BOOKS BY EVANDRO AGAZZI

Starting from the Thirties, Italy has been one of the leading countries in the development of physics. Gino Tarozzi has long been and still is one of the best Italian scholars in the field. The present volume collects several valuable contributions touching upon different philosophical problems, such as entanglement, realism, causality, quantum logic... In the occasion of Tarozzi’s 60th birthday many distinguished scholars, which collaborate with him, evaluate and discuss these topics.

Truth had been excluded from the requirements of science after the so-called "foundational crisis" of the exact sciences (mathematics and physics) occurred between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. A formalistic outlook had imposed itself in the philosophy of science, from which meaning and truth were excluded. This approach, however, was seriously weakened after the discovery of the "internal limitations of formalisms" entailed by Goedel’s theorems, and Tarski almost at the same time advocated the legitimacy of meaning and truth for the formalized languages, calling "semantics" this part of the metatheoretical investigations. This terminology has remained standard especially in mathematical logic. One must note, however, that semantics regards in a proper sense the level of meaning, whereas truth implies in addition the reference of the language to some extralinguistic domain of entities. This domain is not accessible by means of logical, linguistic or conceptual analysis, but can be attained through "operations" of some concrete kind, whose nature determines also the ontological status of the referents. Operations belong to praxis, and this is why the notion of truth is more properly attributed to "pragmatics", understood not in the original Morris’ sense, but rather in a sense closer to pragmatism, in which the performance of actions is considered essential for providing criteria of truth.

When it is spoken of scientific representations it is often understood that science can offer "only" representations but does not enable us to know reality. This tenet is the inheritance of a gratuitous and inconsistent presupposition that affected modern philosophy during almost two centuries, according to which we know our representations and not things, and we have to find warranties in order to believe that such representations correspond to reality (epistemological dualism). The present paper analyzes this presupposition, shows its inconsistency and, through a discourse regarding the relations between thought and ontology, between sense and reference of the intellectual constructions, between abstract encoding of properties and concrete exemplification of the same by means of operational criteria of reference, justifies the cognitive purport of scientific representations, including the mathematical representations of physical phenomena.