On The Thought Of Shapere's Philosophy Of Science

The Shapere's scientific philosophic thinking mainly origins from the criticism and inheritance to the main viewpoints of essentialism and relativism. The essentialism abandons the continuity of scientific development for maintaining the scientific objectivity. The relativism represents the scientific continuity while abandons the objectivity. Shapere thought there were obvious advantages and problems for these two viewpoints., but their problem could also be recovered through the opposite's advantages. What he did was to try to set up a set of theory that not only admitted the scientific objectivity but also represented the continuity of scientific development. The Shapere's background information theory and information field theory was his foundation of scientific philosophic thinking. The Shapere's philosophic thinking is a tool to explain the continuity and objectivity of scientific development through the background information theory. The information field theory is the standard of separating the concrete subjects each other. The information field theory is built based on the background information, in the meantime, the background information is the background information in the relative field, and can only exists in its relative field. In Shapere's philosophic thinking, the interior theory of scientific development, reason deduction chain, observation concept and truth ideas could be taken as the enlargement and concrete application of the information field theory and background information theory. Shapere described the process of scientific development by the internalization of scientific development. He thought the scientific development was successive, there was reason deduction chain relation between the previous and later theories. Both the essentialism and relativism made the theory and observation distinguished. The essentialism thought the theory and observation were completely distinguished. In the actual scientific practice, the pure observation that was independent from the theory didn't exist, the pure observation also made the observation be completely not related to the theory, which also lost the meaning. The relativism thought we must input the meaning to observation artificially and re-explained them. The people could explain them as the unrelated or supporting proof as their wishes freely. Because the observers were different, so there was complete difference in the observation with incommensurability. Shapere took the observation concept in the profound modern science observation as the precondition, he thought the scientific research made by the scientific workers was not based on observation or the base of theory, but was based on the background information used as reasons. Shapere's truth ideas absorbed the characteristics of correspondence theory, coherence theory and pragmatic theory and were built by combining the content of background information and information field theory. He thought the background information that was in accordance with success, non-concrete suspicion and relativity could be used as the similar truth by the people. Shapere's scientific philosophic value is his research opens the third road that is different from the essentialism and relativism. Of course, some limitations exist in his scientific philosophic thinking, such as, he made the understanding of Kuhn's incommensurability as incompatibility, and his scientific philosophic thinking was only limited to research on the interior science but excluded the factors out of science arbitrarily,etc.