International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
The term practical may be preferable to the other term which is
sometimes used: Applied Science. If we construct the antithesis of
theoretical and applied science, the underlying idea is clearly that we
have to do on the practical side with a discipline which teaches how to
apply a science which logically exists as such beforehand. Engineering,
for instance, is an applied science because it applies the science of
physics; but this is not really our deepest meaning here. Our practical
sciences are not meant as mere applications of theoretical sciences.
They are logically somewhat degraded if they are treated in such a way.
Their real logical meaning comes out only if they are acknowledged as
self-dependent sciences whose material is differentiated from that of
the theoretical sciences by the different point of view and purpose.
They are methodologically perfectly independent, and the fact that a
large part or theoretically even everything of their teaching overlaps
the teaching of certain theoretical sciences ought not to have any
influence on their logical standing. The practical sciences could be
conceived as completely self-dependent, without the existence of any
so-called theoretical sciences; that is, the relations of the world of
experience to our individual aims might be brought into complete systems
without working out in principle the system of independent experience.
We might have a science of engineering without acknowledging an
independent science of theoretical physics besides it. To be sure, such
a science of engineering would finally develop itself into a system
which would contain very much that might just as well be called
theoretical physics; yet all would be held together by the point of view
of the engineer, and that part of theoretical physics which the engineer
applies might just as well be considered as depracticalized engineering.
If this logical self-dependence of the practical science holds true even
for such technological disciplines, it is still more evident that it
would cripple the meaning and independent character of jurisprudence and
social science, or of pedagogy and theology, to treat them simply as
applied sciences, that is, as applications of theoretical science.
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