科学客观性:外在性与内在性的交融

本文试图从内在性与外在性两个层面重建科学客观性。一方面,科学对象的客观实在性并非一种外在于人的自在性,而是主体在自身的对象性活动中与客观世界耦合而得到的结果,是一种属人的现实,是在实践中被确立起来的。科学家们借助于直观方法与理性工具把所捉到实体与过程、类型与结构、解释句与理论模型等等,都在某种程度上独立于我们的主观表象,承载着对象的客观性——外在客观性。它们构成了"科学共同体"的"本体论承诺"。另一方面,这种外在的客观性,是在人类主体的内在化过程中实现的。在现代科学中,科学家们自觉地运用对称性工具实现的"内在化"所得到的"变换下的不变性",使得科学具有了公共可理解性与可接受性。这种在人类旨趣、目的和价值引领下对世界实行的主动干预所实现的公共性,就是内在客观性。因此,科学客观性是一曲由外在性与内在性合奏出来的交响曲。

Scientific Objectivity: Integration of Exteriority and Interiority

In this essay, the author tries to reconstruct scientific objectivity from two aspects of exteriority and interiority. On one hand, the reality of scientific objects is not the trait of being-itself which is out of human being, but is the result of coupling between human and the objective world in human agent's activity, and is the reality of human which is established in human practice. The entities and process, types and constructs, and interpretation sentences and theoretical models, etc, which had been grasped by scientists with the help of intuitive methods and reasonable instruments, are in a way independent of our subjective representation, and bear the objectivity of scientific objects-external objectivity. It is them that constitute the "ontological commitment" of "the scientific community". On the other hand, the external objectivity is realized in the course of interiority of human agent. In modern science, it is "the inflexibility under transformation" reached in the course of scientists' interiority using the instrument of symmetry that makes science to be of public intelligibility and acceptability. Such acceptability realized in human's active interference-guided by human interests, aims and values-is internal objectivity. Hence, scientific objectivity is a symphony of external and internal objectivity.