The Theory Of Scientific Epistemological Norms And Its Basic Problems

As one of epistemological actives of humanity, the objective of science is seeking for truth. The epistemological norm plays a key role to the truth seeking. To understand science, we must at first understand the epistemological norms. This work consists of the foundation of philosophy of science, sociology of science, anthropology of science, economics of science, etc. The systematic work, however, are lacking in the literature of theory of science. This article are based on prior's work and try to develop a conceptual scheme to understand the phenomenon of epistemological norms in the science.There are two main problems discussed in this article. The first is: what epistemological norms must be observed? How to elaborate these norms? These kinds of work are descriptive research of epistemological norms. The second one is: why should we observe these norms? How to justify these norms? These kinds of work are rationale research of epistemological norms.In the descriptive research of epistemological norms, this article reconstructed several systems of epistemological norms which based on different foundation of philosophy of science. They include Positivists' system, Popper's system, Merton's system. Because Kuhn offered an special viewpoint about epistemological norms, this article also discussed it.In the rationale research of epistemological norms, this article discussed justifications of different norms. These discussions are processed from two criteria: the first is to examine the factual foundation of a norm; the second is to examine the value foundation of a norm. Beside of this, we present a theory which can be used to examine the rationale of a procedural norm and we show that the "structure-function" analysis would be useful to examine the rationale of "Mertonian norms".In chapter 5, we discussed some meta-problems about the epistemological norms. In the end of this article, we show that the theory of epistemological norms may be used to solve a problem of scientific methodology.