On the problem of the epistemic status of theories of Natural Sciences

The paper examines some features of the philosophy of science and related changes in ideas about the truth status of theories of experimental sciences. It is noted, in particular, that the earliest stage of the formation of the philosophy of science associated with the methodological program of “first positivism” is characterized by the desire to radically reject the use of various speculative, metaphysical assumptions in the construction and substantiation of scientific theories. The development of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century is inextricably linked with the latest and most technically developed version of the positivist program — logical positivism, i.e. neopositivism. The features of this program include its epistemic fundamentalism, i.e. belief in the existence of elementary and undoubtedly true foundations of scientific knowledge, and normativism, i.e. the requirement for a “standard” representation of a scientific theory in the form of a set of sentences in a formal language linked by a deductive inferability relation. The collapse of these postulates of the logical-positivist program led in a number of areas of modern philosophy of science to the denial of the very possibility of evaluating scientific theories as true in the sense of their correspondence to reality, which inevitably resulted in the denial of progress in science itself. Findings of research show that such a conclusion is incorrect, therefore we present the foundations of a model-theoretical strategy for the analysis of scientific knowledge. This strategy introduces effective means of clarifying the concept of the “actual truth of the theory” and can serve as a tool for setting and solving specific scientific and philosophical-methodological problems.

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