Epistemological scientific investigation

In the following section of this chapter, let us focus attention on one area of classical scientific assumption, the notion of materialism, and see in what ways this notion finds itself in need of revision in the light of modem quantum theory. Then let us apply our revised concepts to those two stumbling blocks of classical materialism, organism and mind, to see if we have come any distance toward framing a set of epistemological principles that are both supportive of scientific investigation and tmer to our everyday apprehension of the world. 

Q.1.4 Common problems in scientific investigation are epistemological in nature. Where in the progression of inquiry are most epistemological problems located ... 

We have in mind such discoveries as relativity, with its non-Euclidean topology, and quantum theory, with its notion of the discontinuous nature of matter and energy. Yet, in the face of these novel orders of pattern, whose explication was spearheaded by scientific methodology itself, other areas of science, not concerned directly with investigating such areas, have continued to carry the burden of outmoded, false conceptions as intrinsic components of their epistemological equipment. 

In sum, it is difficult to make philosophical sense of the epistemological reduction of one discipline to another. The only cases that can reasonably be discussed, when the area of intended apphcations of one theory is a subset of that of another, are typical issues of scientific debate, for which philosophers have no particular competence to contribute. They do have, however, for investigating conceptual and methodological differences between disciplines, which makes interdisciplinarity issues a much more promising and useful field of philosophical studies than reduction. 

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