Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2022 number 1

The study deals with the substantiation of the following theses: a) the nature of the principles in scientific theories is Plato’s world of ideas; b) any other respond to this question is inadequate and/or internally inconsistent. The problem of the nature of the principles may be called the basic problem in the philosophy of science, because the principles determine completely the content of any theory. Plato was the first to answer the question “where do the principles come from?”. He claimed that any genuine knowledge is the soul’s memory of the world of ideas; the possibility of formating the prerequisites of scientific theories is a consequence of the involvement of the soul in the world of ideas. The alternative (and, in fact, the only real one) is F. Bacon’s empirical inductivism. However, this approach is internally inconsistent: nothing follows from the facts alone, because the inductive conclusion already presupposes a certain general thesis as its basis. Therefore, it is not like the inductive derivation of the principles is complicated or inefficient, but it is merely impossible. And if the principles of theories cannot be got from experience, then they are a priori.