TEMA 2: TEORIA DE LA CIÈNCIA

TDX, 2018

The subject of this doctoral thesis is the contemporary relevance of a philosophical model inspired in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In Chapter 1 I identify two dominant models in the current theoretical landscape, scientific realism and social constructionism, and describe the conflict between them as sterile, in particular in cognitive science and ethics. I then argue for the opportunity of a transcendental model, as an alternative to both and a sound conceptual device for dealing with contemporary issues (technological divide, ecological crisis and globalization). In Chapter 2 I examine the concept of a model, with respect to our representation of the world and ourselves. I point out the need for philosophy as a peculiar kind of work with models, focused in their representative nature and that challenges basic assumptions of intuitive and scientific models. From a certain level of generality and abstraction on, a philosophical macromodel is a paradigm in Kuhn’s sense. Then I define transcendental philosophy by its emphasis on the crucial link between the philosophical macromodel of reality and the philosophical model of the mind. Chapter 3 summarizes the evolution of Kant’s thought in its dialogical context, from his early works up to the Critique of Pure Reason. My discussion focuses on two crucial and closely related themes in that evolution: 1) the overcoming of the dilemma between Leibniz-Wolff metaphysics and Empiricism that culminates in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories and the System of Principles, and 2) the view of the relation of logic and experience, formal and transcendental logic, in the Metaphysical Deduction. I place the analysis of both questions in the wider context of two interpretative frameworks: 1) the construal of Kant’s development as the maturation of a Pre-critical Project, an attempt to combine a modified Leibnizian metaphysics with Newtonian science in a coherent worldview, and the departure from that Project leading to critical philosophy; 2) the conception of this critical turn as a philosophical modeling of mind and world, one that resulted in a radical revision of the dominant views on representation and consciousness. In Chapter 4 I describe Kant’s model of the mind in the first Critique as an epigenetic model, according to which cognition emerges from the interplay of two basic faculties, sensibility and understanding. Understanding is a capacity to judge, and includes concept formation and use, subsuming the objects of intuition under those concepts (Judgment) and combining the resulting judgements in syllogisms (Reason). Sensibility is the capacity of receiving sense impressions, which stimulate the understanding’s unifying activity, and of being affected by that activity. Transcendental imagination, the mediating faculty between understanding and sensibility, is the effect of the understanding’s activity on sensibility. It enables the logical forms adopted by this activity to guide the synthesis of the sensible manifold in a way that it can be further analyzed in concepts, and those concepts connected to other concepts in judgements and syllogisms in a system of knowledge. The modeling itself rests on the unique nature of the I of Transcendental Apperception, between phenomenon and noumenon, construed as a suitable object of a reflection on the conditions for the possibility of experience in subjectivity (a philosophical model of the mind), but not a materialist or functionalist model in the sense of contemporary AI. Finally, in Chapter 5 I compare the transcendental model of Chapter 4 with Ernst Cassirer’s Neokantianism, both as a philosophical proposition and an interpretation of Kant’s thought. I argue that the main advantage of the former in both counts is that it preserves Kant’s critical balance between sensibility and understanding, receptivity and activity, and his equally fundamental distinction of logic and experience, formal and transcendental logic. I present this argument against the background of recent discussions about the existence of non-conceptual mental content, and interpretative issues regarding Kant’s position on that matter.

Definimos como resonancia al comportamiento de un circuito con elementos inductivos y capacitivos, para el cual se verifica que la tensión aplicada en los terminales del mismo circuito, y la corriente absorbida, están en fase. La resonancia puede aparecer en todo circuito que tenga elementos L y C. Por lo tanto existirá una resonancia serie y otra resonancia paralelo o en una combinación de ambos. El fenómeno de resonancia se manifiesta para una o varias frecuencias, dependiendo del circuito, pero nunca para cualquier frecuencia. Es por ello que existe una fuerte dependencia del comportamiento respecto de la frecuencia. Deviene de ello la gran importancia de los circuitos sintonizados, especialmente en el campo de las comunicaciones, en lo que hace a la sintonización de señales de frecuencias definidas o al "filtrado" de señales de frecuencias no deseadas. Genéricamente se dice que un circuito está en resonancia cuando la tensión aplicada y la corriente están en fase, el factor de potencia resulta unitario.

En este trabajo se hace un análisis del origen y surgimiento de la teoría sociológica; mencionando a los fundadores, quienes aportaron con distintas teorías pero un mismo objetivo (sociología), entendido brevemente que a partir de las revoluciones políticas, sociales, económicas (R. Industrial, R. Francesa, R. Americana) y el nacimiento del capitalismo, que fueron surgidos por Karl Marx, Max Weber, E. Durkheim, George Simmel.