Truth, cognitive objectivity, metaphysics

pp. 143-170

in: Paolo Parrini, Knowledge and reality, Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I argued that the crisis of the verifiability principle does not allow us to consider the metaphysical opposition between realism and the various forms of anti-realism as a meaningless problem. Yet, it is still possible to consider the controversies about the nature of knowledge as pseudo-scientific when they get involved in problems of an absolute kind that, as such, go beyond the sphere of decidability proper to science. Since scientific investigation is structurally connected with the use of a particular linguistic, theoretical, methodological and axiological framework, metaphysical questions which refer to the absolute can find no place in it.