CEFISES Seminar: Michel Bitbol, “Transcendental epistemologies and probabilism”

Series: MEPHISTO (MEtaphysics and PHIlosophy of Science: Transcendental Orientations)

Speaker: Michel Bitbol (CNRS/Archives Husserl, École normale supérieure)

Title: “Transcendental epistemologies and probabilism”

Abstract

Transcendental epistemologies, in their Kantian and Husserlian varieties, can be characterized by two basic tenets: (1) It is possible to regress from objects to the preconditions for their givenness, and (2) The constitution of objects involves anticipating phenomena—both intellectually and practically—through structural assumptions that conform to these preconditions. Anticipation is the key concept here, one to which Husserl ascribes an ambivalent status in his Crisis. According to Husserl, anticipating future appearances is a basic function essential to life. But this is also, unfortunately, the task to which modern natural sciences restrict themselves—far from the ideal of genuine theoretical knowledge that had inaugurated the project of science. In this talk, I wish to show that when its anticipatory status is fully embraced by physical science in the form of probabilism, an about-turn occurs—bringing us closer to Husserl’s ideal of a comprehensive science wholly aware of its own foundation, rather than distancing us from it. This paradoxical development is not difficult to grasp. Indeed, with probabilism, we move away from the deceptive traditional static, demiurgic, objectivistic, naturalistic, third-person, and falsely omniscient view of science. Instead, we move toward a dynamic, practical, first-person, engaged, and inherently finite conception. In this new framework, probability is no longer regarded merely as a mathematical tool reluctantly employed to cope with temporarily incomplete knowledge. Rather, it emerges as the foundational principle of all cognition, finally revealed by the most advanced scientific developments. In this light, quantum physics becomes the paradigm of a new science – one that (unlike classical physics) can no longer ignore its transcendental preconditions.