Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2020 number 2

The article focuses on weak methodological points of all hypotheses about the genesis of oil, which should be taken into account with a view to ensuring benefit for the development of geological knowledge, as well as for the philosophy and methodology of science. We show that successful results of laboratory studies on producing hydrocarbons, and in particular oil, from both organic and inorganic substances are not crucial for geologists, since they do not reflect the complexity of the processes occurring in the Earth interior. As methodological tools which make it possible to "reflect" all the deep processes of the Earth, geologists use a narrative presentation of data that describe and explain the process of formation of oil and gas fields. However, such geological narratives have a number of features that do not contribute to the development of hypotheses about the genesis of oil. The first feature of this kind is the writing of narratives on behalf of the "omniscient narrator", so it creates an effect of "referential illusion"; the latest in its turn makes geological narratives look as a completed study, to which there is nothing to add. The second feature is that narrative hypotheses about the genesis of oil look like a universal rule that ignores individual peculiarities of different types of geological structures in different parts of the Earth. For these reasons, we assume that it is necessary to abandon universal narratives and pass to hypotheses about the genesis of oil for each hydrocarbon field.