Logology (science)

For other uses, see Logology (disambiguation).

Logology is a term used by the transcendentalist Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his 1804 "Aphorisms on the Essence of Philosophy of Science" to describe the unity of being and consciousness. ^[1] In 1996, Barry Sandywell glossed logology as "discourse studying discourse and its signifying forms". ^[2]

Polish use of similar terms

The early 20th century brought calls, initially from sociologists, for the creation of a new, empirically based science that would study the scientific enterprise itself. ^[3] The early proposals were put forward with some hesitancy and tentativeness. ^[4] The new meta-science was given a variety of names, ^[5] including "science of knowledge", "science of science", "sociology of science", and "logology".

Florian Znaniecki

Florian Znaniecki wrote in 1923: ^[6]

[T]hough theoretical reflection on knowledge—which arose as early as Heraclitus and the Eleatics—stretches... unbroken... through the history of human thought to the present day... we are now witnessing the creation of a new science of knowledge [author's emphasis] whose relation to the old inquiries may be compared with the relation of modern physics and chemistry to the 'natural philosophy' that preceded them, or of contemporary sociology to the 'political philosophy' of antiquity and the Renaissance. [T]here is beginning to take shape a concept of a single, general theory of knowledge... permitting of empirical study.... This theory... is coming to be distinguished clearly from epistemology, from normative logic, and from a strictly descriptive history of knowledge." ^[7]

Maria Ossowska

Stanisław Ossowski

Twelve years later, sociologists Stanisław Ossowski and Maria Ossowska (the Ossowscy) took up the same subject in an article on "The Science of Science" ^[8] whose 1935 English-language version first introduced the term "science of science" to the world. ^[9] The article postulated that the new discipline would subsume such earlier ones as epistemology, the philosophy of science, the psychology of science, and the sociology of science. ^[10] The science of science would also concern itself with questions of a practical character such as social and state policy in relation to science, such as the organization of institutions of higher learning, of research institutes, and of scientific expeditions, and the protection of scientific workers, etc. It would concern itself as well with historical questions: the history of the conception of science, of the scientist, of the various disciplines, and of learning in general. ^[11]

In their 1935 paper, the Ossowscy mentioned the German philosopher Werner Schingnitz (1899–1953) who, in fragmentary 1931 remarks, had enumerated some possible types of research in the science of science and had proposed his own name for the new discipline: scientiology. The Ossowscy took issue with the name:

Those who wish to replace the expression 'science of science' by a one-word term [that] sound[s] international, in the belief that only after receiving such a name [will] a given group of [questions be] officially dubbed an autonomous discipline, [might] be reminded of the name 'mathesiology', proposed long ago for similar purposes [by the French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836)]." ^[12]

Yet, before long, in Poland, the unwieldy three-word term nauka o nauce, or science of science, was replaced by the more versatile one-word term naukoznawstwo, or logology, and its natural variants: naukoznawca or logologist, naukoznawczy or logological, and naukoznawczo or logologically. And just after World War II, only 11 years after the Ossowscy's landmark 1935 paper, the year 1946 saw the founding of the Polish Academy of Sciences' quarterly Zagadnienia Naukoznawstwa (Logology) –— long before similar journals in many other countries. ^{[13] [a]}

Notes

1. Other thinkers associated with the Polish school of logology who "have [also] gained international recognition" include Kazimierz Twardowski, Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Ludwik Fleck, and Stefan Amsterdamski. ^[14]

References

1. Zöller, Günter (2023). ""Logologia." Fichte's Kantian Self-Interpretation of the Wissenschaftslehre in the "Aphorisms on the Essence of Philosophy as Science" from 1804". Fichte Studien. 52 (2): 544–561. doi:10.1163/18795811-05202012.
2. Sandywell, Barry (1996). Logological Investigations, Volume 1, Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason. London: Routledge. p. xx. ISBN   978-1-134-88253-3.
3. Bohdan Walentynowicz, "Editor's Note", Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, edited by Bohdan Walentynowicz, Dordrecht, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1982, ISBN   83-01-03607-9, p. XI.
4. Klemens Szaniawski, "Preface", Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, p. VIII.
5. Bohdan Walentynowicz, ed., Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, passim.
6. Florian Znaniecki, "Przedmiot i zadania nauki o wiedzy" ("The Subject Matter and Tasks of the Science of Knowledge"), Nauka Polska (Polish Science), vol. IV (1923), no. 1.
7. Florian Znaniecki, "The Subject Matter and Tasks of the Science of Knowledge" (English translation by Christopher Kasparek), Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, pp. 1–2.
8. Maria Ossowska and Stanisław Ossowski, "The Science of Science", originally published in Polish as "Nauka o nauce" ("The Science of Science") in Nauka Polska (Polish Science), vol. XX (1935), no. 3.
9. Bohdan Walentynowicz, Editor's Note, in Bohdan Walentynowicz, ed., Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, p. XI.
10. Maria Ossowska and Stanisław Ossowski, "The Science of Science", reprinted in Bohdan Walentynowicz, ed., Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, pp. 84–85.
11. Maria Ossowska and Stanisław Ossowski, "The Science of Science", in Bohdan Walentynowicz, ed., Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, p. 86.
12. Maria Ossowska and Stanisław Ossowski, "The Science of Science", in Bohdan Walentynowicz, ed., Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, pp. 87–88, 95.
13. Bohdan Walentynowicz, "Editor's Note", Polish Contributions to the Science of Science, p. xii.
14. Elena Aronova, Simone Turchetti (eds.), Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond: Paradigms Defected, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 149.