental method, which isolated different sides from the natural process, making these sides objectively visible, and helped understand the laws, which govern them, together with the mathematical formulation of the connections between these processes, made possible draw conclusions about the laws of cosmos in general. This method, starting from Newton's mechanics, had great development in the XVIII-th century in optics and thermodynamics. With the invention of the telescope astronomy was reaching new results. Chemistry was investigating processes on the level of atoms. The meaning of the word "nature", which was the object of inquiry was shifting, encompassing new spheres of human experience, which were approachable by the new techniques and methods of inquiry. This process did not depend whether reality was directly experienced by human beings. The mathematical description of reality was the most important point of view, i.e. something which held a most precise, short and encompassing information about the laws of nature. It was possible at least theoretically to ignore the human being and his/her interference with nature. Matter was seen as something which does not change in mass and is capable moving when affected by forces, it was stable throughout all the changing phenomena. Reality was viewed as atoms, which move in time and space - the "foundations" of all the rest of possible combinations of their movement and place. The development of the theory of electricity in the second half of the XIX-th century was the first theory, which had to admit the existence of a magnetic field in the place of matter.

The view of reality becomes again unclear and more abstract. At the beginning of the XX-th century nature was still approached as made of the smallest known elementary particles, and this was the last objective reality, and still in the tradition of the atomistic ancient philosophies. But this simplistic viewpoint had to give way to a more abstract one. Because when perceiving the reality of the elementary particles it is impossible to ignore the processes by the means of which the knowledge about these particles is obtained. The scientific laws, which are expressed mathematically (in quantum theory) apply not to the elementary particles as such, but to the knowledge about them. Therefore the question whether these particles exist in time and space "as such" cannot anymore be expressed this way. It is more correct to describe what happens when an elementary particle under observation interacts with some other physical system, an instrument for measuring, for example. Then mathematics is clearly describing not some new type of reality, and not the behavior of particles, but our knowledge about that behavior There is just no reality "as such", the knowledge about reality includes the existence of the scientist.

In the XVIII and the XIX centuries technical instruments were mostly mechanical, where machines resembled the movement of the human arms. Later on, in the second half of the XIX century electro-mechanical instruments helped investigate objects, which were not directly given to the scientists in their experience. Even today electro-mechanical instruments are not well understood by a lot of people, and sometimes even found scary, although they surround us everywhere. Further on atom techniques do not permit at all any natural experience. With the development of computer science the technical processes are resembling a global biological process, where structures, typical for human beings are transferring themselves on to the surrounding reality, a biological process, which seems to be escaping human control every now and then. It is held, that the changes which took place in nature and human life, have deformed human thinking as well, and that in this is to be sought the deep explanation of the big crises of our time. For the first time the human being has to face himself/herself, with no "partners" and "enemies", we are surrounded just by the structures of human thought, i.e., most of the time we stumble across our own selves. In scientific analysis we stumble across our knowledge about things, and not with "things themselves". The relation between the human being and reality has reached a stage, where the division between an object and a subject, inner and outer world, soul and body, is unacceptable and leads on to difficulties. Science is concentrated not on the knowledge about reality "as such", but on reality in as far as it is questioned by the human being, and again we come across ourselves. Mathematical formulae reflect not reality, but our knowledge about reality, and this means that science is no longer following the tradition of Galileo.

January 1995